Jesse

That's what I got.

My name is Jesse.

I was 29.

This was 2020, the summer everything shut down, which made the isolation feel less like a choice and more like the natural state of things.

The relay station was in the Olympic National Forest on the western side of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

Not the National Park.

The National Forest, which is a different jurisdiction and a different kind of land.

The park gets millions of visitors a year.

The forest gets a fraction of that, and most of them stay near the roads.

Once you're a few miles into the interior on the west side, into the old growth valleys and the high ridges, you might as well be on another planet.

The station sat at about 3,800 feet on a ridgeline called Spur Ridge, between two drainages that fed into the Quinault River system.

The building was maybe 20 feet by 30 feet, poured concrete walls, metal roof, one door, two windows.

It housed a bank of radio repeaters that linked the ranger stations in the Quinault and Queets Valleys to the dispatch center in Olympia.

The equipment was old but functional.

My job was to keep it that way.

I drove up in early June.

The access road was 12 miles of single-lane gravel that climbed from the valley floor through second-growth Douglas Fir into old-growth western red cedar and Sitka spruce, and then into subalpine meadow near the top.

The road was gated at mile three.

I had the only key besides the district ranger.

The station had a cot, a propane cook stove, a table, a chair, a bookshelf full of paperback westerns that previous occupants had left behind.