Open Writing

What I did on my vacation can be divided into rat factories and serenity. It started with a Texas trip, and the first stage was seeing the Rangers play baseball for the first time since moving to Fairbanks nineteen summers ago. Despite flying the 1 AM redeye that morning, I enjoyed the ball game, but its multiple home runs and pitching changes ran the game over four hours.

That’s when I discovered my rental car had been improperly parked and had been impounded in Fort Worth by unpleasant vehicle relocation workers from Fort Worth who demanded $250 and a notary’s assurance that I was the auto’s legal renter. Along with a depressingly nasty motel experience, it set a bad tone for the trip.

Last week I read a headline about a “Fort Worth Rat Factory Pesters Neighbors”. The interesting odors emanating from the Big Cheese Rodent Factory, which breeds 500,000 white rats a month to feed exotic pets, matches the overall impression from my Fort Worth foray.

My vacation’s second part was longer and utterly serene. Clare and I wandered leisurely around Washington’s Olympic Peninsula taking rainforest hikes, visiting a few wineries, and checking out every independent book store and library in sight. We left Olympia’s bookstores with the Honorable Mike Doogan’s mystery “Lost Angel”, “Birds of Western Washington”, and “Little Orphan Annie: 1924-27”, among others.

Port Townsend harbors both an excellent music store, Quimper Sound & Analog Lounge (“Motown Remixed,” and albums by guitarists John Pass and Leo Kottke), and a fantastic new-and-used bookstore, William James Bookseller (Baum’s “The Land of Oz” and a collection of travel writings by the 17th century Japanese haiku master, Basho). We stayed two nights in Forks in a B&B converted from the Peterson Homestead where we encountered the legendary Minnie Peterson.

In 1915 Minnie, daughter of local settlers, married Oscar Peterson, who led packing expeditions into the Olympic Mountains. Hard economic times forced him to take a national park service job, and Minnie, who loved riding in the mountains, took over Oscar’s packing business in the 1920s and continued it for forty years. An eminently readable, photo-packed biography, “High Divide: Minnie Peterson’s Olympic Mountain Adventures,” describes her love of the outdoors, skill with horses, and luck with gamblers with a series of engaging anecdotes.

Reading it was enhanced by the rough terrain of towering forests and tangled undergrowth. This also emphasized the accomplishments of another character in “High Divide”: Iron John Huelsdonk. Born in Germany in 1866, at 21 Huelsdonk moved to Seattle where he worked surveying timber and became a skilled woodsman. He homesteaded 160 acres in the Olympics on the Hoh River, and manually clearing that much gigantic forest singlehanded is astounding enough, but Huelsdonk’s growing family required more income. He worked as a logger until mangling his hands in a donkey engine used to tow heavy logs, so he began backpacking freight.
Word soon spread about Huelsdonk carrying double packs, up to 200 pounds, to earn double wages. According to www.HistoryLink.org, http://www.historylink.org/This_week/index.cfm “The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History,” Huelsdonk once backpacked a bulky campstove filled with provisions, including a fifty-pound sack of flour. He also hunted cougars for the $50 bounties their hides earned, with an 11-foot specimen being his largest.

In 1933 Huelsdonk was surprised by a bear. “Although suffering from claw wounds and a badly torn leg,” HistoryLink.org says, he “managed to walk the five miles back to the farm.” Huelsdonk John refused to go to the hospital, saying he’d “lived in the Wilderness for 43 years without going to a doctor and was not going to start now because of a few scratches.” After two days of convincing, Iron John walked the 17 miles to the nearest hospital for 3 weeks’ confinement.

Returning to summery Fairbanks was a treat, especially finding its wonderful library surrounded by flowering colors. We’d discovered on our journeys, like many Fairbanksans who visit Outside libraries, that ours outshines most others. And though it has some good libraries and people, hot, ratty Texas makes a nice contrast to cool, verdant Fairbanks. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”