4 minute read
The Quietest Sound
Story and Photos by Stephen Grace
The Olympic Peninsula has the best place names of anywhere I’ve lived. Humptulips. Hamma Hamma. Wynoochee. Duckabush. My favorite - Dosewallips.
At the end of autumn, when a window of clear weather opened, I traveled on a road alongside the Dosewallips River. Several years ago, a stormswollen flow pulverized a stretch of pavement, closing the route to motorized vehicles. After packing camping gear in panniers, I pedaled my old steel frame bike on the remnants of the road, its bed buckled and broken, its surface green with ferns and moss—a route the forest was slowly reclaiming. Where the river had erased the road, I got off my bike and pushed it up a bypass around the washed-out section. At the road’s end, where a trail led into the wilds, I pitched my tent beneath a canopy of Western Redcedars and Douglas-firs. Bigleaf Maples with their yellow leaves, and Vine Maples, bright with crimson foliage, insisted that the season was fall. But the frost that stiffened the ground spoke of winter.
Maybe all the solitude I enjoyed on this trip addled my brain, but the Olympic wilderness seemed rife with spectral effects. The sound of spilling water in the Dosewallips echoed off boulders like murmuring voices in a monastery. The river ran clear where it sheeted over rocks, and the flow stalled in pools so green they made a mockery of moss, pools so blue they stole attention from the sky. Deep within a forest crisscrossed by shadows, trees groaned and screeched as they rubbed their trunks together and entwined their limbs. While staring at a splintered stump, I imagined the sound the wood had made as it cracked—centuries of silent growth released in a single thunderclap.
A Canada Jay startled when I moved from the forest into a meadow, its wings brushing the still air, the quietest sound I had ever experienced. But then I heard a silence deeper yet. Ice as thin as cellophane wrinkled and cracked as I walked on the bank of a brook.
Kneeling next to the frozen violence of a waterfall, I listened to the hush that had replaced the roar of raging water: silence distilled into ice.
A path through an elfin forest led to a ridgetop plastered with snow. Peering over an edge, I saw a basin slowly flood with clouds. The summit of Mount Constance disappeared—a mass of stone erased in an instant by shifting weather, making the mountain seem as ephemeral as a thought. Suspended ice crystals refracted a spectrum of rainbow colors inside the space left when Mount Constance vanished behind the clouds. Snow crunched beneath my shoes as I walked inside a cloud. I breathed deeply, inhaling vapor that had risen from rivers and oceans, and droplets exhaled by trees and whales.
Winter clutched the high country in its cold grip, and clouds denied me a view of the tallest peaks. But in the valley below, maples glowed golden. Their leaves ignited at dusk while I descended as if the world had taken time to light torches to show me the way as I returned to camp on this brief autumn day.
As a young man, while desperate to understand the world and my place in it, I had traveled to the Himalayas seeking enlightenment. I don’t remember what I learned in the mountain kingdoms of Asia. If I glimpsed an eternal truth back then, it had vanished like Mount Constance in a cloud.
Just before reaching my tent, a realization stopped me in my tracks. I sat on a log and listened. I can’t recall what the Buddhist monks had told me, not because my memory is dimming with age, but because back then I hadn’t learned to listen. Now, my mind, worn down from three decades of questing, constantly moving forward and hoping for some revelation around the next bend, I could finally sit still in a forest and hear the wild silence. And the forest spoke a simple truth: my life is one among many, and the many lives are one.
In the distance, the Dosewallips flowed.
