YOU KNOW LIGHTNING’S getting closer when you feel the thunder in your bones. That’s how close it got during the recent storm that battered the Olympic Peninsula and beyond with a show of raw electrical power.
It was the ultimate light show for anyone stupid enough to go camping.
This is my story.
I was just trying to help others experience the thrill of camping in the rainforest. That’s my excuse.
We should have checked the weather report. There’s no excuse for that. Except for the fact that my fancy friends could only get away from their busy big-city lives for just one weekend out of the year and last weekend was it. No matter what.
Besides, they had just spent a fortune on camping gear and were itching to try it out. So what if it rained? You can’t let a little rain cancel your camping trip.
If it doesn’t rain in the rainforest, you have been cheated out a real nature experience.
Camping in the rain separates the real campers from the fair-weather posers that only go camping in the sunny weather. That’s what I told them anyway. It’s not my fault they believed me.
We’ll call them Don and Jean because, well, that’s their names.
They had just purchased a new tent and one of those collapsible metal-framed canopy shelters that are so popular these days. They pitched their tent on a sandy patch of river bar and set up the canopy complete with a barbecue, stove, coolers and everything you need for a camp kitchen next to it, making a cozy little camp in which to spend the quiet of a wilderness weekend.
Real campers don’t need all that stuff. Just give us a blue tarp and some bungee cords, and we’re all set to camp, come what may.
In theory, anyway — until the distant rumble of thunder echoed through the hills.
Meteorologists tell us thunderstorms are caused by atmospheric conditions, but we know better. Lightning comes from the Thunderbird’s blinking eyes. Thunder comes from the flapping of its massive wings.
The Thunderbird, called Tistilal by the Quileute and Hoh people, was a large, horned, winged flying beast the size of a Boeing 747 with 10-foot-long claws that could pick a 90-foot whale out of the ocean and fly it up to the Blue Glacier on Mount Olympus, where it lived with Xixixtoya, a massive colored snake that made rainbows as it crawled across the sky.
The Thunderbird was a bad-tempered monster. Sometimes, it would accidentally drop a whale on its way back to the mountains. The thrashing whale would knock down trees, creating prairies like the one you can see to this day along U.S. Highway 101 on the divide between the Bogachiel and Hoh rivers.
Once upon a time, some people tried to salvage a whale the Thunderbird dropped, and he killed every one of them with a hail storm. In another fit of rage, the Thunderbird set off a tsunami simply by flapping its wings over the ocean.
I thought, with global warming, the retreat of our glaciers and the unprecedented invasion of the tourist hordes, the Thunderbird was a thing of the past. No.
As the lightning came closer, the Thunderbird flapped its wings, shredding my blue tarp then launching Don and Jean’s collapsible canopy across the sand bar like a big metal tumbleweed.
They huddled in their flooded tent on a leaky air mattress until the morning light revealed a scene of soggy devastation.
No matter. The air was clear. The wind had died.
We had survived the wrath of the Thunderbird.
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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.
