Part 2
After breakfast we returned to the sopping tent to discover that Eliza's journal had been water logged inside the plastic bag which it was held in. Two weeks of journal entries from the beginning of our hike had bled and run indigo, filling many now illegible pages with a vague, but rich, deep-sea toned watercolor wash. She has been extremely upset by this. We stopped a few miles up the trail under ominous but, for the moment, dry, grey skies, and she peeled back each page, one by one. Shots of anger and despair surged through her distraught expression with each soggy pull.
Later, we stopped again and she began trying to recover some of what she had written by reading and copying word for word her old entries into e-mail form to send to herself later.
The day dragged and we were both in low spirits. The sun barely cracked through the cloud cover. The scenery was relatively unimpressive. We passed across a patchwork of recently clear-cut land, owned presumably by Weyerhauser or the Northern Pacific railroad, and small stands of fir and hemlock, some owned by the Forest Service and some owned by the City of Seattle.
Tonight we pray for dry skies. My sleeing bag got very wet last night and has lost a great deal of its loft. No loft, man, no warmth. With no sun today to help dry my things, I am afraid that I may sleep cold tonight.
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