American Olympus

My first paid vacation in nearly four years was a special occasion. I had married, in Ohio, and then worked a stint as a social sciences editor in Indiana before finally resettling in the desert of Washington state. In mid-spring, my wife and I took off in our Volkswagen Bug for a one-week camping trip circumnavigating the Olympic Peninsula, a finger of land is nearly as large as New Hampshire or Vermont, with mountains reaching more than 7,000 feet elevation, glaciers, rainforests  the heaviest annual rainfall in the continental United States, in fact  and coastline along the Pacific Ocean, the Strait of San Juan de Fuco, and Puget Sound. Complicating the plot was a coincidental visitor out from Chicago, someone perhaps best described as “special friend” and now on good terms with my spouse. However naïvely or idealistically, off we went, together with my parents’ old, cumbersome umbrella tent.
In the process, I received my first prolonged exposure to ocean  its changing tides and restless moods – and pondered a confluence of East and West. While the peninsula and its mountain range are named after the home of Greek deities whose mythology underpins so much European and American philosophy and art, the Pacific Northwest itself is home to another mythology  that of the coastal tribes  which remains alive and at hand, in some albeit diluted form. As I ask, wearing my poet-mask: Why do we Americans typically know more of Greek or even Norse legends than we do of the Amerindian ones arising in our own soil? The West Coast further stands as a fulcrum between European cultures and those of Asia. In this encounter, my embrace of yogic spirituality was about to turn in an unanticipated direction. I was not yet 30.