I laid my bedroll between the hatch and rail on the deck behind the wheelhouse. Neither the wind nor the storm swells had diminished, but I could see stars. The Chumash called the Milky Way suyapo’osh, after the white insides of piñon nuts and the long trail they walked to gather them. Lying on my back, I saw the Milky Way as a rope, one I tried to grab in order to steady myself but, at the boat’s highest pitch, kept missing. How was it possible to survive these seas in a tomol?
Every once in a while James stuck his head out the wheelhouse door to check on me. I’d climbed into my bag with shoes, clothes, and glasses on, because anything loose would have been tossed overboard. The entire boat was wet. With both hands I held on to scuppers and hatch covers. The bow of the boat was like a hand feeling the weight and shape of each swell, how and when wind shifted, from which side we were being ambushed by water. Every now and then I caught glimpses of what looked like a cozy bachelor pad behind the wheelhouse’s red curtains: James enthroned in a pilot’s seat covered with sheepskin; his three helpers playing cards at a table bolted to the floor; sexy music playing on a tape deck … then the curtains would swing closed again.
The boat tipped up and down, and fins of salt water sprayed my face. Old Fernando Librado said that at night the sun goes to rest in the hole of a sand dollar, leaving its rays outside while the sun rests within. I stuck my head under my canvas bedroll cover and smiled in delight.
Toward dawn I must have dozed off. I woke with a start because the boat had stopped shaking. The water was smooth and gray; the sky was gray. Beads of moisture dripped from my hair. Then I saw blue cliffs: Santa Cruz Island. As the sun rose from its hiding place, fog melted away.
There are four northern Channel Islands: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and, most remote, San Miguel. Geologically, they are part of the continental borderland—what geologists call “fringing islands” as opposed to archipelagos made and cut away by rising and dropping seas, the lateral shear of tectonic plates and volcanism. Controversy still rages over whether there was a land bridge to the mainland. Regardless, early-man sites have been found on Santa Rosa dating forty thousand years ago, linking these early islanders with dwarf elephants that, land bridge or not, swam from the mainland and flourished in isolation.
The word chumash means “islander.” The First People were thought to have been born on Santa Cruz and radiated out from there. Islanders spoke a different dialect from mainlanders and danced different dances. They paddled their tomols to the mainland to buy and sell goods, using tiny shells as currency for exchange. On both island and mainland they lived in villages, whose headman or woman was called a wot. A council of officials called a siliyik took care of village ceremonies and problems. The word siliyik also means “whole world.”
An old man called an alchuklash named children and took care of the sick. They were also astronomers and astrologers. As soon as a newborn child moved, these alchuklash gave it a name. For example, those born in January were self-willed and virtuous; the ones born in April, “when the flowers are already in bloom,” were cheerful and worked for the community; and December’s children were ecstatic, then lethargic, then like gods in the world.
Fernando knew an old man whose star maps were embedded with shells—one for the fall sky, one for the winter, and so on, and their twelve-month lunar calendar was adjusted to the solstices, when feather poles were stuck into the earth—an umbilical connecting the human to the natural world.
In 1542 João Cabrilho, whose Portuguese name was changed to the Spanish, Cabrillo, took command of the exploratory voyage along the California coast after his captain died. When Cabrillo’s two ships, La Victoria and San Salvador, paused in the channel, the Chumash paddled out to the strangers. They had never seen a European. Bartholeme Ferrel, Cabrillo’s diarist, wrote: “All the way there were many canoes, for the whole coast was very densely populated and many Indians kept boarding the ships. They pointed out their pueblos and told us their names.”
Unknown to the Chumash, their “biggest island in the universe” was being reduced to a mere point on a much larger, imponderable map.
In 1769 more Europeans came to stay. Dispatched by King Carlos III to protect the area from Russian seal hunters, a priest and some Mexican soldiers arrived on a hot August afternoon. They had been told to build four military forts—presidios—as well as a chain of missions along the California coast like “beads on a rosary.” Again the Chumash displayed extravagant hospitality. They entertained the men with singing and dancing so continuous the travel-weary conquerors moved to another camp in order to sleep. The Chumash didn’t understand that their conviviality had been interpreted as acquiescence. Already they had been betrayed.
Fernando Librado said: “Civilization conquered the world at the point of a bayonet. There was also much money at the point of that bayonet.” Chumash were lured to mission settlements out of curiosity. Horses, livestock, blacksmithing, gardening, tools—so much they hadn’t seen. Some resisted contact with the whites, others let themselves be baptized and dexterously juggled two sets of beliefs for the rest of their lives.
The Chumash were taught to be masons, painters, carpenters, cooks, gardeners, vaqueros. Intermarriage was encouraged. Those who resisted “missionization” were often punished. Librado describes how: “There were two kinds of stocks in that room. One was shaped of wood to cover the foot like a shoe.… These pieces of wood were joined to a ring which went about the knee, and from this ring straps were attached to a belt that went around the waist of the person. Weights were fastened to the straps. As punishment, the priests would work men and women in the fields with those weighted shoes. The priests also sometimes shackled the feet of the Indians or shackled two together at the same time.”
The “civilizing” presence of the Spaniards included many violations, among them the use of Indian women for sex by “celibate” priests. “They took all the best-looking Indian girls,” Librado said, “and put them in a nunnery. The priest had an appointed hour to go there. When he got to the nunnery, all were in a big dormitory. The priest would pass by the bed of the superior and tap her on the shoulder, and she would commence singing. All the girls would join in, which, in the dormitory, had the effect of drowning out other sounds. While the singing was going on, the priest would have time to select the girl he wanted, carry out his desires, and come back to where the superior was. In this way the priest had sex with all of them, from the superior on down.”
Though a good deal of Chumash culture was tolerated—Bear and Blackbird dances were performed on the completion of each mission building, for which the men had carried pine timbers on their backs all the way from the mountains—the elastic present of their tribal society had been transfixed. What had formerly been marked by tides, seasons, solstices, and eclipses was now splintered into hourly work schedules, ringing bells, whippings, and rapes. Food gathering, feasting, canoe building, and ceremony—the staples of Chumash life—were crimped into the leanest kind of existence.
When Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1835 and the missions were secularized, the Chumash were to inherit half the land and livestock. They didn’t. The newly appointed Mexican governor meted out large ranchos to friends. The Indians worked on as cooks, sheepherders, servants, and vaqueros. They lived a double life: alchuklash by night, Catholic ranch hand by day. One of them said: “Yes, much from the outside has been forced on us. But inside we change more slowly. We may wear the European’s clothes, but we do not wear all his thinking.”
Midmorning on the Peace, and it has taken ten hours to go sixty miles. “Kind of a long night,” James said, handing me a cup of coffee. “I cheated and took Dramamine,” I told him. “So did I,” he said. The boat glided on calm waters, with the copilot at the helm. The islands’ sandstone cliffs moved past, each island generating its own private weather of marine mist and inland valley fog, and producing unique, endemic species of animals and plants, and eccentric human islanders.
When I w
as a child I lay in bed at night and looked out at these islands. “There’s no sense sailing to San Miguel,” my father always said. “There’s nothing out there.” Sometimes when the wind shifted and blew in from the southwest I could hear seals barking and a sound like women singing, and I wanted to swim to San Miguel. It stood for the separateness I felt from my family, for the mystery of how identity is formed. Now I find I can’t say I am one thing without saying I am another: as these islands are defined by their relationship to the coast, so is my sense of aloneness rooted in the context of family and because of it. I knew the ways in which I was different, and how “the water between us” could be bridged by what we shared.
Islands are places where exchanges occur. Because the boundaries are so sharp, islands remind us of beginnings and endings, of birth and the arousal of consciousness of the evolutionary movement from water to land and air. At places of exile and island prisons like Sado or Alcatraz, waterline is a hard edge, forbidding as broken glass and high fences. We crave island holidays, hoping that within the geographical confines of an island we can, paradoxically, expand, shed old skin, reimagine ourselves.
Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures. In 1835 the last Native Americans were removed from the Channel Islands by Franciscan mission fathers on a chartered schooner inauspiciously named Peor es Nada, which translates “worse is nothing.” By the time they reached San Nicolas Island, about thirty miles south of San Miguel, winter was coming on. The islanders were hastily gathered. When one woman discovered her child had been left behind, she jumped overboard and swam to shore. Because the storm was closing in, the captain sailed without her, intending to return in a few weeks, but the schooner, living up to its name, sank, and no one returned for her.
Eighteen years later, George Nidever, a fur trapper who had explored California with the Walker expedition and later became an early owner of San Miguel Island, set out to find “the lost woman of San Nicolas.” He found fresh footprints, which led him to her shelter, made of whale ribs covered with sea grass and brush. The woman was roasting wild onion over a fire. No child was present, but she had dogs and two pet ravens. She wore a dress made from the skins of pelagic cormorants with the feathers still attached, sewn together with bone needles.
It is said she went willingly with Nidever. It was an easy passage that day, and she was welcomed at the Santa Barbara mission, baptized, and given a Spanish name, Juana Maria. But like other “wild people” who have been brought into the so-called civilized world, she did not thrive in captivity, and six weeks after her arrival, she died.
The three-mile passage between Santa Rosa and San Miguel is rough. During the night, the swells are obsidian boulders, not cut by the keel’s knife from the sea but carved from the blackness above our heads. Now, in early light, San Miguel is cut from day, a blue muscle dropped and floating on water.
We pass Caldwell’s Point, Nichols Point, Challenge Point, Bay Point, Hoffman Point, then cruise past Prince Island, blackened by pelagic cormorants and dotted with western gulls, and finally turn into the turquoise calm of Cuyler’s Harbor. Small, most remote, most inaccessible of the Channel Islands, San Miguel is only fourteen square miles, roughly ten thousand acres and hit hard by prevailing northwesterly winds, which have made the western end the site of many shipwrecks. Its fractured shores—part volcanic, part sedimentary—split the California current, some of the water curling counterclockwise toward the mainland in cyclonic eddies, the other part breaking out into open seas.
A piece of dead whale floats by, perched on by two gulls, and sea lions bask on an island of undulating kelp, acknowledging our arrival with a blink of the eye. James drops anchor, and groups of us are rowed to shore. Who planted the three palm trees that greet us? They are not native to the island. A swallow nest hangs from a hunk of conglomerate rock: best view in the world of this white sandy beach and natural harbor.
As I walk, the palm fronds behind me come alive with finches. I kick blue mussel shells, red abalone, purple-hinged scallops, and thick slabs of jingle shells. There are spiny sand crabs, cancer crabs, and sand dollars. In which one does the sun find its resting place? Above a sandy shelf of plovers’ nests is an ancient Chumash house site, much like the lone woman’s—a curved depression where the whale rib house once stood.
Was this shelter occupied when Cabrillo was here in 1542? That was the year he wintered on San Miguel. Where did he live? Did he befriend the Chumash islanders, eat with them, sleep with them, fall in love? Sometime near Christmas he broke an arm or a leg and suffered gangrene; he died in January of the new year. A monument to him stands above Cuyler’s Harbor.
This is the island my family wouldn’t sail to because it was barren, they said, but walking up a steep trail from the beach, the one used by sheepmen who lived here long after Cabrillo’s demise, I find that flowers and grasses abound. Ice plant frosts the cliffs, and there is saltbrush, native buckwheat, brome, lupine, morning glory, and coreopsis. Halfway up, I come on sea rocket, a strange flowering plant ingeniously adapted to island life because its seed pods break into two parts: one has a corky outer coating and drifts on water, enabling it to migrate to other islands, while the second pod drops close to the mother plant in order to colonize the ground nearby.
Islands are evolutionary laboratories. How did plants and animals get here? How did they fare in isolation? Did they mutate or stay the same? Get smaller or bigger? Flourish or go extinct? Now conservationists are looking at all kinds of islands, not just the ones surrounded by water but islands of vegetation in desert seas, and deserts surrounded by tundra. The biologist Paul Ehrlich warns us that “the earth is rapidly becoming a system of habitat islands surrounded by a sea of human disturbance,” and as fragmentation increases, so will extinction rates. The same could be said for the islands of the psyche and the soul.
Up top, blow-out channels cut in sand by wind rib the northern end of the island, and to the south, gentle, treeless grasslands slope down to the sea. There is an eerie forest of caliche, calcium carbonate casing tree trunks, the broken remnants of two hundred years of continuous unmanaged grazing, which stripped the island of vegetation—vegetation that is now returning. Out across a grassy plain, island foxes bound, then leap in place, pouncing down on prey; in the Chumash islanders’ Fox Dance, performers painted their faces and bodies with white bands, their necks vermilion, and wore headdresses made of junco feathers twined with flowers and a long braided tail weighted by a rock tied into the end. Dancers shook rattles made of mussel shells and sang about their crossings to the mainland: “I make a big step. I am always going over to the other side. I always jump to the other side as if jumping over a stream of water.… I make a big step.”
There were Swordfish, Barracuda, Arrow, and Skunk dances and the Seaweed Dance, performed by men and women dressed in feather skirts, their faces painted red with white dots. Mimicking the movement of kelp, they slithered and undulated and sang: “Behold me! I walk moving my brilliance and feathers. I will always endure in the future. Ailwawila hilele.”
Near the Lesters’ house site we stopped to eat lunch. Herbert Lester was hired by the island’s owner in 1930 to live there and run sheep. He had suffered shell shock in World War I, and the owner thought island life would be soothing for his friend and his Yankee bride, Elizabeth. For twelve years they reigned as “the King and Queen of San Miguel,” lived in a rambling house, “Rancho Ramboullet,” made of planks salvaged from wrecked ships, had two daughters, and produced a decent sheep crop despite dry years and a deteriorating soil surface. But in June of 1942, Lester, in ill health, killed himself, and the happy island days ended.
Was it really ill health that prompted Lester to take his own life, or geographical and emotional isolation? And why did the lost woman of San Nicolas die after being brought to the mainland, or did “civilization” represent another kind of prison, which she had never encountered before?
As we rowed back to the Peace, I saw James leaning against the
wheelhouse, mirrored sunglasses reflecting our slow progress, and thought: Islands are emblematic not only of solitude but of refuge and sanctuary, the way a small boat is an island in rough seas.
On deck, a stocky young surgeon hands me a glass of wine. “I love these islands, but I could spend days just on the color of the sea. It’s so hard to hold in my mind: sometimes it’s jade that’s been cut, sometimes turquoise,” he said.
Dinnertime. Twenty of us crowd into the galley and eat greasy chicken and limp coleslaw. A boat pulls up alongside and I hear yelling, then James falls past the porthole window. He has jumped from the wheelhouse to the deck. “You do not have permission to board,” he yells. Too late. The men with badges are already roaming around. Hatches and lockers are searched, then the dining room. “It’s the Game and Fish guys,” someone whispers. “They’re looking for illegal lobster.” Relieved, I hold up a drumstick. “Would we be eating this if we had lobster?” I ask. Finally, the men depart. When their boat is gone, James appears, with a devilish grin on his face. “Okay, bring out the lobster!” Then he disappears.
Dark. The sea air is velvet against my face, a perfect temperature of seventy-two degrees. I sit on the hatch behind the wheelhouse and look across the water toward the California mainland, toward the house where I grew up, but can see nothing. No land, no lights, no eucalyptus or lemon trees. Home is how many places? Chumash history was not taught in California schools when I was growing up, but recently a friend with Chumash ancestry said, “If you want to know who you are and where you are, you have to know who lived here first.”
Up on a rock outcrop above my parents’ house, he gave me a geography lesson, naming names up and down the coast: Humaliwo, Muwu, Mitsqanaqa’n, Shisholop, Kosho, Shuku, Q’oloq, Lephew, Lisil, Mikiw—names of Chumash villages. Humaliwo—meaning “the surf sounds loudly”—is now Malibu. Tinik was near the Reagan ranch. At Montecito’s Hammond estate, on whose rolling lawns I once attended all-night formal dances, condos have been built on top of a Chumash burial ground. To the north, Point Conception—where oil companies have tried to lay pipeline—is the Chumash gateway to the Land of the Dead. Nearby, Upop, a village whose name means “shelter,” is now Vandenberg Air Force Base, with its new launching pad for missiles. And Shalawa—Montecito, where I was born—is haven to Hollywood’s new rich. Just above the fancy houses, a hot spring was once a village called Alish’i’l. Its warm waters are now piped through my parents’ house.
Islands, the Universe, Home Page 10
