Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  Sometimes, in defending Pelton, I point out that he thinks volunteer work is one of the best ways to begin to understand a dangerous place. Organizations that do good work are listed in his book. One could assist refugees searching for their relatives in Rwanda, or clean toilets in the Congo, or help clear land mines in just about half the countries on earth.

  But defending Pelton is a thankless task. The guy doesn’t really care about what he calls “flatulent political correctness,” is congenitally arrogant, and expects his work to speak for itself. I suppose I stand up for Pelton because we spent some intense time together, working reasonably hard at not getting killed or kidnapped, and that is the basis of at least one kind of concentrated friendship. Still, I wouldn’t travel with him again on a bet. Robert Pelton really does go to dangerous places and he really does do dangerous things. He’s not a fraud and for that reason, I worry about him. The jerk.

  Collision Course

  Nations rise and nations fall. They crest like waves and collapse against the shores of time. Or so Chief Seattle said, not far from here, almost 150 years ago. His words are a meditation, an admonishment, and I intended to think real hard about them if I survived the immediate encounter with a car ferry that was steaming directly at us as my partner and I paddled our kayaks over the calm gray waters of Puget Sound.

  The trip was supposed to be a simple exercise in urban wilderness camping and backyard kayaking. I hailed my partner, Joel Rogers, a writer and photographer whose books I blame for much of my original interest in the sport of sea kayaking, which is to say I read him long before I ever met him.

  “Joel? Hey, Joel.”

  “What?”

  “I think we’re on a collision course here.”

  “Collision course?” Joel believed, for some reason, that I didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about seamanship.

  “With that car ferry off to the right.”

  “Starboard, you mean.”

  “Starboard.”

  Joel didn’t even have to look. “She should pass in front of us,” he said. “ ’Bout half a mile.”

  “Oh.”

  For the next few minutes, I listened to the sounds our paddles made as they dipped into the sea. Paddling sometimes feels like a religious chant, a prayer offered to sea. It’s tiring and repetitive, so that the mind often turns itself off to the clatter of the merely external. In this trancelike state, it’s sometimes possible to feel the soul spiral inward upon itself.

  But not when you think a huge car ferry is bearing down on you.

  I reviewed the one thing I knew about the geometry of collision courses. If, over time, the angle between two moving vessels doesn’t change, then they will eventually collide. I didn’t see our angle changing at all, and I mentioned this to Joel, with some urgency.

  His mind, it seemed, was somewhere off in the mists—perhaps his soul was spiraling somewhere—and he didn’t want to listen to me whining about the merely mundane.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  Our destination for the day was just ahead. Blake Island, a half square mile of ridged woodland and shoreline, is located pretty much smack in the middle of Puget Sound. A Washington state park, Blake is thought to be the birthplace of Chief Sealth, or Seattle. That would have been sometime around 1786. In 1855, the chief signed the Port Elliot Treaty between the U.S. government and tribes of the Puget Sound area. He is remembered and revered today largely for an elegant and nearly heartbreaking speech he gave on that occasion.

  There are several versions of the speech floating about, not all of them entirely authentic. In one rendition, for instance, Chief Seattle says: “I have seen thousands of rotting buffaloes on the prairie left by the white man who shot them from a passing train.” But he saw no such thing. The historical record is clear: Chief Seattle never traveled west of the Cascade Mountains, almost certainly never saw a buffalo, and died before the railroad reached the West Coast. Which doesn’t mean that various white men didn’t shoot thousands of buffalo from passing trains.

  When I glanced up again, the angle between our kayaks and the car ferry didn’t seem to be changing in the least. Here was a Native American technology—the kayak—on a collision course with an enormous internal-combustion engine carrying several hundred smaller internal-combustion engines. If the situation hadn’t been so intensely personal, I might have been tempted to think of it as metaphor in action.

  The late-afternoon sun began a process of sinking into a cloud bank to the west, and the sky looked bruised. The sea, formerly gray, began taking on the colors of the sky above, so that we were dipping our paddles into areas of welts and wounds. As the light began to fail, red-orange water rapidly faded into puddles of black and blue. On the ferry, lights suddenly glittered on the upper decks. Death looked very festive, rushing toward us over the sea of contusions.

  Did we paddle for our lives, cross the ferry’s bow, and try to beat it to the island?

  Joel didn’t think so. He said, “Let’s stop paddling here.”

  Which, as far as I could see, would leave us bobbing helplessly dead in the path of the ferry.

  “She’ll pass about half a mile ahead,” Joel said again.

  I glanced behind us. The far-off and snowcapped summit of Mount Rainier, which rose nearly three miles above us, caught the last rays of the setting sun, and seemed to glow, as from fires within. At sea level, however, twilight had already failed into night. Only two miles behind us, the lights of Seattle’s waterfront glittered in the cold clear night. It was a real pretty place, I thought, to be crushed by a car ferry.

  In my vision:

  Chief Seattle, a white guy wearing bell bottoms and Birkenstocks, steps out of his VW van to suggest that “all things are connected.” It is in the ancient time—somewhere around 1976, I’d guess—and Joni Mitchell is singing about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, which, in fact, is precisely what is happening in my hometown: the woods where I played as a boy have been felled to make way for Waukesha, Wisconsin’s first Kmart. I’m angry about that. I’m angry about a lot of things. There are oil spills and nuclear plant failures and the world is plunging straight to hell in a basket woven of toxic waste.

  “Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth,” Chief Seattle says.

  He’s here to provide the big picture, and save the earth. His words are emblazoned on posters, and often uttered as a kind of secular prayer to kick off environmental meetings. He is wise; he admonishes; he exhorts; he provides a perspective out of time. His words are both simple and elegant. They would, I imagine, be even more inspirational if the historical Chief Seattle had actually said them.

  In fact, the wall-poster version of Chief Seattle’s speech, complete with slaughtered buffalo, was actually written in the late 1970s by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for the movie Home, which was produced in the United States by the Southern Baptist Convention. Perry was writing a piece of fiction, and never intended that his Chief Seattle be confused with the real one. The writer, I’m told, has spent quite a bit of time in the past few years trying to set the record straight.

  Chief Seattle gave the actual speech in the Squamish dialect, and a translation by a Dr. Smith was published in the Seattle Sunday Star on October 29, 1887. In this version, Chief Seattle says: “Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished.” He assumed, as many whites and many Indians did in those days, that the tribes of America would vanish by the turn of the century. He said: “But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.”

  �
�In all the earth,” Chief Seattle actually said, “there is no place dedicated to solitude.”

  Together, Joel Rogers and I have spent some time together looking for places on the earth dedicated to solitude. He is known for his photos of remote wilderness areas: great expanses of sea and shore populated by whales and seals and salmon. The two of us have paddled northern Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands, paddled for a week at a time without ever seeing another human being. These days, about twice a year, Joel and I call each other and plan kayaking trips to the far corners of the earth. And then we call each other back and complain about money or time or complications in our respective love lives. We don’t get out much anymore.

  The last time we spoke on the phone, Joel told me he’d recently completed a 150-mile solo kayak trip from the southern tip of Puget Sound all the way north to the San Juan Islands, near the border with Canada. This isn’t a typical Joel Rogers expedition: Puget Sound is the site of three busy seaports as well as dozens of cities and towns. Where the hell could you camp?

  “There’s places,” he told me.

  “Near Seattle?”

  “Damn near in the city limits.”

  Joel himself lives in Seattle, on the waterfront, actually, and considers Puget Sound his “home waters.” In Watertrail, a new book of photographs and recollections about his trip, Joel says that in sixteen years of kayaking, he has “largely ignored” Puget Sound, considering it, I imagine, to be not sufficiently remote. The sound, he says, was “a ferry ride to other adventures, a body of water to travel around rather than a destination to be paddled, weathered, understood.”

  In recent times, Puget Sound had not been a good destination for extended kayaking because appropriate campsites were separated by dozens of miles, and it was impossible to paddle from one to the other in a single day. In 1990, a group of avid kayakers formed the Washington Water Trails Association (phone: 206-545-9161), an organization committed to providing a marine-trail system in the Puget Sound area. In essence, this meant negotiating for campsites with the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission and the Department of Natural Resources, which owned most of the appropriate land. The goal was to provide overnight camps every five to eight miles all the way from Olympia to the Canadian border.

  In January 1993, the initial twenty campsites—only human- and wind-powered beachable crafts permitted—were opened and the Cascadia Marine Trail system was born.

  When Joel and I spoke in late February, he suggested paddling a part of the Cascadia Marine Trail, just off Seattle. Solitude, he’d discovered, was not necessarily located in a province far away.

  The thing of it was: Joel was real busy. He only had a couple of days. If I could get from my home in Montana to Seattle by tomorrow afternoon, we could be camping on historic Blake Island, in the middle of Puget Sound, that evening.

  Easy. Puget Sound is practically in my backyard, and the nearest ocean to those of us who live on the northeastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a mere 736 miles due west, along Interstate 90, where daytime speed limits are 70, or 75, and, in my state, simply “reasonable and prudent,” which means, oh, 85 or 90. Still, it was February and there was some snow in the mountain passes. It took twelve hours, and I got to Seattle late, at four that afternoon, parked my truck, and climbed into one of Joel’s waiting kayaks.

  Which is why we were still paddling at twilight, and why, I imagined, there was a car ferry bearing down on us. As it got closer, however, the angle began to change slightly, then slightly more. Suddenly, it began to change very rapidly indeed until the ferry passed, as Joel had said it would, about half a mile in front of us.

  I listened to the engines thrumming into the distance until I was able again to hear the dip and plash of my own paddle in the sea. The irony wasn’t lost on me: I’d driven twelve hours, burning about $75 worth of gasoline, precisely so that I could get away from such annoyances as internal-combustion engines. I resented the ferry about as much as I resented myself, which is to say, regretfully, not very much at all. Mine is an ideology of convenient spirituality.

  …

  We had paddled along the heavily wooded western edge of Blake Island, moving south toward a wide swath of sand where a Cascadia Marine Trail sign marked the campsite. We beached the kayaks. To the east, I could see an enormous full moon rising over Seattle.

  Blake Island is a popular park, and there are over fifty campsites, complete with moorings for power craft. The Marine Trail camp is set about half a mile away from the other sites, which didn’t really matter much because there was no one else staying overnight on the island this February evening. I suppose there was a ranger in residence somewhere, but it was as if we had the island all to ourselves. I stood for a moment under the full moon, and stared at the great city glittering in the distance, only three miles away.

  Joel burned us a dinner of bean and cheese burritos on his camp stove then wandered off to shoot some time-lapse photographs of the moon over Seattle. It was going to be a strange picture, I thought, with all the planes zipping over the city from Sea-Tac airport. There’d be dozens of radiating rays in the photo, like significance streaks in a cartoon. The image suggested a perspective that was not immediately forthcoming.

  Somewhere in the city, I could hear the faint dithering dweep and howl of a police siren, and then I saw the car’s blue and red lights flashing as it raced along a hillside, just parallel to the waterfront. Someone in trouble or hurt. It felt strange to be camping, cooking on a camp stove, and watching a live version of Cops.

  I listened hard, but lost the sound of the siren in a rustle of leaves stirred by a soft breeze. I was camping damn near in the city limits, on the Cascadia Marine Trail, in the place where Chief Seattle was born, and, on this one particular evening, it was a place dedicated to solitude. A small place, a small thing.

  I don’t know about our time of decay, or nations cresting and collapsing like waves on the sand. I do know this: That white guy Chief Seattle? The one in bell bottoms who was out to save the world all at once? That was me, crashing up against the shores of time.

  The Big Muddy

  Mud on the banks of the Missouri River will suck you down to midcalf, pull the boots or sandals off your feet, cling tenaciously to your skin, clothes, canoe, ice chest, and every last thing you own, and then accompany you home and distribute itself around your living quarters and deposit a ring around your tub that appears to wash off and then magically reappears for about a week or seven. The enduring and insistent mire is locally called “gumbo” and is sometimes described as “greasy.” After a heavy rain, the mud extends out miles from the banks of the river. Most of the roads to and from the Wild and Scenic section of the Missouri—which, to confuse matters, is located entirely in Montana—are gravel or dirt, and it’s a simple matter to drop your car axle deep into the gumbo mud, a situation which can be life-threatening along the Missouri at its most Wild and Scenic, an area that is not within walking distance of anywhere. I know, it’s happened to me.

  That was when I’d first moved to Montana, over two decades ago. I was scouting the Missouri at the time, wondering about the classic float, a trip that was then pretty high up on my Life List of Stuff to Do. I got home that year, enlightened in the matter of mud, and then things began to happen fairly rapidly, two decades galloped by, and when I next checked the to-do list, there it was, “Missouri River Float,” undone and staring me in the face like an accusation. I began to dream about it, that float, and the dreams were all bright and sunny, but I was unable to get to the sparkling green water because I was knee- and ankle-deep in mud.

  These greasy frustration dreams were unacceptable. My will was stronger than mud, damn it. And so I was on my way to Fort Benton, Montana, the put-in point for the 149-mile-long Wild and Scenic section of what, in any fair and decent world, would be considered the longest river on the planet. The Missouri rises at Three Forks, Montana, at the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rive
rs, flows vaguely north, then turns east through Montana to North Dakota, before dropping south through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri, finally joining the Mississippi at St. Louis. That’s 2,546 miles: longer than the upper and lower Mississippi put together.

  If the Mississippi is to be considered a continuation of the Missouri—as I’m arguing it should be—the river is 4,220 miles long: longer than the Nile (4,132 miles), the Amazon (4,000), and the Yangtze (3,915). It’s a great big huge world-beater of a river, a ribbon of history and geology and wildlife. Along this free-flowing stretch of the Missouri, mule deer and bighorn sheep frolic all over the adjacent geology, mourning doves mourn unseen in the occasional cottonwood, and rattlesnakes hiss from the banks. There are thirteen Lewis and Clark campsites, some of them set amid cliffs that look like toadstools or ancient Greek temples or castles in Spain or defunct comedians; there are dinosaurs, buried in the mud; there is a violent and often grimly amusing history; and there is, of course, the matter of my own greasy river dreams.

  Fort Benton, Montana, was one of the truly tough towns of the old West. At the turn of the last century, it was, according to one newspaper, “a scalp market, the home of cutthroats and horse thieves.” Armed robberies, gunfights, and lynchings were common, almost daily occurrences. The U.S. Army saw the town as “a whiskey-trading post for hostile Indians.” And indeed, there is a recipe for “Indian whiskey” at the local museum: “To muddy Missouri Water add 1 quart of alcohol, 1 pound of rank black chewing tobacco, 1 handful of red peppers, 1 bottle Jamaica ginger and 1 quart black molasses. Mix well and boil until strength is drawn from the tobacco and peppers.” Firewater, indeed.

  In 1868, irate citizens of Fort Benton lynched their own town marshal in an effort to make the streets safe for extreme drunkenness. It seems someone had been stealing from passed-out inebriates distributed about in the muddy streets of an evening. Townsfolk complained to the marshal, William Hinson, who said (regrettably, he may have thought later), “What our town needs is a half a dozen hangings.”