McKean 02 The Neah Virus

by Thomas Hopp

  Unexpectedly, the cutter did not slow, but instead surged forward on a crazy, zigzagging course dangerously near the breakwater. The microphone somehow managed to stay on and a terrified scream over the loudspeaker joined our cries when the Righteous crashed headlong into the rocks at top speed. The ship’s impact was so great that the bow crumpled and huge boulders were scattered in all directions. Impaling the jetty at a right angle, the cutter came to an instantaneous stop. Gear and hardware flew off her decks. Washes of white water sprayed out on both sides. A moment later, as the boulders rumbled around her and the sound of stone grinding against metal continued, huge puffs of black smoke shot out from her stacks. A billow of orange flame rose from her rear deck. A long agonized scream from the female announcer was overridden by a man’s voice bellowing like an enraged bull. Then the ship’s fuel tanks exploded. A huge billow of flame engulfed her superstructure. The screaming and bellowing ceased abruptly and the speaker buzzed with static.

  “Oh, my God!” Tleena cried. She turned away from the horrific sight and reached for me. I put my arms around her protectively but couldn’t tear my eyes from the scene. The Makah crew ceased paddling to watch. The jet ski and Zodiac did the same. The blazing Righteous began to settle off the breakwater, taking on water and sinking at the stern. Sliding backwards, she went down, down, down, until only the blazing upper deck and pilot’s cabin stood above the surface.

  She slowly heeled over to starboard, and with the groan of twisting metal, toppled on her side. Her superstructure smashed onto the water and raised walls of white froth, into which the blazing cabin and upper decks vanished. For a moment, the side of the ship’s hull floated just above the surface with waves washing across the painted images of whales and dolphins. Then, with fountains of air spouting through her cracked steel plating like a pod of sounding whales, she slipped beneath the surface in an almost serene dive. A wide billow of black smoke mushroomed above her, diffusing and drifting over the gray waters of the bay. Bubbles churned and a oil slicks spread where the once-formidable protest boat had been. An empty Zodiac tied at her stern disappeared last, pulled down by its tether like Captain Ahab entangled with Moby Dick. The canoe and the Zodiac and the jet ski floated, becalmed, while their crews watched bubbles stream from where the Righteous had been. No one had gotten off the ship alive.

  Tleena sat upright and looked out over the bay. “Those poor people!”

  A tribal police car with siren wailing rushed into the parking lot, followed by an aid car and then a yellow fire truck. The police officer got out and waved us away but I was already in motion, pulling my Mustang back onto the road just as the aid car pulled in. McKean watched the rescue workers, firemen, medical technicians and policemen hurrying down onto the marina’s piers. “There’s nothing we can do here,” he said. “In fact, there’s not they can do, either.”

  It was true. The Righteous and her crew, so proud and challenging just minutes before, were gone. I kept an eye on the situation through my rear view mirror as I drove along Bayview Avenue toward the far end of town. By the time the first small boats from the marina reached the site of the wreck, the surface of the bay was smooth. Nothing remained of the Righteous but an oil slick and some bits of floating debris.

  When we reached the Spanish fort area I asked, “Where do we go from here?”

  “That way,” Tleena said, pointing to the left, where a road turned southbound from Bayview Avenue. “That road will take us south to Wa’atch. I’ll give you directions from there.”

  I drove out of town on a thoroughfare that changed from asphalt to gravel within several miles. The rain lifted. I passed a deserted World War II Air Force base, then followed Tleena’s directions onto a graveled road wending west toward Cape Flattery. We passed over headlands, above beaches, and through tall forests for several miles until Tleena pointed out what seemed no more than a dent in the thick greenery lining the road. “Turn here,” she said. I reluctantly steered the Mustang off the roadway and we began jouncing over a deeply potholed, two-rutted track hemmed in on both sides by a tangle of branches and vines under a gloomy canopy of tall trees.

  “I see why this place is hard to find,” McKean observed.

  Twigs screeched and scratched against the side of my car. I muttered glumly, “I can’t believe you live out here, Tleena.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “My house is in town near the school. But Father lives as far away from civilization as he can get.”

  I pressed on, holding the wheel tightly and following what appeared to be a twisting old logging track, which meandered around giant stumps or veered out from under the forest canopy along cliff edges, giving us vertiginous glimpses of whitecapped ocean swells a hundred feet below.

  After a half mile or so, a veil of forest parted and we rolled into an open space surrounded by a stand of tall Douglas firs. In the clearing was a ratty-looking house, some sheds and two house trailers nestled back among the trees.

  Chapter 13

  “This isn’t the place, is it?” I asked, stopping the Mustang and regarding the area in disbelief. The main dwelling was an old single-wide trailer house with sagging pale-green siding streaked with green moss, a roof partially covered in a brown plastic tarpaulin and a column of lazy wood smoke rising from a rusted metal chimney. Rickety side buildings attached to it had deep moss coatings on their roofs. But the house itself was not the worst aspect of the place.

  “What a junkyard!” I exclaimed. Four rusted cars of various makes and ages were scattered around the house, including a broken-down white pickup with all its wheels off and its axels held up by blocks of wood. A half dozen dogs of mixed breeds lay around in the dirt and tall grass of the yard, eyeing us as if barking was too much effort. Blackberry brambles grew through the shattered or missing windows of several of the cars. Behind the main house, two old-fashioned, rounded camper trailers of 1960s vintage sat under burdens of twigs and small branches that had fallen from overhanging trees. Moss covered, rust-streaked and apparently immobile for years, they were partially submerged in thickets of brush and blackberry brambles. The whole squalid menagerie of metal, wood, dogs and moss was arranged haphazardly around a central gravel parking area, through which the dirt road crossed and vanished into the forest on the other side.

  Trash was strewn everywhere. Old plastic milk bottles, TV dinner trays, potato chip bags, aluminum cans, and plastic forks and knives abounded. Food wrappers, pig shanks and cow bones all had been chewed or licked clean by the dogs.

  I glanced questioningly at Tleena.

  “Don’t worry, Fin. This isn’t my father’s place. He lives all the way out at the cove. Keep going.”

  I moved forward slowly, allowing time for a mangy mongrel to hobble out of the way as we rolled through the clearing. “Who lives here?” I asked.

  “Dag Bukwatch.”

  “That name is familiar. John said he’s involved with drugs in Seattle. Methamphetamine.”

  “I could believe it,” Tleena replied.

  There was a roofed wooden staircase and front porch built against the side of the trailer home to serve as its main entry. On the porch was a person I hadn’t noticed when I drove into the clearing. A stocky Makah woman of about thirty wearing a dirty pink nightshirt leaned on the open front doorjamb, dragging on a cigarette and eyeing us hostilely. A toddling baby girl in a yellow tee shirt with no diaper clutched the hem of her mother’s nightshirt, begging unsuccessfully to be picked up. The woman called into the house as we neared and a moment later a man moved past her and came out onto the porch. He was tall and emaciated, with the sunken cheeks of a chronic substance abuser. He wore army camouflage fatigues, combat boots, a black western scarf tied around his forehead to hold back his long tangled black hair. My heart rate kicked up a notch as we rolled past the porch and he stared down at us darkly.

  “Dag Bukwatch and his wife, Denise,” Tleena half-whispered. She gave the couple a little wave, which neither returned. Then she pointed ahead where
the road continued past the house. “Keep moving, Fin.”

  “Gladly.” I pressed the gas pedal and moved on, losing sight of the house and its scowling occupants once we passed the trunks of two big trees and a screen of foliage that closed in behind us.

  I pushed on into the wilderness for another mile or so, following the rutted track through brushy thickets and around cliff exposures, dropping into forested ravines and climbing out again to the cliffs. Eventually we entered a very different sort of forest, one of giant trees towering more than a hundred feet above us on trunks a dozen feet wide at the base.

  “Old growth forest!” McKean exclaimed, enraptured by the titanic thick-barked trunks with open forest spaces between them. “Coastal hemlock! Sitka spruce! And cedar!”

  “You’re right, Dr. McKean,” Tleena said. “These are sacred ocean bluffs, here. According to old legends they are the favorite hunting place of Thunderbird, so nobody’s ever been allowed to cut the trees down.”

  The road emerged from the cathedral-like forest and ended in a wide, rocky clearing with one side forested and the other open at the top of a sea cliff. On the forest side lay a giant mossy fallen log as thick as my car. I pulled up and parked beside an old tan-colored, gem-top Toyota pickup nosed in facing the log. We got out and walked to the brink of the bluff. Tleena cried happily, “Spirit Cove!”

  Below us was a scene of primordial nature almost too stupendous to believe. A long, finger-shaped cove split two rocky headlands and penetrated inland for a distance of nearly a quarter mile with its near end directly below us. Huge ocean rollers with wildly writhing brown kelp fronds on their backs followed one another up the length of the cove. The waves rose as the channel narrowed and broke into foaming white surges thundering against cliffs unseen below us. Their roar was so loud that speech was difficult, but McKean called out, “Nature in her savage glory!”

  The far side of the cove was not so much a part of the mainland as a line of jagged pinnacles that jutted skyward at every imaginable angle. Looking down at the pinnacles and frothing water below us, I hollered to Tleena, “I can’t believe people actually live here!”

  “Not here,” she hollered back. “Down there.” She pointed to the right. On the near side, out by the mouth of the cove, lay a narrow shingle-stone beach sheltered by a rocky prominence that deflected the incoming waves to provide a haven where the surf swept ashore with much less force. Above the dark gray cobble-covered beach, a massive tangle of whitened driftwood logs stretched along the base of the cliff. A long, dune-covered bench lay above the driftwood and beneath the cliff. On this flat area stood a most remarkable dwelling. “My father’s longhouse,” Tleena called with pride. The house, built parallel to the cove among the dunes and protected from the surf by the driftwood line, was about sixty feet long and thirty feet wide, an entirely wooden structure of rough-hewn cedar planks. “Father lives there with a few other Makahs who keep the ancient ways.”

  She motioned for McKean and me to follow her to the head of a small trail that vanished into a drift of wind-stunted Sitka spruce trees at the brink of the bluff. “Come along,” she said, entering the small opening like Alice going down the rabbit hole. McKean followed and I went after him into a world made suddenly darker and quieter by an overhanging canopy of dense spruce foliage. The path plunged steeply downward, switching direction constantly on gnarled tree roots that served as steps. I stumbled on the uneven footing but as my eyes adjusted to the dim light I gazed in wonder at the life that clung to the steep slope. Between the spruce trunks grew a profusion of green salal bushes and lush sword ferns. The air was heavy with smells of forest soil and cold salty sea air. As we made our way down the bluff, the tree trunks increased in size and the understory was augmented with ten-foot tall salmonberry bushes.

  As the roar of the surf subsided a small chiding animal voice drew our attention. McKean pointed out a squirrel perched on a snagged-off spruce branch. “A Douglas’s squirrel,” he declared. “Lovely coloration. Chocolate brown above, caramel-tan on its underside. A nice contrast to the drab gray squirrels we see in the city. That spunky little fellow is a sure sign of a healthy forest ecosystem.” The little rascal chirped at us, “bieu-bieu-bieu,” as we resumed our descent. When we reached the bottom of the bluff we emerged from under the trees onto a sandy beach trail that followed the landward side of a line of titanic driftwood logs with upended roots towering much taller than our heads. The trail threaded between dunes tufted with tall blue-green dune grass. When we came to the rear of the longhouse, McKean and I stopped to stare up at it in amazement. It was a massive structure of three-foot-thick log uprights and crossbeams sided with long hand-hewn cedar planks and covered by an overhanging peaked roof made from more planks. The boards of the walls and roof were lashed to the beams with heavy fiber twine and chinked with brown seaweed.

  Following Tleena along the shore side, we came to the far end of the house. There, a flat sandy clearing was bordered by the driftwood line, a stream’s mouth, forest on the uphill side, and the front facade of the longhouse. Facing toward the open ocean beyond the mouth of the cove, the wide facade was a wall of tightly-fitted vertical cedar planks, each one five or six feet across, with elaborate carving on their otherwise smoothly finished surfaces. On one side, a giant representation of a bear’s snarling face and on the other, a beaver with grinning buck teeth were carved in Northwest-style geometric patterns and stained with charcoal black, berry red, copper green, or left as bone-white wind-bleached wood. A totem pole fashioned from a six-foot-thick tree trunk formed the center of the facade. Towering well above the roof peak, it was topped with a carved wooden thunderbird whose wings stretched a dozen feet wide, and whose talons held a whale. Figures of serpent heads and other fantastic creatures descended in succession below that. The thick base of the totem was penetrated by an opening that was the longhouse’s front door. The hole, large enough for a man to pass through standing, was sculpted in the form of the open maw of a raven, which represented the basal creature of the totem. Its huge black beak projected above and below the entrance in such a way that the visitor would symbolically be swallowed by the raven as he went inside the longhouse.

  Tleena watched amusedly while we took in the jaw-dropping grandeur of the place. Then she said, “Come on. Father will be inside.” She entered the raven’s-maw doorway and McKean followed her, bending his tall frame to avoid braining himself on the raven’s-beak entry roof. We paused inside the door to let our eyes adjust to the dim light, which was provided only by shafts of daylight filtering through several gaps in the cedar-plank ceiling.

  The first impression given by the interior was that of an unfinished farmer’s shed of epic proportions. The floor was hard-packed sand from which three rows of huge cedar-log uprights rose to support equally huge beams that in turn supported the cedar plank roof and walls. The wall-planks, in some cases four feet wide and twenty feet long, were lashed with plant fiber twine to smaller log uprights that spanned the gaps between the larger house posts. Although the breeze had been cool outside, the interior was warmed by an earthen hearth in the center of the floor with a bed of coals that glowed red and radiated heat. Thin smoke rose and drifted out a roof opening above the hearth.

  The broad interior space was subdivided into separate living areas by walls made of cedar planks or curtains of woven cattail fabric. The planks and curtains were decorated with native animal-face designs carved or painted on every available surface. We had entered into the first of these walled-off areas, and here a man sat on a couch-like bench made of carved cedar planks and covered with mats of woven cattails. Although busy with a project, he paused when Tleena called to him, “Hello, Jerry Tibbut.”

  “Hello, Tleena,” Tibbut replied. He was a squat, heavyset fellow in his mid-forties dressed in blue jeans and a chambray shirt with a black braided pony tail hanging down his back. He was using a knife like John Steel’s to carve a bevel on the end of an eight-foot-long pole that looked like it was the
backshaft meant to mesh with the shorter foreshaft of a harpoon tip like the one in the Ortman Gallery. He paused his work and looked us over. A frown knit his dark eyebrows. “What are they doing here?” he asked Tleena.

  “They came to see Father.”

  “He’s down there,” Jerry muttered, pointing toward the rear of the longhouse with his knife and then resuming his work.

  We followed Tleena toward the far end of the longhouse, where another thin column of smoke was visible escaping through a second ceiling gap. Although the interior of the longhouse was a single large space above, it was partitioned below into multiple living spaces, which made it a maze of elaborately decorated cedar plank walls about seven feet high. Each living area we passed was a semi-private room with its own unique decor. Cedar benches served as sitting or sleeping couches. Bentwood boxes, large and small and carved with mythic faces, were the equivalents of cupboards and closets. One room housed a collection of wood, stone and steel tools, some of whose functions were unclear, as well as a collection of canoe paddles, each of which was carved with distinctive totem symbols. Overhead, strings of plant fiber stretched between upright posts, and from these hung very large quantities of salted and drying fish, herbs, and meat. Overall, the longhouse had a smell that was peculiar but not unpleasant - a meat-market aroma that mingled smoke, cured flesh, and essences of spicy herbs and cedar in an intriguing way.