But the tides troubled him the most. He daily watched the water’s movements, sailing the gig point-to-point, marking tide levels on rocks, and following the passage of twigs on the stream. The more observations he made, the more baffled he was by their meaning. For a seaman in coastal waters, time and tide are synonymous: he plots his day by the predictable rhythm of tidal stages and currents. Mysteriously, these labyrinthine tides had no discernible rhythm at all.
The irregularity of the tides was such that no correct inferences could well be drawn.… In the course of some days there would not be the least perceptible stream; and in others a very rapid one, that generally continued in the same direction twenty four hours, and sometimes longer. The time of high water was equally vague and undefinable.
The essential logic of nature had somehow come unstuck here. In Vancouver’s mental world, the fundamental constants were the stars, the tides, and the earth’s magnetic field; he was at home with them as he was in no human society. William Wales’s devoted pupil now doubted the celestial clock, was foxed by the tides, and mistrusted the compass.
He remembered his seventeen days of incarceration:
Our residence here was truly forlorn; an awful silence pervaded the gloomy forests, whilst animated nature seemed to have deserted the neighbouring country, whose soil afforded only a few small onions, some samphire, and here and there bushes bearing a scanty crop of indfferent berries. Nor was the sea more favourable to our wants, the steep rocky shores prevented the use of the seine, and not a fish at the bottom could be persuaded to take the hook.
Most of the midshipmen were away on survey boats, so Captain Van was at least spared the misery of listening to them prattle about the Sublime grandeur of the situation. He hated the “stupendous rocky mountains,” the habitual dank overcast, the confining walls, the lifeless silence broken only by the sound of water dripping. The turbulence and disorder of this place brought him to an intolerable vision of chaos, in nature as in his own storm-ridden character. He named the water Desolation Sound.
IV. POTTS LAGOON
Like a childhood home revisited after many years, Desolation Sound appeared to have shrunk. In hazy sunshine, its forested walls were green, not black, and its forked paths of water glittered. Yards from the boat, a silver salmon hoisted itself three feet into the air, shook itself vigorously from head to tail, and fell back into the sea with a loud smack. Far from being dismal, dreary, awful, lifeless, or even stupendous, Desolation Sound was a picture-postcard image of rugged prettiness.
In April, the log tows and migratory fishing boats had the place to themselves; mine was the only pleasure craft. But in high summer, Desolation Sound would turn into a vacation resort; for boating families in the Pacific Northwest, it was a favorite destination for the annual two-week cruise. In Refuge Cove and Squirrel Cove, mooring floats were attached to seasonal stores, padlocked now, that would soon be doing a hectic trade in ice, beer, fishing tackle, sunglasses, frozen rib-eye steaks, and Desolation Sound T-shirts. From June onwards, scheduled seaplane flights from Seattle and Vancouver would plop into Refuge Cove, bringing fresh supplies and tourists, in shorts and deck shoes, eager for a taste—however diluted—of wilderness, grand scenery, and whatever romantic solitude could be found in crowded anchorages richly scented with the smoke from a dozen taffrail barbecue grills. By day, the paths of Captain Van’s grim labyrinth would be dotted with small boats, moving slowly—on the foredeck of each one, a lightly clad figure with a video camera, capturing the majestic sweep of the precipice, the awesome plunge of the waterfall. I’d once sailed to Desolation Sound in August, and fled; it was uncomfortably like Hampton Court on a sweltering long weekend.
This was not a new development. In 1792, several members of Vancouver’s crew were similarly enchanted by Desolation Sound. Archibald Menzies, staying behind on Discovery when the survey boats left, spent his days botanizing on the slopes above the ship for the quarterdeck greenhouse. His busy comings and goings were conspicuously ignored by the captain, who would have been gratified to see Menzies and his damnable garden go overboard and be forever lost in the inky depths. Vancouver was greatly irked, when he deigned to notice, that Menzies was plainly enjoying himself in this Stygian, infinitely depressing place. Cloistered with his instruments inside the mildewy canvas tent, Vancouver was enraged to have his calculations interrupted by the merry plash of oars, as Menzies sauntered about in the gig, pleasure-boating again.
Menzies noted in his journal:
Near the bottom of a deep Cove which obtained the name of Cascade Cove about a mile & a half to the North East of the Ship there was a beautifull Waterfall which issued from a Lake close behind it & precipitated a wide foaming stream into the Sea over a shelving rocky precipice of about thirty yards high, its wild romantic appearance aided by its rugged situation & the gloomy forests which surrounded it, rendered it a place of resort for small parties to visit during our stay. On the Banks of this Lake I found several species of Plants.…
Menzies and Vancouver, aboard the same ship at the same time in the same place, were on separate journeys through two landscapes. Their Desolation Sounds were leagues apart. They couldn’t even agree on the weather—Menzies’s all sunshine and shadow, Vancouver’s only overcast and drizzle.
Menzies reveled, mildly, in the mighty cataract and the deep romantic chasm. Tumult in nature roused his fancy. Reading him, one is in the company of an averagely clever university-educated man in his thirties; a lot less interesting than his captain, because he is so cheerfully at home in his own time, as he was in Desolation Sound.
The wooded promontory of Joyce Point, where Vancouver pitched his tent, blocked my view of Menzies’s waterfall at the head of Teakerne Arm. Hardly a view worth having anyway, I thought, and didn’t bother to detour around the point to see it. Two centuries of romanticism, much of it routine and degenerate, has blunted everyone’s ability to look at waterfalls and precipices in other than dusty and secondhand terms. Motoring through the sound, watching for deadheads, I sailed through a logjam of dead literary cliché: snowcapped peaks above, fathomless depths below, and, in the middle of the picture, the usual gaunt cliffs, hoary crags, wild woods, and crystal cascades.
When Discovery was anchored here, William Wordsworth, at 22, was the same age as some of the more senior midshipmen, like Thomas Manby. Manby’s own appetite for the picturesque—revealed in the journal he kept secretly during the voyage—was akin to the manner of Wordsworth’s earliest poems. The young sailor who wrote (in Discovery Bay) of his bark skimming over the surface of the deep, on a morning that had more the aspect of enchantment than reality, would have read Wordsworth’s “An Evening Walk” (1793) with a quickening sense of listening to a new voice speaking in the language of his own generation.
During the next dozen years, Wordsworth wrote nearly all the poems that would eventually redefine the way in which English-speaking readers learned to perceive wild nature. In The Prelude, finished in 1805, he described the undergraduate walking tour of the Alps he had made in 1790. Though the setting is Switzerland, it might as well have taken place in Desolation Sound.
Wordsworth and his Cambridge friend Robert Jones set out for the Simplon Pass, but missed the trail. When the lost travelers found a helpful peasant, he disappointed them profoundly with the information that they had unknowingly crossed the Alpine divide and that the pass was already behind them. Chastened, Wordsworth and Jones began the long descent towards the Italian border.
downwards we hurried fast,
And entered with the road which we had missed
Into a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at ever
y turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
This is one of the great epiphanies of Romantic literature: an intense experience of chaos and derangement in nature, which at last brings Wordsworth face to face with his pantheistic demiurge—a being whom the Kwakiutl Indians might well have recognized as their own lord of oceanic misrule, Komogwa. The tumbling, vertiginous landscape is a place where liberty (the “unfettered” clouds) is barely distinguishable from madness (the “raving” stream), and where exaltation verges on nausea. It is a place of moral, mental, and physical extremity; above all, a gloomy strait, a liquid region in which air (“winds thwarting winds”) and water (the crazy brook, the cascades, the “drizzling” crags, the “torrents” that “shoot” from the cloudless sky) are in a state of chronic, turbulent recombination.
Of the several Desolation Sounds on offer, Wordsworth’s is the one to cling to, for the comprehensive seriousness of its vision. There’s room there, too, both for Vancouver’s mortal horror, and Menzies’s aesthetic pleasure. It provides a human footing in a nature seen to be inherently unstable, whirling, contradictory; and discovers, against all odds, meaning and order, even in aberrant tides and disorienting stars.
This was nature as painted by J.M.W. Turner, five years younger than Wordsworth and the exact contemporary of the Honorables Pitt and Stuart. Wordsworth’s experience on the Simplon Pass is mirrored by Turner’s on a pass thirty miles to the east, where he stopped on the Devil’s Bridge to sketch his version of a natural world chaotically inverted. In The Pass of St. Gothard, the lines of conventional perspective have been canted ninety degrees downwards so as to meet in the abyssal depths. Far beneath the painter’s feet, tumbled clouds are trapped in a chasm. Below the clouds, eagles wheel on a thermal. Even now, in the age of the familiar aerial view from the window of a Boeing 747, the painting—at the Birmingham City Art Gallery—has a dizzying effect as it leads the viewer’s eye down into the crevasse, past the lower edge of the frame, into unpainted space.
Turner’s rock-faces are painted as a geologist or mountaineer might see them, with precise attention to every plane and outcrop. The painting (sketched in 1802, finished and exhibited in 1804) is a work of scrupulous realism, but it also represents that mystical Abyss, the great deep, the primal chaos into which reason itself might topple. It’s a painting designed to make you lose your balance and fall into it, through the circling raptors.
The Pass of St. Gothard was painted near the beginning of Turner’s career, before his obsession with turbulence and upheaval took a more and more expressionist form. In the late, wonderfully titled Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich (1842), Turner painted his greatest picture of pure turmoil.
What one sees at first, from a distance, is a single catastrophic vortex—a hurricane-force wind made manifest in whirling snow and spume. As one steps closer, the vortex resolves into a nest of multiplying vortices with, at their center, not so much a ship as bits of a ship: a defiant mast, a signal-flag wrenching at its halyard; the blades of a spinning paddlewheel; a flattened billow of smoke from a tall funnel. Before these bits cease to cohere, and the dismembered ship dissolves into the liquescent swirl, appears to be only a matter of moments.
Like Ishmael, Turner is escaped to tell the tale. Not only is the title of the picture stuffed with documentary reference, but Turner also said that he’d been lashed to the ship’s mast for four hours, sketching the maelstrom, and had fully expected to drown.
Art historians have pounced on Turner for this. No Ariel appears in the shipping lists of the time, and Turner was nowhere near Harwich when the storm broke. Yet he wasn’t boasting deceitfully of his own bravery so much as making a modest, if metaphorical, statement of fact. In this fictional tempest, the steamer is going by the lead and making the correct signals, while the artist, bound to the mast, is going about his usual business with pencil and sketchpad. This is how the world is. We live with chaos as the encompassing condition of our lives. We learn to work through it. With luck, we emerge from it.
In the “Turner and the Scientists” exhibition (1998) at the Tate Gallery, James Hamilton, the curator, hung Snow Storm alongside Michael Faraday’s magnetic-field experiments, in which iron filings were sprinkled on sheets of paper, below which a magnet, or magnets, had been placed. The filings, arranging themselves around the attractors in drifts and squirls, made vortical patterns that exactly resemble the painting’s composition. The play of randomness and order in Faraday’s experiments excited Turner, and led him, as Hamilton suggests, to the radical design of his portrait of chaos at sea. Snow Storm uncannily anticipates the Mandelbrot set and the fractal cluster, as his iron ship performs the function of a Lorenz attractor.
Turner was 67 when he completed the painting. His courage, implied by his story about being lashed to the mast, was real enough. At an age when he might have taken to his slippers and easy chair, Turner chose to face the Abyss with heroic artistry and composure.
The great early Romantic artists such as Wordsworth and Turner created a basic grammar, in which responses to the wild North American West could be phrased by later writers and painters including John Muir and Thomas Moran. Muir, traveling in Alaska, strained in prose to be a born-again Wordsworth, ravished at every turn by what he read in the glorious pages of “Nature’s Bible.” Moran, in The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, strained to paint in the manner of Turner circa 1800. Moran’s swirling clouds and liquid mountains look like Turner with a dose of flu. The land itself was an original subject—the West outdid the Alps in its thrilling and tumultuous geology—but the painting is a grandiose imitation.
As a post-Romantic tourist, I felt that entering a landscape like Desolation Sound was uncomfortably like wandering over a famous battlefield left over from someone else’s war. That it had been a scene of such heightened emotion in the past only made me feel more keenly my own absence of feeling in it. “Enbosomed in scenery,” as John Muir put it, I instinctively fought its old, mothball-smelling embrace. The tidal atlas advised that here the tides were “weak and irregular”—a fair description of my response to Desolation Sound, as I flipped a cigarette butt into it and made an anxious calculation as to whether I could still make slack water at the Dent and Yuculta rapids, fourteen miles ahead.
The orange helicopter, seen earlier that morning, was at work high in the bluffs on the north shore of West Redonda Island. Inside the steep walls of Lewis Channel, the air thumped and shook to the heartbeat of the rotors, as the machine hovered within a few feet of the trees. Moving with the ponderous daintiness of a fat man on a dancefloor, it plucked a single log from a scarred patch on the mountain, whisked it aloft in a sling, then inched fastidiously down a 2,000-foot column of air. In Redonda Bay, the water of the booming-ground swallowed the log without a visible ripple.
A show-off demonstration—for an audience of no one in particular—of the loggers’ dangerous skills, it was lovely to watch. The fallers and ‘copter pilots, the men on the baby tuglets, or “boom-boats,” who formed the rafts, were precision craftsmen. One small misjudgment of angle or distance could easily cost them their lives. There were more deaths and serious injuries in
the timber industry than in any other except commercial fishing. Until lately, loggers were seen as romantic figures; brave, self-reliant woodsmen in touch with the wild. In old sepia postcards from the Pacific Northwest, the logger figured as the heroic, blue-collar genius loci: a nonchalant type, with Robert Redford looks, in a broad-brimmed hat, perched like a steeplejack halfway up the trunk of a cloudscraping Douglas fir. But since the 1960s, he had come down in the world. He was now more likely to be thought a spoiler and a vandal in need of moral rehabilitation and retraining.
Even Julia, who was down on nobody, was down on loggers.
She came back from her preschool one afternoon, armed with an epic, breathless sentence. “Do you know? It’s bad to cut down trees: trees are alive, and trees make air, and we breathe air, and when people cut down trees, they kill all the fish!”
Reverence for the forest was on the preschool curriculum in the urban Northwest and drummed into the heads of adult newcomers. When I first moved here, all I saw was trees—a thick pelt of forest, denser, darker, and more extensive than I’d seen anywhere on the face of the earth. Then I was told, severely, that this was not a forest at all, but a patchwork of “tree farms”—fir plantations, sown over the ruins of the actual forest, which long ago had been clearcut. I soon learned to look at trees with the critical eyes of a consumer-connoisseur. Second-growth was no good. Only old-growth would do, and it must have a spreading canopy, a crowded overstory, a floor littered with fallen snags—habitat for the bugs and small animals essential to a true, organic, grand cru forest. It should harbor spotted owls as proof of its purity. It should never have been contaminated by the presence of loggers.
I learned to dismiss as fake whole mountainsides. The seeming-forests were not, according to the nature zealots, nature. The birds, bears, mountain lions, and bobcats lived there under a mighty misapprehension, tricked into accepting as real a false habitat created by the timber companies.
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