Dungeness

by Polinsky, Karen;

  “Sammon”—as these fish are called in Chinook trade jargon—hatch in freshwater, mature in the current of the rivers, and journey to the saltwater where they grow large, at last returning to the site of their birth to spawn and die. The eggs, implanted in the shallows, are called redds. One fish may bury up to 8,000 of these waxy pearls. When the alevins escape their transparent sacs, and grow bigger than a pine needle floating, they are called fingerlings. One year later, after they have fully matured, the salmon fry begin their journey to the ocean. This adventure lasts three to five years, after which these fish return to the gravel of their birth to die.

  How do these fish negotiate the currents and tides of an average distance of 1,000 miles, or sometimes three times that? Some claim the salmon use their sense of smell to find their way, or, perhaps, taste the water. Others insist that these fish navigate by the stars.

  In the Land of the Salmon People

  On the Dungeness River lived a youthful warrior, a seer, who had received his powers from the Winter Ceremony. He wore a cedar band, dyed red. He carried a stick with a leather string and a sharp bone. If someone teased him, he stropped that person with his weapon. That did it: he or she stopped laughing.

  One time, an old Indian told him, “An old salmon never dies but instead returns to the place where he started.”

  Curious, the young man hiked up the Dungeness River, where the fish spawn. There, he discovered a worn-out salmon. The young man lifted up the fish and cradled it in his lap. He removed his cedar headband and tied it around the old salmon’s tail. Sure enough, the next autumn, when the youth returned to the river, he noticed a leaping fish, its sides a reflection of the rainbow, with twined cedar round its tail. Suddenly, the young man knew the old story was true.

  All the people came to see the fish.

  The young man warned them, “If you see a fish with cedar bark wrapped around its tail, don’t touch it. Let it be.”

  The following fall, the youth again went up river to see the fish spawn. This time, the old salmon, in the last throes of its life, spoke up.

  The fish said, “Get ready. This time, we’re going to take you with us.” Instantly, the astonished youth found himself inside the river, thrown up and thrust down against the current. At last, he arrived in the Land of the Salmon. Here, he wandered. This wide-eyed warrior met all types: humpbacks, silvers, kings, and dog salmon with crooked eyes. He realized there exist as many types of fish as there are Indian nations.

  The next autumn he returned to Dungeness. He looked okay, but something was not right. He felt dizzy; he couldn’t stand up. On the bank of the Dungeness River he kneeled. The people gathered round him.

  He announced, “I have been to the Land of the Salmon. The chief salmon told me to tell you this: When you catch a fish, don’t toss it down. Cut it up on top of a cedar mat. After you eat the fish, throw the bones in the water. As you do this, say, ‘Thank you, salmon.’ If you do these things, the salmon will always come back.”

  My life is over, the young man realized.

  His body was too weak to sustain him. He knew he was finished. He died, but the people still tell his story. As long as they remember, the fish will return.

  Part 3

  Zones In-Between

  Fresnel lens used at the Dungeness Light Station from 1857-1976.

  17

  Leaving Dungeness

  c. 1889

  And so I became a Transcendentalist.

  And a truant.

  Really, what’s the difference?

  Actually, I never decided to stop going to school. Each day I set off with the best of intentions. Somehow, along the way, I was waylaid by an impulse. On good days I followed the shore. When the shimmering rain turned from grey to green to white, I stayed dry exploring the forest. One day I hiked for most of the day, following the Gray Wolf River to Moose Lake, another to Sequim Bay where I mingled on the mudflats with starfish and migrating terns. I even considered an overland journey to the New Dungeness Light Station but then ruled it out. It would take two to three hours wobbling over the rocks at high tide to get there. Plus, without the cover of trees, the stately fir, shimmering alder and blushing swamp maples, my father in his fishing boat might see me, which would put an end to freedom.

  In late October, on a trip to sell our goods in Port Townsend, Carl chanced upon an acquaintance, the bereaved Episcopal minister Paul Mathieson. His feeble daughter Edith needed a girl. The labor shortage was widespread; a servant that could do it all for the pay of a scullery maid was not easy to find. Though Mathieson had never even seen me, he offered me the job. Carl accepted on the spot. Later, he suffered doubts, but Carl could not go back on his word. White or Indian, in the wilderness or in the city, a deal is a deal. A man’s word is his oath.

  No one asked me.

  I dropped my traveling case down into the cradle of Jake Cook’s canoe, wedged in between the bloated baskets overfilled with potatoes, mollusks, and goat cheese for the market in Port Townsend. First, Carl would deliver supplies to the lighthouse, where we would stay overnight. The next day, Jake and George would paddle the canoe to the farmer’s market in Port Townsend.

  Like crows on a drift log, my family had gathered to see me off. Annie looked out at the white sky and remarked to no one in particular, “She never received her Indian name. Up north to the potlatch on Village Island, they still perform the Winter Ceremony. Millie should go there.”

  My father, rearranging the bundles inside the canoe, paused, and stood tall to glare at her. “Don’t you get it? Are you stubborn, or stupid? That’s why I’m sending her away.” He tugged at his beard and added, “Damn it.”

  Seya asked, “Why wasn’t she baptized?”

  No one seemed pleased. Carl openly regretted his decision. Annie stared at me with sad tired eyes and looked away. Seya, like a bauble-eyed bottom feeder, a flounder or a halibut, stared at me sideways. Sensing disaster, Charley molded himself to me like a starfish on a piling. Seya and Annie embraced me. Even baby Julia reached out her spread fingers. Eight arms lifted me up on my toes, blistered from the shiny boots purchased with cash from the city. The traveling ensemble, altered from the cast-offs of a neighbor lady who hired Annie to do laundry, chaffed my skin and my heart.

  Of course it was my fault. If Carl found it necessary to banish me, it was because I had let him down. Humiliated, I climbed into the canoe, and seated myself behind the thwart, and hunkered down in between the baskets. With false cheer I waved.

  George, prying the mud with his tapered paddle, remarked, “Lucky you. For getting out of here.”

  That undid me.

  As the salt pillar of women and children melted into the weepy fog, I began to cry, gently at first, until, all at once, the tears stormed. The minute I left this place, I would become a stranger, even to myself. What hurt most: it was Carl, the one who called me “the pearl of Ostrea Lurida,” who had exiled me. Proud of me, or so he claimed; then why did he want me to change into someone else? If my own family rejected me, how would I succeed with the Reverend’s ailing daughter?

  As I sobbed, the gentle rhythmic sounds all around me—the slap of the paddle against the shushing water in the rising fog—gradually consoled me. By the time I had stopped crying long enough to look back, my grandmother and Annie had piled a heap of charred firewood on the smoking sand.

  Steamboat Girl

  S’Klallam Folklore

  Day breaks on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

  At the edge of the shore, a girl, ten years old, stands erect, straight as a stick. She sheds her robe. Frothing up in between the seaweed grasses, the copper water feels almost tepid. Elated, she leaps and dips.

  Reemerging, in between her feet she notices a stick. Her feet begin to stamp out a rhythm on the hard sand. The stick keeps time in the air.

  Instantly, she freezes.

  From out of the belly of Mount Baker, a steamer appears. The churning monster advances, belching black water.

 
; The girl peers at it through her spread-out fingers.

  The moment she looks at it, she collapses.

  Dead.

  This could be the end of this story.

  But it’s not the end.

  This is the beginning.

  Her spirit peels off and lifts up. For a time, her soul hovers, peering at the scene below: At the edge of the water, her naked body, curled up on the sand in a crescent moon. Beneath her, two stacks coughing steam. The side-wheel, grinding. The black stack on top of the ship sucks in the vapor from a bilious cloud. Six seconds later, the chimney vomits out her soul.

  The steamship is a carrier of disease.

  This only adds to her power.

  Not long after, her spirit returns to her body. The lids open; her eyes collimate the light. After a minute, she is able stand up. One more, and she can dance. In her fist the black stick leaps up, like a piece of iron animated by lightning.

  This girl has passed from one world into the next and survived. Now she can do anything. From then on, with the skill and strength of a warrior, Steamboat Girl protects her people.

  For example, in winter a group of children, including a baby as portable as a stick of firewood, disappear. Kidnapped by a fierce tribe from the North. Soon to be slaves.

  The girl blackens her face with fish oil. She tracks down the culprits, saluting them with a SCHWACK! from her bone club. KER-ACK! The sound of her weapon on top of their skulls invokes the thunder. Her older brothers, out fishing, note the surge of white lightning through the billow of clouds. By the time they return, the children are playing a game with shells and rocks on top of their cedar mats.

  That night, in the dim of the longhouse lit by a central fire, the village celebrates the safe return of their children. The girl-warrior dances like never before.

  Next to the smoldering fire, she thrusts her straight black stick into the earth. Instantly, in its place, grows a noble cedar, a center post for the longhouse.

  Her kin, old and young, gather round.

  The girl declares, “This is my power.”

  She adds, “This is my last dance.”

  She collapses. The girl stretches out her body on top of the hard-packed earth. Softly, she sings, hour upon hour.

  Then, she sits up.

  Steamboat girl announces, “Invaders are on the way. They mean to end it all. I have seen them. Stop them.”

  And dies.

  Of course the people believe her. But what can they do? The girl is gone. Her power remains, yet no one is sure how to use it.

  18

  To the Lighthouse

  c. 1889

  Jake and George leaned, dipped, and pulled. The beak of the canoe, a wolf’s head, bobbed. Yet for the best part of an hour the lighthouse remained an unchanged marker in the distance.

  On the sandbar a sea lion barked. Seagulls and terns wheeled and screamed. Once, I leaned over the side and laid my hand on top of the water. A cloud of herring boiled up. If I had grasped quickly I would have held one in my fist. George noticed too.

  Out of the mist stood the black-and-white tower of the Dungeness Light Station. The steely rain towered above us, a seemingly insuperable wall between our shallow vessel and safety. As we struggled to capture the beach, a wave ripped up the shoreline and swamped our canoe.

  Jake shouted, “Jump!”

  We salvaged the cargo, tossing out baskets and rolled cattail mats, dragging them up onto the sand. Jake and George emptied out the canoe and shoved it up onto the beach. Meanwhile, the rain soughed.

  We made our way up to the lighthouse. Hunkering down, shouldering the wind, we opened the little gate and stumbled through the kitchen garden. On the bright green door I dropped the brass knocker, a bearded Celt with a thick brow and pursed lips, homage to the North Wind. As I waited, buried in my father’s sweater, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a bent form with a dark headscarf hunching behind one corner of a little shed.

  Just then, the lighthouse keep William Blake opened the green door beneath the striped tower. “Hullo! Have you heard? The Indian Wars are over. Geronimo is captured!”

  News from the East Coast of the Unites States, and Europe, and even as far away as China, traveling by schooner or merchant ship, reached William Blake first. An eager storyteller, not one to save the best for last, Blake announced this tidbit while we shed water in the vestibule. My breathless father nodded.

  Blake directed us inside past the winding stone stair up to the tower, through a pantry, and into a hot, steamy kitchen that smelled like cinnamon, yeast, and fresh coffee. After we had draped our wet togs on the back of the kitchen chairs, he showed us down a tiny corridor to two small bedrooms, one for Carl, the other for me. He commanded us to strip off our wet things and return to the kitchen for a hot supper.

  The lighthouse kitchen, with bright tile from Mexico and pretty rag rugs, was spacious enough for a thriving household. Blake lived there alone; not due to the melancholy temperament oft attributed to those who tend the light on isolated shoals. His father Henry Blake held the post for decades. After the eve of the massacre in 1868, Blake’s mother, a spritely woman of Mexican descent, preferred to live on the mainland. Since then a generation had passed, and still Blake could find no bride who was willing to pass the long bleak winter on the tip of the spit where the cruel wind still remembered. While the sociable Blake, confined to his post, courted solitude, his imagination wandered.

  While Carl and I change out of our sea-sponge woolies, Jake and George moved the rest of the cargo inside the shed. Steaming by the stove, they stirred sugar lumps into the hot coffee that Blake poured. Blue plates on top of a black tablecloth, served black beans, cornbread, clams, and a smoked breastbone of goose.

  My father asked Blake, “The petition for statehood?”

  “Haven’t you heard? President Harrison agrees. There’s a new star on the flag. Count them: forty-two. In Port Townsend I’ve been told the people are drowning in drink and women. It’s well known, in the Key City, the men never set down their mugs, except to call for more. And oh, the notorious massacre here at Dungeness: that harrowing tale now has an epilogue.”

  I knew from George that Jake Cook, as a youth, had witnessed the murders at Dungeness. Though I begged them to describe it, no one would tell me, not even in whispers. Carl considered the topic unfit for mixed company (i.e. naïve girls and grown-up Indians). But the unabashed lighthouse keeper, desperate to tell, refused to take the hint.

  Blake remarked, “About two weeks ago. I got up at the usual time. On the beach, just over the picket fence, I saw a dugout canoe. Stretched out inside, a fellow of about twenty, in a plaid shirt, with a red bandana. Curled up on top of his chest was a little wooly dog.”

  Eagerly, I nodded.

  Encouraged, the lighthouse keeper went on. “I asked the young man, ‘Who the heck are you?’ He rubbed his eyes, but said not a word. I shook my fist. His dog leaped up. It yapped. I tried once more. ‘What you hanging ’round here for? What? Did you lose something?’

  “The fellow replied, ‘My past. My mother was here. According to my father, after that she was never the same. Anyhow, I need to get it back.’ ”

  Blake paused dramatically. “Suddenly, a light went on inside my head. I asked him, ‘You ain’t Tsimshian?’ ”

  Like sand, silence filled the tiny kitchen.

  I piped up, “Go on.”

  Blake peered at me keenly. “How much do you about the murders that happened here?”

  “About a kilo more than she needs to know,” my father inserted.

  I begged, “Mr. Blake, tell me. You must.”

  My father’s brow flared.

  Oblivious, Blake exclaimed, “I will, I will.”

  However, his account was once again rudely interrupted by the rasp of a wood leg on a ceramic tile. Jake’s chair. Apparently our paddler and guide had no desire to hear the bloody tale. Rather, he’d take advantage of the break in the weather to move in the kitchen supplies from
the shed. He motioned for George to follow.

  But one set of avid ears was enough to fire up the keeper of the light. In the glow of the lamp, his swarthy face looked luridly handsome.

  Blake embarked upon his tale—

  19

  Blake’s Tale: A Cry in the Night

  c. 1868

  In September of 1868 a band of Tsimshians headed north after harvesting. With their pay, eighteen northern Indians landed on the spit. That night, my mother Maria, sat in front of the bedroom window uncoiling her black hair, peering at a dying ember of a Native campfire on the south side of the spit. For a moment she thought she heard a murmur and a wail. Then, nothing. “Do you see anything?”

  Henry collapsed his spyglass.

  “Nothing,” he said, “nada.”

  They turned in.

  “A few hours later, a rapping at the front door.

  Henry roused himself to open it.

  The girl standing at the mat, shedding blood like rainwater, had been stabbed at least a dozen times. He gasped; she fell into his arms. She was pregnant, and ill; her teeth were chattering. He tried to hold her up. She thrust out a bloodless fist, which wretched open to reveal—a gold coin. To purchase her life. Of course, my father and mother refused.

  My mother removed her dressing gown and tore it into strips to staunch the girl’s wounds. At the same time she called out to my father, “Lock the children in their rooms. Quick!”

  It was too late.

  My brother Richard, four years old, standing in the cold hallway in his bare feet, detailed in his waking mind and dreams every detail of the scene.

  My father lifted him up and carried him into his room. He kissed him on the brow, and turned the key in the door. Today, twenty years later, Richard is still plagued by the image of that girl bleeding on the tiles. That night, in his small bed, he did what he could. He prayed—