The Other by David Guterson Page A

presence of these maples, this isn’t quite your classic rain forest but a variation, with the maples thriving amid cobbles and rockslides and in the glacial till of the river bottom. Rain on the South Fork Hoh is common, but on my recent walk there was no sign of rain—instead, it was warm, and a little dusty where the silt had baked in the sun on the north bank. Still, rain remains this region’s most obvious feature in any season but summer. Notable, too, is the silence here, broken infrequently by the winter wren’s trill—reminiscent of a hysterically played flute—at other times by the ventriloquy of ravens. Then there’s the din of the river, fed by snow in the Valhallas and glaciers on Mount Olympus. In June, the South Fork Hoh runs gray and milky. It’s in places slow enough to suggest tranquillity, but elsewhere it’s extreme in its energy and character. So this is a hike of disparate feeling, unfolding under a dense forest canopy broken by glades of arcadian maples. It’s also a hike through lonely country, four and a half hours by car from Seattle, infrequently visited not only for this reason but because the main fork, a few miles to the north, has a better road and a visitors’ center near its bank. More, the main-fork trail takes climbers to Mount Olympus, whereas the South Fork Trail just leads to deeper gloom and, eventually, into a canyon. Sometimes anglers will try the South Fork’s upper stretches; even more rarely, a party of climbers will pass through on its way to the Valhallas, though I should point out that the first ascents of those peaks were mostly made in 1978, and none earlier than 1966, which should give you some idea of their remoteness. When John William and I first went there, in ’74, wandering into Valkyrie Creek Basin and making camp on Valhalla Ridge, the pinnacles of Bragi, Mimir, Vili, Sleipnir, and Vidar North and South had not yet been climbed, and this wasn’t because of their difficulties but because few climbers had gotten to them. They might have been busy with more accessible mountains, or maybe they hadn’t noticed this part of the map yet, southeast of the town of Forks.
    This June, I walked alone on the South Fork Hoh Trail, three days after the end of the school year, one day after the graduation ceremony held, because of foreboding skies, in our remodeled gym, where students hooted as I strode to the podium in order to recite, into all that space, underneath a raised basketball hoop, “The Road Not Taken.” I have an annual date with Frost at this ceremony, and in the past have read the poem’s well-known final lines with embarrassed misgivings: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” Will the narrator’s apparent self-regard accrue to me? Will the convocation, seeing Frost’s narrator as superior, see me as superior by association? This year, after I cleared my throat, a student yelled, “C’s all filthy!,” meaning “Mr. Countryman’s rich,” and after everyone twittered, I delivered the Frost. The following day—the first of vacation—I got up early, filled my thermos with coffee, made a sandwich, and drove away before first light, and, frankly, despite the things I like about my work, felt glad I was free to walk along the South Fork Hoh instead of teach. It’s an easy journey in its lower reaches; in three miles a hiker gains five hundred feet, and after that, where the trail fades to moss, it’s a matter of meandering across soft green flats or treading on gravel bars near the current. I found myself preferring moss to gravel, even though there’s less gloom beside the water, because recently I’ve developed a Morton’s neuroma where the third and fourth toes on my right foot meet, and this makes me wince if I walk too many hours on unforgiving surfaces like river stones. Pain gives me reason to stop more often than I once did. I take off my boots. I eat a