“Just remember,” Ross said, “the canvas is your very own world. You can do anything you like with it. Use your imagination.”
He piled drift-logs up along the beach, flicking his brush lightly along the water’s edge. “In one stroke, you can make all the little goodies here.” He added a dab or two of white for sparkle, then he was done. “What a gorgeous scene!” Artist and viewers together gazed at the finished canvas: several hundred square miles of dream retirement-and-vacation real estate. Here was a Pacific Northwest in which nature had been spayed and declawed, robbed of all its power to threaten or surprise. Bob Ross pointed with his paintbrush to where the merely decorative forest met the merely reflective sea. “That’s where I’d put my cabin.”
Deep inside the gorgeous scene, I lit a Marlboro and added another hundred revs of engine noise as the boat plowed through the looking glass, past Upright Head and into Harney Channel. This picture wasn’t actually unpeopled, as it had appeared on the TV screen. Looking closely at the ocher, green, and dark sienna woods along the shore, you could see the stilted waterfront properties, like overgrown treehouses, that perched over the beach with enormous, view-hungry windows, their attendant cars discreetly hidden in ivy-clad timber garages. Million-dollar weekend cottages and golden-age retreats peeked slyly through the trees, doing their best to camouflage themselves in the general tangle of Douglas fir, feathery cypress, and twisty-limbed madrona. The native woods had been teased and primped, as if with brush and palette knife, to create veils and vistas.
The snag about every waterfront property in the San Juans was that its chief view was of a lot of other waterfront properties. Since the whole point of this picture was, as the Ross titles put it, Quiet Woods, Majestic Mountains, Secluded Waters, and Evening Solitude, the homeowners had to camouflage their dwellings in order not to damage the illusion. The few bold modernist exceptions looked like pariahs.
Beyond and behind the precious waterfront, as property prices sank toward the lower six figures, the artsy-crafties took over: jewelry designers, potters, painters, quilters, woodcarvers, weavers; makers of wind chimes, dream-catchers, weathercocks, seashell-encrusted bibelots, poems, screenplays, and little embroidered bags of home-cured potpourri. The Friday Harbor gift shops were stacked solid with the works of local artists, many of them in the school of Bob Ross.
The islands—once known for the Pig War against the British in 1859, the pig being the sole casualty—had lately made the front page of the New York Times as the site of the PWC War, a major skirmish in the annals of modern American class warfare. The dividing issue was a jet-ski rental business in Friday Harbor, which provoked an outraged alliance of waterfronters and artsy-crafties, who protested that personal watercraft, or PWCs, as the aquatic snowmobiles were called, were dangerous, loud, and incompatible with the tranquillity and natural beauty of the island environment. The well-orchestrated roar of complaint led the county legislature to pass an ordinance banning the use of personal watercraft in the San Juans. Then the storm broke.
The measure was immediately interpreted as an attack by the middle classes on the taste and culture of the lower orders—of which jet-skis were the metonymic symbol, and the thin end of the wedge. The ban was really a preemptive strike against baseball caps worn backwards, six-packs, hot-dog stands, Kool-Aid—purple pickups with jumbo tires, cigarette smoke, pull-tabs, boom boxes, prefeminist body art, MTV, nose rings, crack vials … The jet-ski operator was introducing the wrong kind of people into the picture and spoiling the composition. If young proles on PWCs were allowed to carve up island waters with their seething wakes, then the pretty artifice of the San Juans would soon be wrecked beyond recognition. The ordinance struck a blow for social and aesthetic hierarchy, and was denounced as elitist and unconstitutional.
As I passed through, an appeal was on its way to the State Supreme Court. I grudgingly agreed that the appellants (backed by the jet-ski manufacturers) probably had natural justice on their side; but I had my own bone to pick with PWCs, and was keeping my fingers crossed for the county.
That morning, mine was the only personal water craft on the move. A car-ferry, too big for the islands, went trundling from dock to dock like a white hippopotamus in a dewpond. In the sheltered bays, a few tenantless sailboats and motor-cruisers rode to their mooring buoys. Many of the waterfront houses had a still-padlocked-for-winter look, their lawns beginning to run wild, their dark windows dead to the world. Out of season, the picture presented by the San Juans was unimprovable. An iconic eagle dipped and corkscrewed on a thermal overhead. From the deep, seals put forth whiskery faces with wide inquiring eyes, and obliging porpoises revolved like cogwheels. I steered through trees, around rocks, past little fir-topped islets, an appreciative tourist in this miniature resort-archipelago.
The charm of the San Juans was lost on Captain Van. Having spotted “islands of various sizes” in the distance, he sent Lieutenant Broughton to survey them in the Chatham. Broughton’s report, after a five-day visit, was wearily dismissive: dangerous submerged rocks, foul anchoring grounds, no wind, hopeless fishing (every afternoon, the Chatham’s crew hauled a seine-net along the beaches without success), heavy overfalls, fast and baffling tides. Broughton lost a sounding lead and twenty fathoms of line to a crevice in the rocks, which didn’t improve his temper. The larger islands were “well Cloath’d with wood,” but this was no special recommendation, given the abundance of timber everywhere else in sight. Even the Indians appeared to avoid the place: during the cruise, Broughton and his men met only six natives in two canoes. They traded them beads and hawks-bells for venison, and brought aboard a live fawn. Thereafter, Vancouver gave the islands a wide berth.
Two hundred years on, Captain Van might have been astonished to discover that the San Juan Islands now came closer to his Augustan ideal of landscape than any other spot on the two-thousand-mile reach of coastline he charted on his expedition. In the late twentieth century, here was a North American equivalent to Pope’s Windsor Forest, abundantly equipped with sylvan groves and checkered shades. Here, though all things differed, all agreed—shadow and reflection, rock and tree, seal and porpoise.
People who scoffed at the tameness of the San Juans missed the point. They were more works of art than of nature; a pleasure ground, a version of pastoral, a cleverly contrived Elysium. Pope’s poetic vocabulary fitted them beautifully. They were verdant isles, adorning a purpled main, where, interspersed in lawns and opening glades, thin trees arose that shunned each other’s shades.
But now secure the painted vessel glides,
The sun-beams trembling on the floating tides
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Smooth flow the waves, the Zephyrs gently play—
Sunbeams were in short supply, but everything else was pretty much in place. Coming up to Pole Pass, a fifty-foot squeeze between great mossy boulders overhung by craggy firs and alders, more grotto than navigable channel, I doubled an ornate gazebo on a kelp-girt rock and spotted a statue of Pan, cast in alabaster-white cement, deep in a sculpted clearing. This was the Pacific Northwest Vancouver had first dreamed into being at Discovery Bay, in his exalted mood. Indeed, he could have been happy in his retirement here; a choleric old sea captain, busying himself with letters and petitions, focusing his telescope on the bizarre excesses of the modern world as it floated offensively past his window. Fuming about PWCs might have kept him alive a few years longer (he would be dead at forty).
The only wrinkle was that no half-pay captain could possibly afford waterfront in the San Juans. Captain Van had long ago been priced out of the land he discovered.
The smell of paint and contrivance faded in the Spieden Channel, where the flood tide, backed by a breeze, ran hard against the boat. Getting out of the San Juans was a lot harder than getting in. I inched over the ground, forcing my way upstream against the incoming sea. Ahead, the Gulf Islands—the Canadian continuation of the San Juans—stood out against t
he long flooded mountain range of Vancouver Island, as dark and shadowy as an advancing storm front. The border ran north to south down the middle of Haro Strait. To reach customs at Sidney on the Vancouver Island shore, I had to claw crabwise across the grain of the tide in the strait, pointing the boat southwest to make a course of west-by-north. Gooch Island and the South Cod Reef buoy sidled slowly toward me at an oblique angle; floating islands, steaming purposefully at around three knots across a motionless sea.
Only five miles wide, but more than a hundred fathoms deep, Haro Strait was a saltwater river of great power and volume. It filled and drained the 2,000-square-mile basin of the Strait of Georgia. It divided the nations. It flowed with languid, weighty self-importance, its surface barely scored by the tribulations of its fast current. One had to watch the land hard and continuously to avoid being swept away north by the stream.
When the Garmin clocked up the meridian of 123°15′W, the boat entered Canadian waters. A subtle boundary, it was not at all like crossing the Rio Grande or the Dover Straits. But the pecked line on the chart marked a cultural fissure that was all the more vexed for being so ambiguous and indistinct.
Raked with binoculars, Canada looked like a different country. The Gulf Islands were shaggier and wilder-seeming than their American siblings. They suffered from traumatic alopecia, with irregular bald patches in their pelt of firs. Gulf Island residences didn’t peep coyly through fringes of combed and scissored greenery, but glared from wedges of bare hillside. One could see the outlines of vegetable plots, with strings of bird-scaring tinfoil; monkey bars and slides from Toys R Us, in splashes of poppy-red and forsythia-yellow; the winking panes of a greenhouse; the brown half-moon made in the dirt by a chained guard dog. One difference was of money and title. In Canada, the foreshore was Crown property, open to the public, which took the exclusive edge from waterfront ownership and frustrated the efforts of lands-end gardeners. Incomes were generally lower, and taxes higher, than in the U.S. Many Gulf islanders were retired civil servants, Captain Van–characters making do on fixed pensions. They lived in plain woodframe houses, not million-dollar retreats.
Nearly all of Canada’s long border with its fat and promiscuous neighbor consisted of a chainlink fence broken, at intervals, with roadblocks. When the language spoken on both sides of it is the same, a roadblock is a very inadequate reflection of intensely felt national differences. The rigid parallel of 49°N, ruled across the western half of the subcontinent from the Great Lakes to the Strait of Georgia, had been drawn in aloof disdain of the topography of mountain ridges and river valleys that might have lent a visible dimension to the division of Canada from the United States.
So this curving line through the sea, a graceful arabesque that ran between the San Juans and the Gulf Islands, then swung east, then west again, out through Juan de Fuca Strait, taking the same route as the ebb tide, was a frontier to be cherished. Here nature and politics appeared—for once—to coincide. Here Canadians could look out on America across a stretch of water that corresponded to the metaphysical gulf of history, taste, and sensibility that, as every Canadian I knew believed, separated the two countries. Whenever I crossed over I met that gulf as an anxious question. Don’t you see how different we are? What do you notice? Often I noticed too little, feeling the Canadian differential more as absence than presence. It was a Canadian fate to wish, forlornly, that America lay elsewhere, across a palpable vacancy, a cordon sanitaire. Canadians ached for sea room—and here, for 130 nautical miles, America was blessedly overseas. On some days, when atmospheric conditions were at their friendliest, the crass, overbearing empire faded completely out of sight.
At Sidney, I tied up to the empty customs dock and reported my arrival on the courtesy phone nailed to a piling. The mouthpiece smelled of stale dutiable items—the fruity breath of a cigar smoker, a woman’s scent, a whiff of sourmash whiskey. They were weekend smells, and two or three days old. I declared my wine cellar—eleven bottles—and was told to stay with the boat; an officer would be with me shortly.
There were no boats or people at this end of the marina. Bare pontoons, meant for the summer hordes, reached out across the harbor like a dozen giant bleached fish spines. Two berths down from mine, a blue heron stood at the end of a slip, its accordion neck folded on its shoulders, a trickle of watery green guano leaking from beneath its tail onto the white concrete. Infected by its air of patient boredom, I wanted to be off among the islands for the remains of the day, not stuck in Sidney waiting for customs. I put together a cheese sandwich and sat up in the cockpit, munching irritably. Twenty minutes passed. An otter swam splashily between the pontoons, unafraid, tamed by fishermen’s tidbits. I threw what was left of the sandwich but the creature altered its course, shunning my American cheddar. The heron went on staring at the water with an unillusioned button-eye. The tide turned. I joined the heron in its tedious vigil, watching the ebb make strings of finger-sized vortices, little cones of turbulence, as it ran out past a tarred piling.
“Penelope?”
“Yes?” I hated answering to my boat’s name, which I’d meant to suppress in this narrative.
Two officers, a man and a woman, both too young for their blue-serge uniforms and black attaché cases, hoisted themselves ceremoniously aboard at the shrouds and came aft to join me in the cockpit.
“Sorry to keep you hanging about. We’ve been busy out at the airport.” “Aboot … oot.” The pursed Scottish o gave the British Columbian accent a soft, owlish, to-whit-to-wooing sound. The past lingered longer in Canada than it did in the U.S., and British Columbians still spoke in lilting voices that had changed little since Victorian lowlanders, from Stirling, Falkirk, Motherwell, Kilmarnock, had first settled here.
I rolled back the carpet in the saloon, pulled up a floorboard, and exposed my meager stock of wine.
“We’re going to conduct a routine search,” said the male officer, pink with bureaucratic self-importance. This was Canada making the most of its sea border. The Americans were relaxed to the point of ennui when it came to small boats entering the U.S. Coming into Canada, I had been searched and questioned several times. Either I was on some kind of official hit list or Canadian authorities liked to make as much of a fuss as they could, drumming it into American heads that theirs was, indeed, a foreign land.
“You are the only person aboard the vessel?”
“I am.” There was no joking with these two.
My accent and British passport counted for nothing. I was in command of a U.S.-registered vessel—a little floating America, an ark, an emissary from the land of indulgence and excess. Through the eyes of these border guards I saw the boat lying low in the water, weighed down by easy-to-come-by firearms, cheap liquor and smokes, pornographic videos, the whole corrupting cargo of American culture.
“Do you want me to show you where things are?”
“No. We’ll find our own way around.”
From the cockpit, I watched them at work, a pair of young proctologists in rubber gloves, poking and probing into the boat’s private parts. One climbed onto the double bed at the front and rummaged through a closet full of socks and pants; the other could be heard prying things open in the head. They lifted floorboards, thrust their arms shoulder-deep into every crevice, shone their flashlights into the dark corners of my life.
I had no contraband, had declared my only dutiable goods, yet felt despondent with guilt and anxiety. I was a wrongdoer, I was sure of that; and these clinical investigators would somehow find me out.
They moved back into the saloon. From the bookshelves, the woman pulled out a row of my own paperbacks and heaped them on the table. For a moment I thought she was going to say, “Oh, you’re the author!” and all would be well. But her interest was in what lay behind the books, their illicit subtext; and here, I feared, she might be on to something. As she felt along the vacant space for the hidden 9-mm semiautomatic or the stacked cartons of Camels, I could pr
actically feel her fingers graze my vitals.
I began to ransack my memory for forgotten violations. A summer night … stirring the phosphorescent water with an oar and raising shovelfuls of pullulating green light, swarming noctiluci. We were smoking joints. What happened to the butts? And, more to the point, what happened to that small, zip-topped freezer bag of grass?
But that, surely, was on the Orwell estuary in England … at Pin Mill. Not this boat. Not even this decade. The luminous plankton, alarmingly vivid a second before, faded abruptly from view.
For 25 years I’ve been visited by a recurrent bad dream. I am the owner, or the tenant, of a warren of rooms in a city that usually seems to be London. It’s a strange apartment, where the dividing line between my property and that of my immediate neighbors is unclear, and they occupy at least one room that is legally mine. Somewhere in this dusty no-man’s-land, in a closet, or buried under the floorboards, is a body, long decomposed. Though not the murderer, I am guilty of knowing about this body and keeping silent, and I’m about to be apprehended.
They were pulling up the floorboards now.
The young man’s face appeared in the hatchway. He raised a plastic bag. Exhibit A. “Potatoes,” he said.
Three large baking potatoes rimed with white mold. Each had grown pallid shoots, like trails of candlewax, searching for light in the dark of the bilges.
“I’m sorry—I’d forgotten those. They must’ve been left over from last year sometime.”
“We’ll have to confiscate them.” He scribbled on his clipboard.
“You’re welcome to them.”
He climbed the companionway steps and started to root through the cockpit lockers, while his colleague squeezed past me and lowered herself into the aft cabin.
Passage to Juneau Page 13