This strangely bright May sunlight illuminates an emerald shard clutched in the dense brown clay. It bears a patent date of 1893, and I spot a couple small broken insulators high overhead, mounted on the smooth trunk of a hemlock.

They must have held thin copper telephone wires above North Head Lighthouse Road, a log and plank affair hewn from impenetrable woods that once blanketed the hills between Ilwaco and the newest of the Peninsula’s two lighthouses, dedicated in 1898.

After decades of benign neglect, Washington state is throwing vast sums of money at newly renamed Cape Disappointment State Park. In the process of installing new water and sewer connections to Ilwaco last year, the overgrown lighthouse road was cleared of man-high ferns and fallen branches.

My little red corgi streaking along beside me investigating earth-colored frogs and plump chipmunks, we’ve pounded out a footpath down the old road and out to the light, a perfect hour round trip from home. First crossing the remarkable new Discovery Heights residential subdivision, we pick up the road and descend onto the edge of a rare remnant of old-growth forest owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

We’re blessed to live in a place with plenty of woods, but there’s a monotony to them, as might be expected of forests planted in expectation of harvest. Corporate tree farms have all the scenic and spiritual value of really tall cornfields.

But the forest along North Head road was justly famous in its time, often pictured on postcards of a century ago – families riding on horse-drawn wagons or walking in their bonnets like tiny pixies in a land of giants. Little is left, but there are enough wild old ones on the road’s south side to at least fuel an illusion of primordial wonder.

Perhaps six stories up in the twisted crown of one 8-foot-diameter skyscraper is what must be an eagle tenement, judging by all the racket and commotion. Four were performing aerial somersaults in a neighboring hollow last week, and a local innkeeper told me of seeing eight fighting over a dead duck on the shore of nearby Baker Bay a month ago.

Too soon, the reopened path ends at the state highway, and our walk must continue down a paved spur to the lighthouse, at least until a planned trail extension through the woods is completed west of the highway to the ocean. Mosquitoes hang in the air like nets waiting for passing mammals, and just maybe they’ll keep too many people from trampling what I already selfishly consider to be my own private way.

My friend Susan Holway was ushering her dog, pet coyote and two English cousins into her van in the parking lot, and we spoke a little about walking, England and other topics. Sadly, in a way, I probably don’t need to worry about much company. Nine hundred ninety-nine people out of 1,000 prefer Wheel of Fortune to an evening stroll, and the great English walking tradition seems about as likely to catch on as afternoon tea.

The gravel path out to the lighthouse is a riot of big root vines, glorying in this spring’s early warmth. Also called wild cucumber, the aptly named big root sends its runners dozens of feet away from a soccer-ball sized root whose bitter juice the Indians once used to treat venereal disease and kidney trouble.

Gale-blasted dwarf Douglas firs hang onto the cliffs, where I pause to examine the ocean’s marching swells and the light’s elegant curves. Returning, the lighthouse keeper’s path leads to brightly painted mansion-like dwellings where a keeper’s wife is said to have been driven insane by wind, loneliness and who-knows-what-else before casting herself to the waves. I’m superstitious enough to wonder whether I’ll keep walking this way when the days again grow short.

Crossing the highway, hungry for dinner and stepping up our pace, I swell up my chest a little at the sight of a brazen nonpet coyote pausing to calculate whether he can grab my little dog for his own meal. Finally deciding against it, he melts back into the woods to the west. We melt away into the east, treading the ancient road home.

– M.S.W.

Matt Winters is editor of the Chinook (Wash.) Observer.