Hole-in-the-Wall: 1 of 3 hikes from sunrise to sunset

I had three trails, one day, and a long drive to the coast before any of them. I was on the road long before first light, with a playlist on shuffle doing what it does best, turning up things I didn’t know I’d lost. The plan was simple enough on paper: morning on the beach, afternoon in the rainforest, sunset back on the ocean. The first stop was Hole-in-the-Wall at Rialto Beach, on the Olympic coast just outside Forks, where the Pacific has spent a very long time working a doorway through solid rock. After that came the Hoh Rainforest, then Ruby Beach to watch the day go down. Somewhere in all of it was a question I’d been carrying for a while.

Hole-In-The-Wall

The drive gave me time to sit with a song from the week before, one that surfaced on its own and brought back a memory I hadn’t touched in years. It wasn’t an important song, historically speaking. It didn’t need to be. A few bars were enough to turn the lights back on in a room I’d forgotten was there, and I spent a good stretch of highway wondering how many other moments are tucked away like that, and what it takes to find them.

Rialto Beach starts with a scramble over driftwood and a long walk north on sand and rock. The tide was out when I reached Hole-in-the-Wall, and the pools between the rocks were full of color and small, busy lives. The waves kept coming at the rock the whole time I stood there, and the rock kept not moving. I couldn’t stop watching that, and I wasn’t yet sure why.

By afternoon I was inland in the Hall of Mosses, where everything drips and nothing seems to be in a hurry. Two old teachers came along with me that day, figuratively speaking: one that taught me to stand firm, and one that keeps asking me to let go. I’d always kept them in separate rooms. Somewhere between the rainforest and the sunset at Ruby Beach, I started to wonder if they had ever really disagreed.

The Journey…

I started at the base of the bulkhead at Rialto Beach just as the day was coming up, with sunrise at 7:38 AM. It was 39 degrees, and the sky had gone soft pink along the edges while the ocean still held on to the last of the night. The moon hung over the water, bright enough to lay silver across the waves as the daylight rose underneath it. Driftwood was piled along the top of the beach, whole trees bleached gray, some of them twisted into shapes that looked like old sea monsters asleep in the sand. The sand itself was cool and gritty and gave a little resistance with every step, as if it wanted me to slow down. So I did. Waves ran white up to my boots and slid back out, leaving shells and polished stones behind, and I turned north toward Hole-in-the-Wall.

Most of the way up the coast was rock, round and wet and a little slick, so I took my time. With the tide out, Hole-in-the-Wall stood open, an arch the ocean has worn clean through the rock, and I could walk right up to it. The tide pools tucked between the rocks were full of marine life, glinting in the early light. The air smelled of salt and seaweed, clean rather than sharp, nothing like the inlets back on Puget Sound at low tide. Sea Breeze makes a little more sense to me now. Waves broke on the rocks just offshore and threw a cool mist onto my face, the sound low and deep one moment and cracking sharp the next, loud enough to feel in my chest. Seabirds called from somewhere down the beach, and an eagle cut across the sunrise. I lost track of time out there, and I didn’t mind.

By early afternoon I had driven inland to the Hoh Rainforest and the Hall of Mosses, a short loop that feels much farther from the ocean than it is. I walked this area some time ago when I visited One Square Inch of Silence. The air changed the moment I stepped in, heavy and damp and smelling of wet earth. Tall trees stood draped in moss, long green strands hanging from every limb, and the whole place had the hush of a cathedral. Light came through the canopy in thin beams and landed on the ferns that covered the forest floor. A young conservation crew was working along the trail, their voices carrying through the trees, and I was glad to hear them. Someone has to look after places like this. It was a short walk, but it settled me in a way the beach hadn’t, and I left with Ruby Beach and the sunset still ahead.

The sun was already low by the time I reached Ruby Beach. The path down from the parking lot ends in a maze of driftwood, and I picked my way over and between the logs, each one left there by some storm I’ll never know about. Then the beach opened up, with sea stacks standing dark against a sky that was turning orange by the minute. The waves came in gently here, easy after a day of harder water. As the sun went down into the Pacific, the color spread and deepened, orange into pink into purple, and I stood in the cool breeze and watched until it was nearly gone. Then I climbed back through the driftwood in the last of the light, a little tired, and full.

Gratitude…

The drive out to the Olympic Peninsula is long enough to hold a lot of thinking, and most of mine went back to something that had happened in the car the week before. Kelly’s playlist was on, and “Up On The Roof” came through the speakers, the Carole King and James Taylor version recorded live at the Troubadour. I’ve heard it plenty of times. This time it took me somewhere. I was back at our first home, a small rambler in Kent, on a warm summer night when I talked Kelly into climbing up onto the roof with me. We spread out a blanket and lay there looking at the stars, trading stories and plans we couldn’t yet afford. Money was tight in those years. Up there, it didn’t seem to matter at all.

I hadn’t thought about that night in years. It had been sitting in the back of my mind the whole time, waiting, and all it took to bring it back was the right song at the right moment. The song didn’t have to mean anything to anyone else. It only had to open the door. Maybe that’s what Kelly had in mind when she built that playlist, or maybe it was just good timing, a small gift that showed up when I needed it. Either way, I’ll take it. Somewhere on the road toward the coast, it occurred to me that the moments I keep going back to were never the big ones. They were a blanket, a roof, and the two of us with nothing much to do. What I’m grateful for this week is that music still knows where those moments are kept, even when I’ve forgotten.

Reflections…

My trail-thought was a question I’d put off for years: whether Stoicism and Taoism, two philosophies I’ve leaned on, really belong together. I started at Rialto Beach as the sun came up, with the surf loud enough to keep time with my thoughts. Stoicism came first, maybe because the ocean made it easy. The surface out there never stopped moving, waves piling in and breaking hard on the rocks, but a little way down the water stays calm. It doesn’t much care what the weather is doing. That’s what Stoicism has given me: the habit of sorting what I can control from what I can’t, and putting my effort into the first. I don’t get to choose most of what comes at me. I do get to choose what I do with it, and standing on that beach, I was grateful to have learned that.

The rainforest asked for something else. In the Hall of Mosses everything was soft and green and wet, and none of it seemed to be holding on to anything. Moss hung from the branches and moved when the air did. Water dripped, pooled, and found its way downhill without any help from me. This is where Taoism came in. I tend to build structure into my life, routines and plans and rules for myself, and I hold on to them tighter than I should. Taoism keeps telling me to loosen my grip, to accept what’s here and move with it, the way water moves around a stone. I stopped on the trail to breathe the damp air and feel the mist on my skin, and I wondered how two ideas that sound so different could both feel true.

Farther along the loop, I started to see them less as opposites and more as partners. One keeps me steady. When things get hard, Stoicism is what lets me stay composed long enough to think before I react. The other keeps me from getting stuck there. Taoism reminds me there’s something good in letting go, in not needing every moment to go the way I planned it. Then I thought about Hole-in-the-Wall. The ocean didn’t carve that arch by being hard. It carved it by being steady and soft at the same time, coming back every day, going around what it couldn’t move until one day it went through. I stood still for a minute with the damp ground under my boots, and for a moment the beach, the forest, and both of those teachers felt like one thing.

By the time I got to Ruby Beach, the sun was low and the sky behind the sea stacks had started to turn orange. It was the same ocean I’d started with that morning, but the day had changed how I saw it. The thought I carried out of Rialto at sunrise had grown up a little by sunset. I’d started out as if there were a destination, some final answer about how the two fit together, and I didn’t come away with one. I’m not sure that was ever the point. What mattered were the moments along the way, the few seconds of clarity, the times I let something simply be what it was. I don’t think either philosophy gets me there alone. Somewhere between holding on and letting go is where I find the most peace.

I watched the last of the light slip into the Pacific and felt humbled more than anything, small next to that much water and grateful to be standing beside it. My path is my own, shaped by where I’ve been and what I’ve carried, and I don’t expect it to look like anyone else’s. If there’s such a thing as enlightenment, I don’t think it’s a place I arrive at and get to keep. It’s closer to what the ocean does at Hole-in-the-Wall, something that happens a little at a time, over and over, without ever quite finishing. Every hike gives me another chance at it. Most days I only catch a glimpse, and that’s enough to keep me walking. The path continues.

-Ken