(This piece is the first installation of a series on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington.)

Drumming, the North Pacific Coast summons me
To its gray altar. The overlook, a dark serpentine
Marble sea, cavalry rearing and
Pounding below this outcrop, this Calvary
Furling its blaring with hands hurling its howls, furlonged
In seconds, and I to the anvil march.

Forward faces the eagle, hung there
Unhurried in the screaming salt hydra, harpoons
Harnessed: its swelling peals and, rolling, shears
Crested still and gliding to where
He wills, like an archangel: Leviathan ropes and wrestles
While Michael rides, smooth and steer
There, how—and I in cleft hiding,
He harrows the wilding wind throws
And pulls up to a skyborne glee—
And with the same up-bent whirling, a thrush call
Shuttle whips round and round and vines up
To treetop-pierced sparkle: sky,
Wonder-music like mossy fire splits and shines
For an instant, then peats under the pile.
One breath of the foaming sea, and those ashes—
She, her mere walking by is enough to flush
Every forest thing to freshest bursting,
From fern floor to tree tier, her
Bright body being body and being
Being this world’s matrixed evergreen, and leave it all   dripping
In between—so endlessly lavishingly lusciously much so
That even dying is a love of living.

The wonder of it!—Olympia’s sea-piled anvil marching draws
Like shoulders, and earthlights plume awaiting underneath:
Arc-dazzle branches to leaf and leave then, awaking another:
Her ribbons of rain fourteen feet are forthed free:
Air-filled, the fall of water percussive calls the thrush
To lift its echo swirling back up to heaven’s drumming deep.

– Selection from A Vespers for Our World, “First Movement“

As I write this blog piece, I have been in a state of planning a trip to the place of this poem’s namesake: the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. As I anticipate my journey, I am going to reflect on my work in a series about Olympia–that is what I call the land, and that is what it deserves to be called, at least by the White Man. Not some lackluster quaint small hamlet for a capital deserves the titanic name of Olympia, Washington. No, the shoulderland of the gods on Mount Olympus should be collectively called Olympia. Olympia is the land of heaven come to earth.

The Olympic Peninsula juts out into the North Pacific shaped like an anvil. Its mountains continue to grow thanks to the very much alive Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Juan de Fuca seismic plate, which runs from the northern terminus of the San Andreas Fault just off the coast of Eureka, CA up north to somewhere far off the open shore of British Columbia, crushes into North American plate and rolls underneath it, down into the fiery underworld of magma, bubbling up into the Cascadian volcanoes like zits on the face of a pubescent girl. The Earth is alive on a very slow timescale. She seems old, and yet in many ways she is ever-youthful, renewed by the many means of climatic, geologic, and celestial activity. It is no wonder that she, too, has the zits of youth.

Olympia’s position rams it into cold and wet circulations of air and ocean. A coupling of Alaskan weather, driven south by subpolar currents and the Jet Stream, and the Coriolis force, powering the clockwise turning of the North Pacific gyre, pummels the Pacific Northwest with buckets and buckets of rain. Olympia, with its range thick with mountains, squeezes the cold water out of the sky. This is why the Hall of Mosses exists. As to why it exists in Olympia and not Amazonia, I have my theories, which I will suspend for the moment and save for a future piece. For now, note that a cool temperate rainforest can sustain higher biomass density (i.e., more living matter per cubic inch) than a hot tropical rainforest. Elsewhere, I have written about the Olympic Rainforest. Here is an excerpt:

“Picture pristine, verdant halls of Sitka spruce, Douglas-fir, hemlock, and redcedar, whose canopies reach hundreds of feet into the air. Their trunks and branches wear sweaters made of moss, and a carpet of greenery drenches the forest floor: ferns, flowers, mosses, and shrubs are everywhere. Fallen logs now serve as nurseries for new growth, swaddled in lichens, mosses, molds, mushrooms, and saplings. The earth is a rich reddish brown, sticky and soft with countless microorganisms and a hidden tapestry of fungal filaments. Birds echo in the distance; a squirrel bounces between branches; Roosevelt elk wander somewhere unseen; and the resident banana slugs happily gorge themselves on the endless feast of leaf litter. Delicious pinkish-orange salmonberries dangle beside the trail. Like little tropical islands, an abundance of small plants burst up in the untrodden parts of the trail. Nearby, a pellucid stream weaves gently through the needle-laced valley. Fern fronds reach out and tap its surface in rhythmic play. Plants hover angelically in the perfectly transparent water column, unbothered by the constant baptism. These waters feed into the glacier-fed Elwha river below, which carries off into the North Pacific. A thrush call accelerates in an ascending spiral.”

One fleeting glimpse of the outskirts of Olympia as a boy, and I was infected with a need to return. One half-day’s visit as a young man, and I was forever changed. My understanding of the world began to swirl, found upon and around Olympia as an angelic vision. My eyes had seen the glory of the Lord, the radiant and feminine presence of the Spirit of God, Shekinah, who guided the wandering Israelites through the desert as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, who hovered over the Tabernacle when they rested, who hovered between the Cherubim above the Ark of the Covenant, who hovered like a dove over the celestial waters at the dawn of time. She was in the air, in the water, nearer to the air than the air to my breath, nearer to the water than the water to my thirst, nearer to me than I was to myself. The trees, the fungi, the mosses, the fresh berries, the abundant birdsong. Goddess of life everlasting dawning everywhere in a play of great joy. Never again would I believe in a a rigid institutionalism, nor would I fall back into a love affair with an arid Nod. She was my lighthouse at the outcrop of Leviathan’s foment. Eden really was out there. Everything else was east and south of her.

June 30, 2021
San Luis Obispo