SEQUIM — The book is not what you might dread.
Olympic National Park: A Natural History by Sequim poet and nature writer Tim McNulty delves into global warming and an ecosystem filled with fragile life forms, but it is far from a dry, dreary tome.
No, the book — a sweeping update of the original McNulty released in 1996 — is loaded with drama.
He’ll give a reading from Olympic at 7 p.m. Friday at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St.
McNulty, who discovered the Olympic Mountains some 40 summers ago, writes like he’s just come down from a backpacking trip that took him from Blue Mountain to Klahhane Ridge to Lake Crescent to the Hoh River to Shi Shi Beach.
He takes his readers into the skies to behold resurgent bald eagles, then it’s into the back country to come face to face with Roosevelt elk, black bears, cougars and those silken-furred, cat-size fishers reintroduced just last year.
He writes of the Elwha River’s 100-pound salmon, harlequin ducks that “look like they’ve been painted by tribal fetishists,” the old-growth forest community of owls, flying squirrels and truffles — and “unbridled resource exploitation” across the wilderness.
But while McNulty writes about the effects of clear-cutting, river-damming and climate change on the park, he is no dour data machine.
He is, rather, a lover of triumphant moments.
FDR’s visit
He describes in detail the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to Port Angeles: Amid the drizzle, more than 3,000 children were amassed in front of the Clallam County Courthouse under a “Please Mr. President, we children need your help. Give us our Olympic National Park” banner.
About 10,000 adults also showed up that day in September 1937, and Roosevelt promised he’d do what he could.
FDR signed the bill creating the then-638,280-acre park on June 29, 1938.
It’s been a rough ride since then, but McNulty gives his readers reasons to believe in a bright future for the park.
Since the first version of A Natural History was published, “the story has changed, all the way through,” McNulty said during an interview at a Sequim cafe Wednesday.
“Pioneering field research has brought Olympic wildlife populations into clearer focus,” he writes in the book’s preface. “New data are unlocking the mysteries of migratory salmon, steelhead and bull trout in Olympic rivers . . . bald eagles and peregrine falcons have recovered from dangerously low num- bers . . . On the human side of the story, new archaeological discoveries are filling in critical gaps in our understanding of early people on the peninsula. The renaissance in Native American cultures described in the earlier edition continues to unfold.”
Native Americans
McNulty brings his readers to the villages of Tse-whit-zen, in what is now Port Angeles, and Ozette, just south of the Makah Reservation, and writes about the Quileute, Hoh, Klallam, Queets and Quinault people who built communities here thousands of years ago.
He looks into the future, the near future in which the river that once harbored all of the Northwest’s native ocean-running fish species — until it was dammed in 1913 — is to be restored.
On the removal of the Elwha River dams scheduled to begin in 2011, McNulty writes: “The Elwha offers a rare opportunity to restore a major ecosystem to its unspoiled condition . . . I can’t imagine another river that holds more promise, and I can think of no finer investment than freeing this magnificent river system to simply do what it does best.”
This book, in 338 pages, is an odyssey from one wet, wild, windswept place to another, with an awestruck yet articulate McNulty as your personal park guide.
The author doesn’t consider himself a scientist — he majored in English and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts and has allowed his unflagging curiosity about the natural world to feed him.
He’s wandered the park’s remote reaches, storing away questions, and sought out the scientific papers and books that fill his book’s bibliography.
“As just an enthusiastic person who loves this place, I’ve depended on the hard, rainy, cold work of researchers,” he said, “who have allowed me to pick among their work and try to put together a coherent story.”
McNulty worked on the park’s trail crew during the 1980s, spent summers since backpacking through the mountains and lived for a time in a tiny cabin south of Shi Shi Beach.
He now lives on Lost Mountain southwest of Sequim and is known for poetry collections including In Blue Mountain Dusk, (Pleasure Boat Studio) Pawtracks (Copper Canyon Press) and Cloud Studies (Empty Bowl Press).
Next project
His next project is a collaboration with Sequim pilot and photographer Dave Woodcock.
Woodcock is shooting aerial photos of the Olympics, and McNulty is writing essays to pair with them.
At the close of Olympic National Park: A Natural History, McNulty includes a section on where to walk among wildflowers, follow birds and mammals and admire old-growth forests, plus checklists of species with evocative names: sun sea star, lesser yellowlegs, great purple monkey-flower.
The book is a mix of majesty and minute detail. With his lyric explorations — and a few dozen stunning photos of Olympic waters and wild creatures — McNulty hopes to immerse readers in the park’s magic.
“It is my goal to deepen their appreciation,” he said, “of the complexity, the beauty, the mystery — and the rarity of what we have here.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.
