by Ivan Doig
Swan, I am beginning to think, may wish that Deans still was on the dock back at Victoria.
The rain keeps on—Our situation is more romantic than pleasant—and the expedition hunkers in for another day.
Swan passes it by sketching the stone doctor... a sandstone reef washed by the surf into a form that certainly does not require much imagination to make one think as the Indians do that it is a giant doctor of ancient times petrified and fossilized....
Perhaps inspired by the offshore medicine man, Swan now concocts a salve of spruce gum and deer tallow for Edinso’s ailing back. If not cured, the chief at least is assuaged. He bestows a pair of shark teeth ear ornaments on Swan in return.
The weathered-in site atop Cape Knox begins to pall on Swan.
This delay, and Edinso’s sickness makes me feel pretty blue...as I must pay for every day these people are with me....
At 2 P.M. a schooner on the offing bound south with all sails set...A pleasant sight as there is nothing between us at this camp, and Japan, nothing but a dreary stretch of wild and monotonous ocean...the swiftly moving vessel gave a feeling of life....I am quite tired of this place and long to leave it.
The last of dusk on the Olympic Peninsula. Beyond Lake Quinault, northward along the Pacific edge of the Peninsula, we are passing through miles of tunnel of high firs. The line of sky is so narrow between the margins of our deep road-canyon that it looks like a blue path somehow hung along the treetops. I am sagging from the day of deciphering Swan’s travel, readying for our own; Carol with her better attention to the dark drives this last blackening stretch of distance.
Mapping in my mind as the road slits the forest, I realize that the coast here, off through the timber to the west of us, is the single piece of Washington’s ocean shoreline never visited by Swan. He came as far north as the mouth of the Quinault River in 1854, on that jesting report from the Shoal water Indians that a British steamship was carrying on a smuggling trade with the Quinaults, and he once canoed down from Neah Bay to the Quillayute tribe at La Push. Between, the stretch of shore where the Hoh River flows into the Pacific, Swan somehow did not attain. But the two of us in this fat pellet of metal have, on some tideline wander or another. I think over the fact of having set foot anywhere along this continental rim where the wandersome Swan didn’t, and of sleeping tonight beside a fine Peninsula river he somehow never saw, and the surprise of it whirls to me out of the rushing dark.
Day Seventy-Three
The Hoh park ranger, stocky and red-mustached, recites for us new numerals of the February windstorm that unbuilt the Hood Canal bridge. Here in his domain those hours, ninety trees were blown down across the first nine miles of the trail Carol and I are about to hike. Twenty-two more barricaded the road we have just come in on from the coastal highway. When the wind hit its wildest, the ranger heard seven trees topple within a total of five seconds.
I try to imagine the blizzard of wood, tons of cudgel falling at every eyeblink, and ask the ranger what he did during it, hole up somewhere and try pull the hole in after him?
“Wasn’t anything to do, just drink a little wine and listen to them fall.”
If the Alava trail is a miniature Roman road and Dungeness Spit a storybook isthmus between saltwater and glacier ice, these Olympic Peninsula rainforests, the Hoh the most northerly of four, are Atlantises of nature. Communities of myriads of life which thrive while enwrapped in more than twelve feet of rain per year. Their valleys are fat troughs to the Pacific. In from the ocean the rainclouds float, are elevated by the terrain beginning its climb to the Olympic summits, and let down their water. The moisture produces a whopping northwoods jungle, a kind of Everglades grown to the height of fifteen-story buildings. Here in the Hoh, for instance, Sitka spruce are the dominant giant trees, and they measure big around as winery vats and more than two hundred feet up.
The power and loft of the Sitkas, however, are merely the might above the. rampant details of the rain forest, like crags over delicate valleys. Nature here tries a little of everything green. Variety and variety of moss and lichen, sprays of fern. The fascination of the rain forest is that all flows into and out of all else; here I can sense how the Haidas, whom Swan went among in their own clouds of forest, could produce art in which creatures swim in and out of each other, the designs tumble, notch together, uncouple, compress, surge. This forest’s version is that an embankment with a garden of fir seedlings and ferns sprouting from it will turn out to be not soil, but a downed giant tree, its rot giving the nurture to new generation. Moss-like growth romps its way up tree trunks, and from amid the fuzzy mat spurts licorice fern, daintily leafing into the air sixty feet above the ground. Alders and broad-leaf elm are adorned with club moss, their limbs in wild gesticulation draped with the flowing stuff. So laced and lush is this ecosystem that we walk our several miles through it today without making a footfall, only scuffs.
Carol tells me that these Olympic rain forests and the rough coast to their west provide her the greatest calm of any place she has been. That she can walk in this rain forest and only be walking in this rain forest, moving in simple existence. Surprising, that, because neither of us thinks we are at all mystic. Perhaps, efficient dwellers we try to be, we simply admire the deft fit of life systems in the rain forest. The flow of growth out of growth, out of death...
I do not quite ease off into beingness as she can. Memories and ideas leap to mind. I remember that Callenbach’s young foresters of Ecotopia would stop in the forest to hug a fir and murmur into its bark, brother tree.... This Hoh forest is not a gathering of brothers to humankind, but of elders. The dampness in the air, patches of fog snagged in the tree tops above, tells me another story out of memory, of having read of a visitor who rode through the California redwood forest in the first years of this century. He noted to his guide that the sun was dissipating the chilly fog from around them. No, said the guide looking to canyon walls of wood like these, no, “The trees is drinkin’ it. That’s what they live on mostly. When they git done breakfast you’ll git warm enough.”
For a time, the river seduces me from the forest. This season, before the glacier melt begins to pour from the Olympic peaks, the water of the Hoh is a painfully lovely slate blue, a moving blade of delicate gloss. The boulder-stropped, the fog-polished Hoh. Question: why must rivers have names? Tentative answer: for the same reason gods do. These Peninsula rivers, their names a tumbled poem of several tongues—Quinault, Quillayute, Hoh, Bogashiel, Soleduck, Elwha, Dungeness, Gray Wolf—are as holy to me as anything I know.
Forest again. For comparison’s sake I veer from the trail to take a look at the largest Sitka spruce along this valley bottom. The Park Service has honored it with a sign, giving the tree’s dimensions as sixteen feet four inches in diameter, one hundred eighty feet in height, but now the sign is propped against the prone body of the giant. Toppled, it lies like a huge extracted tunnel bore. Clambering onto its upper surface I find that the Sitka has burls, warts on the wood, bigger around than my body. For all that, I calculate that it is barely larger, if any, than the standard nineteenth-century target that Highpockets and his calendar crew are offhandedly devastating in my writing room.
Evening, and west to Kalaloch through portals of sawed-through windfalls, to the campground next to the ocean. In fewer than fifty miles, mountain and ocean, arteried by this pulsing valley.
Day Seventy-Four
A night that sagged several nights long. Our aged tent, which has traveled as far as Nova Scotia and up and down the mountain west in all manner of weather, never was soggier, droopier. Rain hit the canvas all night in buckshot bursts. Seepage sprung in one corner and then around the doorway flap until by morning we were scrunched in our sleeping bag into the exact center of the tent, islanded away from the sopping edges like a pair of frogs on a lily pad.
Vehement as it was, the rain made the night’s lesser threat. When the wind arrived off the ocean, the tent walloped and bellied, tried to lift us off in
to the fir trees somewhere. All in all as restful as trying to sleep inside the bag of a leaky balloon, and every hour or so Carol and I muttered inconclusively about the situation. It crossed my mind, and without doubt hers, that this might be a repeat of the big windstorm. Somehow it got decided that if this was so the weather would first define itself by swatting the tent down onto our heads and at that point we would face the issue.
More velocity did not arrive, we finished the night damp but stubbornly prone, and then began the drive home in coastal rain moving almost solidly through the air, as if walls of water were dissolving down over us as the car nudged them.
Swan’s own overweathered site, the rainy perch atop Cape Knox, he concludes to leave on the morning of the seventeenth of August, even if it means abandoning the journey down the western coastline.
I told Edinso if he did not feel better I would return to Masset. He said if he went back it would be as bad as if he goes on and he thought my spruce salve had done his back good.
On they go.
11:30 A.M. ...we passed Salsthlung point and passed Natzun Bay into which three small streams empty, but there are no Indian settlements ancient or modern. Saw a school of whales rolling and blowing.
2:20 P.M. ...we reached Kle-ta-koon point, near which there is a snug harbor inside the reef. On the shore is the summer residence of the otter hunters, a cluster of houses forming a little village called Tledso but at present unoccupied: a narrow rift...not over twenty feet wide, formed the dangerous and only passage for canoes and boats.
Bouncing through the reef-cut—you can all but hear Swan praying to the cobbled bottom of the canoe to hold together—they came out in a quiet little harbor as smooth as a mill pond. A placid bayside site also notable for being almost empty of birds: a solitary raven, two or three sparrows and a few sea gulls. Swan, old combatant of crows, edgily jots that the quiet can only be too good to last. As soon as a camp of Indian otter hunters comes here for a jew weeks, the place will be alive with crows and other birds which seem to follow the abode of man, like nettles, sorrel and other noxious weeds.
Storm returns the next day, heavy surf, strong wind.
Swan spends the time packing his alcoholic specimens of fish—they have been adding up steadily in the diaries, cuttlefish, sticklebacks, rock cod, buffalo sculpine, viviparous perch, young octopus—in one large tin tank in a wooden box.
The rain that night turns tremendous. Fearful, Swan records. The morning, the nineteenth of August, promises no better.
We are now 13 days from Masset and have advanced but fifty miles and at this rate we cannot reach Skidegate in three months and all our provisions will get exhausted.
The weather, the wild broth of the North Pacific, is proving too much.
Beside the campfire at Kle-ta-koon Swan must weigh risks one more time. Chance more of the whistling weather, more canoe peril, or cancel this bravura journey and any further exploration of the west shore of the Queen Charlottes.
He is a man who knows that life is no walk-through: that just now is his single try at this last frontier edge. But he knows too (veteran of all those tumbles by alcohol and that so-frequent slippage of his finances) that defeat will happen when it wants to.
Catch the moment with me, juggle its mood down through the typewriter to waiting paper, say with surety what you-as-Swan decide this rainswept night. Slippery item, surety.
Swan unpockets a diary and writes retreat.
Edinso’s canoe is an old one and unsafe to proceed with so much weight in her, and prudence dictates a return as soon as the wind abates....On consulting with Mr. Deans have decided to return to Massett where I can leave some of my heavy articles and proceed to Skidegate...by the east side of the island.
Day Seventy-Five
A warm rainy morning, a borrowing from April-to-come. The rain makes fine, fine streaks, scarcely larger than spider’s web, against the evergreens. As I began today’s brief visit to the typewriter and diary pages, the day till now spent thinking of Swan at his point of decision, of how it is when a dream at last denies itself to you, a jay went past the window like a blue spear.
One last spurt of—anguish? disgust?—in Swan’s Queen Charlottes pages. I can’t understand this weather with the Barometer so well up.
Edinso announces his own baleful theory. Our present ill luck is occasioned by Mr Deans stirring up the remains of the old sl{aga or doctor back at Yakh nine days before.
Day Seventy-Six
Monday, the twentieth of August 1883. As Swan packed his tin bins of fish for the retreat to Masset, I heard the report of a gun, and...an Indian named Kanow arrived....He has come to hunt sea otter and will return to Masset as soon as he hills any.
Double luck has just blown in.
Swan looks from his heavy fish tanks to the canoe of the arrivee. If...Amiably, Kanow agrees; he will cargo Swan’s load of specimens back to Masset with him.
Next the sky, which this morning has been gradually less malevolent.
Swan waits, waits.
With one last northwest gust the wind and rain whirl away.
Swan sits under sunshine for the first time in a couple of hundred hours and begins to write the reversal of the Queen Charlottes’ defeat of him.
This unexpected arrival and the relieving of our canoe of the weight of the case of specimens which weighs as much as a barrel of beef—nearly three hundred pounds, he noted elsewhere—will make our canoe much lighter and as the Indians have been at work repairing her today, I hope we can make a start tomorrow early if the wind is fair. I have told Johnny to cook enough this evening so that we shall not have to go ashore tomorrow until we camp for the night.
Broke camp and started at 5.20 AM, the twenty-first of August—south toward Skidegate Channel. If Swan’s penciled entries in the pocket diary could take on the color of mood they should here go green with hope. The closest they can come is to speak in spurts, this day’s journey a series of notations of shoreline points and rock formations zipped past, much seen but little investigated. Swan has his mind strictly on speed, and the mended and lightened canoe glides on and on until at sundown we landed on Hippa Island. By far the lengthiest day of advance, this stopless one: more than thirty miles, with about the same distance yet to go to reach the entrance of Skidegate Channel. Swan and Deans after a hearty supper plop to bed with the good-night assurance from Edinso that they are the first white men to sleep on Hippa.
Deans might have foregone the honor. Their tents had been pitched in a patch of cow parsnips and by morning the odor sickened him. However a cup of strong coffee made him feel better and Swan, not noticeably sympathetic to Deans’s quimsy stomach, rapidly marshals everybody into the canoe again.
They have very nearly paddled to Skidegate Inlet in late morning when mist shut down thick and the rain commenced ...Edinso knowing of a camping ground at a place called Tchuwa, we pulled and paddled, now against wind and tide and finally made a landing at 1 P.M. on a pebbly beach composed of paving stones and shingle and so steep that one could hardly climb to the top which from the landing to the summit is at least a hundred feet.
Struggling to the top they find a tent site under large evergreens, a perfect ground in any Country but such a rainy one.
Swan sought out a small dry cave, sat down and wrote these notes....There was progress to report to himself: did pretty well today.... But that night, a severe attack of neuralgia in my head which induced me to retire after taking my 9 o’clock, meteorological readings....
He sleeps until seven the next morning, which approaches midafternoon in his traveling habits, and arose refreshed and feeling unusually bright which I attributed to the healthful influence of the fragrant spruce boughs which formed the pound-work. of my couch.
Good health seems rampant: Deans is unnauseated and Edinso’s back is better. Indeed, the chief arises so jovial that he related many anecdotes and incidents of his early life. His main tale of the day was of how he had discovered the gold—white st
ones—which set off the Gold Harbor rush on the west coast o£ Moresby Island in 1849. Swan, who as early as North Island noted of Edinso that I find him rather inclined to romance, and listen to his stories cum grano salis, later learns that this historic prospecting was performed by another Haida. A Munchausen-ism, he dutifully edits here into Edinso’s fable.
The day’s only woe is the weather, which grabs them again. The rain beat through the tent in a fine mist like an umbrella under an eave gutter...while a small brooklet found its way under my bed.
As the soggy canoe party sits out the hours around the campfire, a stone explodes in the blaze. Swan guesses the detonation caused by water in a cavity of the stone which converted into steam. Not so the Edinso version: it was the Spirits who were angry and had made the recent bad weather. He then threw a quantity of grease and some tobacco in the fire as a sort of peace offering.
Swan makes an offertory of his own by stenciling a marker displaying the following legend.
James G Swan US National Museum & US Fish Commission Washington DC with James Deans Indian Department Victoria BC Camped here Aug 23, 24. 25. 1883 Edinso chief of Massett Captain of canoe Johnny Kit Elswa Skilla Tsatl Kundai Hanow SelaKootKung crew of canoe