by Ivan Doig
In the car: full run hardly says it either. Wind-flung clouds dive almost into the streets. Just beneath their reach traffic lights dance like lanterns swung by frantic trainmen. People waiting for buses try to squeeze themselves narrow enough to fit the lee spaces behind telephone poles. Everywhere a sprinkle of evergreen branches has sifted down, as if the city has been seeded with them by a giant foresting hand.
In restaurants I pass, people are talking to each other with their hands. “Famous weather,” a man brogued to me on a Killarney street one wan but rainless spring morning, “famous weather.” This gale, the unruliest in the dozen years I’ve lived beside Puget Sound, is going to have a name of its own sort. It takes much to draw a gesture from a Puget Sound resident, but steaming mugs of coffee are being waved around in there to punctuate the expostulations that somebody’s daughter and son-in-law got up this morning to find a Douglas fir limb exploded down through the carport roof, that they themselves will not even attempt driving to the job at Boeing this morning, that there’s been nothing like this christly wind since the Columbus Day blow of, what was it, ’62?
At Shilshole: I lean my way out onto the fishing pier. A bird lifts hazardously in front of me near the boat ramp. Incredibly, it is a kingfisher, blown in from some forested river bank or another and looking very weary of wind. I glance west, north, south, and find the Sound absolutely empty of ships and boats, the first time I have ever seen it so. The next surprise is that the weather is not the steady rage down here that it is in our valley. A harsh uneven chop ruffles the water, but no higher than a tugboat’s bow, and not much breakage of wave along the shoreline. I realize what is happening: instead of crashing the waves ashore here, the southerly wind is skidding the water the length of the Sound. When all the miles of chop finally fetch up against the banks of Whidbey Island the banging spray must be colossal.
Out of the wind which whangs among the harbor’s sailboat masts seeps a high agitated whistling, like the cry of mournful birds. Souls of displaced kingfishers, most likely. In the clouds to the west the Olympic peaks pop through into whetted outline every so often, and unexpectedly, sunshine through some loophole in the vapors is beaming onto a stretch of the shoreline across the Sound. But quickly full storm again. The new rain front hits, rolls along the wavetops, resists me every waterlogged inch of the way back to the car; I could lay forward into the storm as if it were a wall of wool.
Homebound: against my habit the storm has me listening to the car radio. The announcer has just said the Hood Canal floating bridge has vanished. A mile of it, strutwork, giant pontoons, roadway, the bunch, blown beneath the waters. I count the number of times I have driven across the span to the Olympic Peninsula this winter, to Neah Bay, Alava, Port Townsend, Dungeness; once just back and forth over it to see where Swan made some of his incessant canoe jaunts with the Indians. With its linkage of barge-sized pontoons sitting across the broad surface of Hood Canal the gray floating bridge has always reminded me of a blockade chain across some river being contested in the Civil War. No more. This storm was the iron wind to snap it.
Day Fifty-Six
Innocent weather today. Clouds wander sheeplike along the horizon as if unacquainted with rain, never any lust to meet the wind and go dancing raucously on the grave of a bridge.
In one or another of his earliest sojourns at Neah Bay, Swan had watched a Makah pageant of marriage proposal. According to what he wrote later for the Smithsonian, into the bow of a beached canoe stepped a man with a whaling harpoon. Another Makah sailor climbed in amidship and held a sealskin buoy as if ready to cast it onto the waves. A third man, the steersman, alertly knelt in the stern with paddle poised.
Onto the shoulders of eight men were hoisted the canoe and its crew of three and through the air in its above-sand voyage toward the lodge of the family of the girl being wooed, the whaling pantomime slowly sailed.
In front led a fourth Makah actor, a man beneath a blanket and creeping on all fours, occasionally raising his body to imitate a whale when blowing. At intervals the Indian in the canoe would throw the harpoon as if to stride, taking studious care, however, not to hit him.
Behind the man-whale and the airborne sailors strode a chorus of the suitor’s friends, singing, drumming, shaking rattlies. The burthen of their song was, that they had come to purchase a wife for one of their number, and recounted his merits and the number of blankets he would pay.
At last, as the procession reached the lodge of the intended, the mock whale scuttled to one side; there was an instant of poised expectation among the entire tableau; and the harpoonist with full might whammed his harpoon into the cedar plank door.
This operation, deadpanned Swan, may be said to be symbolical of Cupid’s dart on a large scale.
Evidently some splinter of that great dart flew and buried itself years deep within the watching guest. Just before Christmas of 1874, into Swan’s diary pages arrives the name of Amelia Roberts. Fifteen times in the next two months it sparkles there, and oftener and oftener “Amelia” is fondly burnished down to the attractor’s nickname, “Dolly.”
This is new. Over the years Swan’s words on women have been scant. In 1863 when the Neah Bay employees invited ashore to Fourth of July dinner the captain of a trading vessel it was rare exuberance, perhaps lubricated by a holiday bottle, for Swan to note that the captain was companioned by a very handsome specimen of savage beauty in the person of a Stikene squaw whom he had brought down in his schooner....There are the warm diary entries about the Makah housekeeper, Katy. A single wisp on a spring evening at Port Townsend in 1869, when Swan had gone calling on friends: Mrs. Phillips and her sister from Whidbey Island were present. I was much interested in Mrs. Phillips from her strong resemblance to my late wife. But little else. Until now these drumbeat inscriptions of Dolly, Dolly, Dolly.
Gifts to her begin to dollop from Swan like honey from a pitcher: sewing box, market basket, inkstand, writing desk, earrings, a painting, collections of seashells. Dolly full of fun, the diary exults. Dolly weighs 127 pounds and measures 5 ft 4½ inches, it commends.
One other reckoning does not reach its pages. That winter of 1874–75, James G. Swan reached his fifty-seventh birthday. Dolly Roberts was sixteen.
That canyon between their ages perhaps did not gape as widely as it would in later eras, but it made chasm enough. There were Swan’s other fissures as well: his thin finances, his drinking. Visiting Indians sometimes slept—good gracious, sometimes lived!—in his office. Swan himself periodically dwindled across the horizon to Sitka or Utah or somewhere. Plenty, in short, for Dolly’s mother, and maybe even Dolly, to mull about Swan the swain. And Port Townsend being the compound of New England small town and muscular western port it was, whatever could be brought up against Swan stayed in the air a doubly long while, as tittle-tattle among the mercantile families on the bluff (Dolly was the niece of prominent merchant F. W. Pettygrove, one of the town’s founders), heavy winks and nudges among the waterfront saloon constituencies.
Unpromising odds. Yet as the ongoing diary lines about Dolly indicate, Swan had a bridgehead in the situation. He had been smitten with young Miss Roberts in, of all locales he ever can be found at, the Port Townsend Episcopal Church choir.
Against Port Townsend’s night in, night out whiskey baritone, that choir must have been a very wavery Sunday trill. Sometimes the hymning voices were six or seven, sometimes as few as four. But consistently in late 1874 and early 1875—the diary begins to show dogged stints of churchgoing by Swan as long ago as 1869—they included Mrs. Roberts and her daughters Dolly and Mary, and Swan. (Mr. Roberts is a mysterious absence, both from the choir and the household. Deceased? Absconded? A sea captain?) Swan quite promptly begins to drop by the Roberts home for rehearsal of the church music. Then he begins gifts of food—scallops, salmon—and naturally is invited to share supper. Henry Webster, also at loose ends in Port Townsend just then and still Swan’s stalwart, might be asked to join in as well. One fine. February
Sunday there even is a morning’s genteel stroll, Swan and Webster and Dolly and Mary, in the course of which the young women probably heard more than they wanted to know about the singularities of life at Neah Bay.
What came of Swan’s season of romantic hovering was just what could be expected: letdown. The choiring goes on but the gifts and visits slow a bit, and then become more widely—more respectably ?—spaced.
Swan never speaks it in the diaries but the increasing intervals say it for him. Sometime here the moment occurs, invisible but sharp, when the fact registers on Swan, as it probably already had on Dolly with some help from her mother, that the choirgirl and the white-bearded frontiersman are not a likely match. I find ahead in the diaries that for a number of years to come Swan will continue a fond proximity to Dolly and the Roberts family. Not this daily nearness of an infatuated suitor, however. More like the weekliness of a favorite bachelor uncle.
So then. Who would have thought the clerkish whiskeyfied aging dabbler had such steam in him? But of course he did, exactly because he had never shown so, and to me his infatuation is as entirely enchanting as it was foolish. Wish such a season to any of us, man or woman, so long self-locked into aloneness. Let the blaze come out for once from within the bones. I say emotional paroles are due the alone of this world even if, like Swan’s, the outing turns out to be quick and bittersweet. Better that than simply bitter.
Meanwhile, early in that spring of 1875 a territorial newspaper carries this item:
MARRIED: In Portland, Oregon, April 3d, Henry A. Webster and Mary E. Roberts, both of Port Townsend.
Day Fifty-Seven
I am negotiating for the purchase of the largest canoe ever built on this coast, Swan to the Smithsonian’s Baird, another spring day of 1875. It is at Alert Bay, Vancouver Island. It measures 75 to 80 feet long....
The great canoe’s reputation proved to be somewhat vaster than its actual dimensions—sixty-five feet in length—but it still was a titanic craft, said to be able to carry a hundred persons. What was more, Swan himself could jaunt north in pursuit of the canoe and whatever other tribal items caught his fancy along the coast of British Columbia and southeastern Alaska. Baird had caught a glint of opportunity: the U.S. Indian Bureau wanted to sponsor a major exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, and after the Exposition the exhibit items could pass to the Smithsonian. The way they would reach the Indian Bureau exhibit was from Special Commissioner James G. Swan, salaried at $200 a month and offered the U.S. revenue cutter Wolcott to convey him around the North Pacific.
Left for Victoria on Steamer...with Lieut Kilgore, to purchase charts and other articles for Wolcott & for me to get some silver to tal(e north to make purchases, the seventh of June, 1875. That same night the Wolcott docked long enough to take the pair of them aboard, and about 12 Midnight the cruise began.
You would expect that this luckstroke from Baird, steamship and silver and all, might be the change of western scene Swan seems to have been angling toward. Certainly it provided distance and fresh enterprise: for the next forty-four days Swan records ports of call all along the broken coast of the North Pacific and buys busily, hundreds of items ranging from the giant canoe for $225 to wooden berry spoons for 25¢ each. (Only the wonderfully carved columns of the coastal villages eluded him. At last, at Howkan village on Prince of Wales Island, he is given a forthright explanation. “These posts are monuments for the dead and we will not sell them any more than white people will sell the grave stones or monuments in cemeteries but you can have one made for you.” Swan at once put his order in.) But his account of the Wolcott cruise does not read revivified to me. The scrupulously-daily-as-ever journal is somehow perfunctory about the new tribes he was among, the Bella Bella and Tsimshian and Tlingit, vivid artistic peoples all; the pages show duty but not bounce of spirit. It may have been that Dolly Roberts still was on Swan’s mind. She definitely poises there on the seventeenth of June, her birthday. A pair of Wolcott officers—with straight faces or not, I cannot tell—join Swan in toasting the handsomest, liveliest, and most lady like belle of Port Townsend. There was this, too: Swan undoubtedly spent time in gab among the Wolcott’s eight officers and crew of twenty-nine which otherwise would have gone into diarying. Swan’s pen for once simply may have been visited to distraction.
Days Fifty-Eight, Fifty-Nine, Sixty
After these steady days of my sorting within their pages, the Port Townsend diaries at last begin to annal themselves.
1869: the year’s page-edges shine with gilt respectability. After a decade of daybooks imported from Boston or New York, this is Swan’s first western diary, printed by the H. H. Bancroft firm of San Francisco. Plump as a pocket Bible and with a neat flap to bring the covers closed, it is fancier than anything Swan has been writing into since the Neah Bay ledgers, and his entries start off more neatly, purposefully, than the previous year’s. He is churchgoing. Has begun to woo the Northern Pacific Railroad and bought some land on the edge of Port Townsend in case the courtship is consummated. Makes his mercantile jaunt to Sitka.
The first half of 1870 stays as steadily sunny—Swan at last sees his Makah monograph brought into print by the Smithsonian, and on June 30 hoists a flag to celebrate the marriage of his son—until the mystifying pilgrimage to Utah on behalf of the Northern Pacific. The diary, another Bancroft and near-twin of 1869, shows its own consequences of that journey: hard-used, spine nearly worn through, the covers flaking and fraying.
1871: this diary a “Pacific” imprint; smaller and an enlivening dark-green after the parson-black Bancroft covers. Swan begins the year with scrupulous routine once more, the tidbits of good news—a lock of hair from his new grandson, sale of the last of the Ellen Foster scrap iron, admission to practice as a lawyer—steady until September. Then he is taken ill again. (First day for nearly 10 days that I have felt like a return to health. I have not been well for some time past, but hope that from this time I may recover both mentally and physically for I am in much need of both.) Perhaps worse, the Northern Pacific has not come through with the salary he has been trying to obtain for months. Gaps riddle the rest of the pages. Swan ends the year literally at sea, en route home to Port Townsend after a steamship journey to Olympia: At 12 midnight while about midway between Steilacoom and Tacoma...the pilot blew three long and loud blasts with the steamer whistle for New Years.
A brighter year, 1872. The Northern Pacific at last pays up, Swan buys still more land, settles his bills and borrows no more. He does much walking of the Port Townsend headland; is impressed with a touring temperance lecturer and evidently takes another of his periodic vows of dryness. This year the Pacific people have Inserted a credo on the calendar page at the front of the diary: “Make your words agree with your thoughts.”
For 1873 the Pacific diary featured across the top of each day’s page a decorative band of colored lines, red-blue-red, reminiscent to me of the battle ribbon rows on the chests of World War Two servicemen. Combat says it for the year, which arrived on the heels of a New Year’s Eve gale and swept on to bring the Northern Pacific’s collapse. Swan records long bouts with neuralgia; Peter’s wife, Dukwitsa, arrives from Neah Bay, suffers hemorrhage, and has to be put up in Swan’s room for nine days. Except for the visit of the tattooed Haidas from the north, the best that can be said of the twelve months is that a brewery has opened at Port Townsend—tasted the first brewing made...found it a very fine quality and it reminded me of the home made beer I used to have at home when I was a boy—and that Swan was given the civic honor of sending the first message on the new telegraph line to Seattle: Flags flying here and every one rejoices.
1874, a Bancroft diary again but the biggest and gaudiest of this group: about the size and fatness of a thick paperback book, and bound in purple with angled streaks, like the pinstripe suit of a colorblind gangster. Swan is gaudy himself. Another inheritance is to be claimed in Massachusetts and for the first time he travels east by train. (Only seven days now, the jo
urney from Pacific to Atlantic.) As before, Swan lavishes money and gifts on his daughter Ellen as if he were practicing to be rich; also dips down to Washington, D.C., to call on Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian; and up to sightsee New York with son Charles. Swan is back in Port Townsend by late September, spends the autumn getting interested in Dolly Roberts, closes the year on that queer note of the New Year’s Eve sodding of the grave of the Port Townsend jeweler, Bulkeley.
1875: the year of Swan’s collecting trip to Alaska aboard the Wolcott but also the year the matter of Dolly Roberts comes to nothing. In this diary’s calendar pages the publisher, who chose anonymity, decorated each month with some scene of gods or gamins. Swan must have looked with rue upon Miss August, a robust unbloused lady around whom a troupe of cupids perform acrobatics on trapeze lines of flowers.
Sick, robust, drunk, dry, infatuated, thwarted, railroad-hopeful, railroad-undone, off now to Alaska and now to Utah and now to Boston, perpetually yearning north toward the Haidas, still ambassadoring occasionally among the Makahs and Clallams from his own white tribe, esteemed author at last for his Makah memoir and dabbler as ever amid piddling paperwork. I take back the slander that Swan’s Port Townsend years are more dozeful than his time at Neah. Not as much of it a life I would trade for, though. The periodic illness, the steady lure of too much whiskey, the seesaw finances, all or any would be as perpetual earthquakes compared to my even days. (Nor does Dolly Roberts, sweetly though she trills, sound like the best prospect I can imagine.) But I do envy Swan the historical moment, just there before America marked that centennial which he went collecting for. (Although historical moments may be less different from our own than we like to think: the quote recovered from a notebook I put it in during the Bicentennial hoopla of three years ago: humorist Mose Skinner in 1875, on the eve of the American centennial, proposing a ceremony to match the popular mood: “Any person who insinuates in the remotest degree that America isn’t the biggest and best country in the world, and far ahead of every other country in everything, will be filled with gunpowder and touched off.”) Both of my grandfathers, in Scotland and Illinois, were born amid the years spanned by these half-dozen diaries, and with them the family’s western impulse. It seems a time when the American landscape had not yet been swathed so hard (although the frontier populace was busy enough at it); a time yet of a green tentativeness about the country, and particularly the West, as if we were still deciding what to make of it, or what it might make of us.
