Winter Brothers (12 page)

The Indians told me this morning,
the thirtieth of July,
that Hadassub one of the best and quietest Indians in the tribe died suddenly last night at Kiddekubbut. I went down after breakfast on foot to the village and learned that he died of apoplexy. He had been very well all day and had joined in the dance at a potlatch given by Chekotte at Peter's house, and in the evening had taken part in a wrestling match and afterward partaken freely of rice and molasses. He had not eaten any molasses for a long time as it did not agree with him but on this occasion thought he would eat some....The Indians always attribute an unusual death to the operation of some bad Tomanawas, and as there is a party of Quinaults here I did not know but they might charge it upon them. I explained...the natural causes that would most likely have produced his death and strongly urged them in future not to bury any one until they had tried every means of testing animation.

 

In the autumn, Swan about to mark his first year in the classroom, school woes return to his daily pages.

For one thing, he has worked out the appalling calculation that to keep the drafty schoolhouse warm through the year will require 100 cords of wood—that is, a woodpile four feet high, four feet wide, and eight hundred feet long, every sliver of it needing to be wheedled from the Makahs by barter of buckets of potatoes.

For another,
the attendance at School has been very meagre...and this afternoon,
the tenth of November,
I sent for Youaitl (Old Doctor) and had a long talk with him on the matter.

I told him that the Government at Washington had been at great expense to have this school house built, and now I wanted the children to come and be taught, and wanted him to let his second son Kachim come and board with me and be one of a class with Jimmy....That if a few of the boys took an interest to learn others would be induced to come, and finally all the children could be taught. I also told him that the old men were dying off and these boys would shortly take their places, and if they would come and learn now they could be useful when they grew up, and could better adapt themselves to the white mens customs, than the old men who were so prejudiced against the whites.

Old Doctor said my talk was “all good,” “all good,” and he would send the boy and talk to the other Indians...

Two days later Swan has in residence with him at the schoolhouse Kachim, Jimmy, and five other boys. They spend the day toiling on the alphabet and amuse themselves in the evening, and that night's diary page exults that
Today has been the first time that it has seemed like a regular school.

Soon after this triumph of regularity, Swan wakes a little past five in the morning to a houseful of smoke.
I found George in the kitchen with a big fire in the stove...and a pot of potatoes on cooking and the smoke just pouring out into the room. As it created an atmosphere like that which he has been accustomed to in the Indian lodge, he thought it was all right and that he was doing finely.
Swan opened the damper and commended the young chef
for his zeal but told him he need not get up another morning till day light.

George's breakfast pall seems to hang on and on in the diary pages, clouding the earlier sanguine estimations of the schoolboys' new diligence...
the principal inducement at present is the novelty of the thing and the plenty of food I give them to eat. They can be influenced by their stomachs much sooner than their brains....

After more than a year of the effort to hold classes and compel attendance, two notations even more glum. The twenty-seventh of December 1864:

My whole time is constantly occupied from early in the morning till ten and often eleven oclock at night without an hour that I can call my own. Cooking, looking after the house, attending the sick, prescribing medicines and trying to teach, and the results are far from being in proportion to the great care and anxiety I feel.

The next day:
John had a talk last evening in Russian Jims lodge about the school...and among others who spoke Jim said that he did not want his boy to learn to read and write for it would be of no use to him, he could not get anything by it, but if he learned to ktll whales and catch halibut he would have plenty of things....This attempt to form a school is the most unsatisfactory thing I have ever tried.

This morning, nagged by a murmur of memory, I finally retraced the entry, Swan's diary words of this exact date, one hundred thirty-nine years ago. The eleventh of January 1860.
Cloudy and calm. This is my birth day 42 years old. I trust that the remainder of my life may be passed more profitably than it has so far. Self investigation is good for birth days.

Tonight, after another coastal day back and forth between Swan's words and the actuality of Cape Flattery: “Some men and women are never part of the time they were born into,” Carol's voice read to me as I hunched in the phone booth at Clallam Bay, “and walk the streets or highways of their generations as strangers....Reinforces our diminishing conviction that there is something special in American earth, in American experience and in the harrowing terms of American survival. Where there is no longer a house of sky...”

The words clatter back and forth between my ears.
Never part of the time they were born into...walk their generations as strangers
...The sort of thing I might write about Swan, restless in Boston, studious on the frontier. Instead, in the pages of the
New York Times Book Review
it has been written of me.

From places here at the outer corner of the Strait it can be seen clearest how abruptly close the Olympic range of mountains stands to this coastline: like gorgeously caped elephants about to go wading. Along much of the Peninsula south of the logging town of Forks, for instance, peaks of 4,000 to 7,000 feet rise within thirty-five miles of the Pacific shore, rather as if the Rockies were to begin at Philadelphia, or the Sierra Nevada just beyond the east alleys of Oakland.

There is a kind of stolen thrill, something unearned and simply granted, about the presence of the Olympics. The state of Washington makes its margin with the Pacific as if the region west of the Cascade Mountains had all been dropped heavily against the ocean, causing wild splatters of both land and water: the islands of Puget Sound and the San Juan group, streaky inlets everywhere, stretched stripes of peninsula such as Dungeness and Long Beach, the eighty-mile fjord called Hood Canal, and a webwork of more than forty sizable rivers emptying to the coast. Amid this welter the Olympic Mountains stand in calm tall files, their even timbered slopes like black-green fur to shed the wet. The region's history itself seems to step back and marvel at these shoreline mountains. The coastal Indians appear not to have troubled to travel much in them. Why wrestle forest when the sea is an open larder? White frontier-probing too went into an unusual and welcome slowdown when it reached the Olympics. Although the range sits only some sixty miles wide and fifty long, not until 1889 did a six-man expedition sponsored by a Seattle newspaper traipse entirely across it and leave some of the loveliest peaks of America with the curious legacy of being named for editors. Thereafter its terrific shaggy abundance of timber saved the range; giant fir and cedar and spruce rose so mighty along its shorelines and foothills that the heart of the Olympics was not logged before National Park status came in the 1930s.

Good fortune for the northwest earth that was, for where the early loggers did begin whacks into the Olympic Peninsula forest, some of them butchered the country: you can see it yet in places beside the highway, obliteration where the ancient stumps lie about like knuckle bones after cannibals had done with them. Those cut-out-and-get-out loggers had some excuse, not understanding or having to care that felling the timber that denuded the slope that lost the silt that clogged the stream would smother salmon runs and other interties of nature, and figuring anyway that the trees and salmon and all else would last forever, but we know by now that America's forevers tend to be briefer than the original estimates.

What remains still original, the Olympic peaks, rise to me when I climb to the rim of our valley as the great Sawtooth Range and other sharp horizons gnashed up to the west of my family's Montana grassland. They were my first shore, those rough snow-topped headlands which stop the flow of plains in the Montana I was born to, and later, when I went back to write about that rock-tipped land, I began at last to savvy the geography as a vast archipelago of mountains and to remember how, like people in fast outriggers, we traveled in pickups and trucks the valleys between the high islanded clusters. Now it is Townsend, Buckhorn, the Needles, Constance, Jupiter, the Brothers, two dozen Olympic peaks alive in jagged white rhythm like lightning laid lengthwise, that make the uneven but steady skyline. From the instant I saw them a dozen years ago I have felt exhilaration from these mountains like a gust down from their glaciers. If they did not exist, I think I would not live here; would need to be within sight of some other craggy western horizon. As it is, over the years I have hiked into all the main valleys of the Olympics except a few of the southernmost, and go time upon time upon time to places along the Sound and Strait where I know favorite views of peaks.

And today I have spent hours studying the Olympics rather than Swan's past. I don't much mind; Swan undoubtedly did the same. I find him writing once for the San Francisco newspaper,
The great Sierra of the Olympic range appear to come down quite to the water's edge, and present a wild forbidding aspect.
Other times, I come across him tallying into the diaries a morning when the Olympics happened to be spectacularly sunlit. But I do not find him ever exploring into the so-near fortress of peaks. Enough of Boston evidently remained in Swan that he would admire mountains with his eyes rather than his feet.

The Pacific's sounds climb into the forest to meet us, minutes before Alava Island stands through the firs as a mesa in the ocean. Alava, first and biggest and namesake of Cape Alava's strewn collection of seastacks, reefs, isles, boulders. Of this pepper-spill on the coast's map which a despairing cartographer simply summed as The Flattery Rocks.

The rhythmic pound of tidal surge underscores the reputation that, all the fifteen miles down from Cape Flattery to here, and south from Alava for thirty miles more, this coast constantly dodges and tumbles. Boulder formations and Iandforms sprawl random and ajut as vast weapon heads. Drift logs lodge high on the beach like colossal ax-hafts tossed on a forgotten armory shelf. Each cape and bluff seems braced, banked for the turns of winter storm that flow in from the southwest. While Swan lived at Neah Bay, itself an outpost of the back of beyond, the tiny community here was considered the truly remote settlement of the Makahs.
Hosett,
it was called then.

Carol and I arrive the one easy way, overland from the east, and the route has become more “over” than I am happy with. Nearly the entire trail, three and a third miles from Lake Ozette to Cape Alava, has been built up into a boardwalk of cedar slabs, the size of stair steps and nailed onto hefty stringers.
Wonk wonk wonk wonk wonk wonk,
our boots constantly resound on the cedar,
wonk wonk wonk wonk wonk wonk.
The boardwalk's height from the forest floor puts my head at an elevation of seven feet or so, and I feel like a Zulu clogging along in a Dutchman's shoes.

“Just like Asbury Park,” Carol offers in joke as we wonk along. But this is not the New Jersey shore at the bounds of boardwalk, but a weave of coastal forest, and because the cedar walkway perpetually stays damp enough to be slick, my eyes are pulled down to it too often from their pleasure of sorting the wealth of green: salal, cedar, hemlock, huckleberry, deer fern, an occasional powerful Douglas fir.

We alight onto the beach at Cape Alava amid a spring noon which has somehow drifted loose into mid-January. No wind at all, rare for this restless coast, and a surprise warmth in the air that denies knowing anything whatsoever about this morning's winter chill.

As we stride north the mile or so to the archaeological dig, we find that winter storms have made the Alava beach a stew of kelp, rockweed, sea cucumbers and sundry unidentifiables. One ingredient is an ugly rotting bulb which we agree must be the ocean version of turnip. Gulls, turnstones, and sanderlings patrol scrupulously along the tideline, while cormorants idly crowd the offshore rocks. Crows swagger now and again among the seaweed, right to ocean's edge. Some evolutionary instant from now the first one will swash in to join the gulls amid the surf and make the species seagoing.

The archaeological site has grown to resemble a tiny silver-strike town. Board houses and sheds dribble along the hillside, and then the laid-open ground where the excavation is underway. A difference is that the digging here represents the most delicate of mining, done painstakingly within two-meter squares of soil at a time. Five buried longhouses have been discovered on the site, and the contents of the three opened to date have sifted out as a kind of archaeological miracle. The scholarly guess is that the Makah residents of some five hundred years ago felled too much of the forest on the bluff above, probably to feed their fires; the defoliated slope gave way and an avalanche of heavy clay soil sealed everything below it as instantly and tightly as if in a flood of molten glass. Washington State University archaeologists and their student teams have been sieving the past here for ten years, and the trove of artifacts is to go on display in the museum the Makahs are building at Neah Bay.

The diggers are proud of the site. The young woman from a Colorado university who shows us around says it is known as one of the ten most important digs being done in the world. She tells us, too, details unearthed since our other visits here: that shells of some sixty kinds of shellfish have been found in the longhouses, testimony to the prowess of the Hosett Makahs in trading very far up and down this coast, and that belongings of a head man of a longhouse were uncovered in one building's northeast corner, the farthest from the prevailing weather and therefore the snuggest.