There were several points during the soggy hike down where we were like, “nah, let’s forget this”, let’s ditch the plan, turn around, and drive away from the edge of America.
But we’d come this far already. A cross country flight and the few hours of driving were in the bank, that time a sunk cost. What’s another hour on foot at this point? We soldiered on, unsure of what we’d see, if we would see anything through the fog.
By the time we hit the sandy shore of the edge of America, off the Olympic Peninsula on the far western rim of Washington, of the nation, we were moist from head to heel, hungry and kinda over it. But then nature dealt us a most glorious hand, as she’s wont to do, and we forgot all about our previous desire to forget this, forgot about our hunger pains and lack of drinking water, forgot, briefly, about the pain just beginning to reemerge down my right leg.
The foggy, wild, and unkept western coast will forever be this photo of my daughters, joyfully exploring the tide pools, fallen timber, rocks and blankets of moss they and we discovered after a long flight, long drive and wet hike to the spectacular edge of America.