So the cause of each wave clearly lay in what Finney called “climatic and oceanographic factors,” but precisely which factors these were was still a mystery. There was a loose fit between warm periods and large runs, and for a while Finney had assumed that this was the clue to each successive wave. Trees grow larger rings in warm years, so that a cross section of an ancient tree was a reliable guide to changes in weather. But when Finney graphed his salmon runs against the tree records, the two lines frequently diverged. He was now looking at the intensity of the seasonal Aleutian Low, and at temperature changes in the sub-Arctic gyre and the Japan Current, to see if he could find a pattern that more accurately duplicated his undulating waves of fish.
Climbing back aboard my own boat, I was greatly excited by what I’d heard: it was like being casually tossed the key to a puzzle I had fretted over ever since arriving in the Northwest.
I had absorbed the standard dogma, that before white men interfered with the balance of nature in the Northwest, the Indians lived in a state of reliable natural abundance. The richness of their art and ritual was often ascribed to the fact that they never had to work very hard to fill their stomachs. Uniquely among Native Americans, Indians on this coast were people of leisure; with their subsistence taken care of, they dedicated themselves to the cultivated pursuit of status and wealth.
The notion had its critics. Wayne Suttles warned of the too-easy acceptance of the “myth” of abundance, pointing out that bad weather and rough seas had led to stories of starving villages in precontact times. But Suttles agreed that abundance was the normal condition of Indian life, broken, on occasion, by exceptional climatic circumstances.
Here was the puzzle—at least for me. Almost every tribe along the coast had a First Salmon ceremony, in which the first catch of the season was ritually prepared and eaten, its remains then given back, reverentially, to the river or the sea. Salmon—fresh in spring and summer, smoked in winter—was the staple diet of the coastal tribes; and this ceremony was generally held to be the single most important piece of evidence about the special relationship between the Indians and the natural world in which they lived, and from which they got their food.
In “The Fish God Gave Us,” an article in Arctic Anthropology, Pamela T. Amoss summarized the details of the First Salmon ceremony as it was described by early observers of several different Northwest tribes.
When the run began, no one was allowed to fish until the first catch had been ceremonially welcomed. Freshly bathed, painted with red ochre, and sprinkled with bird down, the children or the oldest person assembled on the beach to receive the fish from the fishermen. The fish was carried on outstretched arms up the bank to the fire pit. There, the fish was laid on a bed of ferns and daubed with red ochre. Women butchered it, carefully removing the flesh in one piece from the spinal column which was to be preserved intact. The flesh was then fastened to skewers and roasted over the coals. Often hogfennel seeds (Lomatium nudicale) were sprinkled on the fire while the fish cooked. Some groups at the south end of Puget Sound boiled the fish instead of roasting it.
The person officiating, who might be a special ritualist or simply the leader of the people assembled at a fish camp, prayed that the fish would look kindly on the people and return in great numbers. Usually, the whole community partook of the cooked fish, although in some cases only the children, or only the very old, actually ate any. People in ritually contaminated states (e.g., menstruating women, widowers, and widows) ordinarily did not eat any of the salmon. In most cases, all of the fish had to be eaten. The bones and entrails were carefully collected in a basket or new mat and reverently deposited in the river or sea, so that the salmon would come to life again and lead their fellows to the fishing sites.
The red-carpet reception of the salmon-people was interpreted, in every commentary I had read, as a recognition of the spiritual kinship that existed between the Indians and the wild creatures with whom they shared their world. Year after year, the salmon came. Year after year, the Indians paid homage to them, greeting them by honorific names, like “Noble One,” “Lightning Following One Another,” “Chief Spring Salmon,” “Two Gills on Back,” “Quartz Nose,” “Three Jumps.” In Erna Gunther’s “A Further Analysis of the First Salmon Ceremony” (1928), she wrote:
Honorific names are of great importance and significance. That the salmon should be addressed in this way while being cut up, shows very clearly that the ceremony is partly one of propitiation. The use of honorific names is important in a culture where names are high social privileges.
So the salmon were treated as gentry of exalted status—the lords and ladies of the sea.
In the 1970s, First Salmon ceremonies, which had not been practiced since the twenties, were widely revived, under the supervision of white anthropologists. By the time I arrived in the Northwest, they were an annual feature of local TV news magazines, where they were held to demonstrate that the Indians, in revering the environment, were dedicated ecologists from time immemorial. As the Indian never cut down a tree without first praying to it, so he had valued the salmon and sought to preserve it for future generations, long before the runs were endangered by the heedless and destructive activities of white men.
This was pretty stuff, but I found it hard to believe. Some other, more functionalist reason had to inform the ceremony, beyond the desire to mount an elaborate paean of thanksgiving and deference to Nature. Now Bruce Finney’s salmon-population research cast a great shaft of new light on the matter.
In 1792, when every inlet thronged with splashing sockeye, there would have been elders who could remember when so few fish came to the traps that the drying-frames on the beach remained empty; and in times of dearth there would always be old men prattling about the great salmon runs of their youth. Like present-day whites, the Indians assumed responsibility for an apparent steady decline of salmon—who evidently had taken offense at their reception by the tribe, and swum elsewhere in search of people who would treat them better.
Finney’s wave pattern made instant sense of the First Salmon ceremony: the fish were honored because there was a real and proven likelihood that they might not come back again in sufficient numbers to feed the tribe. It also had a very familiar ring. The whole corpus of Northwest Indian oral literature added up, in my reading of it, to an epic parable about the capricious and untrustworthy nature of nature. The regnant powers in the stories—Raven, Komogwa, Thunder-Eagle, Tsonogwa—were all dangerous jokers, dispensing bounty one moment, doling out punishment or death the next.
Now the salmon—the creature nearest to the stable center of Indian life—was being unmasked by Dr. Finney and his team as an inconstant flirt. On the coast of perennial abundance, the steady diet of the Indians could be no more certainly relied on than the sweet temper of the grizzly or the benevolence of Raven. Only by obsequious flattery, with much expenditure of red ocher and hogfennel seeds, and by the exclusion of unclean people, could Lightning Following One Another be persuaded not to leave the tribe and condemn it to starvation.
At five o’clock the water was like glass, tinged with the rose-petal pink of dawn. Nearly half a mile away, John A. Cobb was deep asleep, the slack catenary of its anchor-chain hanging from the motionless trawler’s bow. I was up early, to work my way north against Stephens Passage’s perpetual ebb.
West of Entrance Island, six smoky campfires were burning on the water. Still barely awake, I took an absurdly long time to realize that the fires were whales lazily exhaling into the morning air. The sun turned their gouts of steam to gold. One huge tail slapped the surface, sending out ripples that rocked the boat. I sniffed, but caught only the mulchy-piney smell of the forest, mixed with the salt and rotting kelp of low tide. It’s said that human halitosis has nothing on the foul breath of whales, and I was disappointed that these ones—grays, I thought—were out of smelling range.
Two whale sightings in two days was a good omen: having promise
d Julia whales for certain, I hadn’t spotted one all summer. Now I was in the land of whales galore. At 6:45 I saw another—or at least heard the crash, and turned round to see the great spreading bruise on the water that the whale had left behind.
The boat, quite unexpectedly, was eating up the miles, doing seven and eight knots over the ground on a wayward flood tide that had decided to run this morning, even though we were only two days past the moon’s third quarter. There was no reasoning with this sea. It flouted every rule in the book.
At 8:10 I saw my first icebergs; half a dozen of them strung out across the passage near Tracy Arm, where a receding glacier was continuously calving. From a distance they appeared white, like flakes of snow; closer, they turned an unearthly, luminous pale turquoise—a color much imitated by manufacturers of eau de toilette. The smaller bergs were no bigger than Volkswagen Beetles, the largest the size of eccentric, many-gabled two-story houses. But since only one-eighth to one-ninth of an iceberg’s mass shows above the surface, even the little ones were potentially deadly, and I steered to give them a berth of several hundred yards.
I had long admired R. H. Dana’s eloquent and unmanly description of icebergs, in Two Years Before the Mast, as “little floating fairy isles of sapphire,” and I now saw exactly what he meant. Sluggishly drifting on the breeze, radiant in the fierce sunlight, they were surreal, illusory. They might vanish in a blink.
Over the last two days, I’d watched the light harden as forest gave way to glaciers on the mainland shore. Now the rivers of ice—Sum-dum, Sawyer, Taku, Norris—were coming thick and fast, spilling from the mountains to the sea like chutes of rippled china clay. You could feel the dry chill of their presence on your skin from miles off. Their melted prehistoric water stained the whole sea a milky green.
Soon after noon, as I neared Gastineau Channel, the approach-road to Juneau, the radio began to broadcast live coverage of ram-mings and sinkings, the Coast Guard fielding a succession of distress calls. An excursion jet-boat, Seymour, or Sea Moor, or See More, collided at speed with a chunk of floating ice in Tracy Arm; all eighteen passengers were being ferried to the hospital in Juneau. Next, a gill-netter, Lady Helen, went aground on rocks and was reported by her distraught skipper to be sinking fast.
“South of the lighthouse! North end of Entrance Island!” he shouted.
Another fisherman came on the line. “He’s not too bright. I think he’s off the south end. There’s a light there, not a lighthouse.”
A halibut boat chimed in with the offer of a portable pump. Someone else was standing by, ready to launch his skiff. The Coast Guard arranged for the rescue of the skipper and his mate, while their boat broke up on the rocks.
I wondered if it was always thus around Juneau, and as the traffic thickened at the channel’s entrance I kept a careful lookout for mad captains—the radio was full of them, grumbling and cursing on channel 16. This was the height of the fishing and tourist seasons, when everyone was on No-Doz or something stronger; in the broadcast voices was the ring of mania. I clung to the extreme edge of the channel and watched my back.
Nine miles up the narrowing gorge, Juneau was hunkered down low at the foot of the mountains on the east bank; a huddle of buildings backed by a ragged precipice of tawny rock, like the face of a great cheese after the mice have been at it. The pilot-book told one to look out for the conspicuous governor’s mansion, but that was a forlorn instruction. Juneau announced itself by an oil terminal, a concrete office block, and three cruise liners parked on the waterfront. The ships grandly belittled the town. None of Juneau’s buildings could hold a candle to the many-storied, snow-white magnificence of the floating republics of Holland-America, Princess, Royal Caribbean.
Watching the radio antenna at the top of the mast, I squeezed under the bridge with inches to spare and turned into the fishermen’s harbor, where I found a slot between a gill-netter and an elderly wooden motor cruiser. Stepping ashore with an armful of rope, I was followed from cleat to cleat by a fearless child of Julia’s age, a grubby water-gypsy whose permanent home was the motor cruiser. After I finished tying up, I sat cross-legged on the dock and chatted with Rebecca. We discussed helicopters, her new yellow lifejacket, and the interesting way in which her gobstopper darkened from pink to red the more she sucked it. Long starved of such conversation, I had to explain myself, with some embarrassment, to Rebecca’s mother, who interrupted us when I had just embarked on the final stanza of “The Owl and the Pussycat.”
“I have a daughter, just about her age …”
Skepticism was writ large in the mother’s face, but she receded behind a villainous tarpaulin slung over the afterdeck.
“They dined on mince, and slices of quince, / Which they ate with a runcible spoon; / And hand in hand on the edge of the sand, / They danced by the light of the moon, / The moon, / The moon, / They danced by the light of the moon.”
Five more days.
The Juneau branch of Rent-a-Wreck took their name at face value. My wreck was an old tan Datsun with 97,000 miles on the clock, spongy brakes, vague steering, and an air conditioner that blew a rank simoom wind into the car when set to Cold. But the radio worked. Drifting boatlike down the highway on Saturday morning, I listened to Juneau’s bad news.
Five people were dead, 71 injured, two of them critically. Universe Explorer, a cruise ship on a week-long tour of the Inside Passage, was trundling quietly along Lynn Canal, its passengers asleep, when fire broke out in the main laundry. The flames and smoke quickly filled the deck above, on which crew members had their sleeping quarters. Four of the dead were Filipinos, one was Puerto Rican. Their names were being withheld until relatives had been informed.
The ship was now at anchor in Auke Bay, a dozen miles northwest of Juneau. The injured were being cared for in the local hospital. The remaining passengers were being flown to Seattle on chartered planes. Reports, said the announcer, were still coming in—and were buzzing around the harbor when I returned. The fishermen, who lived on VHF radio, knew everything. Universe Explorer was American-built, American-owned, but registered under a flag of convenience in Panama. This was a sore point on the waterfront, where people remembered the days when only one cruise ship a week called at Juneau, usually flying a Red Ensign and registered in London. Since then, the cruise lines had “reflagged,” re-registering their vessels in Third World countries in order to evade inconvenient American regulations, taxes, and wages.
This was true of every cruise ship I’d seen. While they preferred to hoist a big stars-and-stripes on the jackstaff at the stern, a close look at the transom revealed, in the smallest possible print, that the ship’s home port was Panama City, or Monrovia, or Manila. Under international maritime law, they were in effect chunks of Panama, Liberia, or the Philippines afloat in U.S. territorial waters, and every bit as “foreign,” legally speaking, as any rust-bucket freighter from Vladivostok or Inchon.
There was nothing new in this. In the first pages of Typhoon, Conrad prefigures the disaster that will overtake Captain McWhirr’s steamship by dwelling, with seamanlike distaste, on its “queer flag.” The Nan-Shan, Scottish-built and British-owned, flies the flag of Siam, a white elephant on a red ground: “Length twice the breadth and the elephant exactly in the middle,” as MacWhirr observes.
Universe Explorer sailed under another queer flag, and on the dock people were inclined to blame its misfortune on its Panamanian registry. Most of the ship’s officers were anglophone Americans, but many of the crew spoke little or no English and, not equipped with personal radios, had no way of communicating directly with the bridge. When a hamper caught fire in the laundry, a message had to be passed, voice to voice, from the bowels of the ship to the officer on watch, many stories above, and way forward of the crew’s quarters. The message began in Tagalog, switched to Spanish, was translated into English … and, by the time it reached the bridge was said to be in a state of terminal entropy, too garbled for comprehens
ion. Time was lost, and lives. When the fire alarm was at last sounded, and the dazed crew and passengers struggled in their nightclothes to their muster-stations, five people had already died of smoke inhalation.
News of the accident hadn’t dampened the spirits of the two or three thousand cruise-ship passengers who were shopping in downtown Juneau, or perhaps it had not reached them. Taking a car into these narrow streets was a mistake; one couldn’t move for walkers, wheelchairs, video cameras on slow pan, and people stopping in the middle of the road in order to point out the totem pole, the sculpted bear, the old gold-assayer’s office, the miners’ dissolute saloon. One couldn’t buy anything useful in downtown Juneau because the shops were now “galleries” of gifts and souvenirs. There was a marine chandler’s by the harbor, but for anything domestic one had to go nine miles “out the road” (there being only one) to the Valley.
The Valley was Juneau in exile from its own triumph as a tourist attraction. Here, on the boggy debris left by the shrinking Mildenhall Glacier, people had established an amiable alternative city, whose functional cinderblock architecture and windblown parking lots were calculated to deter even the most resolute sightseer. With its malls, gas stations, nondescript housing developments, and low-flying-aircraft noise, the Valley was the sort of place that tourists came from, not the sort of place they went to visit.
The jewel in the Valley’s crown was a vast and splendid Kmart, with more departments, including a fine liquor store, and more amply stocked, than any I had seen before. Beyond the Kmart, close to the airport, lay the grocery stores, bar-restaurants, law practices, and all the businesses, big and small, that had fled Juneau proper and its hectic cruise-ship trade. The state legislature remained in town, but the daily newspaper, the Juneau Empire, had gone out the road.
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