America the Beautiful? by Blythe Roberson

Author:Blythe Roberson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

11

Living the Life of a Normal Human

I HEAR YOU’RE EXPERTS ON FREE-CAMPING!” I SAID TO TWO men waiting in line at the Olympic National Park Visitor Center. I smiled wide and turned on all the flirt I had left in me after a month on the road. “Or are soon to be, at least.”

The visitor center in Port Angeles was slammed by the time I got there, and the ranger in her sixties who was working the desk didn’t want to answer my questions; she clearly just wanted to go on lunch break. I know this because when I got to the front of the line she said, “I will help you, but I was supposed to go on lunch break.” She told me that all the park’s first-come-first-served campsites were likely already claimed but that two men had just asked her about dispersed camping. She didn’t want to repeat the information, so she pointed them out to me and suggested I talk to them.

The men were less informed than advertised. “Oh, uh, we’re going to ask the backcountry ranger if there’s anywhere they prefer we go for dispersed camping,” one said. I looked at the backcountry line they were in and wondered if I should join, or if I should just browse the visitor center’s postcards until the guys had their answer so they could share it with me.

“But there’s a whole national forest to the west of the park,” the other man added.

Problem solved! If what I had previously heard was true, I could sleep anywhere in a national forest, so there was no need to wait in line to figure out if the rangers had a preferred spot for me. “I’ll just sleep there somewhere,” I told the guys. “I’m so small, how will they ever find me?” The men did not find this charming, maybe because instead of “cute and bubbly” I was “random and covered in 3.5 days of sweat.”

With several hours before sunset, I figured I’d go on a few hikes before venturing into the Olympic National Forest. But every other person in the Pacific Northwest apparently had the same idea. I stewed as I struggled to find any trailhead with parking and then stewed as I waited in a long line for the pit toilet. I stewed as I hiked, never losing sight of someone in front of or behind me. My family had visited Olympic in 2004, and I didn’t remember the trails being so busy when I was a kid. But maybe other people just bothered me less back then. The range of humans who had all decided to drive to a remote corner of Washington and hike this specific trail astounded me: I passed an older woman talking to her friend about a new law restricting abortions and how troubling she found this conservative trend. A minute later I passed a white male teen explaining that he and all his friends have the same gun. When I stopped for photos, a group caught up to me, a family of mother, father and small son.

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