Playing Poohsticks on the Dose

The most wasted day is one in which we have not laughed.

Sebastian Chamfort

When I think back about hikes I have taken, trying to shake loose a few memories that might be worth sharing in these posts, I am reminded that it is not always the mountain vistas and the flower dotted alpine meadows that bring me joy. Sometimes those precious memories have very little to do with the trail and more to do with sharing good times. Here is a story about Poohsticks as one example.

Never heard of Poohsticks? That is probably because you never read Winnie-the-Pooh as a child, or better yet, had it read to you or read it to your own children. I am fortunate to have had both of those tender moments in my life, and the book that I cherish has an inscription inside the front cover written to my mother in fountain pen and dated 1936. The illustration above is from that book, and the original copyright is 1928. Here I am obviously not referring to the Disney version of these celebrated childrens’ stories but the real thing, the one I hold in my hand right now.

That is what you must seek out if you want to learn about Poohsticks. You will find it in the second volume, The House at Pooh Corner. But in the meantime, I will provide you with a brief summary of how the game is played with all of its keen strategy intact.

First of all you need a bridge. A slowly flowing river running beneath it is nice but rapids and whitewater add a special kind of thrill, as in the story I am about to share with you. The goal is simple. The players each drop a stick into the water on the upstream side, then run to the opposite side of the bridge. When swift water is involved this run must be undertaken with considerable vigor, which adds to the excitement of the game. Whichever stick arrives first announces the winner. It is the kind of game one plays on a lazy afternoon, as was the case with Pooh and his friends. It is the kind of game that my friend Kathy and I played on a lazy afternoon on the high bridge across the Dosewallips River, called the Dose (Doe-See), by those that love the river, as I most certainly do.

It was the year after Kathy and I had hiked the Wonderland Trail around Mt. Rainier. We had both completed a year of college by then and felt ready to embark on another adventure together before returning to school. Since it was already late August by the time we planned the trip, it would be a shorter one, beginning on the south fork of the Quinault River in the Olympics, traveling through beautiful Enchanted Valley, and crossing Anderson Pass to descend along the Dose, a traverse of those magnificent mountains.

On the final day we arrived at the High Bridge, a sturdy wooden bridge that takes hikers across the clear West Fork, which flows down from Eel Glacier on Mt. Anderson just before its juncture with the Muddy Fork. The river tumbles and roils far below the bridge as it flows through a narrow sandstone canyon, a perfect place for a raucous game of Poohsticks. We each grabbed a stick and dropped it into the rapids far below us, then ran to the downstream side of the bridge. It was hard to claim our sticks as they tossed about in the whitewater at least fifty feet below us, but it did not matter. We each grabbed another stick, and so began an afternoon of whitewater thrills, punctuated by cheers when one or the other player spotted the winning stick.

We were completely engrossed in our game when two male backpackers came along. They seemed puzzled by our act of running from one side of the bridge to the other and asked us what we were doing. “Playing Poohsticks,” I responded, as if it should be obvious. They looked at us, a quizzical expression on their faces, and then hiked on, shaking their heads. Kathy and I started laughing at this, and then we continued laughing until we had dropped down onto our backs and were holding our sides, our feet in the air, unable to control ourselves. In the history of funny things that have happened in the world, that was the funniest thing of all at that moment. We had to retreat to the high river bank, fearing that we would roll off the bridge in our raucous hilarity. We continued laughing, and then we laughed because we could not stop laughing. I do not know if you have ever had an experience like that with a friend. I hope you have.

When at last we were able to achieve some degree of control, we reached into our packs for some lunch. I found a foil packet of freeze-dried ice cream I had picked up at REI on sale a few days before we left. It tasted like sweet sawdust. This set off another round of laughter. We were playing Poohsticks. We were eating ice cream. It was the most wonderful moment of our young lives.

We would return home that day, then to college the following week. We could not know it at the time, but our lives would forever change in the following year, as we came down from the high bridge and from Poohsticks and from ice cream. I was about to begin my sophomore year in college and had been accepted into the nursing program. That first year, as a nineteen-year-old girl, I would learn what it is like to care for patients dying from cancer, to vomit uncontrollably, to have a seizure that would not stop. Kathy got married in December and then moved to Germany with her husband, returning home a year later with a new baby. I do not recall that we ever took another backpacking trip together. We had careers, babies, and tragedies that struck, one after another.

Last fall we met at a restaurant on the harbor in Tacoma, not far from where we had both grown up and across the sound from those mountains where we had played Poohsticks on a sunny day in early September fifty years earlier. We talked of our journeys through life, of our children, grandchildren, spouses, careers, losses. We stayed and talked long after we had each finished our shrimp salads and were sipping on iced tea. The lunch crowd in the restaurant had cleared out, and we had not yet run out of things to talk about. The waiter kept checking on us, asking, “Anything more I can get for you?” But what she was really saying was, “Get the heck out of here. I want to go home.” It did not matter. We had years of catching up to do. . .and we could not stop laughing.