In Stephen King’s Misery, Annie Wilkes says, “Sometimes when it rains, I get the blues.” It’s more than the blues for her – Annie is morose to the point of homicide, and has to get away from the writer she is holding captive before she blows him away with the gun she’s carrying in her pocket. In August 2001 my partner and I saw 9” of rain in 5 days on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. I know just how Annie felt. By the time Slim Day arrived, I was ready to do myself in.
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Monday: The rain begins while Richard and I are camped by the Strait of San Juan de Fuca. The campsite no longer exists, but it was a beautiful spot either 50’ or 2 miles from the ocean, depending on the tide. At high tide there’s a narrow cobble beach tucked up against steep cliffs and massive douglas firs. When the tide is out, seawater is barely visible beyond rocky reefs covered with weeds. Harbor seals basking on the rocks howl mournfully to each other. I fantasize that they are mermen, luring me to their homes under the water. At night, drizzle keeps us awake with the sound of “popcorn” on the roof as fat drops plunk down from overhead branches. Pinecones smacking onto the aluminum wouldn’t be much noisier.
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Tuesday: We are chased into the library in Forks by a downpour. By the way, this is the Forks haunted by Twilight’s vampires because the sun rarely shines. I check the weather report, and learn that a couple of wet days lie ahead. We head for the Hoh Rainforest anyway, and find a campsite sited under open sky instead of 200’ fir trees. No popcorn on the roof tonight, but rain comes down steadily.
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Wednesday: Hard rain as we drive into the Hoh rainforest in Olympic National Park. The ranger tells us to get out for a hike anyway “because it’s drier on the trails than the parking lot.” Debatable, as the trails are underwater. Prepared hikers squelch through mud near the visitor center; the unprepared don’t leave the building.The Hall of the Mosses is an alley of ghostly vine maples with spreading arms – I mean branches – draped with blankets and streamers of curly green moss. Nourished by over 150" of annual rainfall, epiphytes, ferns, and lichens flourish. Everything is covered with green. Even the phone booth roof is buried by 6” of moss, and a nearby privy is crowned by a 10’ hemlock sapling.
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We meet a pair of hikers coming out from the back country. The woman has hit bottom. When the couple reaches a huge pond that fills the trail rim to rim, she refuses to cross in spite of our assurance that they are nearly back to the parking lot and that this is the last puddle. She still hasn’t crossed when we leave them.
Richard and I eat lunch in the camper. I find dampness on my side, but tell myself that it’s just condensation. But after our hike, the insulation by my pillow is drenched. Richard’s side is wet too, but not as bad. Caulk between the camper shell and the truck bed is loose, and the downpour found its way in. For a few minutes I understand exactly how that wet hiker felt. I don’t want to cope with this. Then a miracle happens - the rain stops and the sun appears for over an hour. I cover the hood of the truck with wet umbrellas, towels, shoes, and poncho, while Richard wrings water out of the insulation. We slap giant silver duct tape bandaids over the most suspicious-looking seams. When the sun disappears we ram our damp stuff into bags. Dinner comes from cans, rain restarts, and continues most of the night. We later learn that that more than 7” of rain have hit the region through today, and it’s not done.
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Thurs: Olympic National Park is a narrow rind of beaches and headlands on the peninsula’s western edge, and we follow it southward, driving slowly to dry clothes on the defroster and floor vents, and to maximize the charge on our battery with headlights, wipers and blowers going.
We turn inland at Quinault Lake, and on into a tree-clad glacial river valley. Heading up the north fork, we stop for a ¼ mile nature trail among magnificent vine maples and sitka spruces. The sky darkens and we hear a quickly-approaching roar. Anguished howls erupt from a family ahead of us on the trail. Up go our umbrellas just as nickel-sized raindrops come pouring down, and the kids sprint past us back to the parking lot.
Steady, hard downpour accompanies us into the only free drive-in campground in Olympic National Park. We drive at 15 mph as the last of our clothing dries. Hopefully we have enough charge in the battery to use the camper light this evening, and start the truck in the morning. We settle into a campsite to wait the rain out, and about 5:00 it lightens to drizzle. Richard grabs his umbrella and goes out for a walk.
A hot meal would boost our morale, and I am just getting the Coleman stove out when Richard returns. I glance at the rear tire – it is flat as a tortilla. Ugh. I stow the stove, and we debate our options. We can use the Fix-a-Flat can, but then we have to drive and hope the goop plugs the leak. We can crawl through mud to detach the spare from its mount under the truck and change it now. We can ignore it until tomorrow and hope the rain stops.
Easy choice. Richard goes out for another walk, I decide we really do need a hot meal, and make spaghetti and tea. We dine in our snug little bed. My great-aunt Carrie always said bad luck comes in threes, and we figure we’ve had a dousing, leaks, and a flat. That’s 3, so we’re home free, right?
About 7:00 pm a man and woman come up to our truck. They are parked ¼ mile away at the trailhead and their car battery is dead. Do we have cables, and can we jump-start them? They gape as we laugh as this new ludicrosity. Sure we have cables, but we can’t drive with the flat tire. The guy thinks it over, then reluctantly volunteers to help us with the tire. We’ll get them started. A win/win situation for sure.
He says he can’t get any wetter, and crawls through the slop to get the spare tire from its mount under the truck. We get our jack out from under the hood and I untangle the jumper cables from our McGee’s closet under the seat, while the woman tells me that she and a female friend had been on a trek with a group of journalists. They wanted to recreate the early explorers’ crossing of the Olympic peninsula in 5 days. It was a poorly organized nightmare even before the rain. Last night they camped near another group of hikers, which included the fellow wallowing in the mud under our truck. The newcomers were on their final night of a 17-day trip. When offered a chance to accompany that party to the trailhead and hitch a ride, the women jumped at the chance.
The female hiker goes off to tell her companions that help is on the way - eventually. As the first blessing on our ordeal, the rain stops, though watery blobs are still plopping down from trees and it’s getting dark. We nearly have the flat tire removed when I hear laughter coming toward our campsite.
Four hikers, 1 male, 3 female, are pushing their little car to our campsite. The road is level, but it is still quite a feat. They started pushing to get warm, and it turned into fun. I help them shove the car over a bump into our campsite, then hand my coat to a shivering hiker wearing only a T-shirt and shorts – she has no dry clothes left.
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We all crack up when we get the tire off. A semi-circular section of tread has buckled inward, and it looks like Barney took a bite out of a huge black donut. In the center of that bite mark is a rock 2” in diameter, so deeply jammed that I can’t pry it out with a pliers and a screwdriver. The rest of the job goes quickly, we get the hikers started, and they drive away in search of pizza and beer.
Richard and I celebrate, for nothing else can possibly go wrong. But a few minutes after we turn out the light, we hear rustling under the plastic liner protecting us from condensation. We pull things out and look, but can’t see anything. Turn out the light, it happens again, but I still can’t see anything. The 3rd time, we get out the flashlight and see a muddy little mouse under the plastic, staring at me with beady, fearful eyes.
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I want to get out heavy leather gloves, catch it and set it free. Richard won’t risk letting it loose in the camper, and says he can kill it. After considering mouse pee in the corners and holes chewed in our bread, I reluctantly agree, and he makes a quick job of it with the flashlight. I bag up poor “Slim” (so-called as he must have been pretty slim to crawl through a thumb-sized drainage hole) and Richard throws him outside for a lucky fox or raven.
Fri: We see highly welcome sun today! At a tiny service station we learn that our tire is a goner. The rock which punctured it is shaped like a railroad spike, and not much shorter. We buy a new tire, I install aluminum-foil Slim plugs in the drainage holes, and we camp in a clearcut to finish drying out. A helicopter circles overhead, but we don’t wave, and aren’t pot farmers, so they finally drift away.
I learn that we endured 9” inches of rain in 5 days, over half of it on the day of the flat. And a few days later we also learn that we hadn’t really solved our Slim problem when another mouse gets in, and gets bonked with the same flashlight. This time we really tear my side of the camper apart to find that last access point. Only someone who can read the minds of mice would know why one would bother to shinny up a metal tube 3” wide and over 18” tall to crawl through a 1” hole in the back of our truck.
The rainfall may have felt near-Biblical, but we weren’t admitting wildlife into our Ark that day. Bitsy, the spider who rode in our rear-view mirror for 8 months this year might tell you differently, but that’s another story.
