From a logging road I climb down the forest trail to the tip of the Cape’s longest finger of headland. At the trailhead the Makah Tribal Council has nailed up alarming signs...Rugged High Cliffs...Extremely Dangerous Area...enter at own risk. The final brink of the trail lives up to them by simply snapping off into midair.
There, some eighty or hundred feet above the Pacific, rides an oceanlooker’s perch, an oval of white hardpack clay about twenty feet wide and twice as long. A clawnail hardness for this last talon of cliff.
I have clambered up all the great capes of this Northwest coast: Cape Disappointment at the mouth of the Columbia, to step to the Pacific horizon as Lewis and Clark did; Oregon’s Cape Falcon with its howling fluency of wind, and south of it Cape Meares and Cape Lookout, and south from them Cape Foulweather and Cape Perpetua and Cape Blanco. But none of those, none, proffers the pinnacle-loneliness of this tip of Cape Flattery. Behind, on all sides, the continent shears away, dangles me to air and the rocky water below. “Those whales,” a Makah tribesman has told me of the spring migrating pattern past this spot: “Sometimes they come right in under the cliffs. They scrape those barnacles off themselves on the rocks.”
Surf pounds underfoot with surprisingly little noise but wind makes up for it. I crouch carefully, not to be puffed off the continent, and peer out the half-mile or so to Tatoosh, the lighthouse island here at the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. While at Tatooche, Swan entered in his diary on July 18, 1864, I counted 18 vessels in sight.
Now machines instead of humans operate the Tatoosh light, visitors are none, and the tiny white cluster of lighthouse, residential quarters, water tower, and a collapsing shed give off visual echoes of emptiness. Tatoosh simply rests out there like a fat stepping-stone off the end of the continent. The next foothold beyond it is Asia.
In the 1860s the Makah tribesmen told Swan that below these cliffs, in hours of calm water, they sometimes hunted seals. Caves drill back in very far at the base of the cliffs and so a Makah would approach by canoe, swim or wade in with a lighted torch and a knife, and stalk back along the tunneled floor until he came onto drowsing seals. The blaze of the torch confused the animals, and the hunter took the chance of their confusion to stab them.
There was risk, Swan noted. Occasionally the torch will go out, and leave the cavern in profoundest darkness.
Profoundest darkness, and naked knife-bearing men who would wade into it. Even if you do not know that story, to stand atop this last rough end of the continent is to have it come to mind: what the dwellers of this coast could do before they found other, easier routes.
Day Twenty
Cape Flattery must have stood the neck hair on Swan a few times, too. This morning I find that in one of the several articles he wrote about the Makahs he listed in firm schoolteacherly style the superstitions of the tribe, then let burst from him this uncommonly uneasy language:
The grandeur of the scenery about Cape Flattery, and the strange contortions and fantastic shapes into which its cliffs have been thrown by some former convulsion of nature, or worn and abraded by the ceaseless surge of the waves; the wild and varied sounds which fill the air, from the dash of water into the caverns and fissures of the rocks, mingled with the living cries of innumerable fowl...all combined, present an accumulation of sights and sounds sufficient to fill a less superstitious beholder than the Indian with mysterious awe.
Yesterday’s weather faded and faded, had gone into gray by sundown. This morning is delivering sleet, blanking the coastline of the Strait down to a few hundred yards of mingled sky and water and rock. A worker from a construction crew stepped from the room next to mine and squinted into the icy mush. He shook his head and declared: “I need this like I need another armpit.”
The feel of Cape Flattery as an everlasting precipice of existence is strong as I repeat routes of Swan’s here. When he established himself in the schoolhouse at Neah Bay in 1863, ready to reason the peninsular natives into the white culture’s version of education, he made himself in that moment the westernmost frontiersman in the continental United States. Jones, the Reservation farmer at the moment, moved briefly into the schoolhouse with Swan while his own quarters were being built, but it was Swan who nestled for good into the room atop the school’s tall square tower, a mile or so beyond that shared magpies’-nest household at Webster’s.
Out here on his pinnacle of the coast, he becomes now the Pacific Republic of Swan, newly independent. Population: one; Caucasian and male. Resources: ink, books, and an occasional newspaper off a passing ship. Languages: Bostonian, Chinook, Makah. Politics: Lincoln Republican, solder-the-Union-back-together-with-bayonet-steel. Industry: very light, allotted mainly to educational manufacture. Foodstuffs: an exuberant variety ranging from halibut-head chowder to something termed beef hash à la Makah. Flag: a river of words against a backdrop of black fir forest.
Delightfully situated as he now was, with windows facing the north, west, and east, and a glass door opening south, in a matter of months after the move to his schoolhouse aerie came news from across the continent which reminded Swan how far he had flung himself. On the tenth of February 1864:
...letter from my brother Benj L Swan stating that on Sunday Nov 29 my mother died aged 84 years 7 mos & 27 days and that on Wednesday Dec 2d my dear wife Matilda W Swan died of consumption.
The double deaths staggered Swan for days. As I read the lines, the same scimitar of bay before me as Swan stared to during the writing of them, his distress and realization thud and thud like a slow surf:
nearly paralyzed with grief
had fondly thought that I might once again go home and be joined with my dear wife and children, but it was ordered otherwise
aching, breaking heart
but little sleep last night went to bed at two and got up at six
Severe pain in my teeth today. Sick in body and mind.
Day Twenty-One
Sick in body and mind, and of all air and earth that touch the two. Any of us who have been hit with such news of death know Swan’s disorder, and its remedy: routine. After some days of remorseful entries, undoubtedly whetted sharper by the memory of that permanent good-bye to Matilda in 1850, Swan turns to schoolroom worries again. Today, the fifteenth of February 1864, quite a number of children were in attendance but David and some others came in about trade which I do not desire and frightened the children away....I have been to Baadah every Saturday at Mr Webster’s request to issue goods to Indians in payment for work done on the reservation. This has caused the others to think. I am the trader and they continually come to me to sell oil, skins and blankets much to my annoyance.
Annoyance is a broad step up from misery, and as the months of 1864 pass, Swan’s words brighten, the classroom perplexity (slow work teaching these Indians. They appear intelligent enough in most respects but appear to take but little interest in learning the alphabet) giving way to the glint of the Makahs themselves.
Julia and another squaw came up today, the tenth of April, and stated that the Hosett Indians had discovered that Kayattie one of the old men...had caused the late spell of bad weather which has kept the Indians from fishing or whaling. A Squaw and a boy had overheard him at his incantations and had reported to the others, whereupon the whole village turned out and proceeded to Kayatties lodge and told him if he did not immediately stop and make fair weather they would hang him. Kayattie promised to do so. John who told me the story very gravely added his belief that now we should have fine weather. I told him it was all cultus talk, but he said no, that the Indians in former times were capable of making it rain or blow when they pleased. There was one of the Kwillehuytes who made bad weather...during the halibut season and the Kwillehuytes hung him, and immediately the weather became fine.
Billy Balch, Kyallanhoo & the others who have been absent since Tuesday returned this forenoon, the tenth of June. They were blown off out of sight of land for one day, and afterwards made land at Oquiet, and remained till this
morning. There was a large crowd of their friends and relatives collected together this morning thinking they were lost, and some of the squaws seemed sorry that they did not have a chance to howl.
The Indians told me this morning, the thirtieth of July, that Hadassub one of the best and quietest Indians in the tribe died suddenly last night at Kiddekubbut. I went down after breakfast on foot to the village and learned that he died of apoplexy. He had been very well all day and had joined in the dance at a potlatch given by Chekotte at Peter’s house, and in the evening had taken part in a wrestling match and afterward partaken freely of rice and molasses. He had not eaten any molasses for a long time as it did not agree with him but on this occasion thought he would eat some....The Indians always attribute an unusual death to the operation of some bad Tomanawas, and as there is a party of Quinaults here I did not know but they might charge it upon them. I explained...the natural causes that would most likely have produced his death and strongly urged them in future not to bury any one until they had tried every means of testing animation.
In the autumn, Swan about to mark his first year in the classroom, school woes return to his daily pages.
For one thing, he has worked out the appalling calculation that to keep the drafty schoolhouse warm through the year will require 100 cords of wood—that is, a woodpile four feet high, four feet wide, and eight hundred feet long, every sliver of it needing to be wheedled from the Makahs by barter of buckets of potatoes.
For another, the attendance at School has been very meagre...and this afternoon, the tenth of November, I sent for Youaitl (Old Doctor) and had a long talk with him on the matter.
I told him that the Government at Washington had been at great expense to have this school house built, and now I wanted the children to come and be taught, and wanted him to let his second son Kachim come and board with me and be one of a class with Jimmy....That if a few of the boys took an interest to learn others would be induced to come, and finally all the children could be taught. I also told him that the old men were dying off and these boys would shortly take their places, and if they would come and learn now they could be useful when they grew up, and could better adapt themselves to the white mens customs, than the old men who were so prejudiced against the whites.
Old Doctor said my talk was “all good,” “all good,” and he would send the boy and talk to the other Indians...
Two days later Swan has in residence with him at the schoolhouse Kachim, Jimmy, and five other boys. They spend the day toiling on the alphabet and amuse themselves in the evening, and that night’s diary page exults that Today has been the first time that it has seemed like a regular school.
Soon after this triumph of regularity, Swan wakes a little past five in the morning to a houseful of smoke. I found George in the kitchen with a big fire in the stove...and a pot of potatoes on cooking and the smoke just pouring out into the room. As it created an atmosphere like that which he has been accustomed to in the Indian lodge, he thought it was all right and that he was doing finely. Swan opened the damper and commended the young chef for his zeal but told him he need not get up another morning till day light.
George’s breakfast pall seems to hang on and on in the diary pages, clouding the earlier sanguine estimations of the schoolboys’ new diligence...the principal inducement at present is the novelty of the thing and the plenty of food I give them to eat. They can be influenced by their stomachs much sooner than their brains....
After more than a year of the effort to hold classes and compel attendance, two notations even more glum. The twenty-seventh of December 1864:
My whole time is constantly occupied from early in the morning till ten and often eleven oclock at night without an hour that I can call my own. Cooking, looking after the house, attending the sick, prescribing medicines and trying to teach, and the results are far from being in proportion to the great care and anxiety I feel.
The next day: John had a talk last evening in Russian Jims lodge about the school...and among others who spoke Jim said that he did not want his boy to learn to read and write for it would be of no use to him, he could not get anything by it, but if he learned to ktll whales and catch halibut he would have plenty of things....This attempt to form a school is the most unsatisfactory thing I have ever tried.
Day Twenty-Two
This morning, nagged by a murmur of memory, I finally retraced the entry, Swan’s diary words of this exact date, one hundred thirty-nine years ago. The eleventh of January 1860. Cloudy and calm. This is my birth day 42 years old. I trust that the remainder of my life may be passed more profitably than it has so far. Self investigation is good for birth days.
Tonight, after another coastal day back and forth between Swan’s words and the actuality of Cape Flattery: “Some men and women are never part of the time they were born into,” Carol’s voice read to me as I hunched in the phone booth at Clallam Bay, “and walk the streets or highways of their generations as strangers....Reinforces our diminishing conviction that there is something special in American earth, in American experience and in the harrowing terms of American survival. Where there is no longer a house of sky...”
The words clatter back and forth between my ears. Never part of the time they were born into...walk their generations as strangers...The sort of thing I might write about Swan, restless in Boston, studious on the frontier. Instead, in the pages of the New York Times Book Review it has been written of me.
Day Twenty-Three
From places here at the outer corner of the Strait it can be seen clearest how abruptly close the Olympic range of mountains stands to this coastline: like gorgeously caped elephants about to go wading. Along much of the Peninsula south of the logging town of Forks, for instance, peaks of 4,000 to 7,000 feet rise within thirty-five miles of the Pacific shore, rather as if the Rockies were to begin at Philadelphia, or the Sierra Nevada just beyond the east alleys of Oakland.
There is a kind of stolen thrill, something unearned and simply granted, about the presence of the Olympics. The state of Washington makes its margin with the Pacific as if the region west of the Cascade Mountains had all been dropped heavily against the ocean, causing wild splatters of both land and water: the islands of Puget Sound and the San Juan group, streaky inlets everywhere, stretched stripes of peninsula such as Dungeness and Long Beach, the eighty-mile fjord called Hood Canal, and a webwork of more than forty sizable rivers emptying to the coast. Amid this welter the Olympic Mountains stand in calm tall files, their even timbered slopes like black-green fur to shed the wet. The region’s history itself seems to step back and marvel at these shoreline mountains. The coastal Indians appear not to have troubled to travel much in them. Why wrestle forest when the sea is an open larder? White frontier-probing too went into an unusual and welcome slowdown when it reached the Olympics. Although the range sits only some sixty miles wide and fifty long, not until 1889 did a six-man expedition sponsored by a Seattle newspaper traipse entirely across it and leave some of the loveliest peaks of America with the curious legacy of being named for editors. Thereafter its terrific shaggy abundance of timber saved the range; giant fir and cedar and spruce rose so mighty along its shorelines and foothills that the heart of the Olympics was not logged before National Park status came in the 1930s.
Good fortune for the northwest earth that was, for where the early loggers did begin whacks into the Olympic Peninsula forest, some of them butchered the country: you can see it yet in places beside the highway, obliteration where the ancient stumps lie about like knuckle bones after cannibals had done with them. Those cut-out-and-get-out loggers had some excuse, not understanding or having to care that felling the timber that denuded the slope that lost the silt that clogged the stream would smother salmon runs and other interties of nature, and figuring anyway that the trees and salmon and all else would last forever, but we know by now that America’s forevers tend to be briefer than the original estimates.
What remains still original, the Olympic
peaks, rise to me when I climb to the rim of our valley as the great Sawtooth Range and other sharp horizons gnashed up to the west of my family’s Montana grassland. They were my first shore, those rough snow-topped headlands which stop the flow of plains in the Montana I was born to, and later, when I went back to write about that rock-tipped land, I began at last to savvy the geography as a vast archipelago of mountains and to remember how, like people in fast outriggers, we traveled in pickups and trucks the valleys between the high islanded clusters. Now it is Townsend, Buckhorn, the Needles, Constance, Jupiter, the Brothers, two dozen Olympic peaks alive in jagged white rhythm like lightning laid lengthwise, that make the uneven but steady skyline. From the instant I saw them a dozen years ago I have felt exhilaration from these mountains like a gust down from their glaciers. If they did not exist, I think I would not live here; would need to be within sight of some other craggy western horizon. As it is, over the years I have hiked into all the main valleys of the Olympics except a few of the southernmost, and go time upon time upon time to places along the Sound and Strait where I know favorite views of peaks.
And today I have spent hours studying the Olympics rather than Swan’s past. I don’t much mind; Swan undoubtedly did the same. I find him writing once for the San Francisco newspaper, The great Sierra of the Olympic range appear to come down quite to the water’s edge, and present a wild forbidding aspect. Other times, I come across him tallying into the diaries a morning when the Olympics happened to be spectacularly sunlit. But I do not find him ever exploring into the so-near fortress of peaks. Enough of Boston evidently remained in Swan that he would admire mountains with his eyes rather than his feet.