IT TAKES A big man to admit you’re wrong. Unfortunately, I am not that man. While I’d never admit to being wrong, I have been misinformed. Which led to the printing of some erroneous statements that I deeply regret upon sober reflection.
I should have never said tourists are a hassle. That’s why we put a season on them in the first place. With the washout of the Upper Hoh Road and the closing of the Hoh Rainforest, the most popular destination in Olympic National Park, tourist traffic has been severely reduced with a corresponding negative economic impact. Once the tourists were gone, we missed them.
I should have never said that our federal, state and county politicians were not doing everything they possibly could to open the road into the Hoh Rainforest. But in my own defense, as our nation’s only wilderness gossip columnist, if I quit badmouthing politicians, I would have very little to write about. Our great nation was founded upon that enduring principle.
As colonists, we revolted against the British monarchy over the practice of taxation without representation. Which we exchanged for a system of taxation without cessation.
The American experiment in democracy has run amok to the point where the scientists are out to lunch and the lab rats are running the show.
Our three original branches of government, the legislative, judicial and executive, have been replaced by the big banks, big insurance and the military industrial complex, which has resulted in the predictable trickle-down economics nightmare for the working people of this county.
Do the math.
Tax rates for peasants during the medieval era were around 20 percent. Compare that to the myriad taxes we pay now and you can figure the peasants got off easy compared to us.
The average modern taxpaying citizen is being exploited by a cabal of degenerate self-serving, panty-raiding politicians spending our country into a black hole of debt at the bidding of a greed-soaked oligarchy whose only business plan is to sell our country out to the lowest bidder.
It’s not my fault the abuse of politicians has become the great American pastime, where we conveniently forget we voted them into office, with a pitiably small percentage of apathetic registered voters against our own self-interest in the first place and keep our leaders enthroned until they are rich and old.
I say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The West End of the Olympic Peninsula has always been the land that time and the politicians forgot. In her 1979 classic book, “The Iron Man of the Hoh. The Man, Not the Myth,” Elizabeth Huelsdonk Fletcher wrote about her family’s pioneer life on the upper Hoh River. Where her father, John Huelsdonk, also known as The Iron Man, established a homestead in 1890 and became a legendary packer, pioneer and varmint hunter.
Fletcher said her father “anxiously waited nearly all of his life for the roads that never seemed to come. Papa wrote letters to the county commissioners but it did no good. Our population was insignificant and our votes not needed. It all ended in wasted ink.”
Things have changed.
With the arrival of the tourist invasion, the government has seen the value of keeping the roads open, more or less.
While we are busy ripping up our highways to provide passage to paper salmon to migrate up dry stream beds, once in a while, our politicians get it right.
Recently, every politician in Washington state, from the governor, state legislators, county commissioners and private donors, came together to fix the Upper Hoh Road.
Thank you. That’s the road report.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
