by Ivan Doig
The fifth of April 1866, in the elegant ledger diary: Yesterday, Ahayah killed the first whale of the season....
The next day: I was muck amused last evening with Johns moves. It seems he feels ashamed that he has not filled any whales and has concluded to go through the ceremonies to constitute him a skookum whaleman. Which ceremonies consist of going without sleeping or eating for 6 days and nights, to bathe in the salt water and run on the beach to get warm. John went into the water with his accoutrements on but soon got so cold that he was glad to come and warm himself by my fire. He had gone all day without eating and I think his courage was failing him for he admitted that he thought he could not stand it more than two days and if that would not suffice to make him a whaleman he could kill sharks. He intended to stop by my fire all night and occasionally go out and wash in the bay, but when I got up this morning he was gone and I learned that he was afraid to sit alone by my fire and had sneaked out about midnight with his courage completely cooled and has concluded that from shark he will be content with killing dogfish.
Day Forty-Two
God, how the blood strums in such weather. What it tingles out is: be truant.
Which I am. I woke with the sense that this would be another day brought pure by the cold and that I needed to be out in it at once. When daybreak came, a dry crackle of light onto the frost, I already had arrived here at Shilshole, a bay favorite to me for its head-on view west across the Sound to the wooded headlands and mountains. The Olympics, clouds caped on their backs, as yet are pale, wraithy, in the beginning day. Snow gods, asleep standing up, like horses. Going past is a big seagoing tug, in from the north and in a hurry. It seems to ride the floe of white water pushed up by its impatient bow. Freighter traffic is starting to procession past. Two ships inbound to the Seattle dockfront, two out. Three of the fleet are outlined in traditional lines of superstructure, masts and plow-pointed bow. But the fourth is squatty as a huge barge, some new fangle of containerized-cargo vessel. Swan would enter in his diaries’ ship list an occasional herm brig; hermaphrodite brig, with a square-rigged foremast but a triangular schooner sail on its mainmast. The day now of the herm freighter?
One inbound vessel overtakes the other and as it begins to pass, the dark shapes merge, then slowly attenuate, pulled longer and longer like a telescope being extended, until they snap into two again.
After an hour or so of shivery wandering the Shilshole bayline, I go on to the dockside coffee shop at Salmon Bay, the fishing fleet schooled into winter berths all around.
“Breakfast, Bill?” the waitress asks the regular on the stool next to me.
“No, a doughnut.”
“Any particular kind, or whatever I grab?”
“Whatever you grab, dealer’s choice.”
“Powdered sugar. There you go.”
There you go: that western byphrase from waitresses and bartenders, sometimes from friends or just people in conversation. I hear it in Montana as I do here and like it immensely, the friendly release in the saying, the unfussy deliverance it carries. A very independent little trio of words, encouraging yet declaring okay-I’ve-done-my-part-it’s-up-to-you-now. The best of benedictions.
Midmorning. Here at the desk, attenuation again. Swan has begun to pull from his five years at Neah Bay.
I am surprised with myself, he has recently mused into the ledger, to find that I have so much patience as I have with these children. I get almost discouraged at times and then again I feel as though they were doing something. But they try my patience sorely and occasionally I feel like giving up my situation in despair of ever being able to do any good....In April of 1866 had occurred the tensest time Swan experienced at Cape Flattery, the arrival of troops to arrest Peter for the fatal stabbing he shoved as ante into the rivalry with the Elwhas. The Makahs resented the show of force, the soldiers resented being thunked down on the back porch of the continent, and we are all heartily sick of their protracted stay. Also, the month’s weather was rampageous even for Cape Flattery: 117/10 inches Rain 3 pleasant days during month. The diary pages twang more than a little. The Swan who liked to intone that he never carried the least caliber of self-defense among the Indians—I have always found that a civil tongue is the best weapon I can use—now inscribes something different: Bought a Remington revolver of Mr Philips this PM....
Nerves cool a bit in the next weeks but in midsummer Swan takes a twelve-day respite from Neah Bay, visiting in Victoria, Port Townsend, and Port Angeles; and a few days after his return there is the entry the year’s diary pages have been marching toward. Wednesday, the twenty-second of August:
Notified Mr Webster of my intention of sending in my resignation as teacher when I send in my monthly report. The resignation to take effect on the 1st of October.
I want not to see Swan step from Neah Bay; not see this particular Boston bird drift back townward from the ultimate point of the West, Cape Flattery. Truth told, it may account for my own tautness of the past days. The glimpses I have had into the diaries ahead do not suggest the rhythmed richness of these regal ledger pages. Port Townsend, which will be Swan’s next site, I think cannot be such a transfixing place as Cape Flattery, nor probably one to which Swan’s talents are as steadily alert. There is grit in the ink to come, I judge. But 1866 is James Gilchrist Swan’s cosmos, not mine. Whatever I might wish here in the ether of the future, he traces his own way with that ceaseless pen. And in the last few weeks of more than two hundred and fifty spent at Neah Bay that pen begins to record farewells.
First a ceremony of fabulous chumminess from exactly the quarter it could be expected. This forenoon, the twenty-third of September, Capt John brought me in his box of “Whale medicine” which under promise of secrecy on my part he showed me after going up into the tower and locking the door....The relics were in a box enclosed in a bag and had evidently been under ground a long time as they were covered with mould which stuck bag and box together so as to make it difficult to open them. When at last the box was opened there a piece of coal which had been rolled by the surf into an oval pebble as large as a goose egg....John very grandly assured me that it was taken from a dead whale and was a great medicine....The other was nothing but the blow hole of a porpoise....
...the great medicine came last, the bone of the Hah hake to ak this was unrolled from some old trash and presented to me. It was a shapeless piece of rotten quartz which had no resemblance to a bone of any kind....John’s father had been humbugged by some smart Indian into this belief that the quartz was a real bone, and John was firm in the same belief. I thought that any animal who had such heavy bones must acquire considerable momentum in darting through the air, and it was not surprising it could split trees, or kill whales when ever it struck them.
Then recessional, Neah Bay style. After closing up my business, the first of October, and packing my books and effects I went to Baadah to pass the night with Mr Webster previous to taking my final leave of Neeah Bay. I have been gratified and surprised at the manifestation of feeling on the part of the Indians at my departure. They are not usually very demonstrative but children and adults appeared very much affected, the former shedding tears and the latter singing a chant expressive of their sorrow.
I have tried to do my duty toward these Indians and these friendly expressions on their part are more grateful to me than the approval of others....
FEBRUARY
The White Tribe
HOORTS
(The Bear)
Day Forty-Three
Whidbey Island, this first dawn of February. Admiralty Inlet, with the Strait of Juan de Fuca angling like a fiat blue glacier into one end and Puget Sound out the other. This promontory surge of the island’s steep edge, lifting me to look west onto the entire great bending valley of water. And south to the trim farmland where on a summer midnight in 1857, Indians snicked off a head.
The beheaders were northern Indians: Tlingit warriors from an Alaskan island near Sitka, knifing downcoast eight hundred mil
es in their glorious high-prowed canoes. The victim they caught and decapitated was a settler named Ebey, a militia officer and member of the Washington territorial legislature. There was no specific quibble between the raiding party and Ebey; simply, one of their tribal leaders had been killed during a clash with an American gunboat the previous year and the Tlingits now exacted a chief for a chief.
Peculiar, for a timber and water empire which appears so everlastingly placid and was explored by whites and yielded by the natives with perhaps less bloody contention than any other early American frontier, that the practice of beheading crops up so in the Sound and Strait country. Recall the Makahs bringing home to Neah the pair of Elwha heads from Crescent Bay like first cabbages of the season. The earliest white expedition in from the Pacific, Vancouver’s in 1792, was met with “A Long Pole & two others of smaller size...put upright in the Ground each having a Human Scull on the top.” That trio of skulls rode the air at Marrowstone Island, in direct line of sight across Admiralty Inlet from where I am perched, and the exploring Englishmen were blinklessly deferential about the display. Lieutenant Peter Puget, whose quote that is, proceeds to remark that he does not wish to criticize a people “whose Manners Customs Religion Laws & Government we are yet perfect Strangers to,” Whether His Majesty’s lieutenant would have been as equable about the northern warriors’ manners in carrying Ebey’s head away from here with them and eventually peeling the scalp off it and swapping the skin-and-hair hank to a Hudson’s Bay trader for six blankets, a handkerchief, a bolt of cotton, three pipes, and some tobacco—the trader then returning the grisly prize to Ebey’s family for burial—it would be interesting to know.
Come look from this eminence of bluff now in the soft hour before daybreak and you will declare on Bibles that the Tlingits’ act of 122 years ago was the last sharp moment on this landscape. The island’s farm fields are leather and corduroy, rich even panels between black-furred stands of forest. Tan grass which broomed the backs of my hands as I climbed the path up to here now whisks soundlessly against a four-wire fenceline. The sky’s only clouds are hung tidily on the southernmost Cascade Mountains at the precise rim of summit where the sun will loft itself. Yes: Rural America of the last century, your eyes say—or Westphalia, or Devonshire.
Directly below where I stand sits an aging barn with its long peaked eave pointing southeast, like the bill of a cap turned attentively toward sunrise. We will sunwatch together.
Across Admiralty the street lights of Port Townsend begin to quench into the day. The timber-heavy shoreline angling westward out the Strait from the town seems not so black and barbed as it was minutes ago. That shoreline is my reason—one of my reasons; the other is sheerly that I love this blufftop arc above the tiering horizons of water and shore and mountains—to be here. Across there, invisible yet imprinted, curves the canoe route which Swan traveled time on time during his Neah Bay years.
A hundred water miles stretch between Port Townsend and Cape Flattery, and the journey along the fjordlike shore of the Olympic Peninsula usually took three days. The Olympic range, recorded Swan from afloat, presents a wild forbidding aspect. But then: the line of foot-hills...disclosing deep ravines, with fertile valleys lying between them, and reaching quite to the base of the great mountains. As for the long rough-hewn channel of the Strait itself, Bays and points are bold, precipitous and rocky. The water at these points is deep, and, when the winds are high, dashes with tremendous force upon the cliffs, making a passage around them, at times, a difficult and dangerous matter.
I can see exactly to where one such matter occurred, beyond the headland where Port Townsend nestles. Early in his years on the Strait, Swan was inbound from Neah Bay one afternoon when his Makah canoe crew pulled ashore to camp at Discovery Bay instead of paddling on the half-dozen miles to Port Townsend. Since the Indians’ canoe pace seemed to be regulated part of the time by weather savvy and prudence and the other part by indolence, it required some knowing to tell the moods apart. (Swan had mused on a similar puzzle of canoe etiquette during his time among the Chinooks and Chehalis at Shoalwater Bay. Speed will be kept up for a hundred rods, he wrote in Northwest Coast, then the paddles put to rest and all begin talking. Perhaps one has spied something, which he has to describe while the rest listen; or another thinks of some funny anecdote...or they are passing some remarkable tree or cliff, or stone, which has a legend attached to it....When the tale is over...all again paddle away with a desperate energy for a few minutes....) This day Swan decided the crew was being entirely too casual with his time and insisted they continue. An old Makah woman in the canoe grumbled her disagreement, for she said she knew we should have a gale of wind from the northwest. As promptly as she predicted, the weather lambasted them. We met the tiderips, and had a fearful time....On we flew like an arrow, every sea throwing a swash into the canoe, keeping two persons constantly bailing. The old squaw began to sing a death song.... The paddlers at last managed to teeter the canoe atop breakers which skimmed it to shore, and a shaken and wiser Swan hiked the rest of the way to Port Townsend.
Twin gulls break into my sight around the bend of the bluff. “Slim yachts of the element,” Robinson Jeffers christened them, and taking him at his words these two are gentleman racers.
They stay paired, the inshore bird a few feather-lengths ahead, in a casual motionless glide past me, and on down the bluffline.
Then one flaps once, the other flaps once—evidently the rules of this contest of air—and they flow on out of my vision.
While I am monitoring birds the first full daylight has reached into the peaks of the Olympic Mountains, brightening the front pyramids of white and surely Olympus itself, eight thousand feet high but so discreet of summit it hides in the western backfile of the range. So a ceiling of sunshine is somewhere up there and in minutes I will be granted the floor of it down here.
I hurry north along the bluff, wanting to watch the light come onto the lagoon which bows out from the shoreline below. The lagoon is not quite like any other piece of coastwork I have ever seen: a narrow band of gravel beach which mysteriously has looped out from the base of the bluff—the curve of the gravel snare about two hundred yards across at its widest—and entrapped several acres of tidewater. Driftlogs by the hundreds float within it like pewter tableware spilled across marble.
At two minutes before eight the first beams set the lagoon aglow, the pewter suddenly becomes bronze.
The sun now rides clear of the mountains, but so far onto the southern horizon at this time of year that its luster slants almost directly along the Sound and Admiralty Inlet, as if needing the ricochet help from the water in order to travel the extreme polar distances to the lagoon and, at last, me.
The canoes that slipped through these water distances like needles; they stitch and stitch in my mind this morning. Beautifully modeled, Swan said of the crafts of the Makahs, resembling in their bows our finest clipper ships...formed from a single log of cedar, carved out with’skill and elegance. The best canoes are made by the Clyoquot and Nittinat tribes, on Vancouver Island, who sell them to the Mackahs, but few being made by the latter tribe owing to the scarcity of cedar in their vicinity.... Propulsion was either the deft broadhead paddles carved by the Clyoquots or square sails of woven cedar bark, which caused the vessels to look all the more like small clipper ships, diminutives of that greatest grace of seafaring. The grace perhaps flowed up out of the cedar into the canoemen. Swan records that when the Makahs would convey him downcoast from Cape Flattery to the Hosett village at Cape Alava, for the sheer hellbending fun of it they would thread the canoe into the archways where waves have pounded through the big offshore seastacks. On one of these through-the-hole voyages Swan and the Reservation doctor had an opportunity of witnessing the operation of three tremendous rollers which came sweeping after us and which I feared would knock us against the top of the arch. The doctor said he had his eye on a ledge which he should try to catch hold of in case of emergency, but fortunately we
had no occasion to try our skill at swimming as the Indians worked the canoe through the passage beautifully.
Makah canoemanship introduced Swan to Swell, dressed in that fresh suit of Boston clothes, bound out from Port Townsend to Neah Bay on a mid-September day of 1859 with a cargo of flour, bacon, molasses and blankets. Swan climbed in for the jaunt and ever after was impressed with Swell, wrote at once of him that line that he is still quite a young man, but if he lives, he is destined to be a man of importance among his own and neighboring tribes.
If he lives. Why those edged words amid the admiration, on a fine bright journey out this valley of water to Neah?
Whatever the reason for those three uneasy jots of Swan’s pen, they were exact augury, Swell long since dead by the time seven Septembers later Swan canoed away from the Neah Bay teaching job, reversed that original route to arrive in from Cape Flattery to Port Townsend, across the water here.
A second illumination of this sunrise. I realize that I bring myself back and back to this bluff because here scenes still fit onto each other despite their distances of time. Becoming rarer in the West, constancy of this sort. What I am looking out over in this fresh dawn is little enough changed from the past that Swan in a Makah canoe, coming or going on the Port Townsend-Neah Bay route, can be readily imagined across there, the sailing gulls slide through his line of sight as they do mine. Resonance of this rare sort, the reliable echo from the eye inward, I think we had better learn to prize like breath.
Day Forty-Four
So to Swan’s next frontier address: Port Townsend.
Port Townsend always has lived a style of boom and bust and that record of chanciness is a main reason I cherish the town. In a society of cities interested most in how svelte their skyscrapers are, Port Townsend still knows that life is a dice game in the dirt. I have been in and out of the place as often as I could these past dozen years and I can almost feel in the air as I step from the car whether the town is prospering or drooping. Small shops will bud in the high old downtown buildings. My next visit, they have vanished. A grand house will be freshly painted one day. When I glance again, peeling has set in. This time I was in town only moments when I heard that a few of the vastest old mansions have been trying life as guest houses. That seemed promising, but now the state is requiring that every room be fitted with a metal fire door, and the mansion proprietors proclaim themselves staggered toward bankruptcy by the prospect.
