“Everywhere,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, meaning on the Northwest coast, “there emerges a parallelism between these natural disorders [like whirlpools associated with named monsters] and those which attack familial and social life.” But of course! The safe management of a canoe through tidal rapids and rough water was the first requirement for survival in these parts—an experience that supplied an inevitable metaphor for the conduct of life. Drowning in a whirlpool was probably the culture’s single most vivid image of catastrophe: the sudden loss of control, the upset boat, the bodies in the water, the overpowering current, the sucking down into the abyss. If you tried to imagine the consequences of, say, killing your brother, or sleeping with your sister, they would naturally present themselves in terms of the whirlpool, the earthquake, the tsunami—just as the canoe was seen as the vessel of life, from the canoe-cradles in which babies were rocked to those used for air burials in the trees. Bad social behavior was like careless canoeing, and got you into much the same kind of deep water. Here, where life was seen as a voyage through a multitude of natural hazards, it was hardly surprising that Lévi-Strauss should discover that the Indians’ sea stories were really lightly coded encryptions of basic social rules, like the prohibitions against incest, murder, laziness, and egotism.
Maybe they order these things differently in French, but in English the fund of maritime metaphor goes very nearly as deep as it did in the Kwakiutl and Haida languages. We see things out to the bitter end (anchored in a storm, you let out all the cable you can to save the ship, and at last you reach the bitter end, the remaining length of chain in the locker, nearest to the bitts, around which it is secured; the ship eventually goes down, of course.) When surprised, you are taken aback, caught head-to-wind; when things go easily for you, it’s plain (correctly, plane) sailing. Your manner is aloof (or a-luff); you let things go by the board; you need a loan to tide you over; coming home from the pub, three sheets to the wind, you lose your bearings … Both Robert Louis Stevenson, a Scot, and Elias Canetti, from Bulgaria and Vienna, observed that the Englishman has a deep-rooted habit of thinking of himself as the captain of a ship at sea; as Stevenson wrote, “a man from Bedfordshire, who does not know one end of the ship from the other until she begins to move, swaggers [on a Channel packet] with a sense of hereditary nautical experience.” Taken by and large (as one assesses a ship in terms of her capacity to sail close to the wind, or “by,” and off the wind, with sheets eased, or “large”), the English are in a good position to understand why Northwest Indians were inclined to see the whole of human life as something you do in a canoe.
In open water now, I killed the engine, unfurled the genoa, and let the boat coast quietly on the breeze while I tried to raise a marine operator on the VHF. Clicking through radio channels containing only static, I at last found a voice from the station at Alert Bay, the Kwakiutl reserve on Cormorant Island, and put through a call to Seattle.
Radio amplified the ringing tone, whose forlorn throbbing filled the boat. There’s an audible difference between the sound of a telephone that will, in a few moments, be answered, and one that, at best, will say: “This is Jean … please leave a message.”
The words had the volume and sound quality of an announcement echoing through the porcelain tunnels of the London tube. “Mind the gap, please. Mind the gap!”
In a calm sea, the first sign of turbulent water ahead is often a slight roughening of the horizon line, like the deckle edge along the top of an invitation card. Odd, you think, but pay it no special attention. Only later do you realize it was a signal to batten down the hatches.
The great outpouring of tide from the interior had smoothed the walls of Johnstone Strait, a gully forty miles long and a thousand feet deep, between Vancouver Island and the labyrinth of smaller islands to the north. The place had an unpleasant reputation as a wind funnel, but that morning the southeasterly was blowing at a gentle ten to twelve knots, just enough to keep the boat moving nicely under sail. With the sun now breaking through the clouds and silvering the water, the strait was a cheering sight after my string of lonely days: a broad marine highway on which orderly lines of coasters, fishing boats, tugs, and barges were following the posted route between Puget Sound and Alaska. The skipper of a Seattle-registered purse-seiner stepped out from his freshly painted wheelhouse to give me a wave as he swept past; we were both of us now far enough away from our shared home port for the usual tribal hostilities between yachts and working boats to be forgotten.
The narrow entrance to Port Neville opened and closed again in what seemed like a flash, with the boat traveling much faster than the tide tables said it should. I was sailing at five knots, but the land was going past at eight, or so the GPS consistently reported. My best guess was that I was enjoying the benefit of “slippery water.”
Seawater, laden with chlorides and minerals, is heavier than fresh. When a river meets the sea, it’s liable to spill out in a wide fan across the top of the denser, saline water. So the brackish surface layer of an estuary can move independently of the saltwater tide below, sliding over it in a continuous ebb current, even when the deep tide is on the flood. Something like this was happening now on Johnstone Strait. The boat was riding on the fast surface current, while the true tide rolled sluggishly westward at a knot or less. I dipped a bucket over the side, and tried the water on my tongue: powerfully salty, not brackish at all. But I clung to the slippery-water theory, a useful explanation of all sorts of inconsistencies between the tables and the erratic behavior of the actual tide.
I’d just stowed my bucket when a sudden rush of wind came down the funnel of the strait, like an unprovoked punch delivered out of nowhere. The boat corkscrewed. The genoa-sheet, bar-tight, groaned on the drum of the winch. I feared for the stitching of the sail as the fabric swelled under the impact of the wind, which had begun to yodel nastily in the rigging. In no time at all, the ruffled water changed to a short, steep, breaking sea.
Sunlit waves never frighten anyone half so much as the same waves under a sullen sky. These waves were full of light and life. The sun, shining clean through their tops, rendered them an opalescent milky green, which darkened, as the wave thickened around the middle, to the turquoise of a peacock’s tail. Algae and phytoplankton gave them the color of a coastal sea dense with vegetable matter, like frigid minestrone.
I had meant to go on to Alert Bay, to meet the Kwakiutl, but the wind nixed that plan. Thirty knots was more than I could safely handle. As the fetch of the strait lengthened, the waves climbed and the boat seesawed over them, crashing into each trough and trying to bury its nose in the wave immediately ahead. Drenched in spray, and by the occasional bucketful of solid green water, I hung on to the wheel, spinning it violently to keep to a more-or-less steady downwind course. I had too much sail up, but it was too late now to mess around with flailing sheets and furling-line. For more than an hour the boat ran away with me, rearing and plunging as if bent on trying to catapult its rider into the sparkling soup.
Even in high sunshine, I had no appetite for this. I had learned to sail too late in life to acquire a real seaman’s instinct for what to do when the wind gets up and the sea growls. I had to listen to the creaking machinery of my own reason as I thought, not felt, my way through the rising waves, trying to figure out what on earth I’d do when the mast snapped off at the root, as it surely would, and soon. I remembered some book or other saying that heavy-duty wire cutters were essential onboard. I had none. So the 46-foot mast, now in the water, trapped by a cat’s-cradle of steel rigging, would work on the hull as a battering ram, until it punched a hole amidships and the boat went down in a string of big bubbles. Wrenching the wheel to starboard, hoping to correct the boat’s sideways slew down a wave, I could already hear the crunch of the severed mast breaking through into the gallery, smashing plates and glasses, letting the sea rush in. I was always the coward, who dies many times before his death.
Nine miles on from Port Nev
ille was a merciful gap in the north wall of the strait, where the Broken Islands were strewn across the entrance to Havannah Channel. I ran for cover there, with the boat skidding into the lee on a crackling surge of foam. The mast still stood. The sun shone. A seal, basking on a rock, opened an eye at my arrival and slid soundlessly into the calm water, making not a ripple.
The 1965 edition of the British Columbia Pilot promised a hotel, general store, and post office at Minstrel Island, tucked snugly into the labyrinth a dozen miles to the north. A working phone was all I needed, and Minstrel Island sounded like telephone heaven. I lunched on cheese and Marmite sandwiches, and spent the afternoon idling, under sail, through a bunch of islands named after British officers aboard the frigate Havannah, a survey ship stationed here in the 1850s; Mist, Harvey, Hull, Bockett, Atchison, Malone …
The old Kwakiutl names had been precisely descriptive, as vivid now as they were before Messrs. Bockett, Atchison & Co. came on the scene. Foam on Beach. Having Great Ebb Tide. Roaring Surf Inside. Tide Running Alongside. Having Wind. Sail-Tearing Place. Breaking Waves. Having Spider Crabs. Sound of Dripping Water. Shallow in Middle of Water. Having Waves. In his monograph Geographical Names of the Kwakiutl, Franz Boas covered their entire territory and restored to the map Indian names obliterated by the British when they turned the Inside Passage into a gigantic naval cemetery. The word for island, mekala, meant “round thing on the water.” The generic name for a dangerous navigational hazard, usually a narrow pass featuring boils and whirlpools, was nomas, “old man,” a polite way of signifying a resident monster.
Following Boas’s map of Havannah Channel, I sailed from Rocky Place Not Reached to Paddled Through On Beach, to Long Face, to Shelter Point, to Round Things On Water In Front Of Beach, to Having Devilfish, to Hanging Place, to Coming In Sight In Front, to Abalone On Back, to Having Fern Roots, to Round Thing On Water Inside—a graphic and memorable afternoon’s cruise.
I liked to think of Boas here. He was an arresting anthropological specimen in his own right: short, wiry, with black eyes, black hair, an aquiline nose, and a bushy black mustache. His face was deeply incised with dueling scars, from his student days in Heidelberg (that must have interested the Indians). His personality was forbidding. He had an ascetic relish for physical hardship; detested frivolity in any form, but especially light opera; and his grim prose style reflects a mind of such flinty seriousness that one quails at meeting it on the page. The man was a research engine. Not a glimmer of warmth shows in his writing, which reveres the cold fact to a degree rarely seen since Mr. Gradgrind made Sissy Jupe define a horse.
What can the Indians have made of him? He looms craggily over the field of Northwest ethnology, with his dictionaries and grammars, his collections of native myths and stories, his relentless tabulation of motifs in Indian art and oral literature. Somewhere there must be Kwakiutl or Tsimshian stories of Franz Boas—Scarface, with fountain pen and ledger, meatgrinding their whole world into volume upon volume of the Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology.
Strangely, Boas comes most to life in the moment of his death. He was 84 when, on 21 December 1942, he hosted a lunch at the Columbia Faculty Club for the French anthropologist Paul Rivet. With lunch over, he refilled his wine glass and lit a cigarette (a late-in-life luxury), delivered a two-sentence denunciation of the evils of racism, and fell back dead in his chair. This is a rare glimpse of Boas indulging himself in earthly pleasures, and it would be nice to imagine the aged dean of anthropology aboard an Indian canoe, blowing thoughtful smoke rings into the evening sky.
From Atchison Island (or, Round Thing On Water Inside), the sun-starved gorge of Chatham Channel (otherwise Cormorant Place) led to Minstrel Island, where, with an Indian fisherman’s help, I found a place for the boat in the huddle of skiffs and gill-netters.
“There’s a phone here?”
“Yes,” he said, pointing up to the halfmoon of buildings at the head of the cove. “Right up there outside the bar.” After a calculated pause, he said, “If you can make the sucker work.”
Minstrel Island was a roundish green thing on the water, about two miles in diameter, rising to a thickly timbered cone at 1,400 feet. The harbor was sheltered from the exposed northwest by the tarred hulks of lighters that had gone down at their moorings. The “hotel” was a line of scabious cabins on fir stilts; a hunting-and-fishing resort presently being used as the bunkhouse for a logging crew. The carpets were rank, the lightbulbs unshaded. On the verandah overlooking the harbor, a big, rheumy-eyed dog with a lot of German shepherd in it stood guard by the payphone.
“Don’t mind him—he won’t bite,” said the woman in charge of this amiably gimcrack establishment. “You can try the phone. Somebody got through on it yesterday, or the day before.”
I fed in a pile of money but, as at Blind Channel, the satellites were in the wrong conjunction. All I got was the sound of surf, lazily collapsing on a faraway beach. I ached for Jean’s and Julia’s voices, especially at sunset, when distances lengthened like shadows and the city lights of Puget Sound now seemed as remote as if I’d left my family back in Liverpool or Valparaiso. I kept at it, trying to will a dial tone into being. No luck.
“We don’t have much use for the telephone around here. We’re all on radio, channel six. You want the roast-beef dinner?”
My beardlessness made me conspicuous in the bare formica cafe. I lacked even the minimal three-day stubble that might’ve enabled me to pass without comment from the loggers, who viewed my brown tweed jacket, khaki pants, and scuffed Docksiders with discomforting interest.
“You with the census?”
“Sorry?”
A lone yachtsman, it turned out, had lately been cruising the islands, his salary and expenses paid handsomely by the Canadian government. In an average day’s work, he would seek out and register one married couple, stay for a free meal and bath, then retire to his boat. He was thought to have the most enviable job in the world.
“We figured you must be his pardner. You and he, you got the exact same boat.”
“How do you like your meat?” the woman asked me.
“Oh, rare as it comes—”
“Moooo!” said the spade-shaped tangle of black beard sitting opposite. “Moo! Moo!”
The crew, who were helilogging a stand of old-growth cedar near the island’s summit, were not great conversationalists. Each man gloomed privately over a broken-spined paperback or last Sunday’s edition of the Vancouver Sun. Blackbeard was reading a seventh-hand copy of John Grisham, his eyes traveling at a leisurely pace from word to word; occasionally his lips moved, to frame a difficult trisyllable.
All I could find to read was the “Fisherman’s Chain Letter,” a photocopied document pinned to the wall above my head.
Dear Friend:
¾ of the earth’s surface is water … and only ¼ is land.… The good Lord’s intentions are very clear. A man’s time should be divided … ¾ FOR FISHING. ¼ FOR WORK.
This chain was started in the hope of bringing happiness to fishermen. Unlike most chains it doesn’t require money. Simply send a copy of this to 5 fishermen friends, then bundle up your wife and send her to the fellow whose name heads the list. When your name reaches the top of the list you will receive 16,268 women and some should be dandies. Have faith, don’t break the chain. One man broke it, and got his wife back!
When the food came, it looked like Minstrel Island on a plate: a mountain of mashed potatoes flanked by cliffs of beef and brussels sprouts. My portion was sufficient to feed several of me, with enough left over for two or three hungry dogs. The loggers methodically clearcut their plates, in a gristle-chewing silence infrequently broken by the low one-liner, perfectly incomprehensible to me but answered with appreciative growls by the rest. Like a ship’s crew, these men had spent so long in one another’s company that they spoke in a close-fisted code. If you were in on it, a single phrase, “camshaft,” pe
rhaps, or “Mac’s toenail,” could bring the house down.
At the beginning of the century, logging crews were on the front line of organized labor in America. Big Bill Haywood’s Industrial Workers of the World were headquartered in Seattle because so many of the Wobblies were loggers in the Pacific Northwest, marching to the songs of Joe Hill.
Working men of all countries, unite!
Side by side we for freedom will fight.
When the world and its wealth we have gained,
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:
You will eat (you will eat), by and bye (by and bye)
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry (way up high).
Chop some wood (chop some wood)—’twill do you good (do you good)
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye (that’s no lie!).
Loggers were good candidates for conversion to revolutionary socialism. Working at their dangerous jobs in deep rural isolation, far from their fat-cat big-city employers, they created their own fraternal societies in the woods. The Wobbly Manifesto foresaw an industrial democracy “where the workers own the tools which they operate and the product of which they alone will enjoy.” In the labor-intensive timber industry, the chief tool was the saw, and loggers were in a fine position to plot the overthrow of their absentee capitalist bosses. At the time of the Seattle General Strike of 1919, every remote logging camp was a soviet waiting to happen.
I wished I could talk with the Minstrel Island crew about such things, but had only to glance from beard to beard to know that my chances of persuading these men to open up about their political convictions were a good deal slimmer than those of beguiling them into a group discussion of Swan Lake.
At dinner’s end, the proprietress came through from the kitchen to join us, and the addition of a woman to the equation instantly altered the room’s tone. Books were shut, newspapers folded away, as we sat over coffee like Lutherans at a church supper. The chief topic of conversation was—in a cursorily oblique way—me.
Passage to Juneau Page 26
