Author’s Note
I wrote this in the Spring of 2021. Another life, it seems.
Life in Bumblefuck has its challenges.
The West End of Clallam County is one of the most distant, most sparsely populated regions of western Washington that a person can call home. The physical and population geography of this place means that it struggles with some of the infrastructure—reliable cell coverage, high-speed internet, paved roads—that makes modern civilization tick. Even electricity isn’t reliable here in the winter, when the persistent rain presses down on trees and soaks the ground around their roots until they fall on power lines installed in the 1950s. For places to shop, work, and play, there’s only one town, Forks, that can properly be called a town; in that town, there’s one grocer, two hardware stores (one is attached to the grocery store), a tiny library, a few small motels, a handful of local restaurants, a bowling alley, and a fucking Twilight exhibit. The nearest city, Port Angeles—which is so small by modern standards that it’s only barely recognizable as a city—is about an hour’s drive from Forks.
If you’re the kind of person who loves people, loves the hustle and bustle of large populations of humans living in close proximity, who needs a nightlife and consistent access to broadband-speed internet, Bumblefuck is not for you. No surprise there. However, if you’re a borderline misanthrope and optimistic nihilist who finds peace and joy in the wilderness areas of the world, the northwest end of the Olympic Peninsula can be a quiet paradise. Endless miles of rarely used and abandoned forest service roads will carry an intrepid explorer deep into the heart of temperate rainforests so infrequently touched by the hands of civilization that one can wander for hours—days—without seeing another human being. In the off-seasons of fall and winter, there are even beaches one can visit without ever seeing another person.
Getting outside to explore far from the rest of humankind is a big part of my life these days. Evenings after work are spent running my dog tired down empty timber roads lined with verdant forest, and weekends see me exploring new sections of forest, river, or beach for hours on end. A whole branch of recent studies suggest that exposure to nature benefits a person’s cognitive abilities and mental/emotional health, and I can say with confidence that’s true for me.
Well—OK, I can’t be so confident about the cognitive improvements. I haven’t tried to measure my recall or my ability to solve problems before and after a trip into the wild. I also smoke cannabis during my explorations, so 🤷🏻♂️😅 I can, however, attest to feeling better—happier, less anxious, less stressed—when I get into the wilderness. My sense of overall well-being improves almost as soon as I get out of the car and off the road, and it deepens with every hour I’m outside. The feeling lasts, too. A weekend of casually exploring the wilderness in my backyard can get me through an entire week of work bullshit.
Exploring the wilderness also does something more for me than simply connecting me with nature. It’s not just the beautiful scenery, the quiet retreat from the sounds of human civilization, or the healthy exercise that make my adventures in the wilderness some of the best moments of my life. Exploring the wilderness also gives me back time with my favorite people in the world—time that is otherwise stolen by work; by the tiny glowing screens that inform and entertain and enslave us; by the mundanities of everyday life in America.
Time at home feels short, moments together fleeting from the end of one workday to the start of the next. Time in the wilderness is as expansive as the landscape. Conversations can unfold at a quiet, leisurely pace, when they unfold at all. In fact, more of my time in the wilderness with my wonderful partner and our monster-weasel-dog is spent in companionable silence than in conversation—by a large margin—but all of that time is spent together, present in the moment. We’re seeing the same sights, hearing the same sounds, smelling the same scents, vaulting the same logs, scrambling over the same boulders, splashing across streams and creeks together. Even smoking pot and sharing some snacks during a little break feels more special, somehow, when all the world is reduced to just my little family in the vast wilderness.
