Winter Brothers (25 page)

 

This has been another delightful day,
the sixteenth of July,
the temperature just about right, with a refreshing breeze and everything looking charming. My flower garden looks very pretty Fox gloves, white and purple, and blue Canterburybells...My roses are beginning to bloom and Lllies ready to expand....If our season is later than up sound it is very welcome, for while everything here is green and fresh, at Port Townsend and on Whidbey Island the ground is parched and flowers are done.

 

Swan has reason to find charm in his Neah Bay days. By regular steamship, he can jaunt to Port Townsend once a month, tend to a few office chores there, see friends and be back at Neah within a day or so. Visits across the Strait to Victoria are an equally simple matter now. So dinky are his official duties that he can spend as much time as wanted on personal correspondence, and letters constantly ripple off, to Baird, to Ellen and other relatives, to any number of ink-addicted acquaintances out of his past two decades in the Pacific Northwest.

 

Brief aggravation on the nineteenth of August:
The calves have annoyed me so much by running in my back door whenever it is open that today I put up a temporary fence of poles but I doubt if it keeps them out.
But then the year purls along again. Swan draws a salmon as the pattern for the new weather vane put atop the schoolhouse. Sends off to a tailor in Boston for
a suit of Navy Blue Beaver Cloth.
Cheerfully reimburses Webster, that dogged practitioner of patronage, $24
as my assessment to National Republican Committee.
...Has a chortle when the chief of the Makahs reports his impression of Rutherford B. Hayes, the chief of the whites making a visit to Puget Sound:
David returned from Seattle & Port Townsend. Says he saw the President, but had about as lief see me....I think David expected to have seen him in uniform.
Discovers that he himself has unsuspected white-tribal standing:
Mrs Webster told me that when President Hayes and wife called on her, they expressed their regret that I had not come up from Neah Bay as they had heard of me at Olympia. She said that President Mrs Hayes, Gen Sherman & Daughter, Gov & Mrs Ferry, Secretary Owings & others of the Presidential Party called at my office but I was not there and they then learned that I was not in town.

 

Even early winter seems just dandy to Swan.
Driving NE Snow Storm 3 inches fell to 7 AM,
the fifth of December...
I think it auspicious to have winter set in at this time of year. The more cold weather we have now, the better the prospect there is for an early spring.

 

By the end of 1880, Swan has filled 366 sumptuous ledger pages with daily entries, done twelve elaborate tables of day-by-day weather, kept account of the seal harvest, written 413 letters (and received 185), and had the president of the United States knock on his door. Writ large in more ways than one, this year of Swan the Pen.

A quiet rain, which hangs bright beads on the birches. At the end of every branch, and strung at random between, elves' balloons of silver against the evergreen valley slope.

Swan's weather at Neah this date, the twenty-first of February, in the winter of 1881:
very heavy rain during night 3.25 inches jell stormy dull day. This is the perihelion of Venus Jupiter & Mercury and the last quarter of the moon The weather is quite warm and buds are well started.

 

Another 1881 entry: the twenty-fourth of May:

The
Teazer
brought the “Intelligencer” and “Argus” in which is the announcement that Mr H A Webster Collector of Customs has been removed from office and this will of course remove me....

 

The twenty seventh of July:

Arrived at Port Townsend from Neah Bay at 2 oclock PM. Called at Custom House and reported myself to the new Collector A W Bash....Received an invitation to tender my resignation as Inspector of Customs which I took into consideration. Dined at Mr Websters and gave Mrs W a boquet of flowers which I brought from my garden at Neah.

 

The first of August:

Left Port Townsend at 11 AM for Neah Bay to get my things....Before leaving I handed Collector Bash a letter in which I declined tendering my resignation and he in turn gave me a notification that my services were no longer required....

The second of August:

Very pleasant morning and smooth all night. Arrived at Clallam Bay at 6 AM and after leaving mail proceeded on to Neah where we arrived at 9 AM. Capt Munroe blew the whistle before we reached Baadah, and on rounding the point Mr C M Plympton teacher came off in a canoe and took. me ashore.

I immediately commenced packing my things and was assisted by Jimmy and others.

I gave Jimmy all my floor mats, an empty barrel, a lot of coal oil cans and a variety of stuff.

I gave all my little garden tools to Ginger and distributed a lot of other things to Martha, Ellen, and some other children and to Martha I gave many of the flowers in the garden particularly my white lillies and Tiger lillies.

I feel more regret at leaving my flowers and plants than anything else, as they have been to me a source of pleasure the past three years.

At last all was packed, and boxes and packages taken to the beach and put into Kichusams canoe, and soon the
Dispatch
came up and anchored and my things were taken off. It took two canoe loads. I went on board in the last canoe after bidding good bye to the family and friends I have lived with the past three years. The school children will miss a kind friend.

I do not regret leaving Neah Bay as I think I can do better elsewhere....

As it is better late than never
—Baird of the Smithsonian, the last day of January 1883, blandly about to incant a miracle—
I may perhaps be able to arrange for an exploration under your direction during the present summer....

Not simply an exploration:
the
exploration, Swan to the home islands of the Haidas, the Queen Charlottes.

Swan had tugged at Baird's sleeve about the topic for ten entire years. Now there was some quick back-and-forthing on money—Swan:
Will you kindly allow me to remind you that I have received no salary for my work...I support myself wholly by office work which in a place like this is but a mere stipend, and I cannot leave to go on any expedition to make collections but I find on my return that I have lost business
....Baird:
I am not unmindful of the very great service you have rendered...our funds are either so limited or tied up that it is extremely difficult to use them as I would like
—until they worked out that Swan would receive $300 a month for at least three months in the Queen Charlottes, plus an allowance for expenses and purchases of Haida artifacts. Baird made it plain he wanted his money's worth:
You will understand that we want the fullest collections of all kinds, especially of objects connected with the fisheries and with hunting, to include models or originals of boats and canoes, weapons, hunting and fishing dresses, &c. As stated, I want you to make the most exhaustive memoranda as to the manufacture and application of the various articles gathered by you.

Swan, at age sixty-five, is about to have the one more West he has wanted.

The water route to Port Townsend, hastily re-created after a lapse since steamship days now that the Hood Canal bridge lies tumbled beneath three hundred feet of riptide. That void atop the waves has made Port Townsend more queerly isolated and central than ever: without the bridge, the drive to Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula beyond is so long, south all the way around Hood Canal, that the state ferry system has installed this nautical shortcut.

The big green and white ferry
Kaleetan
spins northwest out of the Edmonds ferry slip as if having decided to make a break for Alaska, and the newness of direction sends itself up from the deck plates through my body, a vibrant return to the time when passenger craft skimmed up and down the Sound and Strait in purposeful daylong voyages instead of flat across the channels in quick commuters' hops. The fresh sense of surging out onto the water world is not illusion; the
Kaleetan
, running almost at its maximum eighteen knots, will take an hour and a half to reach Port Townsend.

The day is dark enough that the first of the lighthouses to slide past the ferry, Point No Point, still has its light winking. Behind it, the shoreline of the Peninsula juts blackly along the gray canyon of water and sky, Whidbey Island its mate-shore to the east. I have brought along Swan in scholarly tatters, notes and photocopies and snippings, but the wide water and its dikes of forest keep my eyes. Time enough for Swan's future at the two coffers of it waiting for me in Port Townsend.

Some dozens of minutes and Foulweather Bluff, named by Captain Vancouver as the North Pacific rain ran into his ears. Strangely, Puget Sound and now Admiralty Inlet seem broader, out here as the ferry goes along the center of their joined water like a zipper up a jumpsuit, than when I look across from either shore; the wave-ruffled distance in both directions somehow adds up extra.

More midchannel minutes, until the
Kaleetan
sprints north past Fort Flagler, opposite Port Townsend, as if still determined on Alaska, then at last yields slightly west with a graceful dip and begins to wheel direct onto the hillside town.

Seen here from the water, Port Townsend stands forth as a surprising new place. It regains itself as the handsome port site of its beginnings, the great water-facing houses appear correct and captainly on their bluff, the main street is set broadside along the shore as it ought to be in a proper working wharftown. Instead of the dodgy glimpses along its downtown through too many cars and powerlines, this Port Townsend looks you level in the eye and asks where you've sailed in from.

Docking this ferry is also from maritime days of the last century.
Kaleetan
is far too massive for the tiny ferry slip, like an ocean liner coming in to moor to a balcony, and the crew must show seamanship. One ferryman fishes out with a boat-hook, snags a larger hawser off pilings at the port bow. With that our vessel is snubbed while a tugboat hustles in and butts the stern around until, slotted just so, the ferry can make a final careful surge to the little dock ramp. The elephant has landed.

Many of us who step off as foot passengers could be our great-grandparents traipsing ashore at Ellis Island, Montreal, Boston: beards, duffel coats, parcels, suitcases. A number of us, as I am, in watch cap and waterproof jacket, which I suppose would mark us as crew of an immigrant windship. Three ministers are prim among us, over from Seattle for the day on some missionary duty or another. Women carry children ashore, mothers greet daughters, husbands wives, huge trucks ease off the ferry, others snort aboard, turmoil of drayage and pilgrims such as the town hasn't seen in eons.

 

But a block or so from the ferry landing, within a dozing quiet from some other vector of the last century, the carved cane reposes in its glass museum case. I squat and begin to inventory. The handle is ivory carved into a perfect fist the size of a child's right hand. Through the grasp of the fingers, like a held rattle, and out the circling grip of thumb pressed onto forefinger, twines a snake. The ivory reptile then writhes through air down onto the wrist. There above where the tiny pulse would hammer, the snakehead rests. Except that it is not at rest, but in midswallow of a frog, eternally doomed in its try to escape around the rim of wrist.

I check my notes. Swan first saw this creation in the village of Masset in the Queen Charlotte Islands on the tenth of July 1883. The carver, one of the Haida magicians either
in wood, stone, or in gold or silver,
still was at work on the cane.

A second snake, this one of wood, drives up the cane from the bottom in three precise writhes covering most of the length, until the head poises very near to the carved struggle of snakehead and frog. After snake eat frog, the outlook seems to be snake eat snake. This deft crawler along the cane length has a broad scalloped design along the middle of its back, with cross-hatched scales along either side of the broader cuts. It also has tiny blue-green abalone eyes, a gentle everlasting glitter.

Snakes white and brown, contorting a stick of wood into struggle, legend, art. I very nearly reel back from this example of Haida blade magic.

 

Over lunch in a restaurant which confusedly has tried to rig its interior as a shipdeck, I think of Swan coming upon the snake-cane six hundred miles to the north of here. Keen as he was about art of this coast, he must have felt like a prospector whose boot has kicked up a potato-sized nugget in front of him. The carved scene ripples the other way in me, from art out into life. I see back to the instant when a jay attacked into the garden outside my window, its flash of blue and black and the high excited
HEEP HEEP HEEP
cry and then the toss of the garter snake which had been sunning on the warm dirt. In combination of grappling and chopping, the jay finished off the snake in an instant, then undertook to pull it apart, like a man trying to stretch an inner tube he is standing on. After a few minutes of tugging, the jay dropped the loop of corpse in disdain, bounded across the garden in three arrogant hops and flew off. When I went out to look at the snake, I found it as long as the span of my hand, nine inches: gray-green with three strings of yellow down its length. In places the jay had frayed through the body, small ruptures like those a knife makes in rubberoid wiring. Even as I bent in study of the snake, not two minutes after the jay's ambush had begun, an ant clambered on like a pirate coming aboard a derelict schooner, dashed in and out of the snake's open mouth and up to a quick circle of the flat skull, then raced off in exploration of the first body-rip. How sudden it all, the same eternal suddenness of the ivory frog sinking down the ivory snake's gullet.