No wonder that when they told stories to their children, Indians cast the animals in roles of arbitrary and malevolent power. Even small creatures—that cruel joker, the raven; the mink, the frog, the clam—could, if provoked, easily humiliate or kill a grown human. The animals were the ancestors of the tribes, but showed little compassion for their dim two-legged descendants.
Read simply as children’s fiction, these stories describe a world of infinite danger and portent, where knowing one’s place and following baffling rules of deference and etiquette are every bit as important as in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass House (or Captain Van’s England). In the Pacific Northwest, humankind lived on sufferance, at the whim of a great multitude of untrustworthy and intelligent creatures. Tread with care, the stories warn; you are as nothing to the beasts of the forest and the monsters of the deep.
Most collectors tidied up their material, doing their best to squash it into the mold of Aesop-like fables. But in Boas’s faithful transliterations, the strange narrative grammar of Indian storytelling is kept intact—and the grammar is sometimes as interesting as the eventful content. Quite often a story begins with the word “Then” and finishes abruptly, with an open-ended sentence: “Then he drifted down” or “The warriors drifted about” or “He had just been dead when he came down falling from the sky.” Frequently the plot is hard to follow, because things happen contingently, for no apparent reason, the story moving forward by means of a series of bolts from the blue. Just as you think you’re getting the hang of it, a killer whale is likely to swim up and abduct the central character. A bad person suddenly comes into an unexpected fortune; a good and inoffensive one suffers inexplicable punishment. The world of these stories is turbulent and random: again and again, they show Indians as creatures moving through a landscape full of powers—hapless babes in the malevolent wood.
In Kwakiutl stories, masks, and statuary, two important characters recur: Komogwa, the submarine plutocrat, and his forest counterpart, Tsonogwa. Though operating independently, in different elements, they are a perfectly matched couple. Komogwa has a beak nose and protuberant, see-all eyes. Tsonogwa has huge pendulous breasts, and her eyes are usually shown half-closed, as if blind or in a stupor; her mouth is an insatiable O, with lips thrusting inches out from her face. Short-sighted, dim of brain, ferocious, Tsonogwa is close kin to the grizzly bear.
Both of these beings prey on humankind. Komogwa drags canoes under the surface. Tsonogwa, a thief and a kidnaper, steals young children from villages whenever a lapse in security allows her to make a raid. At winter dances, the masks of Komogwa and Tsonogwa were among the scariest, with Tsonogwa letting out her child-catching cry of “Huu! Huu!” through monstrous vermilion lips. Yet both figures were intimately associated with livelihood and wealth. Komogwa presided over his undersea treasure-stash of valuable copper. (According to Lévi-Strauss, the same word could signify both “copper” and “salmon,” perhaps due to their similarity in color.) Tsonogwa lived in a forest mansion stacked to the roof with skins, dried meats, berries, grease. Komogwa/Tsonogwa stories usually explain how lucky, or clever, Indians managed to return from the ocean or forest laden with riches from the ogres’ dens.
So Komogwa and Tsonogwa embodied the wilderness that humans must brave in order to survive or prosper. They were no more given to friendliness than the killer whales and bears who were their familiars. In their carved and painted portraits, one can see bottomless reserves of greed, malignity, and power. They bear no resemblance at all to Mother Nature, the smiling goddess of the modern American preschool, though they do represent the best efforts of the Kwakiutl to put an intelligible face on nature as they knew it.
On that lonely, chilly evening in Blind Channel, the masks and stories made great sense, as I studied them by lamplight, the trees groaning in the wind and the rain hammering on the coachroof. Too often, Indian life on the Northwest coast was pictured as an idyll—the tribes living at one with nature, in a region of unparalleled abundance—until it was violated by the white intruders. Nothing in their own art or literature gave credence to that guilty, sentimental notion. Rather, what rose from every page was the justified terror of living cheek-by-jowl with creatures far larger and more powerful than oneself.
You might go picking berries and find yourself—armed with no better weapon than a bow and a few arrows tipped with musselshell points—squaring up to an aggrieved bear. You might go fishing and find your canoe spinning out of control in the swirls as half a gale blows down the exposed strait. You were constantly made aware of your own physical insignificance by the girth of the fir, the rearing bulk of the grizzly, the crash of the whale, the massive turmoil of the tide.
Huu! Huu!
Komogwa and Tsonogwa were the rightful geniuses of this place.
Early white visitors—Cook, Vancouver and his troop of journal-keeping young gentlemen, Cardero, Joseph Ingraham—all wrote of how welcoming the Indians were, sometimes extravagantly so, as when Maquinna, the Nootka chief, laid on feasts and entertainments for the whites at Tahsis, his winter village. Very occasionally, the Indians tried to attack vulnerable survey boats or small ships like Ingraham’s seventy-ton brigantine Hope; generally, however, the interlopers found the natives eager, confiding, vastly curious, and quick to catch on.
When a four-story floating village of white men came ghosting into view under full sail, it was commensurate in scale to its surroundings. Discovery’s main topmast, with its fantastic cobwebbing of shrouds and spars, stood 120 feet above the water—as tall as a well-matured forest tree. Lying alongside the ship, a canoe looked like a hazelnut shell. Moving silently, airborne, without the splash of paddles, the giant ship was an emblem of human power to match the powers of nature, a dizzying vision of what mankind could accomplish, given the tools and materials that the whites left scattered in their wake in exchange for fish and furs.
By the late eighteenth century, Indians had pretty well exhausted the possibilities of their technology. The artifacts that Cook picked up in Nootka Sound (now in the British Museum) are astonishingly ambitious and refined, when one thinks of craftsmen laboring to bring them into being with implements of bone, stone, and shell. Looking at the red-cedar Tlingit chest in New York’s American Museum of Natural History that is said to date from the seventeenth century, one imagines a fierce struggle between the carver’s soaring imagination and his minimal toolkit: it is as if the chest itself were dreaming of what it might have been, if only the carver had possessed a better chisel.
The Indians needed no teaching. They fell on the tools, firearms, nails, iron, copper, and cloth as necessities long overdue. White ships had barely dropped anchor off the villages before Indians were using iron fishhooks and arrowheads. With muskets (denied them by Captain Van, but standard currency in the fur trade) and woodworking tools, the Indians were at last able to get on a more nearly equal footing with Komogwa and Tsonogwa.
Among the much later products of the new technology was a 22-foot-tall sculptural effigy of Tsonogwa, photographed by Edward Curtis for volume 10 of The North American Indian. She stands on the edge of a partially logged forest, her arms spread wide to receive a gift of property from the family of a bride-to-be. Her body is finely tooled, with special care paid to the realistic musculature of her arms and her blunt, big-fingered hands; but it’s an odd piece of work. There is no threat, only pathos, in her collapsed breasts. Her painted head is carved in a quite different, cartoonish style. Jug-eared, with wide-open saucer-eyes, she stares out of the photograph looking like a shocked Minnie Mouse. Even her yawning mouth and out-thrust lips suggest little more than vague, senile bewilderment. This is a Tsonogwa who has lost her power to hex—who by 1900 or thereabouts, when the statue was carved, had become a harmless folk memory, no longer the guardian of forest riches but an antique figure of fun.
0645. Bar. 998, r. Sky like a grubby washcloth, draped low over the trees. Dead calm. Forecast wind: NW10-15.
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nbsp; In the chill of what passed in Blind Channel for dawn, the blood had bypassed the tips of three of my fingers, which made writing difficult, and gave my extremities the appearance of belonging to someone else’s corpse. Gripping a mug of hot coffee to coax the pink back into my fingertips, I pulled away from the dock and began a stopwatch race against the tide. Greene Point Rapids, just around the corner, turned at nearly the same moment as Whirlpool Rapids, twelve miles further on. By taking the first set on the flood, an hour and ten minutes before slack, I hoped to shoot the second on the ebb, within an hour of the turn.
Greene Point Rapids was a long, straight, gleaming hill of water, where the tide surged through the gap between West Thurlow and the Cordero Islands. Seabirds had stained the cluster of spiky rocks to starboard a uniform white, and the usual foul-tempered mob was rioting over the bonbons cast up by the turbulent deep. The boat labored against the gradient, barely gaining on the beacon where two sated cormorants were perched, digesting their breakfast fish. Seven knots through the water; two, at best, over the ground. The diesel snarled underfoot at maximum revs. Blue smoke swirled astern and came drifting back into the cockpit. The cormorants, hanging their wings out to dry, inched past the bow to the shrouds, then drew level with the doghouse: a pair of miniature black pterodactyls with prehistoric eyes.
I was surprised by the force of the tide as it drove deep inland, but was able to keep the boat more or less on course, with only an occasional sideways slew as it skidded on a boil. The gulls’ clamor and thrashing wings made it hard to read the water surface and locate the back-eddies to the side of the main stream, but the beacon slid gradually astern and the current soon weakened to a manageable three and a half knots.
In the stories I’d been reading, the tide was the most nearly friendly to humans of all the powers of nature. Though it had not always been so: once upon a time, control of the tides had been in the hands of famously vindictive beings: South Wind (Puget Sound Salish); West Wind (Nootka); Thunder-Eagle (Coos and Tillamook); Wolf (Kwakiutl); or the Mistress of the Tides, the ancient hag who held the “tide-line” in her hands and could let it out or draw it up at will (Tsimshian and Tlingit). In those days, the sea sometimes rose so high as to drown the mountains, or withdrew so far as to leave the whole country parched and dying. Then someone—usually Raven, though sometimes Halibut, Skate, or Mink—tricked or blackmailed the tyrant power into moderating the tide and putting it on a regular daily basis with strict limits to the extent of high water, so that Indians could safely gather shellfish from the beaches during an ebb tide, without fear that their villages might be inundated by the coming flood.
It was obvious why people thought the tides of the past much fiercer than those of the present: a bull tide, when the sun and moon lined up on one axis, came roaring through these narrow channels as if nothing short of miraculous intervention could ever stanch it. Most coastal tribes had stories of a great flood long ago, when the sea swamped the world and left canoes stranded on snowpeaks. The missionaries found Noah was a surefire hit on the reservations; one had only to see a spring tide in action here to start thinking of arks and Ararats.
In this habitually overcast country, where a week might go by without a glimmer of sun or stars, the best available way of telling the time was by tide. In Halkomelem, the language spoken at the southeast end of Georgia Strait, Wayne Suttles found terms to describe each stage of its cycle: “flooding tide,” “be flooding,”“ebbing tide,” “be ebbing,” “high tide,” “be just high water,” “low tide,” “be in a period of half-tides,” “be slack water.” The continuous variations plotted the day as efficiently as any clock: one glance at the level and direction of the current and you’d know exactly how soon to begin paddling home for lunch. Under clear skies, the states of the tide could be synchronized with the movements of heavenly bodies—as the Kwakiutl Indians showed Galiano and Valdés the time of slack water at Arran Rapids, by pointing at the mountaintop over which the sun should stand before the Dons attempted the passage.
The tide—calendar was well as clock—mapped the Indian year. In the Pacific Northwest, the two lowest tides of the year occur at local noon within a few days of the summer solstice, when the moon is full, and at midnight close to the winter solstice, when the moon is dark. Both events were celebrated. Families swarmed over the beaches to harvest shellfish during the midday summer lows. On the midnight winter lows, men and boys hunted wildfowl by torchlight. Suttles found Halkomelem words for the seasons: “shifts to daylight” meant the coming of spring, in March, when the big bull-tide lows, ideal for gathering clams, begin after sunrise; “shifts to dark” meant October, when the lowest lows occur after nightfall; “moon tide” described a low tide under a full moon, like the ones that signaled the summer clam-fest; “dark tide” referred to a low in the moon’s final quarter, like the December wildfowling tides.
Afraid of meeting whirlpools in Whirlpool Rapids, I watched the tide as keenly as an Indian. The tables were not to be entirely trusted, especially at this time of year, when rising temperatures in the mountains filled the rivers with snowmelt: the torrent of freshwater, escaping to the sea, could easily overmaster a weak flood and throw a monkey-wrench into the works of the tidal clock. Strong offshore winds or abnormal atmospheric pressure were also likely to screw up the computer-modeled predictions. In the last 24 hours, a fifty-plus-knot wind had been blowing off Cape Scott, and the pressure was way down in the barograph’s bass register.
The scrolled current-lines grew lazier and more indistinct as the flood dwindled to a trickle. Off Lyall Island, eight miles short of the rapids, I could sense the brimming stillness of high-water slack—when the sea seems to draw breath, the land to be afloat on a painted lake. The Halkomelem word for it was xtlúnexam. According to Thom Hess’s Dictionary of Puget Sound Salish, when a story began with an image of water in this moment of stasis—mirror-like, without a ripple—a happy ending was guaranteed. Of these upbeat calm-water stories, though, I hadn’t yet managed to find one.
Within five minutes, the sea was on the move again; thimble-sized vortices slid diagonally across the grain of the emerging current, and the Garmin showed the boat to be traveling steadily faster over the ground than through the water. Riding the friendly tide, with the blood now back in my fingers, I could afford to take time out for a small diversion.
Where does the word “nookie” come from? “Prob. from nook,” opines Wentworth and Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang, in an untypically spiritless shot in the dark. Joseph Ingraham, cruising the Charlottes in 1791–92, compiled a rough-and-ready vocabulary of essential Haida words. The first and most important word on the list was for sea-otter pelt: “nuckky.” In 1907, long after the sea otter had been hunted to near extinction, Franz Boas noted that the Bella Bella word for fur seal was “nukwe.” By the early 1800s, several thousand American sailors—always generous contributors to vernacular English—were using “nookie” to mean something furry, soft, and precious. Captain Van would have gone from village to village, earnestly asking for nookie.
Far to the south, a tear in the sky exposed a ragged strip of blue behind the clouds; and a dog’s-breath of air, from the southeast, not the forecast northwest, wrinkled the water. Whirlpool Rapids, now steaming into view, lay where the channel was blocked on its western side by a bold wooded bluff with an offlying cigar-shaped island, which squeezed the tide into a firehose-jet.
The whirlpools formed at the downtide end of the pass, where the stream of fast water rubbed against the pools of slack on either side. A seven-knot current travels at nearly twelve feet per second—a fierce speed when applied to the rim of a baby vortex whose diameter is just an inch or two. This was like setting a gyroscope in motion with a long tug on a wound-up thread; the spinning vortex grew into a hungry, self-propelling eddy with a deepening center—a Kansas twister made of water.
As tornadoes do, whirlpools wander on wayward and arbitrary tracks that make them se
em full of inscrutable purpose. A whirlpool might suddenly lunge sideways to snatch at a canoe, or veer off as abruptly as a shark declining to accept the bait. Indian literature dwelled on the skittish humor of whirlpools, their taste for human flesh, and their extreme sensitivity to fancied slights. In exchange for a safe passage, they required to be fed. The Tsimshian whirlpool of Getemnax, for instance, was partial to an offering of fat from the kidneys of a mountain goat. In one story, it was deeply offended by a group of young men who not only failed to provide the fat but also tried to smuggle past it an adolescent girl in the middle of her first menstrual period. They took the precaution of putting the girl and her grandmother in a separate canoe, and covering them with blankets, before towing them through the rapids; the whirlpool, undeceived, swallowed the men, breaking the towrope, and left the women safe but adrift.
In its emphasis on caution, respect, due preparation, and the consequences of bad timing, the story might have earned a place in Lecky’s Wrinkles in Practical Navigation. I appeased the charted monsters by offering them hours of apprehension beforehand, by checking and rechecking the tide tables, and by allowing whirlpools to invade my dreams. Going into a tidal pass, I wasn’t above crossing my fingers or touching the wood of the binnacle. On land, I was a hardline skeptic; afloat, something else. I never whistled on the boat. I noticed—with a faint tremor of anxiety—when a Friday was the 13th. On occasion I would’ve been reassured by the presence on board of the caul of a newborn or the feather of a wren killed on 1 January—a custom that led to the wren becoming an endangered species on the Isle of Man, so highly did Manx sailors prize their lucky feathers.
Racing into the jaws of Whirlpool Rapids, doing ten knots over the ground, I was 65 minutes into the ebb and just in time. A big bowl-shaped eddy had developed in the lee of the island, its swirling sides like tar in a mixer. But it paid no attention to the boat, and no sooner had I seen it than the tide had sucked the boat past, out toward Johnstone Strait and open ocean.
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