Shocking slayings leave forest peace shattered

You just keep hoping there's more to it.

Some piece of reason. Some fragment of extenuating circumstance.

Given the tragedy and the stupendous scope of loss for the families involved, you almost feel guilty even thinking it. But you keep hoping the horrible slayings of Mary Cooper and her daughter, Susanna Stodden, aren't what they first appeared to be.

Completely random.

Down deep, you know people get killed, every day, all over the world, in horribly arbitrary ways. But as a Northwesterner and a person drawn to the outdoors, you've always maintained a blind faith in a sanctuary, of sorts, from the madness.

It's the temple of old growth, the church of ocean beaches, the hallowed neutral ground of clean air, blessed silence and sweeping views. It's the realm into which a lot of us slip on evenings, weekends and those treasured vacation days, just to get back in touch with what matters.

It's a psychological protective bubble, and last week's slayings revealed it to be exactly that: as solid as a single layer of soap film.

The shooting deaths of Cooper, 56, and Stodden, 27, rocked a lot of individual worlds last week. It's because we assign degrees of risk to certain activities.

You're taking at least a small chance when you hang out in a seedy urban neighborhood at 2 a.m., for instance. You know something could go wrong when you jump out of an airplane with only a parachute between you and the ground. You even hold your breath a little bit when you pass someone on a rural highway and notice the speedometer edging up toward 80 mph.

Hiking the Pinnacle Lake Trail off the Mountain Loop Highway? It's right up there next to rolling over in bed on your mental mortality list.

People who hike so many trails that the boot miles begin to blur together — and there are many in these parts — come to believe that the only ill likely to befall them on a walk in the wild is their own stupidity.

Sure, you could always encounter that one black bear or cougar having a bad day. Or step on a rattlesnake. Or get caught, ill-equipped, in a surprise July snowstorm on High Divide. But failing that, and failing some incredibly stupid lapse in judgment on your part, you honestly feel like the sanctuary of Northwest forests and streams and high peaks is exactly that.

And then this.

A mother and daughter, well-loved, apparently without enemies, walk into the woods off the Mountain Loop one day and don't come back. A fellow hiker finds them, both shot to death, along the trail. A week later, when this column went to press, few clues had been revealed.

You think about your own planned hike for the weekend, and a new devil lurks amid the details. Especially, one imagines, for women, who probably enter the deep woods carrying an extra layer of caution to begin with.

Could there really be some crazed lunatic out there walking up trails and just waiting for victims? Not likely, you think. Then again ...

It's not a logical fear. Even if a crazed backwoods killer lurked out there, the chances of you and him/her meeting up on one of Washington's tens of thousands of miles of trails is probably less than the likelihood you'll get mowed down by a Metro bus tomorrow.

Still, it haunts the brain.

Not because you think it's suddenly dangerous to hoof it up to your favorite lake. Not because anything in the realm of the rational has really changed. Just because one of your favorite ways of seeking peace has been shattered.

I don't think the tragic deaths of Cooper and Stodden will keep many of us out of the woods for long. Hope not. The family members of the slain women, in fact, said that's the last thing the two victims would have wanted.

A lot of us will still be out there this weekend, probably not on the Pinnacle Lake Trail, which at this writing remained closed, but on thousands of other Northwest pathways.

We'll be putting on bug dope and sunscreen and telling old stories. We'll be stopping for water, drinking in views, piecing mangled heels back together with duct tape and moleskin. We'll be settling into that happy, mental fog you can only get by falling into a boot step rhythm on a path into and out of someplace special.

But it won't be the same. Not for a while. Not with the memory still fresh of two people, by all accounts model citizens, who did the same thing and did not live to tell about it.

You just keep hoping there's something more to it. But you prepare yourself for the awful possibility that maybe there isn't.

A gaping hole has been blown in that bubble. And all of us feel the cold wind blowing through it.

Ron Judd's Trail Mix column appears here every Thursday. 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com.