You start in a wet and mossy forest with little flowers and budding skunk cabbage. A walk that begins in and out of forest, to field, to road to bring you to the trail. You glimpse the headland when you get to the field – of the path to come.
You approach the official trailhead and step into a portal of dampness and beauty. Pink purslane litters your path with its five bookmark petals and two plump and pointy leaves. Fiddle-heads of wood ferns seem frozen in time, but you know they are slowly unfurling themselves. You look up and see microcosms of mosses and ferns enveloping ancient sitka trees that stretch for light. Tender mushrooms, big and small, are to be found when looked for, and stream violets call out for your attention to their sunshine glow and opening hearts.
You ascend slowly, then steeply, then slowly, up the slope through the forest. Pink blossoms of salmon berries whisper to you of the late spring bounties. The sitka watch over you with their fish-scale bark and overwhelming presence. Water runs beneath your feet as you cross bridges and go under arches of understories.
Eventually the forest opens to the headland. White-crowned sparrows speckle the canvas of grass with their song. The curvature of this existence stretches and connects a peninsula to the land you touch. When you look up to where you will be the grass goes from blades to a blend of a painted green hill far above.
Before you turn to the first switchback you peek at the rocks below to see a seal playing. You switch back and forth and back and forth. Little strawberries blooms come to the edge of the trail and the clouds smear in the wind above you. You glance self-similarity in the shape of the peninsula below and the switchback at your feet with little yellow blossoms of lesser celandine.
Towards the top you spot the scat of Elk - not very old. You can smell their musky morning on the hill. You glance around, but they have moved on. You reach the top of the Cascade Head, but rather than stop and take pictures or take in the view, you feel the pull of the forest beyond.
You walk through a second portal today. This time the darkness and the moisture are deeper. A pressure brought on by the coolness and density of the forest presses in and pulls you deeper. The soft mud is covered in Elk tracks. The trees are so close, yet the floor of the forest is a short green carpet with little understory. You can see far into the trees, but the trees are their own curtain.
A fallen tree is suspended as if the hands of a forest goddess wove under, over, under through the trees still standing. The light that breaks through is intense and warming, but scarce. The magic of this beauty is that it brings you from one spotlight to the next in which a robin sits - nudging you deeper.
Skunk cabbage breaks the soil and the Elk tracks become more frequent. Every leaf highlighted by sunlight is framed in the shadow of a sitka. Lanky moss calls to you with its softness. You reach a road and know it is time to head back. A longing to see the elk sits for a moment before you begin your return.
You feel the soft earth with every step, you smell the mossy ferns with every breath, and then you hear it – a sound of something breaking – a sound of someone eating. You scan the forest and to your left stands an Elk. You stare at each other while she eats what once was a sapling.
There is a connection – a deep connection that roots right through you like the trees that surround you with their awe.
And then, you realize they are all looking at you – A herd of Roosevelt elk in this sitka forest where the cold presses in, and the sunlight reminds you that there is a world beyond this, but all you want to do is be here – now.
Eventually a young buck gives you the signal that it is time to move on. It is time for them to have this world without you in it. You move again and realize how cold you've become. You move again back towards the portal's mouth through the woods while your spirit stays with the elk, with that sitka there, with that little purslane, and discrete configuration of roots holding each other through time.
The sun appears as you pass through the mouth and warmth becomes you. Now, you can take in the view, but it is different. You see, knowing that the elk were here in the morning – in the mist. Do they stop for the seals? Do they wonder about the self-similar trails and landscape? Do they smile and blow kisses to the little white crowned sparrows guarding this path?
As you head down you remember and savor the words from reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. She wrote of how the people of this land would set it on fire to welcome the salmon home. The opening quote of this chapter, "Burning Cascade Head," is :
“The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast. – Ursula K. Le Guin”
You leave in a state of renewal.