What’s past is prologue.

– SHAKESPEARE

1999

My boots are braced on the familiar asphalt bridge, slippery from algae and the ever-pounding rain. Here on the shadowy overlook of the Skokomish River, I lean on a railing and watch a leaf run past, running circles over rocks, twirling and ducking through a logjam before dancing out of sight. I imagine it tumbling for miles past the bulging eyes of the rainbow trout, making its way to its destiny like the history of a person’s life, far into the mist, where everything that floats in the river becomes part of it.

My favorite hiking trail is on the north fork of the river. There isn’t much elevation gain and I am fine with that. Instead, both the trail and I disappear into a dark and mossy reverie as I trek inward along the great riverbed staircase. The way is muddy until I get a couple of miles farther in, where it becomes crunchy from snow half melted and frozen again. I wind around the cold, wet mountain, deep into the dripping forest where the tang of wet earth fills my senses and teases up the doubts and fears that bring me here alone, year after year.

I am vigilant when I hike alone. I may be lost in thought, but I don’t want to become lost, so I pay attention to my surroundings. What I see are rain-heavy branches drooping halfway to the ground, the water dripping on me as I pass below. The mountaintop is out of sight in the clouds.  The song of the river is everywhere.

And I am everywhere, twisting in the wind, trying to catch the falling while I fall myself. So I return again and again to this cathedral of moss where, by following a timeworn trail through the woods, over and sometimes under fallen logs, alone and  lost in spite of myself, I hope to gain ground on a real and tangible path to courage.

I turn from the bridge, hunching my shoulders to adjust my pack and hike up to Dead Horse Hill. I’ll search amid the fir and western red cedar where the Skokomish meanders through the burn of the 1985 Beaver Fire, gushing and descending over ice age boulders on its way down the Olympic Mountains. I’ll block out the sounds of everything but this river, and follow the trill and timber of the voices that sing through it.

And when I sink a stone into Red Reef Pool, I’ll watch its circles fan out and struggle not to feel as cold and heavy and dead as the rock, while everything that was once alive rushes by, out of my life and into the mist.