Trip of the Tongue (10 page)

Due to their remote location, extremely compact territory, and, no doubt, their small population, the Quileutes weren't initially subject to quite the same level of bureaucratic scrutiny as some other tribes. Their language nevertheless suffered the same misfortunes as so many other Native languages, beginning with the establishment of the first tribal school in 1882. By the mid-1970s, the population of native Quileute-speakers had dwindled to fewer than fifteen, at which point the tribe established a committee of elders and experts to spearhead preservation efforts. Even so, the number of native speakers continued to fall, from ten in 1977 to six in 1990. The best estimate is that there are three, maybe four native Quileute-speakers still living today.

Even though it seems impossible that Quileute will ever again be a mother tongue, the language is not yet completely lost. The tribe stepped up its preservation campaign in 2007 with the Quileute Revitalization Project, focusing on documenting the language and creating and disseminating language-learning materials. And recently the language has received a boost in interest from an unexpected source. Like the Quileutes' home, the Quileutes' language is also benefiting from the
Twilight
bump.

I caught the
Twilight
tour bus on North Forks Avenue, the town's main drag. I was a full five minutes early, but I was still the last one to arrive, and the girls on the bus gave me a bit of the stink-eye as I crept toward the back.
Great
, I thought.
Just like high school.

The tour was run out of a store called Dazzled by Twilight, the brainchild of Annette Root, a
Twilight
fan who first came to Forks as a tourist herself. When she arrived was shocked by the lack of
Twilight
-related retail presence, and so, displaying an enviable amount of foresight, she moved in and literally set up shop. When I visited Forks, Dazzled by Twilight was a spacious storefront crammed with T-shirts, perfume, and paying customers. They also ran up to four popular tours a day, at $39 a person. At the time, I was not surprised to discover they were planning to expand and upgrade. Who knows how long it will last, but I imagine they're something of a small empire now.

Our guide was a forcefully outgoing man named Travis who had previously cut his teeth running tours of Hollywood. His was an impressively slick performance, but his smooth, practiced delivery seemed slightly out of place in a town such as Forks. I couldn't help but wonder, every so often, if I'd somehow stumbled onto a studio back lot.

As we got under way, Travis played the crowd like a pro, knowing exactly how to elicit the maximum amount of adolescent glee. Early on he asked a very important question: “So who here is Team Jacob?”

Now, in a situation like this, normally I would just not respond. I really don't go in for audience participation in any way, shape, or form—it gives me hives. But I was sitting on a bus with a dozen fifteen-year-olds
going on a
Twilight
tour
. I was more than a bit out of sorts from the get-go. And so I found myself raising my hand. I also found I was the only one raising my hand.

That's when they hissed at me. They actually hissed at me.

“Whoa, tough crowd,” Travis said with a grin. “So I guess we're Team Edward?” The bus responded with riotous cheers. I sank farther into my seat.

The tour took us all over Forks: the police station, the hospital, and a succession of houses that had been for whatever reason identified as the main characters' residences. At each stop, the girls would scramble off the bus to take pictures, and time and time again, I found myself intrigued by their casual indifference toward matters of fact and fiction. Take the house of Bella Swan, the series heroine. Now, I have no idea how it was selected. Stephenie Meyer didn't visit Forks before publishing
Twilight
. I can't imagine she was able to base Bella's house on a real house. And even if she did,
Bella herself isn't real
. But this doesn't matter to true fans. Travis told us the story of how one morning the owner of the Swan house had walked into the kitchen to find a complete stranger standing there in awe.

“Oh, don't mind me,” he said. “I just wanted to see Bella's kitchen!”

Once we finished our circuit of Forks, we headed toward La Push. As we crossed over into Quileute territory—“No Vampires Beyond This Point”—the soundtrack switched over to Warren Zevon's “Werewolves of London.” I perked up. I love that song. I actually love that song so much that I said as much out loud.

“Oh, so do I.”

I turned to my right. A woman was smiling at me. The one woman over forty—actually, the one woman over thirty. She was there with her preteen daughter, a dimpled girl in a
Twilight
T-shirt who was excited to the point of insensibility, and she looked vaguely relieved to find me there.

I think I probably looked relieved to find her, too.

About two thirds of the way through the film
New Moon
, Jacob Black, werewolf and member of the Quileute tribe, says something to Bella Swan. And no one knows what it is—all anyone knows for sure is that it's in Quileute.

When Stephenie Meyer chose to set
Twilight
in Forks, her decision had nothing to do with the town's proximity to any Indian reservation, much less La Push. According to her, she chose Forks first and foremost for its vampire-friendly climate. Only after she began researching the surrounding area did she learn about the Quileutes. And only after she learned about the Quileutes did she start thinking about werewolves.

There surely are many different accounts of the Quileute origin myth, but one of them goes something like this: the being known as K'wati (or the Transformer) went to the mouth of the river by La Push and saw two timber wolves, and he decided to transform these wolves into people. In the version of the story I read, K'wati then made the following pronouncement: “For this reason you Quileute shall be brave, because you have come from wolves. In every manner you shall be strong.”

Note that K'wati did not then add, “And the strongest and most shirtless among you will also periodically change
back
into wolves. Then, with very little effort, you will be shockingly and disproportionately famous.”

La Push and the Quileute tribe have been thrust into the spotlight just as much as Forks, if not more so. Basic though the tourist infrastructure of Forks may be, it's significantly more developed than that in La Push, which is little more than a handful of weathered buildings crouched near the water. Even so, the reservation is seeing a tremendous influx of visitors. Quileute merchandise—both authentic and otherwise—is selling like mad, the weekly drum circles held at the community center have been opened to the public, and when I visited, the tribe's Oceanside Resort, a picturesque collection of cabins, motels, and campgrounds, was positively bustling.

And with the inclusion of a single Quileute phrase in
New Moon
, the interest in the Quileute people and culture has been extended in some small way to the language as well. This interest was stoked due to the fact that everyone involved with the movie refused to provide a translation. As curiosity grew and entertainment media began asking about the mysterious line, the cast and crew—
New Moon
director Chris Weitz and actor Taylor Lautner in particular—repeatedly demurred, suggesting instead that hard-core fans “ask a Quileute.”

Which, naturally, they did. In force.

Shortly thereafter, the Quileute Nation posted a statement on its Facebook page:

Dear Fans: Thank you for all the calls and emails regarding the scene in the movie where Jacob whispers to Bella in Quileute. Please know, we would love to translate the phrase for you, but out of respect for Jacob's feelings for Bella we are unable to at this time.

In the absence of any knowledgeable guidance, fans have turned to increasingly implausible online speculation. Consensus appears to favor one of two options, either “I love you” or the more oppressively saccharine “stay with me forever.” Rarely, however, does anyone offer any proof or analytic support for their preference apart from “I read it online so I know it's true.” I saw requests for “people who speak Indian,” and I saw assertions that the phrase is in Mohawk. I read one post that seemed to imply translation was as simple as typing an English word in a Quileute font.

But, to be fair, I'm not sure anyone really can figure it out without expert—and willing—help. For one thing, no one seems to agree on what was actually said. I've seen three separate transliterations (“kwop kilawtley,” “kwopkalawo'li,” and “que quowle”), none of which appear to be written with Quileute spelling conventions. Even if there was a specific phrase to translate, you can't exactly run down to Barnes and Noble and pick up a Quileute dictionary.

The
Twilight
franchise has certainly made celebrities of the Quileute people and their culture, and I can only hope that the economic windfall is compensation enough for what I suspect will be years of putting up with stupid questions about werewolves, vampires, and throwaway werewolf lines in vampire movies. And though I'm not a fan of the
Twilight
books, even I can admit that it's fairly miraculous that because of these books there are thirteen-year-olds saying things like “I want to learn Quileute.” In a country where indigenous languages are essentially ignored among non-Native populations, this is something to celebrate.

The
Twilight
industry in Forks serves as a reminder, however, of the tenuous boundaries between reality and fantasy. It is important to be aware that even the most genuine interest does not guarantee a language or culture will be represented fairly or thoughtfully. I suspect that many of the fashionable young people who appropriate Native dress in indefensibly disrespectful ways do so, unknowing and unthinking, because to them Native culture is “cool.” Put simply, in American culture there is more misinformation about Native culture than there is information. I wish the Quileute tribe luck steering its flood of new fans and visitors toward the latter and not the former.

When you drive west from Seattle on Highway 101, you skirt the Olympic National Forest on your way north to Port Townsend before jogging to the east. Then a few miles past Port Angeles the road splits in two. If you're looking to see temperate rain forest and up-close views of the Olympic Mountains, stick to the southern route, which takes you through Sappho, Beaver, and eventually down to Forks. But if you're looking for something more, then the northern route—State Route 112—is for you.

It's this road that will take you to the end of the world.

And it's this road that took me to my last stop in Washington state, a place called Neah Bay.

I've navigated some pretty spectacular roads in my time, chief among them Highway 1 along the Pacific Coast, the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, and the Beartooth Highway in Montana and Wyoming. Along the way I've developed a system for determining the comparative caliber of the landscape. It's not that I'm interested in rankings or that I'm looking for reasons to be underwhelmed. But if I'm in the most beautiful place I've ever seen, I want to be aware of that fact. I want to be able to feel the moment the entire balance of my life experience shifts ever so slightly toward the sublime.

So I use something I call the Fuck-Me Factor.

It's very simple. The louder and more profane my reaction, the more impressive the scenery. Your standard ocean view, for instance, would typically elicit an appreciative but family-friendly response, something like “cats and dogs” or “goodnight, nurse.” An alpine waterfall or stirring sunset merits something closer to “crap” or maybe “crap-damn.” By the time you get to your heavy hitters—the Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, the first glimpse of Manhattan after a trip to Massachusetts—I've usually left behind all semblance of gentility: “fuck,” “holy fuck,” “fucking shit,” “fucking hell.” It's my version of a heartfelt sigh. The last thing I manage to say before I'm finally struck dumb by sheer emotion is typically “fuck me.”

As soon as I turned onto SR 112, I basically turned into a character from
Glengarry Glen Ross
. By the time I reached Sekiu, I was out of words. When I finally pulled up to my cabin on a beach about six miles southeast of Cape Flattery, I had lost my breath. It was then and remains to this day the most beautiful drive of my life.

With the foothills of Olympic Mountains to the south and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north, the road is just a sliver of pavement, a tenuous ledge between forest and sea. It is slow going, and not only on account of the highway's twists and turns—there's also the view to consider. Time and time again I found my eyes drawn one way or another, either down toward the ocean or up into the trees, only to realize with a start that I did still need to pay some attention to the road.

The highway ends in Neah Bay, a tiny town of about 800 and the largest settlement on the Makah Indian Reservation. The main industries in Neah Bay are fishing and tourism, but apart from the museum, the general store, a few motels, and some tiny shops and restaurants, there's not much to the town. A few dogs ran alongside my car as I turned off the main road and headed toward Hobuck Beach.

There isn't a particularly wide variety of lodging options in Neah Bay, so even though I'd read a few excellent reports of the Hobuck Beach Resort, I wasn't expecting much. I was staying in a cabin, sure, but I figured it would be something like the “cabins” I'd been forced to sleep in on high school camping trips: knotty wood, spiderwebs, an insidious damp that sticks to your socks for days. I'm not averse to the outdoors—quite the opposite—but at the end of the day I do appreciate a spot of indoor plumbing. I figure that untold multitudes of men and women have labored for centuries to harness the powers of hot water, so it's up to me to show my appreciation for their efforts by using it.