We did a bit more looking around Forks in the morning. We went into one of the many Twilight souvenir stores looking for a map of locations. We picked up a few trinkets as souvenirs and did find a map which purported to tell us where the Bella lived, where she went to school, and so forth. We were not the only ones with this map as you can see in the picture of these fans below.
The problem we discovered was that nothing we saw in real life looked anything much like any we had seen in the movies. In the movies, the high school is a charming brick building in the classic American collegiate gothic style. In real life, Forks High School is a collection of rather ugly modular buildings.
We stopped by the Visitor Information desk at the Chamber of Commerce. They do feature the actual truck that Bella drove in the movie as to get people to stop there. The lady was nice and quite honest with us. Almost nothing in any of the movies was really filmed in Forks. The high school, for example, is really a middle school near Portland. The beach scenes in the second movie were really filmed in Pacific Rim National Park near Tofino, BC.
Her explanation for the fact that Forks itself was not used was the it was cheaper to film elsewhere or they had more amenities for the crew. I think the real reason, however, is that Forks is a basically an ugly, depressing, old lumber town. This is what you see a couple blocks from the high school, for example. Twilight is a fantasy; Forks is too real for the story.
Of course, even after we learned that the scenes from the movie had been filmed elsewhere, we still could not resist going to La Push, the Indian reservation town where Jacob was supposed to have lived. We are, after all, definite Team Jacob people and the dogs’ sympathies are obviously with the werewolves, too. Here is the cliff where Bella sort of, kind of tried to commit suicide. The water is really quite shallow there, and there are signs imploring people not to try diving off them.
Even without the Twilight connection, La Push is rather striking in a melancholy way.
After our visit to La Push, we headed south towards Kalaloch. Although the federal government owns most of the Olympic Peninsula, a sizable amount of land here is owned by lumber companies. There are vast stretches of denuded hillside from clear cutting. Occasionally you could see the sad remains of a forest right along the roadside.
The section of the national park near Kalaloch is really only a narrow strip adjacent to Highway 101. The park service allows dogs on these beaches though they are supposed to be on leash. We park the car near the turn off for Destruction Rock and took the dogs down.
Almost no tourists ventured more than 100 feet from where the trail met the beach, so we wandered further down where we had a huge stretch of beach to ourselves. We let the dogs play in the surf and Eli got a chance to chase his ball again.
Tonight we are staying at Kalaloch Lodge in the Olympic National Park. Although the park system is not at at all friendly to dogs, many of the hotels and other accommodations that the park service runs are quite dog-friendly. We had not reserved early enough in the season to get one of the cabins right on the edge of the cliff overlooking the beach. Still, its two rooms and little kitchen looked absolutely great after our last motel experiences.
John and I had read about a four mile hike near Lake Quinault that took you through the rain forest. While the north shore of the lake is owned by the National Park Service, the south shore is under the jurisdiction of the far more dog-friendly Forest Service. So we drove about 25 minutes south to the lake, parked the car, and embarked on the trail. It was early evening at this point, and the light shining through the trees was gorgeous. David Lean, the English film director, referred to the late afternoon and early evening as the “golden hour” because everything photographed so beautifully during that time of the day. The real twilight is every bit as magical as the fantasy Twilight.
Our trail ended at the Lake Quinault Lodge. This is a one of the great old hotels of the National Park system.
John and I split an entree in the restaurant there. Around ten o’clock we headed back towards Kalaloch where everybody, particularly the dogs, was tired.
Tomorrow, we head down towards Portland for a few days with my sister and brother-in-law. We’ll be joined there by our friends Sherry and Giles from Louisiana, and all of us will head towards Ashland for the Shakespeare Festival and the last leg of this trip.
