The OrWa road trip diaries, Day 6: Stacked stones, bared fangs and the end of the new world

About now, you may be thinking, we’re due for a  reference to that old Grateful Dead lyric, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” So here it is. And here’s why.

I’m sleeping tonight — well, I may not be sleeping; I may just be lying down — in a Port Townsend, Wash., hotel room, directly above the town’s leading brew pub. My room was quite affordable, about $81, and when I got here I remembered the proprietress saying something about the bar having live music sometimes.

Well, what it has is a Grateful Dead tribute band, Jack Acid. The band members have already covered “Truckin’,” “Sugar Magnolia” and a bunch of other favorites. And it’s clear they’re far from done.  Which probably means that I’m far from sleep.

So, the day. It was long — something like 250 driving miles. And because of the way 101 is routed through Washington, there’s been a lot of jogging out to the coast, jogging back to the highway, then jogging out to the coast again. But there have been rewards.

A few miles north of Kalaloch Lodge, I stepped down to Ruby Beach, the last easily reached beach before the 101 veers inland through the Hoh Rain Forest. It was filled with massive driftwood — not so surprising, given Kalaloch beach. But over the months and years, visitors had covered this driftwood with little cairns — pebbles and stones stacked everywhere, on trunks, branches, sea stacks. I’d seen cairns in plenty of other places. But this setup was otherworldly.

An old guy with a fancy camera sidled up.

“Down in San Diego, they sell flat river rocks like this for a fortune,” he said. “A friend of mine put some in his frontyard. Cost about $1,000. I don’t dare tell him he could have gotten all he wanted.”

The man wandered off, and so did I. To Forks, where popular culture is rewiring the town.

Every since writer Stephenie Meyer set a 2005 vampire novel in this small, hardscrabble lumber town (after she went looking on Google for someplace dark and wet), entranced strangers have been showing up, often teenage girls. But now that the novel has grown into a series of books, and a movie series, among other things, the vampire pilgrim phenomenon has gone out of control.

When I rolled up at the local lumber museum, which stands next to the Chamber of Commerce, I saw a minivan about to haul away one load of vampire tourists, hot on the trail of the fictional Edward and Bella. Meanwhile, a few more were inside the chamber offices, sticking pins in maps to show where they’d come from. An old red truck sat out front, outfitted to resemble one in the movie so that the tourists can pose in front of it.

Marcia Bingham, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, pulled out her tally of visitors: In 2006, all year, the chamber got 6,386. By 2008 that number had tripled. And in the first half of this year, the number had jumped to more than 25,000. In a town of 3,200 or so, this changes a few things. Most of the restaurants seem to have dishes named for the movie; many of the stores on the main drag are touting tie-ins . Those who don’t take the minibus tour can trace their own route, following maps offered by the chamber.

Malia Suzui, 21, and Lani Kiefel, 37, were among those taking turns with cameras in the bed of the truck, posing and grinning wickedly with their fake vampire teeth. They had come from Walla Walla, Wash., they’d seen all the sights, and they didn’t seem to want to leave. They were still hanging around when I left.

I’m not really a vampire guy. (Could you tell?) But I have to thank the vampire groupies for turning me on to Quileute Days, which were going on just down the road in La Push, the beach town on the nearby Quileute Indian Reservation. An easy drive. So I wedged it into my already overburdened itinerary and got to see a bunch of happy Quileutes and their guests from neighboring communities, smoking salmon, selling arts and crafts, playing softball. It was nice to see so many people smiling, and nice to see the Quileutes harvesting a few vampire dollars and nice to see the reservation’s coastal location.

Oh, yes. Speaking of Indian tribes that somehow managed to hold on to priceless real estate, I capped the afternoon with a drive and hike out to the northwesternmost point in the continental U.S.

It’s called Cape Flattery, and it’s on the Makah Indian Reservation. The payoff view comes after a half-mile hike through dense forest.  On a fogbound day, I’ll bet the drive and hike are a complete bust (fortunately, the Makah have put together a museum that gets good reviews.) But today, under brilliant blue skies, the observation points at the end of the trail gave us hikers a real treat: sandstone caves, turquoise waters and the storybookish Tatoosh Island, which is topped with emerald green vegetation and a handsome lighthouse.  Looking farther north, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, is some other country, I forget which, but I hear it’s got pretty good healthcare.

And the band plays on.  It’s midnight now, and the bass line radiates right up through the floorboards, up the legs of this old oak desk, into the laptop keys. It’s “Bertha,” with those ringing G chords.

Can’t beat ‘em. I’m going downstairs to join ‘em and have a beer.  No sense going down the road feeling bad.

– Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times staff writer

[Photos: From top, breakfast at the Kalaloch Lodge. Fun with logs and rocks at Ruby Beach, Wash. Malia Suzui and Lani Kiefel of Walla Walla, Wash., are such big fans of "Twilight" that they came to Forks bearing fake fangs. Cape Flattery, the northwesternmost corner of the continental U.S., is only a half-mile trail away, but it's full of views like this. Credit: Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times]

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 1:07 pm by Christopher Reynolds and is filed under Oregon, Oregon Washington road trip, Outdoors & Adventure, Pacific Northwest, Washington. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.