by Gail Griffin
My brother and his wife lived with their two small children in a house in the West Hills that looked out across the city toward the mountain. They seemed perfect: married, happy, with beautiful children and interesting friends and wonderful places to go and a view of that mountain from the upper story. I felt like an anomaly, as usual. I did a passable impression of a happy teenager to cover a fundamental discomfort, loneliness, and alienation. In my brother’s house I was a visitor to a world that I couldn’t imagine myself inhabiting.
1792
Admiral George Vancouver, at thirty-five, was enjoying his first command as he crossed the Pacific and turned left, sailing up the western coast of North America. The name of his ship, HMS Discovery, reflected his mission and the vision of his age. His Majesty King George III might have lost the American colonies and his sanity, but the British Empire itself was a going concern. Vancouver had two directives: to accept from the Spanish commander possession of Nootka Sound, to the west of the great island that would bear his name; and to explore the coasts in search of that chimera at the heart of so many European adventures, the Northwest Passage.
After confusing and unproductive dealings with his Spanish counterpart, Vancouver sailed south again, into the long, deep sound he would christen after one of his officers, Lieutenant Peter Puget. In fact, Vancouver played to the hilt the Adamic part of the imperialist, slapping the names of his officers or friends on everything he saw. The white peaks rising to the east and south, for instance, were quickly renamed after Lieutenant Joseph Baker, Lord Samuel Hood, the Baron St. Helen’s, and Rear Admiral Peter Rainier.
1975
Within five years of my visit, the domestic idyll in Portland had disintegrated, but my brother soon married again. Liddy was a native, born in Oregon, raised in Seattle, graced with a kind of irresistible wide-openness and empathy. Animals and children instantly gravitated to her, and so did I. She had an infallible sense of the absurd, an unerring nose for the comic in any moment. She cried and laughed on a dime, often simultaneously. She voiced her dogs and cats to memorable effect. Her answer to a long day (or, for that matter, a short one) was “Let’s have a glass of wine.”
Liddy’s buoyancy overwhelmed my solipsism and depressiveness. Whereas I tended to obsess over a hurt or a failure as if it were a sore tooth, Liddy’s energy was recuperative, forward-moving, light-seeking. She brightened me up and, in a strange way, made me feel saner, as if the world were not entirely fearsome or grim. Her own hurts and losses were mediated by some internal mechanism I seemed to lack. And she liberated me, making me see that rules could be broken, directions ignored.
While my brother practiced law, Liddy and I tore around Portland on random errands, often with her three boys and a large dog in tow and always to the tune of a running desultory narrative of her family, her friends, her childhood. In her tales of growing up in the Northwest, she often mentioned the islands off the coast of Washington—Whidbey and the remoter San Juans, up near the Canadian border. “You love it so much out here; you’ve got to see those islands,” she’d say. “Someday we’re going. Someday I’m taking you.” Over the next thirty years I would visit many times, but I never saw the islands. They floated behind my eyes, out on the water, misty and inscrutable.
1990
Oddly, that describes the place marriage held in my imagination as well: distant, obscure, elusive. Nothing I planned or counted on, another human possibility I regarded as being for others. It was shortly after Liddy’s marriage to my brother collapsed that Bob arrived as a colleague at the college where I worked and became a drinking buddy and sparring partner. Yet when his own marriage ended and suddenly we found ourselves “together,” it never occurred to me that it might be a temporary arrangement. Bob was naturally more cautious than I and only recently single, after all, so he danced around the edges of my intractable certainty for a while. But eventually, there we were, coupled.
We put in eighteen years, sixteen of them at distances of from seven hundred to twelve hundred miles, as Bob’s career took him from New England to Colorado while I stayed safely tenured in Michigan. During that time we rendezvoused once in Oregon (mostly so that he could shield me at a particularly treacherous family wedding), where Bob met Liddy, who threw her arms around him. Neither of us saw a good reason to get married: we were in our fifties, with independent careers and incomes, living time zones apart. Eleven years in, we had had the matching rings designed, agate and white gold, and wore them happily as signifiers of our peculiar togetherness.
And togetherness it was. My earlier relationships with men had been mostly transient. Even several time zones away, Bob was with me; I was not alone. I became sharply aware of what being coupled signified to the world, and to me as well, and I paid close attention to the benefits, perceived and real. Hetero coupledom offered safety, social and psychological; I felt I wasn’t facing the slings and arrows alone. It offered sexual validation, especially for a woman: despite the gender upheaval of the past half century, the single man is still often seen as enviable, free, a person with options; a single woman registers simply as unwanted. And beyond that, it offered belonging—an official ticket to human adulthood. From pricing to seating to travel to holidays to advertising to dinner parties, the world is arranged for couples. Seeing clearly through the entire institution, I nevertheless embraced it with all my might. Bob brought me a warm new foundation of knowing that I was at the center of another person’s life. What I felt, in fact, was saved.
1792
In the spring of 1792, Discovery anchored on the coast of modern British Columbia. Late in May, Vancouver dispatched Lieutenant Joseph Whidbey, also thirty-five, to explore the sound in a small craft that could probe the inlets, in the hope that one of them would prove to open a water corridor through the continent.
On June 2, sailing the Saratoga Passage along what seemed to be a long peninsula on the western side, Whidbey landed on the southern shore of a deep cove to make some surveys. “Deer playing about in great numbers,” he noted, “rich black soil, grass which grew to three feet in height, ferns nearly twice as high, and an abundance of freshwater streams.” From all directions people flocked to the water’s edge to examine the strangers. He had landed near a large Skagit village; he estimated six hundred residents. This may have been a first encounter with Europeans: Whidbey recorded their fascination with the sailors’ skin; he opened his shirt to demonstrate that his pallor was pervasive.
The Skagit replenished Whidbey’s stores with gifts of roasted roots, dried fish, venison, and fresh water, and the crew made to depart. But as it turned out, the point declined into a long sandbar. The outgoing tide had left the ship stranded in mud. With the ready help of the locals, the ship was pushed out to where the water took it.
True to form, Vancouver later named the deep cove where his lieutenant had anchored after a friend, a grandson of William Penn of Pennsylvania fame.
2008
Maybe, I thought later, our mistake was tempting some obscure power by trying for too much reality. We had dared to construct a life together, really together, in the same place on the map. We had made it legal, signed documents, bought property, planned a future. But the great cosmic clown revealed itself. Bob’s death whipped off the façade of a new life and left me to my old sense of destiny. I was not to be allowed not to be alone. From childhood I had known that isolation was my script, that I was in some essential way singular. Now this cataclysm had only reinforced it. A griever is an island.
The world contracted sharply. I reined in my mind lest it wander back to the river and the panic rise again like vomit. I curtailed my life, my movements and contacts. I became insular.
The landscape of time was likewise circumscribed. I couldn’t bear to think back to a world with Bob in it; the details of his body, his habits, our times were torturous to recall. Forward was equally dreadful: I had imagined a companionate final chapter; now a wasteland stretched ahead, with nothing waiting. Typically given to regr
et and worry, now I found myself assertively inhabiting the present moment. Anywhere else was uninhabitable. So for two years, as the initial trauma wore off, I occupied the here and the now as much as possible. I didn’t travel. I did my job and came home, dragging grief behind me like a sack of rocks. I tried to turn my new residence in the present to some advantage, and it worked: I found myself more able to respond to the needs of my students and others than I had before. Life felt meager and sad and manageable. And time went past me.
1792
Further north, on June 7, Joseph Whidbey spotted a “very narrow and intricate channel, which . . . abounded with rocks above and beneath the surface of the water.” Expecting a dead end, he carefully navigated the tricky waters as they narrowed between rock walls. And then the channel opened and he saw he was wrong: he had reached the top of a long, thin island. He took this information back to the Discovery, and in return, Vancouver christened the island after his lieutenant. With the pioneer conqueror’s readiness to see the landscape as a willful, untrustworthy opponent, he dubbed the channel Deception Pass.
August 2010
Approaching Whidbey Island from the north, the road crosses the flat, nondescript terrain around Fidalgo and the Swinomish reservation and then swerves south. Cutting through tall trees, the road suddenly narrows sharply. Without ever having seemed to go uphill, you emerge high above the water. Cars line the roadside and pedestrians wander the sides of the narrow bridge. Far below, indigo waves dazzled by midafternoon sun surge through the brief. rocky passage.
So this is Deception Pass. Less dramatic, less romantic than I’d hoped. It deserves a better story than a British imperialist discovering his misprision. What seemed connected turns out to be separate—really a minor deception at best. Until it happens to you, that is.
Liddy has designed this trip, the fulfillment of the old promise. In the intervening decades she has married again. Her boys, barely out of diapers when I met them, are grown now, two of them fathers. We have both lost our mothers, and I have lost Bob. More recently I lost my left knee, replaced by titanium and still tender six weeks later. Last spring Liddy called to say she was retiring. “So this is it: we’re going to the islands! Tell me when you can come; I’ll plan everything!” In the days that followed, a remarkable thing happened: I felt myself begin to lean forward.
I left my house at 5:15 this morning, 2:15 a.m. Pacific standard time. Liddy picked me up in Seattle shortly after noon local time, and we’ve been on the road since then. She has taken the long way, avoiding the ferry to the southern part of the island. So I have been traveling for some fourteen hours. Jet lag is settling in over the basic layer of exhaustion. As we drive down the island I begin to long for sleep. My knee aches from being in one position for hours.
Whidbey is forty-some miles long and skinny, at points just a mile across. To the east you look across to Camano Island, the Saratoga Passage, and the mainland. To the west you see the Olympic Peninsula and the spectral sierra of the Olympic Mountains. The vista constantly shifts: high bluffs looking out over the water, sweeping gold meadows, deep bays, stands of giant evergreens, towns clustered at water’s edge. About halfway down, Penn’s Cove carves deep into the east side of the island. The cove is famous for mussels; driving around its perimeter you see big wooden mussel rafts floating at the shore. On the cove’s southern shore is Coupeville, where we are to meet up with with Liddy’s kindergarten friend, Bobbi, who lives here. She tried in vain to find us accommodations until finally, a few days ago, her neighbor agreed to rent us a cottage she owns out at the edge of the cove.
The afternoon turns elastic, stretching on and out of shape. I am struggling to be pleasant to Bobbi and her husband as we run various errands with them, but I feel myself zoning out. When finally we head east out of town at 5:30—8:30 in my body—I’ve entered some kind of fugue state. I feel like I’m dreaming. The edges of my vision blur; the sun is too bright. I can barely follow the conversation. Restaurants are being considered. God, they want to go out to dinner. I can’t imagine doing that.
We turn off onto a side road that immediately dives steeply down into a stand of huge firs, fingering the light. Soon after, another left onto one-lane blacktop with a forbidding PRIVATE ROAD warning in red. The sign reads, “Snakelum Point Road.” Suddenly the cove appears below us, wide and bedazzled with sun, and my brain pulls into focus. We’re out of the trees and pointing even more sharply down toward the water. At the bottom of the hill the blacktop curves ninety degrees right to follow the shore, rocky and strewn with big drift logs. To the right is a wide, wild meadow footing the high bluff we’ve just descended; to the left, along the beach, is a line of cottages, nondescript, boxy, close together. We slow to about five miles per hour to pass them. I keep expecting the car to stop or turn, but each driveway is full of cars or kids or dogs. As we pass the last in the row, I see that the road ends at a breakwater and a public beach. I’m confused.
The car stops. Off to the left, by itself out on the very tip of the point, sits a little square house out of another story altogether, a fractured fairy tale. The lower story is covered in dark blue shingles. A squat, dark-gray, four-sided pyramid roof comes down low over the first story like a sorcerer’s hat. On all four sides, white-painted dormers look out of the roof like open-lidded eyes. Many windows and doors, trimmed in bright white. Hollyhocks—red, orange, pink—clamber up the walls next to the front door. A dollhouse, a witch’s house. I blink and stare. I might be hallucinating.
Inside, it is silent, bright, warm. The peace is palpable. The main room, occupying the left side of the house, centers on a tall, shiny stone fireplace. Next to it is a reproduction of an old photograph of a Native man and woman, reading, “Charlie Snakelum & wife.” Through the windows the waters of the cove roll, only a few yards away, below a bulkhead of rocks and standing logs. There is no beach at this point; tide is in and seems almost to engulf the house. The kitchen, lined with windows, including two original ship’s portholes, feels like the prow of a vessel breasting the waves. From the great room, French doors open to a flagstone terrace. In a daze I go out. Across the Saratoga Passage of Puget Sound, Mt. Baker raises its head over a wreath of clouds, reflecting the western light. The White Sentinel, as both the Lummi and Skagit people called it. Sailboats far out. Gulls crying, diving.
I began this day in one world and will end it in another. My sense of unreality, fed by weariness, flows happily into transport.
It is dark when Liddy and I return from dinner. She will sleep upstairs under the eaves; my knee earns me the downstairs bedroom. A queen bed covered in white nearly fills it. Beyond the bed are French doors opening to a patch of flagstones, then perhaps ten feet of grass to the breakfront. The view is straight east, to Camano Island. One of the doors, swollen, won’t shut entirely. When I decide I won’t worry about that, I feel something open in me as well. I crawl like a refugee onto the bed. I am awake just long enough to take in the lights on Camano, the slight breeze through the open door, the sound of the waves against the breakwater.
1792
It’s hard not to watch Whidbey sailing out of Penn’s Cove without imagining the locals waving and calling from the shore. A prelapsarian moment: Europe lands in Native America and takes nothing but food, small gifts, help, and data. Native America examines European skin with interest and probably humor, but not fear or worry—yet. Europe sails away, writes in its journal, reports to the boss. Who reports to his. Maps are made, imprinted with the names of Vancouver’s associates.
Among the curious, generous people on shore as Whidbey sailed out into the Saratoga Passage, there may well have been a child or youth called Snetlum, who would grow to lead his people. Three years after his death in 1852, two of his sons were among the many signatories of the Treaty of Point Elliott, which began removing the local tribes to reservations to make way for U.S. expansion. The point at the mouth of Penn’s Cove remained an important gathering place for the Skagit, imprinted with Snetlum’s
name, evolved to Snakelum. His grandson, known locally as Charlie Snakelum, is buried there. It was, perhaps, a holy place.
Morning
Still on eastern time, I wake very early. An orange ball of a sun is rising over Camano into the pale sky. I get up, push the open door wide, and walk barefoot out onto the flagstones.
The tide is far out, exposing the long tip of the point, hundreds of yards of muddy sand covered with shells and weeds. Shorebirds dive and strut, confabulating over stranded mussels and clams. The sun’s heat is just a whispered promise through the cool air. The water is silky in places, in others rippled with breezes and complex currents as it breaks around the point. The sun casts a diamond path across the waves. Far out, a ragged wooden elbow rises from the low water, strange relic of a mast, maybe, or a long-gone wharf, now a marker of dangerously shallow water. Farther, a green buoy rocks where Penn’s Cove meets the Passage. In the distance, the ridges of the White Sentinel, in shining aloneness above it all, lightly ringed in cloud.
Something on the point punctuates the water: a lone blue heron, on one leg, motionless. Like a dark brushstroke against the morning, more gesture than creature. When it moves, it is with slow, tai-chi grace, one foot down, the other leg bent and drawn up above the water toward its breast, then carefully extended to plant the other foot. Suddenly it strikes like a snake at something in the surf, long neck extending sharply, then whipping back up, tossing the victim down its long gullet. Then stillness again, containment, as if it were there in its splendid isolation mostly to watch the morning break. The quintessence of poise.