The Sea Runners

by Ivan Doig

  Wennberg cast Karlsson up a look, though, and fanned enough exasperation in himself to blurt:

  "Karlsson, one more time I hear 'need to' out of you and—"

  "You'll be that much closer to the place Astoria each time you hear it. Off your bottom now. This's as close a tide as we'll likely get."

  By the time they pushed the canoe the distance across the sand to the tide line, both were panting and stumbling. Wennberg hesitated, looked back at the beach. Then surf surged in, swirled up his shins. Wennberg shoved the canoe ahead, half-clambered half-fell into the bow.

  The most wobbly launch of the entire journey, this one, the canoe nearly broaching into a wave before Karlsson managed to steer it steady.

  Straight out to ocean they paddled, until Wennberg stopped stroking and turned to demand: "Where to hell're you taking us? Shore's almost out of sight."

  "We need to stay out from those surf waves or your belly will be visiting your mouth again. I'll bead us by compass the way the coast has been pointing."

  Wennberg could be seen to be choosing. Seasickness, or swallow Karls son's notion of voyaging all-but-blind.

  He said something Karlsson couldn't catch. And dipped his paddle.

  Fog, gray dew on the air. During a rest pause Karlsson touched a hand to his face and found that his beard was wet as if washed.

  Fog, the breath of—what, ocean, skv, the forest? Or some mingling of all as when breath smoked out of everyone at New Archangel the morning after the December snow?

  Fog, and more of it as the canoemen labored south-east. Through this damp sea-smoke the shore was a dimmest margin of forest, now glimpsed, now gone.

  This day, different eyes had been set in the heads of Karlsson and Wennberg. Nothing they saw except the beak of the canoe had sharpness, definite edge to it. This must have been what it would be like to drift across the sky amid mare's tail clouds.

  ... Got to be near, Astoria. All the miles we've come. Can't have gone past. River mouth would tell us, Melander said it's a river of the world, big as Sitka Sound. Can't have missed that....

  In the slim space of the canoe the two of them now were the pared outlines of their New Archangel selves. The canoe, though, seemed to have grown; looked lengthened, disburdened, with a pair of men astride it rather than four.

  As best they could, Karlsson and Wennberg settled to terms with the shadowless, unedged day. Their paddling was slow, with frequent need to rest. In what might have been the vicinity of noon they ate cold clams from the potful Karlsson had cooked the night before. Two-thirds of the total vanished into them, and each man could have immediately begun the meal over. But Wennberg said nothing to Karlsson's policy that they needed to save the remainder for midafternoon.

  The close fog. Somewhere in it over there, the sand haunch of coast they were trying to trace along.

  Paddle swash and silence, silence and paddle swash, Untended, a mind let them take it over. Karlsson shook lus head sharply.

  ***

  Cold clams again, sips of water. Then two pairs of callused hands, resuming paddles.

  End and beginning, land and water, endurance and task; the Pacific's fusions seemed to distill up endlessly, persist into the mind as if the fog was the elixir of all such matters. Into a belowstairs corner of this ocean—the year, 1770—another of Cook's vessels nosed. An inlet was about to be dubbed Botany Bay and the moment was history-turning, arrival of white exploration to an unknown coast of Australia. A hundred five feet long and thunderheads of canvas over her, Cook's Endeavour swept in from the sea, while the black people on the shore and in the bay registered—nothing. Past fishermen in dugout canoes the great ship hovered, and the fishermen did not even toss a second glance. A woman ashore looked to the Endeavour, "expressed neither surprise nor concern," and squatted to light her meal fire. Too strange for comprehension, Cook's spectral ship to the aborigines; in the dreaming, they accepted it to be. An apparition, a waft of the mind. Just so, here on their own gable end of the Pacific, was the fog taking Karlsson and Wennberg into a dreaming of their own. Through the hours it shifted, and diluted, then came potent again; the vast hover of coastline north behind them, Alaska to Kaigani to Vancouver to wherever this was, the join of timber to ocean, islands beneath peaks, tsarmen beside seven-year men, Koloshes beside whales; it curled and sought, then to now: Melander's vision of how they would run on the sea, and Braaf's single stride wrong on tins inexorable shore, and Karlsson day by day finding dimension he never knew of, and Wennberg in over his head as he always would be in life; it gathered, touched its way here in the mind of one paddling man and there in the mind of the other: all a dreaming, and not.

  Somehow the two canoemen stretched what was left of their strength, did not give way until the day at last did. Dusk and fog together now, shore as well as canoe clasped into their cloud.

  Watching how sluggish Wennberg had become, Karlsson was not certain he was any better himself. Thirty more, he vaguely heard himself decide. Aloud, to Wennberg? He wasn't sure.

  Those thirty strokes numbly done, Karlsson turned the craft toward where the compass said shore ought to be.

  "How to hell far out'd you take us?"

  "Ought be almost in now."

  "Where's shore, then?"

  "Just ahead."

  "Maybe that compass's gone wrong, maybe you've steered us to sea—"

  "We're with the tide, Wennberg. Can't be taking us anywhere but in."

  "This goddamn fog."

  "Wennberg, listen."

  "So? You think you can say anything that'll bring shore, fetch it out—"

  "Not to me, goddamn it. Listen for rocks."

  "liocks? What, you—?"

  Karlsson and Wennberg both had stopped paddling, the canoe being carried by the tide, the slosh of surf now near in the fog. Both listening, listening until it seemed each ear must narrow as a squinting eye would.

  But the slosh around them stayed steady, no underdrum of tidal rock anywhere behind it, and the canoe continued to be carried in.

  The sightlessness seemed to extend time, the ride through slosh went on and on. Still no beach, no dark bank of forest.

  They were onto shore before they ever saw it. The canoe simply stopped, as if reined up short.

  Karlsson and Wennberg lurched out of the canoe and sank ankle deep into tideflat. "Muck," said Wennberg as if it was exactly what he had expected. And then they pushed, the canoe asking shove and shove.

  Amid one, Wennberg slipped. He fell from view, splatted somewhere below the wooden wall of the canoe.

  Karlsson labored around the craft.

  Wennberg was elbowing himself from the mire, like a person trying to rise out of a deep soft bed. Karlsson got him up. Mud coated Wennberg's legs and his left side to the shoulder.

  They went back to shoving. Finally the canoe was beyond water and mud. Only then could the leaden men beside it see the forest, a tangle at the edge of the fog and near dark.

  Something of the landfall nudged at Karlsson. But couldn't surface through his weariness. It was as much as he could manage to grasp that the fog had not fed Wennberg and him to the coast's rocks, that they had fumhled the sailcloth and blankets out, that Wennberg already had sagged off under them, that he too now was being let to sink from the day.

  It shot clear to Karlsson as he woke in the morning.

  ...Wrong side. Sweet sweat of Christ, water's to the wrong side of us, how ...

  Water east rather than water west, and water that was not ocean but a broadsheet of bay, miles of it.

  Through the hills across the bay a silvery haze hung, but Karlsson could make out that those bills and the shore forest all around were like the Alaska coastline pressed down and spread: rumpled and green but low.

  Karlsson clambered across the beach toward the tree-line for higher view, turned, scanned fervently. Beyond the canoe, across the broad brown tideflat, into all the blue of water, his search: and nowhere in it, any steady move of current which would mark a
great river flowing out.

  ...Drifted us in, blind as kittens. But in to where?...

  Its scatter of water across greatly more geography than it had depth for gave name to the bay: Shoalwater. A startling washout in the southern Washington coast, Shoalwater Bay pooled across nearly ten miles at its widest and managed to stretch itself Southward another twenty-five. A kind of evergreen fen country, Shoalwater, taking some cons to decide whether to remain tideflat and marsh or to danken into forested swamp. Tide, current, channel, seep, all were steadily at work 011 the decision, sometimes almost within splash of each other. Shoalwater's modest rivers, though, along the eastern bayside, seemed ambivalent. During the sleep of Karlsson and Wennberg those streams had been flowing into themselves, turned backwards by the Pacific-sent tide advancing between their banks; for some hundreds of yards at each mouth, the Willapa, the Querquelin, the Palux, the Naselle were slowly creeping back toward their origins, like bolts of drab cloth surreptitiously trying to roll themselves up.

  Karlsson's eyes were correct. Shoalwater Bay was not the mouth of the great river of the west of America, Astoria's river. No, it still was beyond the southern squishy extent of Shoalwater that the Columbia shoved forth into the Pacific. Four miles beyond.

  Something in Wennberg had gone slack. Karlsson's rouse of him took minutes and when at last he was upright, he looked pale and bleary. Caked mud from last night's tumble covered his britches like scales.

  Wennberg shivered and sat with slow heaviness onto the gunwale of the canoe. "Caught a chill, must've."

  "Here." Karlsson teetered a bit himself as he shawled a blanket over the blacksmith's shoulders. He noticed there even was a clot of mud in the man's sidewhiskers. "Wennberg, get awake. We need to make a fire and try this tideflat for clams,"

  Wennberg sat staring along the rippled mud and tidewater. "Where to hell are we?"

  "In a bay, looks like."

  Wennberg hugged the blanket more snug around him. "Are we there?"

  "In a bay, yes. Get up now, we'll fetch firewood."

  "Astoria. Are we at Astoria?"

  "Not yet. Get up."

  Wennberg still was staring out along the tide line. "Karlsson," he intoned. "Karlsson, what're those?"

  Karlsson turned for a look.

  "Is it? Got to be—" Wennberg was haggard, hung between hope and alarm. "Karlsson, is it?"

  Karlsson still studied into the bay. He and Wennberg bad slogged a few hundred yards north for a closer gaze. "I—don't think so."

  "Got to be! What the hell are those, if there aren't whites here to put them up? Karlsson, this's got to be the Columbia mouth, people here—"

  Karlsson tried to make his mind work past Wennberg's insistences, figure what the thin shapes rising from the water could signify. Four wands of them, like long, peeled willows implanted out in the tidewater, their small bare branches forking to the sky. Standing like four corners of a plot of—water? Tidal muck? Wennberg had the point that they'd never seen anything of the sort done by Koloshes. But if whites had markered here, why? And where was sign of anyone, except these skinny corner posts of nothing?

  ... Still no river current. Can't he the Columbia, this. We need go on. But why four sticks, middle of nowhere...

  All the desperation in Wennberg seemed to be coming out at once. He swayed around wildly scanning the bay. "Whites've got to've done those. Marking off some goddamn thing or other. Around here somewhere—'"

  ... Wennberg, easy with this. There's no ... Karlsson realized he was not saying aloud, began to: "Wennberg..."

  "Karlsson! Give a look!"

  ... Oh Christ, he's moonstruck about this, how'll I...

  "No, there!" Wennberg was pointing farther north along the low shore. "There, there!"

  The cabin sat in the mid-distance, on the far side of where the tideflat made a thrust into the beach.

  Not since New Archangel had they set eye on such a dwelling, a spell of house!essness which asked some moments of blink to cure itself, to allow in the news of peaked green roof, weathered gray walls, hearth, warmth—

  "Those markers out there!" Wennberg, all over himself with excitement. "Told you there had to be whites here! Fishermen of some sort, must be, planted those sticks! Christ-of-mercy, let's get ourselves across there!"

  Into the muck the pair of men plunged.

  Impetus of all the voyage moved their legs now. The distance down the precipice of coast since New Archangel, the pieces of ocean like an endless series of waterfalls, the cold burn of North Pacific wind and current, all now pushed these two grimy men like pebbles in a torrent.

  Whenever lie had breath Wennberg hallooed, his calls hoarse and lonely in the stillness.

  The prospect ahead lensed everything around Karlsson. The cabin yet held back within the dim tones of mud flat and sea grass around it, but spatters of muck flying up from bis boots, the motions of his own arms and hands as he lunged forward and forward, the mud man who was Wennberg beside him; Karlsson was aware of the crystal memory of each as they arrived into him.

  Twice more Wennberg hallooed. "Got to be someone about, got to," he insisted.

  They labored two-thirds of the distance to the cabin before Karlsson could make himself bring out what was wisping in his mind.

  "Doesn't look right."

  "We don't give a fly's shit how it looks," Wennberg panted. "Just so it's roof and walls."

  "Wennberg. Wennberg, it's not."

  "Not? Skin your goddamn eyes, Karlsson, it's right there, it's—"

  But a further twenty yards dissolved the cabin details entirely. All the Wennbergs and Karlssons of the world could have put wish to it at once and still the profile would have been only what it was emerging as. The green roof roughening into growth of bush. The weather-silvered curve of wood, high as the men, dropping pretense of gray cabin wall.

  A huge butt of cedar drift log, nursery of salal atop it. Mammoth chip from this coast of wood, undercut by some patient stream or other and carried in here, years since, by the tide.

  Karlsson swallowed, felt an ache sharpen itself behind his eyes.

  Wennberg stood and shook his head like an ox discouraging flies. "Why couldn't it've been—"

  The way one plods the distances of a dream, both of them slogged on to the huge log. Wennberg slumped against it, sagged until he sat with his back to the silvered wood. His knees came up and his head went down to them.

  Karlsson leaned against the inland edge of the log, propped bis weariness there. A rust was spreading in him. Judgment, movement, both now seemed so tedious that he had to force his mind to them.

  ... Done it all this far. Done the work of the world. Can't end here. Oughtn't. Need to see how...

  Karlsson made his feet turn until he was viewing north along the bay edge.

  ... Bay and bay and more of it. Got to be a mouth there somewhere. Over those dunes. Find it, figure...

  "Wennberg. Wennberg, we need go for a look. Just over there. Find how to get the canoe out of here."

  "No use to it." The blacksmith's tone was muffled, head still to his knees. "No use," he droned. "Just more muck."

  "The bay mouth. Need to see what it's like."

  "No."

  "It's our only way out of here."

  Wennberg did not answer.

  "You'll stay here to the log, then." Karlsson tried to focus instruction. "Just where you are."

  ... He goes off into the mire and tide catches him, there'll be his end. Ironhead he is, but not that. Doesn't deserve that....

  "Wennberg! Wennberg, hear me! You'll stay to the log. Ave?"

  "Stay—" agreed the muffled voice.

  Karlsson aimed inland, off the mud of the tideflat. When he reached sand and made bis turn north, now he was wallowing through dune grass high as his waist.

  ... Maps, we'd know. Could see to the place Astoria, on them. But we'd still be in here....

  He pushed the grass aside as he trudged, until he felt its sharpnesses biting at his
hands. To stop the stabs he brought his hands up and in, put his elbows out, woodsman's habit against brush.

  ... Step it off. Like pacing where the tree'll fall....

  The whetted grass was on all sides of him now, color of a faded rye field, lines of these sown dunes rolling parallel with the bay.

  ...Guts are out of Wennberg. Someway get him on his feet, get us out....

  Whiteness stroked up into the sky, in a slow strong swim passed before Karlsson, Two yellow eyes estimated him harshly.

  The snowy owl flapped far into the dunes before perching again.

  Karlsson tramped on north until it came through to him that the footing was wavering, creeping in front of him, A slow crawl like tan snakes: sand blowing in ropy slinking patterns. He was out of the dune grass. Water lay a meadow's width in front of him.

  Now at water edge. Beautiful blue.

  Peering out into the bay entrance which the fog had poured them through.

  Squinted to be sure of what he was seeing.

  Instead of surf stacking against the shore three and four and five deep as had been happening all along this coast, here the waves flowed and flowed, breaking into the bay as if in stampede. They flashed, right, left, and before, across the entire neck of entrance. A mile-breadth of whitecaps.

  Karlsson stared long at the breakers, willing against what he knew to be the truth written white in them. Even could he persuade Wennberg back to the canoe and they someway summoned muscle to launch into the mud bay, against such flow as this the two of them were too weary to paddle through to ocean. Never in this lifetime. Whatever candle end of it was left to them.

  ... Melander. Then Braaf. Oughtn't happened, either time. They were keeping in life, bending themselves to our voyage. So why...