THE RIVER THAT YEARNS TO RUN FREE

A HIKE IN THE AUTHOR'S NATIVE WASHINGTON STATE GIVES PERSPECTIVE ON HALF A MILLENNIUM OF PERSECUTION, AND A HOME WORTH FIGHTING FOR.

- LANCE GARLAND

Big-leaf maples blush with the first bloom of autumn on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Just beyond the parking lot in Olympic National Park, the Elwha River rushes north toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. A forest service road, which once led to the ranger station, is now gated. Although I am expecting the first big storm of the season, the sky is now blue, so I stow my rain gear. Signs warn me about bears and a cougar that have been prowling the area. As a solo hiker, I'll need to make noise along the way.

Not far down the road, I find the shuttered National Park Center, eerily quiet. Staffing issues here, too. The mists of recent rains evaporate from the roofs like smoke from burning buildings. It feels as if the landscape is swallowing up all traces of human interference. The pallor of decay adds to my sense of unease.

Four miles beyond, I come to the site of a former dam. At the end of the walkway, the concrete ends abruptly. Two hundred feet below, the Elwha cuts between the broken walls of the ruined structure, rampaging below the steep cliffs of Glines Canyon. I lean out over the railing and feel the exhilaration of the sheer drop and the roar of a river freed.

The project to remove this dam began in September 2011—the biggest such removal in U.S. history. That same month, I was preoccupied with another historic removal: the repeal of “Don't Ask, Don't Tell.” I had served as a gay man, openly, until the military denied the very existence of queer people in its ranks. I left the Navy in 2007 because that law threatened my career.

My journey along these waters, and into the mountains that feed them, have come to feel like a trek through the turbulent era when I came to terms with my own sexuality, and the forces arrayed against people like me.