Ancient Places

by Jack Nisbet

  From the scientific side, those clues will certainly keep coming. Haugerud’s USGS colleague Brian Sherrod recently employed an aerial laser scanning process called LIDAR along the Columbia River south of Lake Chelan. He and several students with shovels then scrambled up to a suspicious spot in a tight canyon to expose a clear scarp—the kind of scar left behind when an earthquake ruptures the ground surface—that extends for three and a half miles. Sherrod thinks that geologists may finally be closing in on an exact source for the shadowy event known to some as “the earthquake that wouldn’t stay put.” That kind of significant news may hold ramifications for the way people live all over the Columbia Plateau.

  I had one more story to share with Ann McCrae, told by a Sanpoil informant to Verne Ray in 1928.

  An old man, Kapús, was looking for horses around Davenport. After he had found them he started back north, toward home. On the way he took a trail up a different canyon from that which he usually traveled.

  Just about dusk, as he rounded a curve near the end of the canyon, he began to hear noises that he thought were ghosts. He looked over to a grove of cottonwoods and maples nearby and thought he saw a fire on the other side.

  “Someone must be camping over there,” he thought. He drove his horse over there, and when he rounded the bushes he saw a huge fire burning. There were no tents or horses, though, to show that anyone was camping there.

  Then suddenly, on the other side of the fire he saw a woman with long, unbraided hair, wearing no clothes. All of a sudden the horses gave a snort and started running back where they had come from.… Kapús’s horse ran also. None of them stopped until they reached the end of the canyon, two or three miles away.

  The place where Kapús had seen the woman and the fire was an old winter camping site of the Spokane Indians. It had been deserted after the year of the earthquake. At that time an old woman had gone crazy from fright of the earthquake and had run wild through the woods, her hair coming unbraided and getting full of stickers. It was a week before she could be caught. She had died a while later.

  It was the ghost of this woman that Kapús had seen at the fire.

  “I read the paper you brought me,” Ann McCrae said the next time I dropped by her office. “It reminds me how people then saw each other more and shared everything they had. San Poils and Spokanes had many kinship relations. They used to be down in Davenport all the time, digging roots, chasing horses. If Kapús wanted to drive them back across the river to the Colville Reservation, he could have taken any number of trails that run down on the Columbia between Whitestone Rock and the mouth of the Spokane.

  “I don’t know who that man Kapús was, but I will have a look. I don’t know which canyon he might have been running his horses through, but I’m going to go back to that name in Sadie’s story, the one that sounds like water lapping against the shore beneath rough breaks and steep side hills.

  “I believe that Kapús did see the Spirit of Whist-m-la’s mother. She might have needed to be seen by someone so that she could rest from the terror she went through that caused her death.” That kind of terror, I think Ann was saying, could never be measured in numbers.

  CODA

  SKATE AWAY

  Winter is timeless, because the presence of ice can stop time’s incessant flow. Not as often as it used to, of course—no one has seen the Columbia River’s main stem frozen clear across for many decades now—but at some point after Thanksgiving, temperatures in the Inland Northwest usually tumble into single digits and remain there for a week or two. Clear ice skims farm ponds and flooded wetlands, and the skating season begins.

  At first, I have to feel my way around artesian springs and fertile mud in order to remain on top of things. But if no warm wet system blows across the Cascades to push away the Arctic flow of air, whole bodies of water soon begin to turn over. Black ice can appear in some of the shallow flood-scoured lakes of the Columbia Basin overnight. Deeper glacial pocks to the north take longer, and the inevitable advent of snow lends a sense of urgency. Conditions at each site change from hour to hour, and it’s easy to fall into the habit of sniffing the air first thing every morning to search for subtle clues. What might the ice look like today on one attractive lake down in the basin that my skates’ blades have never touched?

  To that end, I am thrashing through a wide band of bulrushes that edge a secluded bay. The thermometer is stuck on zero and hasn’t approached the melting point for a week. Last night’s stiff west wind seems to have died down. From the highway, the frozen surface showed wild patterns of darkness and light, but there must be some smooth ice out there somewhere.

  I know this bay because white pelicans frequent it during the summer, but its wetland seems utterly different today. The rushes rise more than head-high, and the whole marsh is solid enough to walk on. I trace faint animal trails to the icy shore, where I discover that the breeze has freshened again. I stamp hard on frozen whiteness at the edge of the bay, then jump up and down. Not a single crack.

  The surface a few yards farther along, although rough from puddled goose tracks, shines a little more clearly. I cross a series of jagged fault lines that allow me to gauge the thickness of this ice at something close to eight inches, which feels plenty safe. The greater question is whether to try this bumpy shore ice or to venture toward the unknown center. After a few tentative steps, two small people come into view across the bay, standing in the midst of several black dots. There is nothing like the sight of ice fishermen to give a hesitant skater confidence. Off comes my backpack, and I flop down to start drawing on the long laces.

  Once I’m up, the ice immediately gets worse, forcing me to tiptoe across features that seem to mirror geologic actions of much greater proportion. Pressure ridges have buckled thick floes upward and dropped them down. Sheets of water must have exuded from these spreading tectonic cracks to flow across one another and freeze. One fractured intersection catches a skate and sends me skittering ahead.

  Now I can see that the surface looks smoother around a teardrop island that rises near the lake’s west end. This ragged plug of basalt carries enough height to redirect the wind. As I move toward it, I spot a third fisherman standing motionless in the island’s lee. He has walked a long way across the ice.

  The closer I get to the island, the more the situation changes. At first, I find that steady breezes have rippled recent puddle flows in exactly the way that tidal action griddles the sand on a hard-packed beach. It’s better than the inshore ice, but skating over it at even a moderate pace still chatters my teeth.

  Those ripples soon give way to a more extensive plain, where relentless wind has scoured surface-bubble clusters into a paisley pattern: curved ovals of frosted tinkling glass set into a dark ice netting. This strange terrain, I realize, is what I saw from the highway, and dominates the greater part of the lake surface in all directions. It turns out to be negotiable, and the trick to attacking it is to weave back and forth along the black net strings, feeling for their polished smoothness.

  I pick up speed and close in on the island, shaped not all that long ago by successive Ice Age floods. Only a few miles beyond this lake, one of my favorite coulees yawns open in the scablands. From the center of that dry coulee, a flood-carved island very similar to the one I am now approaching rises like a fortress. As a memento to the ice time’s dramatic end, the last passing deluge dropped a pendant bar of exotic gravel on the fortress’s downstream side.

  That bar and coulee look exactly the same today as they did in June of 1860, when a young Boston artist from the International Boundary Commission climbed a terrace above the broad expanse of landscape to sketch the scene. He made a numbered key for the muted gray-green hues of the surrounding shrub-steppe, then daubed in colors aboard ship during his voyage back around Cape Horn. On the bottom edge of his work he wrote, “Aspen Camp, looking North. 27 Miles from Cow Creek.”

  The right edge of the painting curves along the bench where the artist had positioned himself
, so that the aspen grove, fronted by a few tents, lies nestled in a cove far below. The basalt fortress takes center stage on the coulee floor, with a half circle of supply wagons stationed along the base of its pendant bar. The outfit’s pack mules, released from their hauling duties, have scattered uphill from the wagons to forage for the night.

  The artist had been working with a boundary survey crew on the forty-ninth parallel around the Purcell Trench when some of the axmen, charged with cutting a swath along the new international border, began to suffer from the loose teeth and aching lethargy that any mariner knew meant scurvy. “The Surgeon of the Escort advises that we send them to the Spokane River where there is a wild onion which grows along the bank which may prove of service,” wrote one of the officers. That pendant bar, then and now, offers the kind of scoured ground rich in edible biscuitroots, while each May the wetter areas around the aspen grove still shine blue with camas lilies. The coulee itself sits in that in-between territory where Sahaptin ancestors of Mary Jim might have met Salish-speaking kin of William and Mattie Three Mountains as they all traced their annual rounds for roots. The land that had nourished these families for untold generations would cure the visitors’ scurvy after just a few hearty meals.

  Drawn by the winter lake’s own version of a flood-carved fortress, I lean into my turns, veering away from the lone fisherman as I aim for wetlands along the western shore. Each fragile white paisley flower in the ice assumes a different size and shape, ready to send a skater flying, but the dark, hard surrounding ice provides a continuous cursive line to follow. I fight into the wind, pumping hard and slow, threading through an array of basalt boulders off the western head of the island. Turning down the protected side with the wind at my back, it’s all speed now, and all I can do to keep my skates writing on the secure black track.

  When I risk a glance up, I’m already at the island’s east end, and I decide to duck under the protected brow of basalt rather than face a tough upwind return. The moment I round that rock corner, the solitary fisherman reappears. Given that this is the second time our paths have almost crossed, it only seems polite to pay him a visit.

  The ice turns bad again around the foot of the island. Elemental forces have broken the surface into fist-sized geometric shapes and glued them together like pillow basalt, so that I have to stumble along at a painful rate. Without actually staring, the fisherman sneaks glances at my progress. I, on the other hand, have to come to a dead stop twenty feet away in order to size him up; otherwise, I’ll fall flat on my face.

  The man is short, squarely built, and appears to be a Russian. If so, he and his kin have a rich history in the Columbia Basin, ranging from homesteaders who began as Volga River farmers dispatched by Catherine the Great to a much more recent stream of settlers emanating from the splintered periphery of the Soviet Union. I think of one schoolboy I met recently who knew all about trapping and preparing pelts; in order to prove it, he had brought in a red fox-skin winter cap, complete with long earflaps, which a Ukrainian uncle had made for him.

  From my tentative vantage point I can see that the lone fisherman’s black wool cap has similar protective flaps, and that his body is wrapped in a quilted orange parka meant for a much larger man. Fearful that he might think I’m some kind of game warden, I smile and nod my head to put him at ease. He flinches just enough to keep me from catching his eye.

  It takes longer to close that last short distance across the fragmented ice than it did to skate around the entire island, but once committed, I can’t very well swerve away. I say hello at what I think is a comfortable distance, and feel the wind scatter all the sound. It is really whipping now, and I’m suddenly aware of the cold. There’s nothing to do but edge my way along until I’m right beside the fisherman in the lee. I nod and smile again. He nods but doesn’t smile.

  “I hope my clumsy steps don’t bother your fishing,” I shout, wondering what could have drawn such a foreign arrangement of words from my mouth.

  “Da,” the man mutters. He is standing next to a hole in the ice, hands in his parka pockets. A heavy black spinning rod lies draped across the opening. It’s impossible not to notice that although the hole was obviously hand-chopped through ice nearly fourteen inches thick, its circumference makes a tidy almost-perfect circle.

  “Am I disturbing the fish?”

  “Da.” He does not seem annoyed and perhaps doesn’t understand what I’m saying. There are two more holes nearby, each one hewn with skillful precision toward some ideal roundness. I point to the closest opening, spread my hands apart, and rotate them to form a tight circle. He nods, and looks at my skates.

  “Having any luck?”

  “Da,” he answers, pointing to a tin pail beyond one of the holes.

  I struggle over to the bucket and admire a nice catch of small trout. Beside the pail, there’s a heavy short-handled ax propped against a battered tackle-box lid. The ax is pretty close in size and heft to the standard fur trade item that David Thompson offered to Plateau tribal people two centuries ago. There’s something here, I think. This guy knows fish. He knows the tools of his trade. He knows his own version of the north country from the other side of the globe, and parts of it translate directly to the place where we are standing now.

  I stalk back to the first hole in the hopes of sharing some of these parallel worlds. I nod, and the fisherman nods back.

  I would like to find out how he got here, what forces spun him across the frozen taiga to land on a lake where he could chop such neat circular holes. I picture Odysseus, setting off to challenge an entirely unstable world. I wonder how to ask this man to tell me a story.

  After a few more silent moments, I let a heavy gust of wind push me away from the trio of black holes. There’s some ice nearby that looks close to skatable, and as things smooth out, I spot my shoes, waiting far across the bay. I venture a glance back at the fisherman as he tends his pole. Maybe if we meet out here again, the wind will not be blowing so hard. Then he might be able show me the way he tunnels down, through time and space, to reach the fish.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have happened without the help and encouragement of these generous people and institutions.

  Kathy Ahlenslager, Merle Andrew, Bruce Archibald, Steve Arno, Jim Baugh, Steve Box, Roy Breckenridge, Tom and Susan Bristol, Angela Buck and family, Pam Camp, Sharon Carroll, Francis Carson, Kay Comer, Jackie Cook, Helen and Win Cook, Chalk Courchane, Francis Culloyah, Jim Ellis, Ellen Ferguson, Pauline Flett, Ron Fox, Vi Frizell, Em Gale, Darlene Garcia, Dean Garwood, Joseph Goldberg, Charlie Gurche, Laurel Hansen, Jan Hartford, John Haugerud, Michael Holloman, Lindsey Howtopat, Larry Hufford, Gene Hunn, Tony Johnson, Gene Kiver, Phil Leinhart, Estella Leopold, Chris Loggers, Ruth Ludwin, Gary Luke and everyone at Sasquatch Books, Ann McCrae, Ben Mitchell, Pat Moses, Karen Myer, Wally Lee Parker, Madilane Perry, Kathleen Pigg, John Phillips, Richard Pugh, John Ross, Dick Scheuerman, Mark Schlessman, Beth Sellars, Brian Shovers, Darby Stapp and Northwest Anthropology, Michael Sternberg, Marsha Wynecoop, Tina and Judge Wynecoop, and Henry Zenk.

  Asa Gray Herbaria, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Clayton/Deer Park Historical Society, Deer Park, WA; Eastern Washington Historical Society, Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane, WA; Federal Records Center, Cheney, WA; Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Winnipeg, Manitoba; Loon Lake Historical Society, Loon Lake, WA; Montana Historical Society, Helena, MT; Multnomah County Historical Society, Oregon City, OR; Spokane Public Library, Northwest Room, Spokane, WA; Spokane Tribal Preservation, Wellpinit, WA; Stevens County Historical Society, Colville, WA; Stonerose Interpretive Center, Republic, WA; and University of Oregon Library, Special Collections, Eugene, OR.

  CHAPTER NOTES

  Chapter 1: Chasing the Electric Fluid

  1: “as if to bid us good night”: Thompson, Writings, Vol. 1, 126.

  2: “a Meteor of globular form” and related quotes: Ibid., 126–27.

  3: “phenomena that are peculiar”:
Ibid., 125.

  4: “We seemed to be in the centre” and related aurora borealis quotes: Ibid., 152–58.

  5: the global aurora … as a dynamic, undulating oval: Akasufu, 41–49.

  6: Kootenai elders: in Canada, the Kootenais are known as Ktunaxa First Nations People.

  7: one of David Thompson’s maps: Thompson, Map, sheet 7.

  Chapter 2: Meltdown

  1: “Spokane Natural Wonder Gives Free Ice on Hottest Day,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, July 19, 1929, p. 1.

  2: layers of sage leaves: Ross, Spokane Indians, 436.

  3: reports about “ice caves”: Halliday, Caves of Washington, 111–12.

  4: “cold air wells” in Thompson Falls: Dufresne, A Heritage Remembered, 203.

  5: A local geologist named Thomas Largé created a map: Largé, “Glaciation.”

  6: Largé proposed that ripple marks: Largé, “Glacial Border.”

  7: naturalist David Douglas and missionary Samuel Parker: Douglas, Journal, 208; Parker, Journal, 290.

  8: J. B. Leiberg postulated: Leiberg, “Bitterroot Forest Reserve,” 256–57.

  9: Pardee visualized how this dam had impounded: Pardee, “Glacial Lake Missoula.”

  10: Bretz published the first: Bretz, Glacial Drainage, 573–608.