Winter Brothers

by Ivan Doig

  Swan did not write those words. I have written them for him, or rather, for both of us, this dusk of winter and of his life. The archival diaries end with 1898, the volumes of 1899 and 1900 held in a private collection, but the entries have been dwindling anyway, Swan lamenting to his daughter Ellen his failing grip: My hand and wrist are still painful and I have to write slow. I don’t think this is so much of a Rheumatic affection as it is the pen paralysis from over exertion writing....But it is very annoying to me to have such continual pain in the cords of my hand when I attempt to write. I have been trying a little instrument called the “Electropoise” which my cousin Edward kindly sent from New York. It sends a gentle current of electricity to the part affected but it is too much bother for me to use it properly. Swan hooked to an electrical rheumatism gizmo rather than a pen is Swan become an old bewildered stranger to himself, I am afraid. From that eighty-second birthday of his, where my imagination takes over the telling, he has four months and a week to live.

  But I discover an odd thing as this companion of my winter begins to fade from life. There at the first days of this century Swan comes into view to me in a strong new way: as if a white-instead-of-tawny cat suddenly has padded into sight at the forest edge. Swan stepping to the century-line which I crossed in his direction almost three months ago now has endured into time which touches my own. A little more than a year from that eleventh morning of 1900, my father will be born at the homestead in Montana. The grandmother who will share in raising me already is a seven-year-old farmgirl in Wisconsin. (In history’s less personal terms, put it this way: Swan was born when James Monroe inhabited the White House and Napoleon was yet alive, and now he is almost to Theodore Roosevelt’s America, and Einstein already is thinking the world into a nuclear future.) Connection of lifespans is added to our shared places, our intermingled Wests.

  So much of Swan I still do not know, even after studying him through the fifteen thousand days and two and a half million words of his diaries. In his lamplit times alone in the schoolhouse tower at Neah or the narrow office at Port Townsend, for instance, what urges of the night worked in him, moving behind his brow, under his thatch of beard, atop his thighs. Or why, like me, he chose to invest his life at this edge of America over all other—although I think it has most to do in both our cases with a preference for gossamer possibilities, such as words, rather than hard and fast obligations, such as terms of employment. Or why he would admit into his pages whatever peeves he held, but no hatreds; details of infatuation with a choirgirl, but none of the fact of it; hints of whiskey, but never direct confession of too many bottles. Unlearnable, those beneath-the-skin frontiers. Even the outer ones leave questions, for I believe now that no one winterbook—no book—can find nearly all that should be said of the West, the Wests. Profundities of westering there undoubtedly are, but do they count for more than a liking of mountains and of hearing a waitress say, There you go...?

  What I do take from this time of musing in Swan’s Wests is fresh realization that my own westernness is going to have to be a direction of the mind. Personal geography shifts restlessly in America, much as plates of bedrock are said to grind and jostle against one another far under the surface of the earth. My West, or Wests, inevitably are going to be smaller and a bit more skewed than Swan’s and the more intensely held, felt, worried over, for that reason.

  Yet any separations between Swan’s territory and mine mysteriously close at some moments. Scenes of this winter and of Swan’s own western-edged seasons do flow together, in the way that beings mingle in one of those magical carvings of the Haidas. (“They weren’t bound by the silly feeling that it’s impossible for two figures to occupy the same space at the same time.”) Perhaps atoms merge out of the landscape into us. However it happens, the places are freshly in me. Whidbey Island, gulls balleting along the roofs of wind. Dungeness Spit, days there glossed with sea ducks and crowned with an eagle. The thrusting Capes, Flattery and Alava, their surfs bringing in perpetual cargoes of sound. This suburban valley, at its mouth the greater gray-blue water valley, Puget Sound. The cabin at Rainier, summing all these sites by being abode for a dweller rather than a citizen.

  The patterns explore their way back and forth between centuries as well, and I see with less surprise than I would have three months ago that a torpedo test Swan watches in the Port Townsend harbor will become Trident nuclear submarines in Hood Canal. That his dream of railroad along one shore of Puget Sound must bend and become a transportation megalopolis along this opposite shore. That his introduction of the alphabet in the Neah Bay schoolhouse in 1863 has led to a federal grant for the preservation of the Makah language. That no more than Swan knew of such eventuating can I know what is ahead for my West.

  And there, in that specific rill of realization, I suppose is the truest bond of pattern I have to you, Swan, old coastal nomad, remembrancer of so many diary pages, canoeist of yestertime. Winter brother.

  Day Eighty-Nine

  Sometime in the morning of the eighteenth of May of 1900, Swan lies in his room and listens for footsteps. They are slow to come, time needed for it to dawn on one or another downtown citizen of Port Townsend that the old man has not been seen to emerge to the street as usual. Feet at last are heard and a knock questions through the door; then, silence all too much answer, the inquiring friend forces in to find Swan where the stroke has pinned him.

  Life stays in Swan through that paralyzing day, but only half the night.

  He is buried near the center of this graveyard west from Port Townsend’s headland of houses, under a gray marble stone. Rust-orange lichens have crept down into the cut letters but they can be read: PIONEER-HISTORIAN JAMES G. SWAN BORN MEDFORD MASS. JAN. 11, 1818 DIED PORT TOWNSEND WASH. MAY 18, 1900. From here at the graveside my automatic line of sight is across the land Swan owned, to the dark hackled profile of Whidbey Island and beyond to the Cascade Mountains, but the view does have competition from the monuments all around, the urn-topped and pyramid-peaked markers of the merchants and ship’s captains thrusting above his low box of stone.

  The Port Townsend Morning Leader four days after Swan’s death: “...The friends of the deceased were permitted to take a last look at the venerable pioneer, and just before the casket was closed a delegation of Indians from Neah Bay appeared and asked permission to take a last look at their oldtime friend and adviser. The Indians as they gazed upon the rigid features gave expressions of their grief in low moans and each affectionately patted the face of the dead man.”

  Swan’s grandnephew in Massachusetts to the Port Townsend lawyer who notified him that debts would swallow Swan’s scant belongings: “Of course the manuscripts & diaries can have no great money value...and I would hope they might be lodged in some library interested in the special subjects they relate to.”

  Day Ninety

  Winter’s last dozen hours. Today the Sun crosses the Une and it is the first day of spring. Swan wrote on this date, the twentieth of March, in his lustrous year of 1880 at Neah Bay, then stepped outside to admire his larkspurs and lilies.

  As we approach Neah Bay, midmorning sun making shadowplay with the trees and sea boulders along the shore of the Strait, I calculate where we will be when spring arrives tonight at nine twenty-two: back aboard the big ferry, south from Port Townsend by about an hour; near Point No Point, its lighthouse the ushering beam from Admiralty Inlet into Puget Sound: almost home.

  Two sites ahead of us before then. One is the rock tip at Cape Flattery where Carol and I will be by midday to watch for whales in northward migration, out past Tatoosh Island. From our watching times elsewhere on this coast, other springs, we know that first the spouts will be glimpsed, small here-and-gone geysers in the ocean, then sudden blades of dark in the water that are the gray whales. Only those ridges of their backs—the wet island of being which the Makah hunting canoes shadowed in on—rising in quick glistening view, until for an instant the great Y of a tail is seen to lift, then plunge.

  But
before the whales the stop at Neah Bay. Sometime amid this winter’s constant scud of words the brief casual news: oh yes, that still exists, it’s tricky to find but if you ask so-and-so at Neah Bay....

  Luck. We reach Neah at low tide and the rock deck of shore beneath the low coastal precipice lies open to us. A young woman who works for the Makah Tribal Council leads us beneath the cliff face, peering carefully. In a minute or so she says: “There it is. There.” As she returns up the bluff to her construction work—the Makahs are building a greenhouse of translucent plastic to grow vegetable seedlings; progress I am glad to see from Swan’s depot of potatoes—we are left with the bayline sheet of rock.

  The sun’s brightness stops a stride or so short of the cliff. Shadowed sandstone swells as high as my chest, bulges and rounds there and then recedes as a sudden ledge, angled at about thirty degrees. That afternoon in 1859 Swan stood atop something, likely a driftlog long since reclaimed by the Strait, to reach this beveled shelf. The deep-cut letters J G S are level with my eyes, and above them rides the stone swan.

  Tail fluted high to a jaunty point.

  Neck an elaborate curve gentle and extended as a suitor’s caress.

  Breast serenely parting the shadowed current of cliff.

  As Carol inserts a roll of film into her camera I span my hand three times to measure the length of the bird, less than half that for its height. A bit more than two feet long, a bit less than a foot high, this swimmer of rock. Swan’s diary entry for the afternoon of that long-past day is this project—Worked carving a swan on a sandstone cliff with my initials under it—and surely the stone embossment took the full set of hours. So clearly and intently did he sculpt that only the downthrust of the bird’s head, where the beak and eyes would be, has faded with 120 years’ erosion, the weathering-away providing a demure mask of time.

  Otherwise Swan’s swan, as I step back until it is just visible within the cliff-shadow, punctuates the flow of this coast as firmly for me as it did for him. The stone dot that puts period—and seed of the ellipsis for whatever continuation is on its way—to this winter.

  Acknowledgments

  The first gratitude of anyone working with the diaries of James G. Swan must be to Lucile McDonald. Her articles in the Seattle Times of the early 1950s and her subsequent Swan Among the Indians (Binfords & Mort, 1972) are particularly valuable for background of the early—New England—portion of his life, which Swan himself tended to gloss over.

  Throughout the time I spent with the Swan diaries in the Manuscripts Section of the University of Washington library, I enjoyed the unfailingly attentive talents of the staff there: University Archivist Richard Berner, Curator of Manuscripts Karyl Winn, Eve Lebow, Connie Pisano, Robert Mittelstadt and Christine Taylor. I was similarly fortunate in the skills and diligence of the staff of the library’s Northwest Collection: Head of Special Collections Robert Monroe, Librarian Andrew Johnson, Dennis Andersen, Susan Cunningham, Sandy Kroupa and Glenda Pearson. And Georgia Kloostra of the library’s Newspaper and Microcopy Center cheerfully helped me follow the most evanescent traces of Swan.

  At Port Townsend, Helen Burns and Deborah McBride guided me through the Swan holdings of the Jefferson County Historical Society. In Victoria, the British Columbia Provincial Museum and the Provincial Archives were helpful to me in countless ways; I owe specific and special thanks to Alan Hoover of the museum’s Ethnology Division. At the Smithsonian Institution, Deputy Archivist William A. Deiss and James R. Glenn, Archivist of the National Anthropological Archives, traced Swan correspondence for me.

  My appreciation as well to the Makah Indian Nation for the hospitality of their Reservation; to anyone interested in the tribal past I recommend a visit to the Makah Cultural and Research Center at Neah Bay.

  For their typing of the various drafts of this book, I’m grateful to Billee Lewis, Karen Murphy, Marilyn Ridge, and Merlyn Talbot.

  Vernon Carstensen and David Hawke devoted an inspired evening to pondering the white tribe with me; Mark Wyman provided one quote I never would have unearthed, Susan Schrepfer provided another: double benefit in having historians for friends.

  Finally, I’m indebted, on various grounds, to: Pat Armstrong, Gary Bettis, Eileen Bouniol, Richard Daugherty, Cliff Fiscus, Bill Holm, Pat Kelley, Robert Kelley, Amy d’Ernee Mates, Ann Nelson, Marshall Nelson, Myron Ogden, Jean Roden, John Roden and Victor Scheffer.

  And Carol Doig.

  About the Author

  IVAN DOIG was born in Montana in 1939 and grew up along the Rocky Mountain Front, the dramatic landscape that has inspired much of his writing. A recipient of a lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association, he is the author of eight previous novels, most recently The Whistling Season, and three works of nonfiction, including This House of Sky. He lives in Seattle.