Strange Forest

When the tidal wave came in 1958, it ripped whole trees and their roots from the rocky soil and pounded meters-big boulders way up the hillsides. At its highest, it reached 1700 feet, a mess of driftwood debris way up where salt was never expected.

When you look from across the water, you can see a line where new forest meets old, no trees older than 63 years, lighter colored with alder leaves.

Hiking, the line itself is a jungle gym of mossy, rotted logs, monoliths of stone, rootstocks twice a human height still clinging to the rocks they grew from.

Coming up out of the devil's club and thick huckleberry-blueberry brush, the deadfall makes us duck, step carefully on decaying balance beams, weave around exposed roots. Ryan's apt to crawl under giant logs; I choose gymnastic routes up through parallel logs.

But the forest is strange in many ways, unique amazements of terrain and little caches of discovery.

Today, we found a spread of eggshells, nearly whole, gathered inland around a mossy hummock on Cenotaph Island.

Elsewhere, Ryan finds the bones of some flat-headed bird, and then later the skull of something with a long, wicked beak.

Above Fish Lake, we find moose sign and moose beds with their strange rubbery hairs. The forest there is open, well-spaced mature trees, and moss so deep around their bases that we sink in it to our knees.

Each day brings new sights: hemlock forest dripping with goat's beard lichen, tiny mushrooms poking from the moss, giant bear cracker polypores rounding into each other on stumps. I think that soon, the flowers will start to bloom.

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