This historic photo shows the old plank road that used to run to the North Head Lighthouse, note the four trees balanced on both sides of the roadway.

Believe it or not, things are back to normal at our endearing headland, Cape Disappointment. Minutes ago I would have said otherwise. A short visit with Webster’s set me straight. Simply, normal is natural. Storms are natural, as is storm damage. It’s normal for storms to bring wind on the North Pacific coast. It’s normal for trees to fall down in the wind. Fortunately, trees grow back, especially here.
I don’t want to downplay the tragedies that some have experienced due to the latest round of storms. I do want to provide some historical perspective, perhaps even a natural perspective. Over the last five and a half years of working at Cape Disappointment State Park I have parked in the lower lot of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center almost every day. Walking by the same stump on the path from the parking lot to the center for over one thousand four hundred days I have seen both death and birth.

This stump, likely an old Red Alder, was probably cut back in the mid-1970’s when the path was being built. In the last thirty years it has slowly been whittled away by bacteria and bugs, moss and weeds. The outer edges are now mush, I’ve witnessed more and more plants take hold. The stump is practically a garden now, soon enough it will provide the nutrients needed for another tree to take its place. This will happen to your stumps too, it’s normal, it’s natural.

Looking at historic photos of the old plank road that led to the North Head Lighthouse provides another example of normalcy. The narrow road that was cut into the thick Hemlock-Spruce forest was often photographed and ended up on more than a few postcards. The road certainly couldn’t have been that unique, plank roads were the norm in this country where timber is plentiful and it was always coming down. One photo in particular reminds me of the last couple of weeks. It shows a Model A or T driving the old plank road underneath a huge Sitka Spruce that had fallen across the lane, balanced on both sides by the cut sides. Looking closer, I noticed three other such massive trees also balanced in the air high enough for the car to drive beneath them. Those trees are now long gone. But there is no shortage of large trees on North Head.

Stumbling upon the monthly meteorological notes from the North Head weather station from January 1921 I found some strange kind of comfort. On the last day of the month, “the most severe storm ever experienced in the history of this section of the country, broke.” Sound familiar? “The wind reached a very high velocity. A maximum velocity of 113 miles per hour is thought to be a conservative estimate of the velocity.” The report goes on to describe the damage to the buildings and weather instruments on the headland, including that of the wind gauge, the storm warning tower, and both rain gauges. The interpretive center lost its wind gauge in the November storm so we were unable to record the gusts of the last gale. Nothing new, the new wind gauge should be up soon enough to blow off during the next storm.

The report goes onto describe the damage done to the coastal forest. The observer explained that, “a large percentage of the fine spruce timber on the Lighthouse Reservation was destroyed…many trees were uprooted some were broken off where their diameter was as much as four feet.” With what we just experienced this report sounds very familiar. Years from now someone may stumble upon this article and note that in December of 2007 a fifty square foot section of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center blew off, the North Head Lighthouse lost a window from its work room, and dozens of huge spruce and alder trees littered the campground and crossed the park’s roads. Sounds normal to me; as normal as Mother Nature can be.

Walking by that stump every day I typically view it from a distance of around ten feet. Looking closely I can see a tiny spruce just starting its long life on the cape. Maybe it will live to be one of the giants that will wow visitors to the center one hundred years from now. Maybe it will fall in a windstorm in 2048, if so, it’s only normal.

This stump on the pathway to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center reminds me that there have been many storms in the past and there will be many more to come.