By Chiggers Stokes

In November of 1974 I stepped off the Coho Ferry onto the thumbed shape protuberance of land that would be my home for 41 years…but not on this trip. The previous year I had resided in a hayloft on my sister’s farm in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. I cut and sold firewood to eat and eventually began to look for employment with the National Park Service.

I had quit a Park Ranger job back East, working near the other Washington. I got turned down by most of the Parks in the Pacific Northwest, including Olympic National Park. Less than a year later I was returning to the Northwest to pick up my drum set, chainsaw, and other cherished possessions. My forlorn easterly retreat from the PNW to my old duty station at Great Falls on the Potomac had presented opportunities.

I was a River Ranger and lived rent-free in a 100-year-old research cabin on an Island without electricity or plumbing. I was on a four-month furlough when I triumphantly traveled across the Olympic Peninsula on my way to join my drumset and cherished property in my sister’s apple shed for a few months. I built a mobile ark to haul my stuff back to the research cabin overlooking a 70-foot cliff over the Potomac.

On that November 1974 landing, I purchased beer from the old Lincoln Street Safeway and proceeded to East Beach, to drink illegally into the night and camp. The morning came early with the sun shining on the NO OVERNIGHT CAMPING sign under which I slept. A Park Maintenance guy arrived and I jumped up to stow my sleeping bag and ensolite. The guy surveyed the clean camp and me on hands and knees, teasing the grass to erase my body’s impression thereupon.

“There’s no problem here…,” said the kindly worker. “No problem here at all…unless the Rangers catch you.” That admonition stuck with me.

In three years I would return to the Olympic Peninsula as home. My position as a River Ranger, yielded a job at my dream Park here on the Peninsula. In August of 1977, I drove into Forks and saw her for the first time, not as a tourist, but as a new resident. I wondered how many souls in this community would learn my name.

I wondered how I would be accepted with my Quaker perspective on politics, my Sierra Club goggles on the timber industry, and my lifetime ability to say the wrong thing at the worst time. With what esteem would this rough-and-tumble little town treat a pilgrim in a Park Ranger uniform. One of my off-duty coworkers was knocked off his bar stool at the Hang Ups Tavern by outraged loggers who found out mid-beer that they were drinking with a Park Ranger. I learned that my uniform was best left in the closet when off duty.

Bury my heart at First Beach. When I arrived in 1977, all of Rialto Beach and most of First Beach were under the exclusive jurisdiction of Olympic National Park. If loggers weren’t happy to drink beer with off-duty Rangers, the Quileute Nation was even less thrilled to be visited by uniformed agents of the same Government which had pushed them onto a square mile of what was historically vast expanse of the Quileute’s usual and accustomed territory.

It didn’t take me long to learn the word and meaning of “Hoquat!” But before I learned, a fellow employee set me up by telling me that “Hoquat” was Chinook language for the word Kemo sabe in Tanto’s dialect and as spoken to the Lone Ranger (meaning “Cherished Friend”). So until my boss put

me straight, I was over in LaPush, flying the National Park Service badge on First Americans who had every reason to resent me AND the uniform. “Hoquat!” one of the community would snarl. I would smile, wave and call back, “Hoquat, you!”

In the earliest days of manned flight, the United States Land Office was still giving away quarter sections here on the Olympic Peninsula. German immigrant Otto Seigfried claimed 160 acres of Bogachiel Rain Forest beneath Reade Hill south of Forks and named her The Flying S Ranch. He burned stumps and cleared land to expand horticulture upon his original 20 acres of meadow that evinced the hunting enterprise of the Quileute or Lower Hoh People. The Pacific Trail, which connected Forks and the outlying Olympic Pioneers to such saltwater ports as Clallam Bay and Aberdeen, crossed the Flying S.

On a July day in 1978, less than a year of residing at Mora Ranger Station, I stood upon The Flying S and watched waves upon waist-high grass. Grasshoppers played in the wind that carried the scent of elk and the bouquet of forest from the creek which ran through her. I filled my chest with this pungent, wild air and wanted to own this land just as I owned that breath. I would become that land owner…but for 40 years, the land owned me.

But, by the time I moved on, I had secured environmental protection for this piece of rainforest biosphere in the form of a Conservation Easement managed in perpetua by the North Olympic Land Trust in Port Angeles. The easement protects this piece of The Flying S FOREVER. Typical of my double vision when pursuing a goal, I became the first developer to test the Easement. I was running a 12-bed Airbnb enterprise and built a campground with a primitive restroom and four tent pads. I had big tents and had plans for marketing this special environment which I had legally sworn to protect.

For four decades I would make my stand on this piece of the Flying S Ranch. This mossy, green piece of frontier would soak up my sweat, blood, and tears as fast as I could shed them. My effort and the shared joy and toil of my family were echoes of the Olympic Pioneers who gave all of themselves to settle upon this wild land.

Some missed me when I left Forks in May of 2018. Some were glad to be quit of me. It is all of you that make this wonderful community and to which I am forever indebted for giving me place and a voice.

Memories are echoes. For the next few weeks, I invite you to share my Echoes of Forks.