PORT ANGELES — One December day, Larry Lang, newly divorced, asked a woman if she might like to go out for a bird walk.
A lover of the forest and all of its songs, she did take that stroll with him.
It led to another and another, until Larry and Nancy Lang had walked thousands of miles together, with Nancy smelling the trailside blossoms and calling to the red-breasted nuthatches, tiny birds whose subtle “beep, beep” she could imitate perfectly.
Larry said goodbye to his wife — an author and historian — last Sunday morning; at 74, she succumbed to ovarian cancer after fending it off for more than a decade.
Vivid in his mind is one day in January 2003 when he and Nancy, still just dating, walked the trail beside the south fork of the Hoh River.
“It was one of those mornings when the sky was crystal clear,” he said.
“I didn’t have a plan . . . we stopped for a break on the trail,” where he laid an old camping pad on a log so they could sit.
“I was taken by something. I can’t describe it,” Larry recalled.
He took a long strand of moss from a tree overhead, wrapped it around her finger and asked if she would be his wife.
She instantly said yes, then found another piece of moss to encircle her man’s finger.
“In the eyes of God,” Larry believes, “that ring of moss was just as valuable as any ring of gold.”
Larry and Nancy Lang were married July 12, 2003, atop Hurricane Ridge. This was their place: Larry was an Olympic National Park ranger, while Nancy was an interpretive naturalist, leading snowshoe walks and other forays.
Nancy received her cancer diagnosis in late 2004. The signs were subtle. Her daughter Sabrina Trask remembers how Nancy had to keep after her doctors, asking them to go a step further with their tests.
“She was very, very proactive about her health,” said Trask, who believes that gave her mother the 10 years of life after diagnosis.
After chemotherapy made Nancy bald, Trask suggested wigs.
“Why would I do that?” was Nancy’s response. From then on, she’d go out into the sunshine bare-headed and talk to strangers.
“She’d use [her baldness] as an opening of a dialogue with anybody who was curious,” Trask recalled.
On their daily 3- to 4-mile walks, Nancy and Larry ran into a lot of people. They’d do Ediz Hook, where they’d meet plenty of humans and dogs. Every day, Nancy would record the ones they saw.
“She was a journalist,” Larry said, who logged the temperature, wind and water conditions and of course the mileage — “my Fitbit,” Larry said, referring to that electronic device he and Nancy didn’t need.
An author in 2014
In spring 2014, Nancy became an author. She published a book about her grandmother Pearl MacHenry’s 1930 trip across the United States in a Willys-Knight automobile.
Titled 9,000 Miles in a Knight, the book became a collaboration for Larry and Nancy, both avid genealogists and historians.
She transcribed her grandmother’s travel journal, and together, they found and scanned newspaper clippings, maps, postcards and photographs to illustrate 148 pages.
The release of 9,000 Miles in a Knight, along with Nancy’s genealogical research, helped bring her extended family together. Cousins, aunts, uncles — they connected over MacHenry’s grand adventure.
On Sunday, Aug. 30, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Larry plans to host an open house and remembrance of Nancy. It’s open to the community at their home at 808 Golf Course Road.
He’ll have copies of 9,000 Miles in a Knight to give in exchange for donations to Volunteer Hospice of Clallam County.
From the time he contacted them a couple of weeks ago, the hospice’s workers “have been great. I can’t say enough about them,” he said.
Trask added that her mother, even at her most fragile, had the power to heal an old hurt.
“My brother and I had quite a rift,” Trask said, adding that she and her sibling Sean, who lives with his family in Seabeck, had not spoken for a couple of years.
But “coming to Port Angeles and spending time with him, caring for our mom in her last four days . . . we came together so automatically.”
She saw a side of her brother she hadn’t before: a compassionate, tender one.
This reconciliation, Trask said, “was a gift she gave us.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
