Ancient Places (25 page)

Oral accounts passed down through generations continue to provide sharp and significant evidence of the historic disruption. Coeur d’Alene member Cliff SiJohn grew up hearing how an area around the mouth of the Spokane River sank during that first night of violent tremors eight decades before. When SiJohn’s elders spoke the Salish word for the place, they would hold their hands out, fingers spread and palms down, then shake and lower them to mimic the effect.
“That’s what the word means,” SiJohn said. “All sunken down.”

“I’ll ask around about that word for ‘sunken down,’ ” said Ann McCrae, after digesting all the earthquake material I had piled on her desk. “The Spokane is probably different than the Coeur d’Alene. And the Kolaskin story is interesting. I don’t like to use the word ‘prophet,’ but I think he was a seer. Many of our people long ago were seers. Some could see any time; others could see when their animal or plant spirits guided them. In my life I’ve known some, and have seen what they could do.”

Ann handed me a file folder that contained a single page of neat typing. She had found Sadie Boyd’s recorded account of the earthquake and transcribed it into English, highlighting all the Salish names for people and places. Ann had tried to trace out the site names, but she couldn’t figure out all of them. “Sadie was the oldest informant,” she said. “Maybe the words are old and those places are underwater now.”

“Before I was born, and while my mother was pregnant with my older sister, there was an earthquake,” Sadie began. Ann knew that Sadie was born in 1884, so the dates matched up well.

“There were families living at the flat above the mouth of the Spokane River, and at a place near there,” Sadie continued. Ann said their second campsite had a name that sounded to her like “stuffed”—maybe it was a place where they gathered bedding, or stored food in pits.

“It was in the fall when the earthquake happened. The way my mother told it to me, it was so frightening that it made one woman lose her mind. This was Whist-m-la’s mother.” The son’s name, Whist-m-la, looked similar to the name on the marker in the Walla Walla cemetery. But Sadie could not recall the name of his mother. Sadie said that the people at the camp “remembered Whist-m-las’s mother running around, scared, and when it was all over they couldn’t find her.”

There were others, she said, who were just as disturbed by the earthquake. One man who lived at the mouth of the Spokane River kept chasing his horse, even though the animal was safe in a corral. But at least his family knew where he was.

Whist-m-la’s mother remained lost, and it was only after a long time that someone found her body. It was in a place named for the sound of water, with rough breaks and steep side hills.

Sadie Boyd’s mother told her how the trees and land were shaking and moving in the earthquake—not from side to side as Sadie had imagined it, but like boiling water, or something boiling. When Sadie grew up, she said she asked another elder who had been there what the earthquake looked like:
“Did it shake from side to side?” The old lady said, “No. It was like something boiling.”

Sadie Boyd also recorded the story of a separate seismic event that had taken place long before 1872, echoing the scientific analysis of the colluvium below Ribbon Cliff.

“It was awesome as it boiled like a giant pan of boiling gravy. Wave upon wave upon wave, fore and aft. People were running helter skelter, screaming, crying, as the land pulled apart, swallowing them up, swallowing the animals, trees, everything.”

When I showed Sadie’s Boyd’s transcript to geologist Ralph Haugerud, he did not hesitate to interpret the account.
“I immediately think of ground liquefaction,” he said. “If you shake water-saturated sediments, they disaggregate and pack more closely. Then they release water, or muddy water, or sandy water, to boil up to the surface.” Haugerud sent YouTube links of classic
liquefaction from recent earthquakes in Japan, New Zealand, and Puget Sound to prove his point. Every one of them bubbled like thick gravy. “This is the kind of clue that we might be able to do something with,” said Haugerud. “All we need is a few more.”

From the scientific side,
those clues will certainly keep coming. Haugerud’s USGS colleague Brian Sherrod recently employed an aerial laser scanning process called LIDAR along the Columbia River south of Lake Chelan. He and several students with shovels then scrambled up to a suspicious spot in a tight canyon to expose a clear scarp—the kind of scar left behind when an earthquake ruptures the ground surface—that extends for three and a half miles. Sherrod thinks that geologists may finally be closing in on an exact source for the shadowy event known to some as
“the earthquake that wouldn’t stay put.” That kind of significant news may hold ramifications for the way people live all over the Columbia Plateau.

I had one more story to share with Ann McCrae, told by a Sanpoil informant to Verne Ray in 1928.

“I read the paper you brought me,” Ann McCrae said the next time I dropped by her office. “It reminds me how people then saw each other more and shared everything they had. San Poils and Spokanes had many kinship relations. They used to be down in Davenport all the time, digging roots, chasing horses. If Kapús wanted to drive them back across the river to the Colville Reservation, he could have taken any number of trails that run down on the Columbia between Whitestone Rock and the mouth of the Spokane.

“I don’t know who that man Kapús was, but I will have a look. I don’t know which canyon he might have been running his horses through, but I’m going to go back to that name in Sadie’s story, the one that sounds like water lapping against the shore beneath rough breaks and steep side hills.

“I believe that Kapús did see the Spirit of Whist-m-la’s mother. She might have needed to be seen by someone so that she could rest from the terror she went through that caused her death.” That kind of terror, I think Ann was saying, could never be measured in numbers.

Winter is timeless, because the presence of ice can stop time’s incessant flow. Not as often as it used to, of course—no one has seen the Columbia River’s main stem frozen clear across for many decades now—but at some point after Thanksgiving, temperatures in the Inland Northwest usually tumble into single digits and remain there for a week or two. Clear ice skims farm ponds and flooded wetlands, and the skating season begins.

At first, I have to feel my way around artesian springs and fertile mud in order to remain on top of things. But if no warm wet system blows across the Cascades to push away the Arctic flow of air, whole bodies of water soon begin to turn over. Black ice can appear in some of the shallow flood-scoured lakes of the Columbia Basin overnight. Deeper glacial pocks to the north take longer, and the inevitable advent of snow lends a sense of urgency. Conditions at each site change from hour to hour, and
it’s easy to fall into the habit of sniffing the air first thing every morning to search for subtle clues. What might the ice look like today on one attractive lake down in the basin that my skates’ blades have never touched?

To that end, I am thrashing through a wide band of bulrushes that edge a secluded bay. The thermometer is stuck on zero and hasn’t approached the melting point for a week. Last night’s stiff west wind seems to have died down. From the highway, the frozen surface showed wild patterns of darkness and light, but there must be some smooth ice out there somewhere.

I know this bay because white pelicans frequent it during the summer, but its wetland seems utterly different today. The rushes rise more than head-high, and the whole marsh is solid enough to walk on. I trace faint animal trails to the icy shore, where I discover that the breeze has freshened again. I stamp hard on frozen whiteness at the edge of the bay, then jump up and down. Not a single crack.

The surface a few yards farther along, although rough from puddled goose tracks, shines a little more clearly. I cross a series of jagged fault lines that allow me to gauge the thickness of this ice at something close to eight inches, which feels plenty safe. The greater question is whether to try this bumpy shore ice or to venture toward the unknown center. After a few tentative steps, two small people come into view across the bay, standing in the midst of several black dots. There is nothing like the sight of ice fishermen to give a hesitant skater confidence. Off comes my backpack, and I flop down to start drawing on the long laces.

Once I’m up, the ice immediately gets worse, forcing me to tiptoe across features that seem to mirror geologic actions of much greater proportion. Pressure ridges have buckled thick floes upward and dropped them down. Sheets of water must
have exuded from these spreading tectonic cracks to flow across one another and freeze. One fractured intersection catches a skate and sends me skittering ahead.

Now I can see that the surface looks smoother around a teardrop island that rises near the lake’s west end. This ragged plug of basalt carries enough height to redirect the wind. As I move toward it, I spot a third fisherman standing motionless in the island’s lee. He has walked a long way across the ice.

The closer I get to the island, the more the situation changes. At first, I find that steady breezes have rippled recent puddle flows in exactly the way that tidal action griddles the sand on a hard-packed beach. It’s better than the inshore ice, but skating over it at even a moderate pace still chatters my teeth.

Those ripples soon give way to a more extensive plain, where relentless wind has scoured surface-bubble clusters into a paisley pattern: curved ovals of frosted tinkling glass set into a dark ice netting. This strange terrain, I realize, is what I saw from the highway, and dominates the greater part of the lake surface in all directions. It turns out to be negotiable, and the trick to attacking it is to weave back and forth along the black net strings, feeling for their polished smoothness.

I pick up speed and close in on the island, shaped not all that long ago by successive Ice Age floods. Only a few miles beyond this lake, one of my favorite coulees yawns open in the scablands. From the center of that dry coulee, a flood-carved island very similar to the one I am now approaching rises like a fortress. As a memento to the ice time’s dramatic end, the last passing deluge dropped a pendant bar of exotic gravel on the fortress’s downstream side.

That bar and coulee look exactly the same today as they did in June of 1860, when a young Boston artist from the
International Boundary Commission climbed a terrace above the broad expanse of landscape to sketch the scene. He made a numbered key for the muted gray-green hues of the surrounding shrub-steppe, then daubed in colors aboard ship during his voyage back around Cape Horn. On the bottom edge of his work he wrote, “Aspen Camp, looking North. 27 Miles from Cow Creek.”

The right edge of the painting curves along the bench where the artist had positioned himself, so that the aspen grove, fronted by a few tents, lies nestled in a cove far below. The basalt fortress takes center stage on the coulee floor, with a half circle of supply wagons stationed along the base of its pendant bar. The outfit’s pack mules, released from their hauling duties, have scattered uphill from the wagons to forage for the night.

The artist had been working with a boundary survey crew on the forty-ninth parallel around the Purcell Trench when some of the axmen, charged with cutting a swath along the new international border, began to suffer from the loose teeth and aching lethargy that any mariner knew meant scurvy. “The Surgeon of the Escort advises that we send them to the Spokane River where there is a wild onion which grows along the bank which may prove of service,” wrote one of the officers. That pendant bar, then and now, offers the kind of scoured ground rich in edible biscuitroots, while each May the wetter areas around the aspen grove still shine blue with camas lilies. The coulee itself sits in that in-between territory where Sahaptin ancestors of Mary Jim might have met Salish-speaking kin of William and Mattie Three Mountains as they all traced their annual rounds for roots. The land that had nourished these families for untold generations would cure the visitors’ scurvy after just a few hearty meals.

Drawn by the winter lake’s own version of a flood-carved fortress, I lean into my turns, veering away from the lone fisherman as I aim for wetlands along the western shore. Each fragile white paisley flower in the ice assumes a different size and shape, ready to send a skater flying, but the dark, hard surrounding ice provides a continuous cursive line to follow. I fight into the wind, pumping hard and slow, threading through an array of basalt boulders off the western head of the island. Turning down the protected side with the wind at my back, it’s all speed now, and all I can do to keep my skates writing on the secure black track.