Winter Brothers (20 page)

Anyway, Swan strives on a central route of his era, a site he is not generally found at, in his current quest for bonanza. His problem is that nowhere among his skills is the knack for hitting it rich. This stone fact asserts itself in these Port Townsend years by not only keeping Swan unrich but chronically short of any income at all. He has tried to tap a field he knows much about, the native artwork of the Northwest, but without much success. In his periodic letters to Baird at the Smithsonian he attempts now and then, with more than ample justification, to pry whatever occasional collecting salary he can:
I know that I can do this work as well and probably better than any man on the Pacific Coast, but I cannot do myself or the subject justice, unless I am paid for my time, labor and expense.
Baird's thrifty fist stays closed. When Swan on his own contrives a trading trip to Sitka in Alaska, the venture seems not to produce much except some interesting new scenery.

Time and again the Port Townsend diaries have to make account of small borrowings, from Henry Webster, from a friendly storekeeper named Gerrish, most of all from the local jeweler, Bulkeley, who is steadily ready with a few dollars. The sum usually flits from Swan so promptly he scarcely leaves a fingerprint on it:
Borrowed of Bulkly $5.00 Paid wash bill $1.00.
...His credit plainly holds good; generally he notes repayment of his debts the same day he comes into any real cash and is himself then touchable for a loan. But chronic is chronic and so the Swan I watch in these railroad missives still is a fellow I would cheerfully accompany to Katmandu, but am not so sure I would buy a horse from, if he happened to be needy for funds at the moment.

 

Therefore his crowbar work on the coffers of the Northern Pacific. To my astonishment, which shows how much I know about financial sharpstering, Swan is hired, and at his price. I can only think that the New York railroaders wanted to overlook no chance, and if the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca somehow proved worthy of railroad iron, this
careful reliable person
who wrote such blarneying letters did know that outback shore.

Getting himself hired was different from maneuvering a railroad into town. Swan escorted the railroad moguls around when Canfield led a group of them out from New York, lobbied now and again in the territorial capitol at Olympia, tried to tout the prospect of transpacific trade with Siberia after talking with a barkentine captain who had come from the Amur River
in the very short passage of 28 days,
drew maps of the proposed rail route up from the Columbia River to Port Townsend, lined up local pledges of land if the town was tapped as the terminus. Then Canfield inexplicably telegraphed Swan to meet him at Ogden, Utah.

Swan, now no young man by any count of the years, jounced off into sage and desert on a 700-mile journey of horseback, steamboat and stagecoach.
Very hot and dirty,
the battered pocket diary of this trip mutters...
alkali plain...rattlesnakes...hottest ride I have yet had...desolate...miserable log house full of bedbugs
...At last at Ogden, a message meets Swan: Canfield has decided not to wait for him.

After that jilt Swan skidded downhill both fiscally and physically. Arriving back at Port Townsend from the three-and-a-half-week wild goose chase he jots constant notes of bad health—
Sick in house all day from the effects of my journey and a cold
and
sick for some time
—and probably despond as well. He also begins to record that the Northern Pacific has omitted to pay him several months' wages and he is having to nag for the sum.

It all spins out, Swan's several years of railroad fantasy, into a few words at the end of the summer of 1873. That spring, having thoughtfully bought much of the townsite first, the Northern Pacific had chosen Tacoma as its transcontinental terminus; now, on the eighteenth of September, the railroad underwent a financial collapse which took years to mend. Swan wrote unknowing prophecy in his diary at Port Townsend two days earlier:
Town very dull nothing doing.

 

I have some feel for Swan's railroad debacle, because the bulldozers on one of the slopes across this valley remind me steadily of futility of my own. My effort was to narrow progress, Swan's was to lure it in his direction, but in the end we are each as futile as the other.

The bulldozers are carving out housing sites. On any scale the slope they are swathing was no hillside of grandeur: scrub alder, madrona. But amid Seattle's spread of suburbs it made a healthy green lung, and its loss is one more nick toward changing the Puget Sound region into Los Angeles North.

At the hearing I spoke against the total of 107 houses designated for the site, suggesting if nothing else that half the number, on lots the same size as the reasonably generous ones on our side of the valley, made a more swallowable sum for the area. The zoning law, however, permitted that the size of the lots could be averaged over the entire acreage, including slopes of unbuildable steepness—a principle by which Los Angeles can be averaged off into the Mojave Desert and it be proven that every Angeleno owns a numerical rancho—and 107 houses it is going to be.

Part of me has known the prospect is not bright that I can go on and on through life as a suburban druid. Seattle, the city I have most affection for, which until not so many years ago was a green quilt of neighborhoods without much pretension beyond that, has begun to overgrow, preen itself into metropolis. (I hear the same of Denver, Portland, Boulder, Billings...) Probably, too, I am at the point of life where, in this odd cottage industry of making words, my velocity has slowed enough that I notice society's more. Yet understanding the fact that change, alteration of landscape and manscape alike, is a given of life does nothing to make me think its consequences won't be particular for me; everyone in the world has a nose but we all sneeze differently.

This attack of bulldozerphobia I know is a mood I should put away, box it in the admission that I am sounding like a grumpy homesteader who has just seen new chimney smoke on his horizon. (Make that 107 new chimney smokes.) Swan, you there in mid-spiel of your wooing of a railhead for Port Townsend: you might tell me that I have western policy backwards, that even yet “limits” is not a word to say, but you ought to hear this much of my side of it, for it includes you more than you know. While they were eating me like banqueters sharing a cheese, the landholder's lawyer and the developer's experts and the county's planners, the developer himself said least of all, and I remember an instant when our glances met, baffled. I wore my one suit, so as to look less like a beaver trapper among the bureaucrats. The developer was in his rough shirt to show humble toil. Guises aside, we probably are not so very different; I would guess I was piling hay bales at least as early in life as he started pouring concrete. But the matter between us has become one of mysterious creed—how many homeowners may dance on the top of a surveyor's stake?—and the prevailing scripture is on his side, not mine. Which is why his housing developments fell my forests, and tracks are laid to a town the railroad owns instead of one where a Swan dreams. Preach as we may in our own backyards, cottagers do not often sway a society's fiscal theology.

Rain trotting in the drainpipe when we woke up. Now, at ten in the morning, a gray pause has curtained between showers, a halfhearted wind musses among the trees. Today and yesterday are standard Puget Sound winter, rain and forty-five degrees, after the weeks of clear frost-rimed weather. A rich winter of two seasons, this. Time of frost, time of cloud.

Last comment unearthed from Swan on the railroad adventure.
Did not alter my opinion,
I come across him suddenly grumbling, apropos of nothing, during a visit to Tacoma years later.
That it is unfit place for terminus.

A day that promises better weather one minute and reconsiders the next. The valley is sought out by wind every so often, but not yet rain, and the thermometer is nosing fifty. I would have known without checking that the mercury was up, for the cat is tucked atop a post of the fence at the far side of the neighbor's yard. More than ever he looks like a lion seen from far off, adoze at the edge of some thornbush thicket, waiting for a mouse-sized wildebeest to patter into his dreams.

What regulates this periodic cat, besides the day's warmth sliding in through his fur, or any other of the cats I have watched past my writing-room windows for the past dozen or so years, I have no conception. They are the most constant animals I
see and the most out of camouflage: they pace through our wooded backyard in robes of color entirely unsuited to hunting. Harlequins against the green. Yet unlike the neighborhood's dogs which lollop around the street in dizzy concern for human attention, cats are thoroughly in place within their routes. Only other cats stir their imagination. Those aloof encounters by day when any two, stalking like muffed-and-coated heiresses, will ostentatiously keep the full length of my backyard between them, then the shrieking rites by night when they try to murder one another as inventively as possible. Otherwise it takes the profoundest kind of intrusion to nick into a catly routine. The gray-and-white wanderer who one day tiptoed into the garden dirt, scratched a hole, daintily settled atop the tiny pit in hunched but poised position—Queen Victoria on a thunderbox—to do the necessary, did it, scratched the lid of dirt into place, gandered uneasily around, spotted me watching from the window, and fled as if aflame. (No such episode from the tan cat; it would not be lionly.) Probably the mind of cats is territory we are better off not knowing. The winter Carol and I lived in London, I stretched back from my typewriter one morning and looked directly up at a cat on the ceiling. Our flat was the below-stairs portion of a Georgian townhouse, a long warren of rooms with plumbing pipes and electrical wires vined along the walls like root systems and a splash of daylight at the rear, a kind of glassed-over porch with frosted panes as its roof. The cat was roof-sitting. Ceiling-sitting, from my point of view. Into the middle of the roof-panes of glass a light fixture had been webbed, on the English electrical principle that unless the electrician has been specifically told by the householder not to expend 238,000 miles of wiring he will proceed to rig a bulb to the underside of the moon, and the light as it glowed threw upward a small circle of heat. By some instinct the cat had gravitated up from the alley to curl itself to the warmth. (Is it Eiseley?—“In the days of the frost seek a minor sun.”) The rest of the day I would glance overhead every so often and find the cat absorbedly licking its paws, its midnight-and-snow face dabbing in and out of focus through the frosted glass. That time of an alley tabby in wavery orbit over me convinced me forever that whatever their thousand daily pretences, cats all are secret Cheshires.

 

To Swan of Port Townsend now, another here-again-gone-again countenance of my wintering. His effort to woo the railroad was mostly told in spare pages of the ledger diary he had used at Neah Bay, evidently a special effort to keep straight the skein of blandishments being tried on the Northern Pacific executives. Otherwise, the Port Townsend years are an era of pocket diaries: lines jotted instead of composed. Low water in the forty-year river of words. Scrawled small as they are, these entries will be day upon day of decipherment. But beyond doubt, worth it. I lift pages to the start of 1869 and find:

Stormy day. Commenced to occupy office on the lower floor of old Post Office building Pt Townsend, as the office for Commissioner of Pilots. US Commissioner. Notary Public rent $5 per month.

I check the final night of 1874 and learn:

One Arm Smith & I worked this PM sodding Bulkeley's grave & planting shrubbery around it.

Even for Swan these seem broad enough brackets of endeavor.

Pleasant day, nothing of interest occurred except a fight...between Ginger Reese and Sam Alexander in Reeses saloon....

Dave Sires, Lieut Paige and several officers of the Cutter gave me a serenade about 12 oclock PM....

Col Larrabee & Col Pardee passed the evening with me discussing Swedenborgianism....

Swan's frontier Americans as they clumped themselves together into the barely-in-out-of-the-weather settlement they called Port Townsend. To the local Clallams and visiting Makahs they must have seemed exotic as albino bears, this white tribe.

Their customs and rites of leadership are sporadic but frenzied. (Most memorable, at least by Swan's report, would have been the election of 1860:
The Republicans burned a tar barrel in honor of the supposed victory of Abe Lincoln.)

They have a fixation on honorific titles: officers from the army post near town always addressed as “Colonel” and “Major,” those from ships on station in the harbor as “Captain” and “Lieutenant”; at the courthouse, it is “Judge” and “Sheriff.” (Swan himself in these years served for a time in charge of a municipal court and became thereafter on the streets of Port Townsend “Judge Swan.” Such distinction was not without drawbacks:
Tom Butler and I had a talk in Jerseys saloon this evening in which he made threats that he would hold me responsible for my decision in case of Butler vs Butler.)
This they extend with guffawing generosity to the Indians, renaming the local Clallam chief Chetzemoka as “the Duke of York” and one of his wives “Queen Victoria.”

This white tribe's sacred notions focus not on the earth and its forest and its roof of sky, but on obscure ancient quibbles among humans. (White humans, at that. Swan early makes note of an Oregon tribe who shook their heads firmly when told the story of Christ's crucifixion. The Indians had enough trouble getting along with each other without borrowing conflict, they declared to the missionary; this Jesus matter was a quarrel the whites would have to settle among themselves.) They hold as well a strange sense of territoriality, strong as that of wolves, basing it on invisible boundaries: not the borders of common sense where you know yourself liable to ambush from another tribe, but seams on the earth somehow seen through a spyglass mounted on a tripod.