The Testament

The House Of Memories

The northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula sweeps out into the Pacific in a violent and intrusive manner. It's granite ridges claw into the ocean like the talons of a huge wing, angelic or otherwise I'll leave to you.

At these ragged edges of our world, the impenetrable rock and the remorseless waves are locked in an eternal battle of great violence unseen by most.

And in this endless primordial war between what lies above and what hides beneath, the raging waters respond to the granite's intrusion with its own form of eternal punishment. Grey-blue-green breakers scrub and scour the coastline endlessly, reaching up from the inky depths, grinding stone to sand and, given enough time, ripping those granite claws into ruin.

The massive arched spine of the peninsula, the Olympics, is a great beast of heaving mountains and sinuous canyons, locked in battle with some dark leviathan just below the waves. But regardless of its raging ruggedness, it's beauty is unsurpassed. It was named after the lofty home of the Greek Pantheon of gods and heroes. Rightfully so, when observed from a safe distance. It's picturesque.

But when you live close enough to that edge, the place where ocean meets shore and fog erases the line between above and below, and you watch the waters do battle with the land, daily and forever, you understand something.

These dark forbidding mountains, impenetrable and deep, ragged and shrouded in both mist and forest, may have been named for the wrong kind of gods.

When Lovecraft spoke of the dark wetness and the twisting tendrils of the old gods, he'd not put his eyes on my part of the world; the deep twisting canyons choked with rubble and trees like bones broken and shrouded in cold ocean mist. He'd not witnessed the deep waters and their cruel crashing waves, surging forces suggesting titanic battles happening below. And he knew not of the cold creep or the damp dread of these far forests, but he'd imagined it.

His fevered imaginings spoke of beaks and claws and tentacles and hidden many-eyed gods. The northwestern coast of the Olympics instead gives us rock and crashing waves and deep ocean abysses and high granite ridges like massive jagged teeth. But the gods hide just as easily and act just as impulsively here.

Gods. Gods only stay hidden until we call them forth, I believe. And we of course called them forth. Soon, eastern industrialists found the area, and smelled the minerals and with them, money. And they began to dig.

One of these massive, mineral-rich granite ridges ended at a tiny bay where the small town of Port Crescent would soon be built to serve Boston Mining's operations.

Ah. U2. "In God's Country".

Sorry, the radio keeps fading from the storm. I love that song.

Anyway.

It was to this location in 1921 that Erskine Salk brought 2 wagons full of supplies and tools as well as 4 workmen to begin construction on what would become his family home. Salk, a mining engineer who had campaigned aggressively for this very position with the Boston Mining Company, had been hired to survey the mineral resources available in the Lake Crescent area just to the east, and so a full complement of hiking, climbing, mining and surveying equipment arrived just days later.

His home would sit atop the end of the ridge, a lightly forested promontory soaring well over 300 feet above the wind chopped bay itself. The hard, mineral-rich granite was exposed in places there at the top of the ridge, and his home would lay its foundation deep into this very bedrock.

He would choose for his family home a name that, while apparently innocent enough, appeared particularly selected to confuse everyone, including his wife. But the fanciful name of the home was no mystery to me.