As the fog cleared on the peninsula, the residents of Port Angeles had a sort of sparkle to them. Not in their smile but their skin as the sun beat down on them. It became apparent why. After seeing Bella’s Pharmacy and hotels letting you know Edward Cullen slept here, I realized we were in the presence of abstinence vampires. Man, they were everywhere too. Every small business was capitalizing on the fact that Twilight was set in the area. Thriftway (a small grocery store) declared themselves the Twilight gear headquarters and had an area in the store set aside called “The Twilight Zone”. Two trademark infringements with one stone. I was half expecting to see the local orthodontist offering fang implants, buy one get one free, the Edward way.
I laughed about this until I actually saw some girls driving up the tourism market in a place that gets the most cloud cover in America. One girl was wearing those jeans and fat shoes the kids wear and a black Edward shirt. She was perusing the Twilight Zone with her grandparents in tow. I don’t know who I identified with more. I recall making my dad and brother take the ferry to Bremerton with me as a kid because my favorite band was from there. But the look in the grandparents’ eyes resonated with me even more. They clearly loved their granddaughter but did not understand at all why she liked this crap. They followed her throughout the “Zone” wherever she wanted to go. Only wanting to spend time with their granddaughter even if it was buying tour guides to a small shittown because some fictional vampire boy treats some fictional girl the way she wants to be treated.
After soaking in everything we needed to know about Twilight, we crossed the “vampire treaty line” and went in to Olympic National Park. At this point, the forest got really thick. Olympic National Park has a mainland section that surrounds a tall mountain on the peninsula but it has a separate portion that is in the coastal area. This is the area we were in. There were no ranger stations but there was a campground. After picking out our spot, we set up the tent on this mossy area. The air was so damp, the trees so tall, the animals so strange and the ground so soft that I imagined I was inside that cave that was “no cave” in Empire Strikes Back.
We took a hike to the Quillayute River. Along the way, we cut through a rainforest. By definition, it was a rainforest and it looked like Ferngully so I believe it was. It just felt weird because it had the humidity you expected but was quite cold that evening. Along our moss-covered walk, we ran in to a chicken. We didn’t run in to any humans, just a chicken.
Before we went to bed, we drove to Rialto Beach just down the street. This beach was covered in large pebbles and solid driftwood trees. It also had this huge kelp deposits that our friend Joe in Denver named “whale sperm” due to their size and shape. The beach was cold and cloudy and though we were there at sunset, we saw nothing of it.