Winter Brothers (7 page)

We stand atop Dungeness Spit's rough spine of driftwood to watch the bald eagle and his meal vanish into the shore trees. From up here, all its bowed length into the Strait of Juan de Fuca—seven miles—Dungeness prickles into view like a gigantic hedgerow somehow weired atop the water. Age-gray drift logs tumble across each other to the height of a Dutch dike, fresher logs perpetually angle ashore, yellow and tattered from grinding across the gravel beach, to pile in turn onto the long heap. The rarity of Dungeness in all the dozen thousand miles of America's coastal edge speaks itself even in the flat intonings of scientists:
longest natural sandspit in the United States; driest point on the West Coast north of San Diego.
A thin hook of desert snagging the water, within walk of glaciered mountains and cool fir forests.

Swan, as said, voyaged by here for the first time on a February morning of 1859, inbound for Port Townsend and his resumed western life. With his feathered name and that migratory nature he was something of a Boston bird himself, testing new waters, fresh paths of glide. For the several years after his arrival to the Strait, Swan shows up time upon time at this sandy breakwater, usually portaging across the base of the Spit as the most direct canoe route between Port Townsend and the Makah settlement at Neah Bay. If he happened to journey by ship, the route cut close past the site of the lighthouse which rises like a white candle at the far end of the Spit
...A keeper's house and fine brick tower
92
feet high,
he recorded in that year of 1859,
in which is placed a stationary light of the order of Fresnel.

The Dungeness light tower is now white-painted concrete, and not so lofty, that original beacon having proved to be so eminent that it blinked futilely above the fogs that drift on the face of the Strait. Until a few years ago a Fresnel lantern still was in use, not the one Swan describes but an 1897 version, an exquisite six-sided set of glass bull's-eyes which flung a beam of brightness eighteen miles.

Once Carol and I had the experience of being drawn the full length of the Spit, through the exact blackest center of night, by the focused blaze out of that elegant box of glass. I was to write a magazine article about the Coast Guard families stationed there at the remote end of the Spit's ribbon of sand, and Carol to shoot photographs for illustration. We arrived here to Dungeness about an hour before a November midnight and met a specter.

The bosun's mate in charge at the lighthouse had phoned that he would drive in to meet us on the coastal bluff overlooking the Spit. He wavered now out of the blackness like a drunken genie, clasping a hand to half of his forehead and announcing thickly that we had to hurry to keep the tide.

Wait a minute, we said. What exactly had gone wrong with his head?

Groggy but full of duty, he recited that when he judged the time had come to drive in above the tide, he traveled fast. Racing through a bank of spume, his four-wheel-drive vehicle bounded over a log the way a foxhunter's horse takes a hedge, and when man and machine plunged to sand again, his forehead clouted the windshield.

With woozy determination our would-be chauffeur repeated that we would lose the tide if we did not hurry. I looked at Carol, some decision happened between us, and we clambered into the four-wheel-drive.

Headlights feeling out the thin route between driftwood debris and crashing waves, our Coast Guardsman ducked us through cloud upon cloud of spume sailing thigh-deep on the beach. That spindrift journey was like being seated in a small plane slicing among puffy overcast. From that night I have the sense of what the early pilots must have felt, Saint-Exupery's blinded men aloft with the night mail above Patagonia, avid for “even the flicker of an inn lamp.” We had our ray of light, leading us with tireless reliable winks, but even it could not see into our foaming route for us.

At last at the lighthouse, with the engine cut, no next encounter between four-wheel-drive and fat driftlog having been ordained, the Fresnel lens wheeling its spokes of light above our heads: we breathed out and climbed down to the Dungeness sand for our weekend stay.

Two moments stand in my memory from that next day at the tip of Dungeness Spit. The first was seeing the lens itself, coming onto the fact of its art here on a scanty ledge of sand and upcast wood. What I had expected perhaps was something like a titanic spotlight, some modern metallic capsule of unfathomable power: not a seventy-five-year-old concoction of magnifying prisms, worked by the French artisans to angles as precise and acute as those of cut-glass goblets, which employed a single thousand-watt bulb and stretched its glow across nearly twenty miles. The magnifying power from this small cabinet of glass was as pleasantly astounding as Swell's explanation of the aurora borealis glinting up from Eskimo campfires.

The second memory is of the mustached bosun's mate himself. With what pride he showed off his domain of Dungeness, not only the artful glass casing at the top of the lighthouse but the radio beacon apparatus and the foghorn and even the flagpole with a red storm-warning flag bucking madly at the top. “The wind wears out about ten flags a winter,” he said to impress us, and did.

Lighthouse life dimmed a bit when he escorted us in to talk with his wife and the wife of the young petty officer on duty with him. Both proved to be edgy about the strand-of-sand way of existence. Mrs. Bosun's Mate calculated to when their oldest child would start school, which would loft the family away to land duty: “I WANT to move inland.” Until that could happen she was forbidding the children to leave the fenced yard around the quarters because they might injure themselves in the driftwood. The petty officer's recent bride, dwelling in the building attached to the base of the lighthouse tower itself, was disconcerted to have in her living room one huge round wall which emitted a night-long beamish hum.

The bosun's mate heard them out, evidently not for the first time, then led the pair of us off to see any further feature of lighthouse keeping he could think of. The day, blown pure by last night's wind, had its own magnifying clarity. Mountains rose in white shards far north along the Canadian coastline. Mount Baker lorded over the glinting horizon of the Cascades to our east, highest ice-flame among dozens of ice-flames, while the Olympic range crowded full the sky south and west of us. Dungeness seemed more astounding than ever, a gift of promontory grafted carefully amid the mountains and strait.

The knot on his forehead barely visible beneath his cap bill, hands fisted for warmth into his jacket pockets, the bosun's mate looked around at this ice-and-water rim of the Pacific Northwest in a quick expert glance, then turned to us.

“I'm a shallow water sailor,” he announced as if introducing himself. “A true coastie.”

The Dungeness light has blinked through a number of hundreds of nights since then, and today in bright sun Carol and I casually prowl the inside shore of the Spit, around to where smaller Graveyard Spit veers off from Dungeness. In outline from the air Dungeness and Graveyard together look like a long wishbone, Graveyard poking shoreward from near the end of Dungeness like the briefer prong of the forked pieces. Out there now just beyond where they join, the lighthouse and outbuildings sit in silhouette against Mount Baker, a white peg and white boxes beside that tremendous tent of mountain.

I am watching for snowy owls. This is a year in their cycle of migration which brings them far south from the Arctic, and we once sighted one here, a wraith of white against the gray driftwood. Pleased with ourselves, we returned to Seattle to discover that another snowy had taken up a roost on a television antenna above a midcity restaurant and half the population had been out to see him. No owl today, nor the blue herons who often stilt along Graveyard Spit.

We stay with the inside shore, the one facing Graveyard. The wild-fowl side, commissary for migrating ducks and brant, as the outward shore is the lagoon for seals who pop up and disappear as abruptly as periscopes. Today's find presents itself here on the interior water: a half-dozen eider ducks making their
kor-r-r, kor-r-r
chuckles to each other, then, as if having discussed to agreement, all diving at once.

An edge of ice whitens the shoreline, a first for all the times—fifty? seventy-five?—we have come here. Full-dress winter greeted Swan once, in January of 1880:
We arrived in Dungeness harbor at 10 AM and found three feet of snow had fallen during the night. Everything was covered with a white mantle, our boat's deck was loaded with snow and the light house tower on its north east side had a thick coating from the base to the
lantern. Fog signal house and all the other outbuildings were covered, and the whole scenery of Dungeness Spit and bluff was the most like an Eastern winter of any I have seen in this country.
This afternoon, mountains stand in all directions with the clear loveliness Swan observed during one of his early visits—
unobscured by mist or clouds their snowy peaks shone most gloriously.
...Across the Strait at Vancouver Island, where we can see in miniature detail the tallest downtown buildings of twenty-mile-distant Victoria, Swan had marveled at the endless timber
level as a field of wheat, following the undulation of the ground with a regular growth most wonderful for such a dense forest.

How cold the day, but how little wind, not always the case in this restless spot. Swan on an excursion past the Spit on a day in May of 1862:

Stopped for the night at the light house where Mr Blake, the keeper treated me very politely to a supper & a share of his bed.
Next morning:
Left the light house at 3:15 A.M., calm. Passed round the spit where a breeze sprung up which freshened into a squall wth rain. A tremendous surf was breaking on the beach & we for a time were in great peril. But finally we managed to get ashore at Point Angeles where we found shelter....

Dark settles early, the sun spinning southwest into the Olympic Mountains instead of dropping near the end of the Strait as it does in summer. We leave the Spit before dusk, heading back to Seattle to spend New Year's Eve in our traditional geographically diverse game of penny-ante poker. Baltimore—“Ballumer,” she says it—will play her challenging, by-God-you're-not-going-to-get-away-with-it style. Texas, behind a cigar which would credit J. P. Morgan, contents himself until a strong hand, when he raises and reraises relentlessly. Carol—New Jersey—is the steadiest of the bunch, and wins regularly from the rest of us. By way of Montana—me—comes an uncharacteristically fevered kind of style which can swathe through the game, devastating everybody else for three or four hands in a row, or obliterating my own stake.

Swan would approve the pastime, if not our particular card-table temperaments. He once passed up a chance to visit with the lightkeeper at Dungeness because he and the others
concluded to remain on board, devoting our energies to the successful performance of a game of seven-up, or all-four, or old sledge, as that wonderful combination of cards is variously termed.

The new year.

On Sunday, January 1, 1860, his first New Year's Day on the coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Swan creased open a new tan pocket diary and inscribed on its first page:

May it be not only the commencement of the week, the month and the year, but the commencement of a new Era in my life, and may good resolve result in good action.

Today Mr Brooks, William Ingraham & myself finished setting the posts for the main building of the school house and when we had all ready which was at noon, I told Capt John to call the Indians. Some twenty-five or thirty came out and when Mr Brooks was ready I told John who then gave the word and the sticks were lifted into their places and the whole of the sills for the main building fastened together in about an hour. I told John that when the buildings were done Mr Webster would give them a treat to pay for the good feelings evinced on this occasion. They have been opposed to having the building erected back of their lodges and I have had a deal of explanation to make, to do away with the superstitious prejudices of the old men. But by the exercise of a great deal of patience I have succeeded in inspiring them with a confidence in me, which
makes them believe not only what I tell them is true, but what we are doing is for their good.

The noontime came on the fifteenth of October 1862, and the exertions which overtopped the cedar longhouses of the Makahs with the framework of a schoolhouse lofted more good for James G. Swan than he let his pen admit.

Precisely when his mind had become set on securing the job as teacher at Neah Bay, there is no direct evidence. But hints murmur up from the diary pages. Likely as early as those first visits to Cape Flattery in 1859 Swan divined that Henry Webster would try for the appointment as Indian agent when the Makah Reservation came into being. Even more likely is that Webster, noticing Swan's knack of getting along with the Indians, advised or asked him to seek a Reservation job.

Those discernments and Swan's rummaging curiosity about Makah tribal life were the pulls to Neah Bay. The push was that Port Townsend had not worked out well for Swan, and a fundamental reason seems to have been whiskey.

Once I happened across the lines of a diarying compatriot o£ Swan's, a Scot named Melrose who also had alit to the Pacific Northwest—to Victoria, north on the Canadian coast of the Strait—early in the 1850s. The alcoholic atmosphere of this frontier enthused Melrose to near rapture. “It would almost take a line of packet ships,” he wrote cheerily, “running regularly between here and San Francisco to supply this isle with grog, so great a thirst prevails among its inhabitants.” Melrose took care to note down how far his companions in thirst overcame their parching: whether each had become one-quarter drunk, one-half drunk, three-quarters drunk, or wholly drunk. Every so often the Melrose diary presents the forthright wavery notation: “author whole D.”