Lost…And Found In The Pacific Northwest

When you lose your wedding ring it’s not like losing your sunglasses or your phone. It’s a drag to lose those things for sure and it will cost you but they’re easily replaceable. But the ring? Yea you could get another one but it will never be THE one. It’s a sinking feeling when you’ve lost something that’s irreplaceable.

Carol and I are on day 10 of our first van trip of the summer. We’ve made our way through Northern California and Central Oregon and now find ourselves at Olympic National Park, tucked into our campsite at an idyllic, forested fairyland called Heart O’ The Hills. Our itinerary for the day is a 4 mile in-and-out hike through old growth forest. You think you’ve seen green? Well you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve hiked in the Pacific Northwest. This is where green lives! The forest is dense and there’s growth everywhere, the timeless dance of life, death and rebirth. Downed trees become nurse logs, the home for fungi, insects, mosses, plants and a place where new trees sprout. Nurse logs eventually melt into the forest floor to nurture the soil for new growth and the cycle continues. The understory is a tangle of Devil’s Club, a spiky plant with leaves the size of my head, thimbleberry, salmonberry, huckleberry, maidenhair and sword ferns, skunk cabbage and other plants I’d need a botanist to identify. The trees are broad leaf maple, hemlock, Douglass fir and western cedar, the latter is the star of this forest with some 30 or more feet around and two hundred feet tall. Needless to say the old growth trees here are impressive. The birds are here too, mostly heard and rarely seen. Swainson’s thrushes and Pacific wrens sing away, a woodpecker taps out a song on a snag somewhere.

We leave our camp for the short walk to the trailhead, crossing a tiny wooden bridge I stoop to splash my face with the cool, clear water below. The day is warm and wonderful, we’re in the groove moving at a leisurely pace and taking in the newness and beauty around us. About an hour into the hike I realize that my wedding ring isn’t on my finger. There was a little jolt of panic. I looked down at the fourth finger of my left hand and saw just a slim band of white skin where my ring should be. Carol and I have been married for 24 years and I can count the times when I’d taken the ring off. My ring is gone and I have no idea when I lost it. After a few minutes the initial shock began to wear off and I tried to puzzle out how and when the ring could have disappeared. Prior to the hike I’d been cutting firewood and wearing work gloves, surely the ring must have come off when I removed the gloves. I told myself this and tried to focus on the beauty all around me and enjoy the hike. As we took a slow ramble down the trail I flashed back on the day Carol first put that ring on my finger. Our wedding was in a forest similar to this one with towering old trees and dappled green light playing on the forest floor. My ring can’t be gone, I thought, it just can’t!

When we got back to camp several hours later, my head filled with the sights and sounds of the forest, my thoughts returned to the ring. I went straight for the work gloves and put the left one on…no ring. I scoured the ground where I’d been chopping wood…no ring. We combed the entire camp, stripped the bed in our van, checked through the trash and even sifted through the ashes in the fire pit…still no ring. I wracked my brain trying to remember when I’d last felt it on my finger. If I’d lost it on the hike, it’s for sure gone forever. Carol and I grabbed our phones and did some detective work. There’s a photo taken of me the previous afternoon, there’s the ring, another one of me later that evening roasting hotdogs over the fire, the ring is glinting in the fire glow and yet another of me earlier this morning playing my guitar. However in the latter photo my left hand is obscured so at least I know that I had the ring on when I went to bed. I made a note and taped it up by the campground registration area asking anyone who may have found it to return it to our site. It was a long shot but at that point I was desperate, trying to come to a place of acceptance over the loss of my ring.

I was the first one up the next morning. I sipped my coffee and scanned the ground again hoping that my ring would somehow magically appear. It was time to move on to the next adventure so Carol and I busied ourselves with packing up the van. When we were just about ready to go, I reached into a small plastic box where I keep my energy bars to get one to eat on the drive. There at the bottom shining up at me between a chocolate/peanut butter and coconut almond Kind Bar sat my ring! Like Frodo I slipped it back on my finger, feeling its magic return. I laughed, went over to Carol and hugged her, feeling an incredible sense of relief. How the hell did the ring get there? It must have slipped off while reaching for a Kind Bar prior to our hike. Recently the ring had felt looser and I’d been meaning to get it sized. Or…perhaps the ring was put there as a reminder to not get too attached to things, even irreplaceable ones. Losing my wedding ring also underscored the irreplaceable nature of my life with Carol and our kids.  We started up the van and headed down the road.