Winter Brothers (15 page)

 

Except for the four of us, Carol, me, Ann, and Phil, good friends newly moved to the height above our valley, today's visitors to the Point all cluster out on the water with salmon as their purpose: twenty-five small boats in a bright shoal around the lighthouse. Many are red rowboats from the resort nearby, with dashing white script on their sides proclaiming
Point No Point.
The fanciness reminds me of another prank of language, that when his Mississippi townsmen used to scorn Faulkner as an overelegant scribbler they would dub him Count No 'Count. Here is a site in scansion I can see that sly squire enjoying, out in one of the red rowboats with an antique bamboo rod and a flask of sipping whiskey, affirming to fellow anglers that yes, none other, he is Count No 'Count of Point No Point.

When the tide is down, as now, the beach can be walked for a few miles southward from the Point into long views of the forested rim of Puget Sound. In fact an angled look across the water to a particular patch of the quilled horizon on the Sound's eastern shore exactly reverses my usual line of sight along the gray plain of water: the view from the top of the valley which holds our house, across into this Point No Point corner of the Sound. Now, here on the western shoreline, bluffs align in sequence along the Sound's edge like sterns of a moored fleet.

We begin to do the leisurely beach miles and the friends' gab that comes with them.

Ann performs a squinched-up impression which she assures us is an abalone.

I retaliate with my imitation of a tenpenny nail being driven: rigid stance, hands at side, shuddering winces as my knees buckle downward.

Phil gently informs us that neither has much career ahead as sealife or spike.

Carol is first to see an inbound ship. Freighters entering the Sound pass close by the Point—indeed, emerging from Admiralty Inlet to round the bluff they give the illusion that they are going to carve away the lighthouse as they come—and this beach offers one of the few sites where I can share in Swan's fixation on passing ships. Windships sail day on day in his pages, rocking into view with the hidden push of air against their groves of canvas, whitely slicing the Strait's breadth of blue, the very print of their names vivid enough to ferry the imagination horizonward.
Willamantic
and
Alert
and
Flying Mist
and
Naramissic.
The
Toando Keller,
the
Lizzie Roberts,
the
Jenny Ford. Orion, Iconium, Visurgis. Torrent. Saucy Lass. Wild Pigeon. Forest Queen. Maunaloa. Growler. Quickstep.
Up from San Francisco,
Nahumkeag. Aguilar de Los Andes,
eagle of the Andes and homebound to Santiago.
Lalla Rookh
and
Wavelet
and
Jeannie Berteux.

Nothing in our world is so richly, gaily named any more, unless it would be racehorses, and the sails that come and go on these waters now fill for pleasure rather than commerce. Saturday spinnakers instead of daily broadsails. Swan would like it, though, that the region still is water-mad, in its way. To walk down to the shoreline of any Puget Sound community is to find mast-filled marinas, natural as coves of cattails. But schooners, barks, any of the working-canvas fleet that kited past him, sometimes several a day: no.

Our version of a
Quickstep
sheers past the Point No Point light like strap-iron passing porcelain, then steadies massively into the shipping lane of the Sound. We try, and fail, to pick the name off the freighter's bow with field glasses.

Ann tells of a handy powerful monocular her father carries with him on hikes. A spyglass, it would have been in Swan's time.

As if the first freighter was the outrider, others now show themselves from behind the bluff regularly each half-hour or so. The third black ship cuts past just at low tide, three
P.M.
As we have walked I have been watching a known place on the horizon for any glimpse of Mount Rainier, where I will be at this time tomorrow, but a squall in the center of the Sound's prairie of water is intervening. Soon the squall line moves north, off Whidbey Island, and try as we do to convince ourselves it can't boomerang toward us, it comes.

The Sound and sky go to deeper grays, the lighthouse begins sending out dashes of light, and we start back to the Point as the day's fourth ship, edges erased in the rain, passes indistinct as a phantom.

As I carry groceries from the car to the cabin, the forest challenges me.
Rawf,
it barks,
rowf rowf roof. Rawf.
While showing me routines of the cabin, doorkeys and woodpile and pots and pans, Trudy and Howard had mentioned that a neighbor's small brown dog is fond of visiting. Solo and I would be instant friends, Trudy assured me. Dog friend is advancing on me now from the woods with his five-note salvo like a sentry triggering off warning bursts.

“Hullo, Solo, hey, Solo Solo Solo,” I offer and coax him into being petted. At once he wags ecstasy, devotion, worship. But as I step down the path from the cabin Solo moves to my heels and yammers steadily all the way to the car.

Before gathering the next armful of cargo I again Solo Solo Solo him, stroke his back until the hair threatens to fray off, scratch his belly and the place between his ears, seem to have sent him irretrievably giddy. He then rolls to his feet and yaps me every step back to the cabin. One more round trip we make, Solo yawping determinedly whenever my hand isn't stroking him. I face the issue.

“Solo, goddamned if I'm going to spend four days petting you. Go home.”

He wavers, somewhere between another aria of barking and a demand for further ransom of petting.

“Get-the-hell-outa-here.”

Off Solo scampers through the ghostly alders, looking faintly regretful about having overplayed me. The silence that arrives along his retreating tracks fills the forest, reaches instantly down from the upthrust of fir trees and the hover of the mountain, vast Rainier, somewhere above their green weave. After the unquiet introduction, an avalanche of stillness.

I am here for stillness. For pause in this winter at Swan's heels and, I suppose, in my own strides across time. Coming to this underedge of snow country is a brief reflective climb back to my first life in the West, the Montana life. I grew up in powerful winters of white, amid stories of even mightier ones: the arctic seasons which have swept western Montana each three decades since the first of them was registered, to the everlasting shock of the rangemen, in 1886–87. 1919–20, which broke our family homestead under its six-month burden of frozen snow. 1948–49, when I watched my father struggle to save two thousand sheep, and our future, on the blizzard-lashed ranch at Battle Creek. Now, again, another thirty-year giant. For weeks Montanans have been telling me by phone or mail of the deep lock of cold in the Rockies, of snowdrifts across porch railings, concern for beleaguered cattle soon to begin calving. Sentences from a Missoula friend: “Anything bad about this winter in Montana that you happen to hear, believe it. It is the worst ever, and it started November 9. The ground has been under snow since, and it hit -28 here on January 1, -50 in Butte.”

I have had urges recently to return to Montana, go there for the experience of the great thirty-year winter. It may after all be the last to fall within my lifespan, and that ink of Swan's will not drain away in spring runoff. But I would be returning on a tourist's terms, on whim and mere spectatorship, which to me are tarnished terms for such an occasion. Any honesty about earthdwelling tells me I have not earned this Montana winter by living with the land's other moods there, by keeping my roots within its soil. Half my lifetime ago I decided the point, although I did not then know how long-reaching the decision would be, that the ranch-country region of my grandparents and parents is no longer the site for me to work out life. I could not divide myself, a portion to the words I wanted to make, another to the raising of livestock and coping with furious seasons. Not winters of white steel but the coastal ones of pewter-gray, soft-toned, workable, with the uninsistent Northwest rain simply there in the air like molecules made visible, are the necessary steady spans for me to seek the words. Yet the white winters have not entirely let me from their grip. A time or two a season, snowline will help me see the margins of what I am doing and I migrate to some place such as this, a silvered edge of the Northwest where I can sit above my usual life for a few days. Hear what is being said in my skull. Watch mountain dusk draw down.

 

And scrutinize deer. The boldest of them wintering here is a doe which made her appearance soon after I arrived, and has ghosted back into the near-dark now. Black-tailed and gray-furred for winter she eases past this cabin a time or two each evening, Trudy and Howard told me, and can be recognized by the nick in her ear. A wide screened-in porch rambles about three sides of the cabin, a pleasant half-hidden promenade up among the first branches of the trees, and from it she can be seen for several minutes on her route.

As I watch down from the porch the motion of the doe's each step seems to recoil slightly into her as if some portion of poise is being pulled back each time in reserve. This tentative grace of deer which stops them just short of being creatures of some other element. Hoofed birds, perhaps, or slim dolphins of the underbrush. Who would have thought, on a continent of such machines of the wild as bison and elk and the grizzly, that it would be deer to best survive? For once, the meek have inherited.

Before bed I look up Swan on deer. The blacksmith at Neah Bay was undertaking to raise one from a fawn. The twenty-sixth of January 1865:
Mr Phillips tame deer has been missing for several days and I strongly suspect the Indians have filled it in retaliation for sundry dogs which Phillips and Mr Maggs have shot.

But the next day:
The deer made her appearance this morning much to my satisfaction....It is very tame and looks very pretty running about among the cattle.

New snow, two inches of dry fluff. The entire forest has been fattened by it, everywhere a broad white outline put onto all branches of trees and brush. The effect comes odd against yesterday's green and gray of the forest, like a white blossoming gone rampant overnight.

I intend as mild an afternoon as can be spent aboard snowshoes. Whop around on the slope above the National Park buildings at Paradise, watch the weather seethe around the summit of Rainier nearly two miles above. When my thigh muscles make first complaint about the pontoons at the bottom of my legs, ease off the fluffy ridge, try to keep the car from becoming a bobsled on the white-packed road down to Longmire Lodge and coffee and pie: then the forest's miles back to the cabin, and dusk and deer.

But halfway above Paradise I wallow onto rodent prints stitching a path in and out of the stands of firs. Fate has jotted in the snow. No choice but to become a tracker. Along tilts of slope, over drifts, up, down, across. After several minutes I glance back from the tiny pawprints to my wake in the snow. It is what a whale might chum up in hot pursuit of a minnow.

Shameless, I plow on, occasionally deserting the tracks for the pleasure of creating my own didoes in the white. I discover that the south face of every fir I pass is gray-white with ice: frozen melt at the very end of the branches, in fat cellular conglomerates sectioned by the green fir bristles. Grenades of ice. A sudden thaw would put me under bombardment. Doves of peace—no, gray jays ambling through the air to me, pausing just off my shoulder as if kindly offering to search my pockets for any loaves of bread which might be burdening me.

The jays sortie off to elsewhere and time drifts out of mind after them, replaced by attention to the weather atop Rainier, lowering, rising, brightening, darkening. As though the mountain when it ceased being a volcano of fire became a cauldron for weather. Like all else in this region of the Cascades, this casual slope I am on, still not far above Paradise and its visitor center and lodge, points quickly up toward Rainier as if in astonishment at how the glacier-draped mound looms. I was surprised myself, far back along the highway when arriving to the cabin, how the lift of the mountain made itself felt even there, the road suddenly jerking into rising curves.

Inventorying the arc of mountains which surround Rainier, themselves lofty but less than half the giant peak's three-mile height, I come onto the thought that the geographical limits of my Northwest winter are Tatoosh and Tatoosh: Tatoosh Island offshore from the outermost perch at Cape Flattery, the Tatoosh Range of crags in view to the south here at the crest of the Cascades, jagging white up through the high-country fabric of forest. At Swan's first mention of a visit to the Tatoosh lighthouse I looked into a place-names guidebook, found that the derivation could be from the Chinook jargon word for “breast” or the Nootkan word for “thunderbird.” Divvy the deriving, I decide: give these cleavaged profiles their due, let the thunderbird have the island.

Bulletins from below. Thighs are threatening open rebellion. Snowshoes still want more country.
Tatoosh-tatoosh tatoosh-tatoosh
the webs sing into the snow as I go onto a fresh drift.

Strange, to be again in a lodging of entirely wood. Under the rough brawn of ceiling beams and amid the walls' constellations of pine knots. Almost two decades of suburban wallboard intervene from when ranchhouse and bunkhouse nightly surrounded me with board walls.

What is it about a cabin within a forest or beside a shore that sings independence from the common world of dwellings? Something more than hinterland site or openly outlined strokes of beams and rafters; some inherent stubbornness against ever being thought an ordinary house shouts through as well. Cabination or antidomicility or some such rebellious shimmer of the atoms of wall-wood; a true surmiser of cabins would have the term. I simply know that cabin-y distinctness says itself and I step across the threshold as if going into some chamber of a far year. The broad central room of this cabin, for instance, trades adamantly back and forth between the family who spend summers and weekends here and the abiding forest outside. A wall-beam aligns the china plates which sit on it as if they were shiny droplets on a branch; beneath runs a long bank of mullioned window, the small panes fondling separate bits of the forest as if they were scenes on porcelain. On another wall is the cabin item that interests me most, a crosscut saw. Blazon of sharpened steel, the crosscut is a remarkably elegant tool to have inspired its epithets: “miser^ harp” the least profane description Northwest loggers had for it as, sawyer at either end, they ground the blade back and forth through Douglas fir or red cedar. Having caught from Swan the winter virus of measure-and-count I've learned by yardstick that this slicer of forests is six and a half feet long, by careful finger that it has sixty-eight beveled sharp-nesses interspersed with sixteen wider-set prongs which make space for the sawdust to spill away. A giant's steel grin of eighty-four teeth and as innocent and ready in this cabin amid these woods as a broadsword on a Highlands castle wall.