Exploring the Washington coast along the Strait of Juan de Fuca turns up natural beauty and the scars of history.

By David Laskin

A restored 1902 barracks at Fort Worden overlooks the entrance to Puget Sound. (Courtesy Fort Worden State Park)

Even the name is stirring: the Strait of Juan de Fuca, so called to honor a semilegendary Greek mariner who first sailed into these waters while exploring for the viceroy of Mexico in 1592. On a map it looks like a long blue funnel connecting the Pacific and the inland sea of Puget Sound. But glimpsed from the deck of the ferry whisking me northwest from suburban Seattle to the upthrust triangle of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, it strikes me as a monumental passage to the great beyond. The immense cork of British Columbia's Vancouver Island plunges in from the northwest. Mountain ranges softened by sea light rise on both sides. And all along the Washington coast of the strait, the landscape spills down to the sea in sand spits, promontories quilled with conifers, and bluffs diving to rocky beaches, with a scattering of towns and mills to break the flow of nature.

It's not until I make landfall at Kingston and begin to explore the highways and back roads that the scars of history surface. White people haven't spent much time along the strait: English mariners, notably Capt. George Vancouver, didn't penetrate the entrance until the 1790s, and the first towns went up in the 1850s. But we've made short work of taking the timber and fish we want and leaving a mess behind. Cut, fish, and run: That's the history that hits me hardest on a 130-mile trip hugging the coast, more or less, from Port Townsend to Route 112 and out to Cape Flattery at the western tip.

It takes a little longer to discern the parallel history hidden on the shores of shallow harbors and in the shade of second- growth fir and cedar, where places are defined by missed opportunities, near eminence, not-quite superlatives. The best example might be Port Townsend, a late-Victorian town built on speculation for a railroad line that never came. (See "Worn to Perfection," News, September/October 2003.) Like Nantucket, its East Coast counterpart, Port Townsend has made it more or less intact into the 21st century because it slept through the decades of industrialization that blighted most other towns. Now tourists throng its stately downtown of office buildings, warehouses, mansions, and working waterfront.

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