Day Twenty-Four
The Pacific’s sounds climb into the forest to meet us, minutes before Alava Island stands through the firs as a mesa in the ocean. Alava, first and biggest and namesake of Cape Alava’s strewn collection of seastacks, reefs, isles, boulders. Of this pepper-spill on the coast’s map which a despairing cartographer simply summed as The Flattery Rocks.
The rhythmic pound of tidal surge underscores the reputation that, all the fifteen miles down from Cape Flattery to here, and south from Alava for thirty miles more, this coast constantly dodges and tumbles. Boulder formations and Iandforms sprawl random and ajut as vast weapon heads. Drift logs lodge high on the beach like colossal ax-hafts tossed on a forgotten armory shelf. Each cape and bluff seems braced, banked for the turns of winter storm that flow in from the southwest. While Swan lived at Neah Bay, itself an outpost of the back of beyond, the tiny community here was considered the truly remote settlement of the Makahs. Hosett, it was called then.
Carol and I arrive the one easy way, overland from the east, and the route has become more “over” than I am happy with. Nearly the entire trail, three and a third miles from Lake Ozette to Cape Alava, has been built up into a boardwalk of cedar slabs, the size of stair steps and nailed onto hefty stringers. Wonk wonk wonk wonk wonk wonk, our boots constantly resound on the cedar, wonk wonk wonk wonk wonk wonk. The boardwalk’s height from the forest floor puts my head at an elevation of seven feet or so, and I feel like a Zulu clogging along in a Dutchman’s shoes.
“Just like Asbury Park,” Carol offers in joke as we wonk along. But this is not the New Jersey shore at the bounds of boardwalk, but a weave of coastal forest, and because the cedar walkway perpetually stays damp enough to be slick, my eyes are pulled down to it too often from their pleasure of sorting the wealth of green: salal, cedar, hemlock, huckleberry, deer fern, an occasional powerful Douglas fir.
We alight onto the beach at Cape Alava amid a spring noon which has somehow drifted loose into mid-January. No wind at all, rare for this restless coast, and a surprise warmth in the air that denies knowing anything whatsoever about this morning’s winter chill.
As we stride north the mile or so to the archaeological dig, we find that winter storms have made the Alava beach a stew of kelp, rockweed, sea cucumbers and sundry unidentifiables. One ingredient is an ugly rotting bulb which we agree must be the ocean version of turnip. Gulls, turnstones, and sanderlings patrol scrupulously along the tideline, while cormorants idly crowd the offshore rocks. Crows swagger now and again among the seaweed, right to ocean’s edge. Some evolutionary instant from now the first one will swash in to join the gulls amid the surf and make the species seagoing.
The archaeological site has grown to resemble a tiny silver-strike town. Board houses and sheds dribble along the hillside, and then the laid-open ground where the excavation is underway. A difference is that the digging here represents the most delicate of mining, done painstakingly within two-meter squares of soil at a time. Five buried longhouses have been discovered on the site, and the contents of the three opened to date have sifted out as a kind of archaeological miracle. The scholarly guess is that the Makah residents of some five hundred years ago felled too much of the forest on the bluff above, probably to feed their fires; the defoliated slope gave way and an avalanche of heavy clay soil sealed everything below it as instantly and tightly as if in a flood of molten glass. Washington State University archaeologists and their student teams have been sieving the past here for ten years, and the trove of artifacts is to go on display in the museum the Makahs are building at Neah Bay.
The diggers are proud of the site. The young woman from a Colorado university who shows us around says it is known as one of the ten most important digs being done in the world. She tells us, too, details unearthed since our other visits here: that shells of some sixty kinds of shellfish have been found in the longhouses, testimony to the prowess of the Hosett Makahs in trading very far up and down this coast, and that belongings of a head man of a longhouse were uncovered in one building’s northeast corner, the farthest from the prevailing weather and therefore the snuggest.
The dig deserves honor as a North Pacific Pompeii, an invaluable pouch of the Makah past. Yet I find as ever that I am stirred less by the treasure pit than by something almost invisible among the Alava tidal rocks. At low tide, if you know where to gaze amid the dark stone humps, a canoeway slowly comes to sight, a thin lane long ago wrested clear of boulders by the Makahs so they would have a channel into the Pacific for their fragile wooden hulls.
This dragway is the single most audacious sight I know on this planet. Musclemade, elemental, ancient, leading only toward ocean and the brink of horizon: it extends like a rope bridge into black space. Mountain climbers, undersea explorers, any others I can think of who might match the Makahs for daring are able to mark their calendar of adventure as they choose, select where and when they will duel nature. But this handwrought crevasse through the beach rocks was the Makahs’ path to livelihood, their casual alley, and out along it with their canoes of poise and their sensations cleansed by rituals slid generations of Hosett whalers, lifting away into the glittering Pacific.
The archaeology student mentioned Swan as we toured the dig, saying that a good deal of what is known about the Makahs’ whaling implements was learned from the descriptions he wrote. The words of his that interest me today, however, begin in his diary on July 22 of 1864, when he commenced a trip for Hosett and the lake said by the Indians to be back from Hosett village. As we retrace our steps inland to Lake Ozette we will be on Swan’s route, and the Makahs of the time assured him that he was the first white man ever to see Lake Ozette.
That may have been native blarney, but the known history of the Alava coast testifies for it. In the journals of the seagoing explorers I have found no record of longboats rowing in to reconnoiter this unnerving rock-snaggled stretch of shore. In July of 1785 at the mouth of the Hoh River, twenty-five miles south of here, the Spaniard Bodega y Quadra did send in from his schooner a boat crew of seven men to fill water casks. The waiting Indians killed five, and two drowned in terror in the surf.
The Lake Ozette corner of the Peninsula was to remain undisturbed until white settlers arrived to its shores—inland from Alava, along the trail Swan walked thirty years earlier—in the 1890s. Their homesteads never really burgeoned and the lake even now remains remote, lightly peopled. Carol and I once hiked in to the southern end of Lake Ozette by a little-used trail to camp overnight. The solitude was total except for hummingbirds buzzing my red and black shirt.
Now, with a last memorizing look toward the beach and the Makah canoeway, to Ozette again. Swan’s exploration on that day in 1864 we begin to duplicate with eerie exactness. The trail commences a short distance south of the village and runs up to the top of the hill or bluff which is rather steep and about sixty feet high. So the route still climbs. From the summit we pro-ceeded in an easterly direction through a very thick forest half a mile and reached an open prairie which is dry and covered with fern, dwarf sallal and some red top grass, with open timber around the sides. The very grass seems the same. From this prairie we pass through another belt of timber to another prairie lying in the same general direction as the first but somewhat lower and having the appearance of being wet and boggy. This was covered in its...lower portions with water grass and thick moss which yielded moisture on the pressure of the feet. Step from the boardwalk and drops of moisture from James Swan’s pen distill on our boots.
By now this second of the twin prairies possesses a name, and some winsome history. Maps show the eyelet in the forest as Ahlstrom’s Prairie, where for fifty-six years Lars Ahlstrom led a solitary life as one more outermost particle of the American impulse to head for sunset. Through nearly all the decades of his bachelor household here, Ahlstrom’s was the homestead farthest west in the continental United States.
Originally, which is to say within the first few dozen days after his arrival in 1902, Ah
lstrom built himself a two-room cabin close beside the Ozette to Alava trail. That dwelling burned in 1916 and he lived from then on in the four-room structure which still stands, thriftily but sturdily erected with big tree stumps as support posts for its northwest and northeast corners, a few hundred yards from the trail.
Even now as Carol and I whap through the brush to this latter-day cabin, all signs are that Ahlstrom kept a trim, tidy homestead life. In his small barn on the route in, the window sills above a workbench are fashioned nicely into small box-shelves. At the cabin itself the beam ends facing west into the prevailing weather are carefully masked with squares of tarpaper. Inside, when Ahlstrom papered the cabin walls with newspapers, he wrapped around the pole roofbeams as well, a fussy touch that I particularly like. Summers in Montana when I worked as a ranch hand I spent time in bunkhouses papered this way, and neatness made a difference. Always there would be interesting events looming out at you—ROOSEVELT ORDERS BANK HOLIDAY or U.S. GUNBOAT PANAY SUNK BY JAPANESE—or some frilly matron confiding the value of liver pills, and the effect was lost if the newsprint had been slapped on upside down or sideways.
This rainbelt homestead of Ahlstrom’s never quite worked out. Regularly he went off into the Olympic Mountains on logging jobs and other hire to earn enough money to survive the year. On the other hand, the homestead went on never quite working out for five and a half decades, until Ahlstrom, at eighty-six, cut his foot while chopping wood and had to move to Port Angeles for the last few years of his life.
Here in the drowsing cabin I think of Swan and Ahlstrom, who missed each other by forty years on this mossy prairie between Alava and Ozette, and judge that if time could be re-woven to bring them together they might be quite taken with one another. Swan promptly diaries down the facts of the life of Mr Ahlstrom...arrived to America from Sweden at the age of 20 years...he and a neighbor have laboured to build a pony trail to the lake by laying down a quantity of small cedar puncheons...the rain here does not allow his fruit trees to thrive but his garden particularly potatoes grows finely.... Ahlstrom, with his reputation for conviviality with travelers, pours coffee for Swan, watches to see whether he will take cream, Swedish style, or swig it black the way of the barbarous Norwegians. (Swan, resident of Neah Bay for a full two years before a milk cow arrived, takes cream whenever he can get it.) At slightest prompting, Ahlstrom entertains Swan with his story of coming face to face with a cougar here on the Ozette trail. I yelled to scare him. Instead it brought answer: the cougar snarled and I could see plenty of room inside there for a Swede. Ahlstrom spun and strode away—It was no use to run—without looking back. The next day Ahlstrom returned carrying a long-tom shotgun and discovered from the tracks that when he retreated, the cougar had paced along behind him for a hundred yards and then lost interest in Swedish fare.
The trail again, Swan’s and Ahlstrom’s and ours. After crossing the second prairie we again enter the forest and after rising a gentle eminence descend into a ravine through which runs a small brook. Exactly so. The little stream that dives under the boardwalk runs very loud, and sudsy from lapping across downed trees. Where the water can be seen out from under its head of foam, it ripples dark brown, the color of strong ale.
And now the lake, obscure and moody Ozette.
Here we found an old hut made in the rudest manner with a few old splits of cedar and showing evidence of having been used as a frequent camping ground by the Hosett hunters. An old canoe split in two was lying in front, and bones and horns of elk were strewed about. Now the premises which emerge into sight are a National Park display center and rangers’ quarters.
At last at the lakeside, Swan recorded a curiously threatening experience.
It was nearly sundown when we arrived and I had barely time to make a hasty sketch of the lake before it was dark. We had walked out very rapidly and I was in a great heat on my arrival, and my clothes literally saturated with perspiration. I imprudently drank pretty freely of the lake water which had the effect of producing a severe cramp in both of my legs which took me some time to overcome, which I did however by waling about and rubbing the cramped part briskly. I said nothing to the Indians as I did not wish them to know anything ailed me, but at times I thought I should have to ask their assistance.
So he saved face, and evidently something more. What was it that struck at him with those moments of dismay in his legs? Uncertainty of how the Makahs might react to an ailment? That tribal habit of burying first and regretting later? The remoteness of Ozette itself, like a vast watery crater in the forest?
The next morning, the twenty-third of July 1864, Swan intended to go out with Peter and sketch his way along the Ozette shoreline, but awoke to heavy fog. As I well knew that the fogs at this season sometimes last several days, I concluded that I had better return. Their return hike to Alava was memorably soggy. The fog and mist had saturated the bushes so that before I was a mile on my way back I was wet through and reached Hosett as well drenched as if I had been overboard.
Well drenched, and better pleased. I had accomplished two things I had proved the existence of a lake, and had made a sketch of a portion and as I was the first white man who had ever seen this sheet of water I concluded I would take some other opportunity when I might have white companions with me and make a more thorough survey.
Swan never did achieve that more thorough survey. But today, at least, he had the companions to Ozette.
Day Twenty-Five
I like about Swan that he has arithmetic in his eye.
When he and the Makahs dig around in the rubble of the short-lived Spanish fort at Neah Bay, the clay tiles they unearth are 10 inches long 5¼ wide & 1¼ thick. When Swan visits the lighthouse on Tatoosh Island, the Fresnel lens measures 6 ft across and is composed of 13 rings of glass above 6 rings below. When he is curious about how large the clearing behind the Indian lodges at Neah is, he finds out by pacing it off... 235 paces long 60 paces wide this will give at a rough estimate 29/10; acres.
He scares me a little, though, about this winter’s effort at precision, my try at knowing as much as possible of Swan. There is that easy deceit of acquaintanceship; in the months since This House of Sky was published I have heard again and again from schoolmates and Montana friends, “I figured I knew you pretty well, but...” (Echo: never part of the time they were born into...walk generations as strangers...) If I myself am such an example of private code, how findable can Swan be in his fifteen thousand days of diary words? Findable enough, I still believe, for by now I have a strengthening sense of how it is that some of those coastal paths which for so many years carried him now hold me. But Swan does maintain boundaries, often numerical ones, with that deft pen. He may let me know exactly what size coat he wore, yet generally is going to make me guess about the inside of his head. Which perhaps is as much as one measurer can comfortably grant another.
Days Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight
The Neah Bay schoolroom once more, that wrestling site for Swan’s tutoring and the Makahs’ resistance to it.
My occupation is pretty regular every day, he reports on the sixth of February of 1865. As soon as I get up, which is from half past 6 to 7, the Indians begin to come for medical treatment. Some who want prescriptions only I serve before breakfast but others who have sores to be dressed have to wait till I have done eating. Then it is dressing scrofulous sores, syringing out sore ears, bathing sore eyes and bandaging up wounds. Then round to visit patients. By this time it is eleven oclock & I then sit down to write, or if any children come in, try to teach them. And with the exception of a walk to Jones or Jordans, keep in the house all the time so as to be ready either as teacher or physician.
Of these eithers, the Makahs plainly preferred Swan as physician, and logical choice it was. Mending an ill was welcome enough; changing the tongues of the tribe’s children was not. For rickety and fumbling though it may have been, this new white men’s governance of Cape Flattery, with the plow and schoolhouse as its cutting
machines, meant rip after rip through the Makah way of life.
Swan himself once honed the metaphor. We have indeed caused the plowshare of civilization to pass over the graves of their ancestors and open to the light the remains of ancient lodge fires. Many of the Makahs must have known the consequences as well as Swan—probably better—and the wonder is that the tribe did not stiffen harder against the demand that they surrender their sons and daughters to alphabet and agriculture.
Part of the answer must be in the beguilement that Swan and his paper and pen represented. The Makahs respected any potent ability, and Swan as the reservation’s deftest practitioner of paperwork flexed a right hand of magic. He it was who would provide a “paper” by which anyone who brought him an amount of firewoud could be paid off in potatoes. Would draw up a document attesting that a canoeman had helped rescue shipwrecked sailors and so deserved the favor of whatever white man was reading the words. (Or occasionally provide a somewhat more wan endorsement: Gave a “paper” to Shekaupt...that he is as good as the average but requires watching.) Out of his books would reproduce those strange winged creatures and their stories. Swan had surveyed and mapped the Makah reservation, taken its census, noted down whenever a whale was killed and who the harpooner was, made arithmetic of the very weather by measuring rain and wind and temperature and giving them a history in his tremendous ledger. All his perpetual counting and scrawling added up to something the Makahs weren’t quite clear on, no more than we would be if a tribe came out of the sea to us and spoke green sparks which hung in the air, except that it carried power.
The Indians have a belief that I can tell by referring to my book containing the census of the tribe what becomes of any Indian who may be missing, so last evening a great many came to ask me to look in my book and tell what had become of Long Jim and the others who had gone for seals and had not returned.