By Chiggers Stokes Special to Peninsula Daily News
EDITOR’S NOTE — Chiggers Stokes, a former Olympic National Park Ranger who lives off the grid on a ranch southeast of Forks, tells about his own personal “manifest destiny,” a search for trees and wilderness that brought him to the North Olympic Peninsula.
BOGACHIEL RIVER — In 1978, my search for a home in nature ended.
I purchased a piece of the Flying S Ranch, where I live without electricity, surrounded by trees and wildlife.
The land was named by German pioneer Otto Seigfried. The deprivations, physical challenges and self-sufficiency of these early settlers is the stuff of legends and not frequently displayed in a modern world.
Still, living at the end of the Dowans Creek Road has involved some isolation. Our road keeps washing out and has been closed many times by natural catastrophe.
We live in one of the few unelectrified communities in the Lower 48.
Within 20 minutes of Forks, I can look down a two-mile-wide corridor to the east, and I have no human neighbors for 50 miles.
Looking down the same corridor to the west, there are nine homesteads between myself and . . . Asia.
I live on the wilderness interface. I have always wanted to live in such a place as the Bogachiel rain forest.
I believe I was born in Rio de Janeiro, 60 years ago, to find my way here.
Perhaps my journey started aboard a Pan Am Constellation flying over the immense Amazon Rain Forest.
It was from the pilot’s seat with my hand on the yoke that I surveyed the wonder of this endless wilderness.
Enormous white clouds built against an azure sky with an unbroken carpet of green forest as far as the eye could see.
In the passenger compartment, a middle-aged man puffed on a Cuban cigar while his young wife smoked one of the cigarettes given to her by the airline.
Their 8-year-old daughter drew pictures of the house in the woods she was promised her parents would build for her in a new country beyond the horizon.
These were my family.
In a post-9/11 world, it is hard to imagine the 1955 world, where 5-year-olds were invited into the in-flight cockpit to sit on the pilot’s lap and feel their little hands on one of the flight yokes.
Access to woods was one of the enticements my sister and I were promised to assuage our loss of Brazil and all it represented to us.
Before World War II, my father had bought two acres of wooded property in Langley, Va.
At the time that my father bought the land, he was close, personal friends with Howard Zahniser, an environmental activist who was the primary author of the Wilderness Act of 1964.
My father’s land faced what became National Park Service land in the Potomac River valley.
The Central Intelligence Agency was constructed less than a mile through the woods from where we lived.
Another intrusion into the massive greenbelt that I enjoyed as a boy was the construction of the George Washington Memorial Parkway.
The beautiful, rocky palisades on the Virginia shore were developed as commuter highway, with the park service given the mission of making rush-hour traffic a park experience.
It was the George Washington Memorial Parkway that hired me as a seasonal ranger interpreter in 1970.
By 1973, I was living in the closest possible residence to Great Falls, Md., where I worked.
But it still seemed suburban, and I yearned for something more wild.
I moved into a tent and, from there, to a hayloft and, from there, to a cabin I built and, from there, back to a tent.
From there, I moved to a biologists’ cabin on Plummers Island and, from there, to an apple shed, a cabin on Watkins on the Potomac, an old farmhouse in Seneca Creek State Park and a piece of an old train station near Great Falls, Va.
The commonality of every place I found was that I paid no rent, it had no power — or I didn’t pay for it — and I was surrounded by woods.
My predilection to live surrounded by trees was being threatened by enormous population pressures.
Outside of protected land, all open space I enjoyed as a kid was converted to townhomes and shopping malls.
I came to the North Olympic Peninsula as a protection ranger in 1977. I began looking for a treed setting to live in outside Olympic National Park.
The next year, I began living on a portion of the Flying S Ranch two miles outside of the park.
Hemp Hill Creek provides electricity to me and two other families. I have made some big mistakes along my way to electrical independence.
Where we live, how we live and even how long we live is a weave of kismet and self-determination. The threads of our lives frequently pull in different directions as fate may pull against choice. Each of us has a story.
My story is about a person who had no skills or knowledge building habitat that co-exists with wildlife habitat.
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NEXT SUNDAY: One man’s road to electrical independence.
