Winter Brothers (19 page)

The sun now rides clear of the mountains, but so far onto the southern horizon at this time of year that its luster slants almost directly along the Sound and Admiralty Inlet, as if needing the ricochet help from the water in order to travel the extreme polar distances to the lagoon and, at last, me.

The canoes that slipped through these water distances like needles; they stitch and stitch in my mind this morning.
Beautifully modeled
, Swan said of the crafts of the Makahs,
resembling in their bows our finest clipper ships...formed from a single log of cedar, carved out with'skill and elegance. The best canoes are made by the Clyoquot and Nittinat tribes, on Vancouver
Island, who sell them to the Mackahs, but few being made by the latter tribe owing to the scarcity of cedar in their vicinity....
Propulsion was either the deft broadhead paddles carved by the Clyoquots or square sails of woven cedar bark, which caused the vessels to look all the more like small clipper ships, diminutives of that greatest grace of seafaring. The grace perhaps flowed up out of the cedar into the canoemen. Swan records that when the Makahs would convey him downcoast from Cape Flattery to the Hosett village at Cape Alava, for the sheer hellbending fun of it they would thread the canoe into the archways where waves have pounded through the big offshore seastacks. On one of these through-the-hole voyages Swan and the Reservation doctor
had an opportunity of witnessing the operation of three tremendous rollers which came sweeping after us and which I feared would knock us against the top of the arch. The doctor said he had his eye on a ledge which he should try to catch hold of in case of emergency, but fortunately we had no occasion to try our skill at swimming as the Indians worked the canoe through the passage beautifully.

Makah canoemanship introduced Swan to Swell, dressed in that fresh suit of Boston clothes, bound out from Port Townsend to Neah Bay on a mid-September day of 1859 with a cargo of
flour, bacon, molasses and blankets.
Swan climbed in for the jaunt and ever after was impressed with Swell, wrote at once of him that line that
he is still quite a young man, but if he lives, he is destined to be a man of importance among his own and neighboring tribes.

If he lives.
Why those edged words amid the admiration, on a fine bright journey out this valley of water to Neah?

Whatever the reason for those three uneasy jots of Swan's pen, they were exact augury, Swell long since dead by the time seven Septembers later Swan canoed away from the Neah Bay teaching job, reversed that original route to arrive in from Cape Flattery to Port Townsend, across the water here.

A second illumination of this sunrise. I realize that I bring myself back and back to this bluff because here scenes still fit onto each other despite their distances of time. Becoming rarer in the West, constancy of this sort. What I am looking out over in this fresh dawn is little enough changed from the past that Swan in a Makah canoe, coming or going on the Port Townsend-Neah Bay route, can be readily imagined across there, the sailing gulls slide through his line of sight as they do mine. Resonance of this rare sort, the reliable echo from the eye inward, I think we had better learn to prize like breath.

So to Swan's next frontier address: Port Townsend.

Port Townsend always has lived a style of boom and bust and that record of chanciness is a main reason I cherish the town. In a society of cities interested most in how svelte their skyscrapers are, Port Townsend still knows that life is a dice game in the dirt. I have been in and out of the place as often as I could these past dozen years and I can almost feel in the air as I step from the car whether the town is prospering or drooping. Small shops will bud in the high old downtown buildings. My next visit, they have vanished. A grand house will be freshly painted one day. When I glance again, peeling has set in. This time I was in town only moments when I heard that a few of the vastest old mansions have been trying life as guest houses. That seemed promising, but now the state is requiring that every room be fitted with a metal fire door, and the mansion proprietors proclaim themselves staggered toward bankruptcy by the prospect.

Reputation here has waned a bit, too, at least from what I can determine by reading around in Port Townsend's past. Swan once writes that in its early years the town was noted for whiskey so strong it was suspected to be
a vile compound of alcohol red pepper, tobacco and coal oil.
The quality of Port Townsend's early inhabitants occasionally was questioned in similar tones, as when a transplanted Virginian assessed his period of residence: “Suh, when I first came here, this town was inhabited by three classes of people—Indians, sailors, and sons of bitches. Now I find that the Indians have all died, and the sailors have sailed away.” Those of us who grew up in small towns of such lineage (“Tell 'em”—the Montana rancher to me, sixteen-year-old ranchhand about to brave the community of Browning on a Saturday night—“tell 'em you come from Tough Creek, and you sleep on the roof of the last house”) may become rare as mules in this citifying nation, but meanwhile a Port Townsend, adoze out on its end of the continent, reminds us of the vividness.

No ferry from the cities of Puget Sound connects to Port Townsend, and the road to its flange of headland on the Strait is a dozen-mile veer from the main highway of the Olympic Peninsula. In fogless weather I can very nearly see to the town, north past the jut of Point No Point, from the bluff above our valley. But driving here on this day of murk, the sky like watered milk and the road spraying up brown slush, Port Townsend seemed far-off and elusive as a lookout tower atop a distant crag.

From its initial moment of settlement, which happened in 1851, the remarkable siting has been Port Townsend's topic to boast, whenever not cussing it. As the first community astride the Strait of Juan de Fuca-Puget Sound water route, claiming a spacious headland with a sheltering bay along its southeastern side, Port Townsend looked to be a golden spot on the map. But the promontory site turned out not as the dreamed-of stroke of geography collecting all inbound ships but merely a nub of coast around which the lane of maritime commerce bent, like a rope pulleyed over a limb, and lowered cargoes onward to the dock-lands of Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and Olympia. Those cargoes still are going past.

The civic personality did not quite prove out as anticipated, either. Huge aspiring Victorian houses and unexampled views across water shoulder side by side with the scruff and shagginess of a forest clearing. The town is divided between the abrupt waterfront (brinklike in more ways than one: Swan once reports to his diary that
One Arm Smith the waterman jell through the privy of the Union hotel down onto the beach and injured him
self severely & perhaps fatally)
and the expansive reach of bluff behind it, where the big old betrimmed houses rise like a baker's shelves of wedding cakes. Downtown is divided again, between the blocks of brick emporiums of the 1880s and a straggle of modern stores which look as if they have been squeezed from a tube labeled Instant Shopping Center.

I discover from the diaries that Swan achieved his move from Neah Bay to Port Townsend by way of Boston, a transcontinental detour not entirely surprising from him; if he had been paid by the mile in this Strait period of his life he would have made it to millionairehood. The holiday season of 1866 and the first months of 1867 Swan spent with his daughter and son, Ellen and Charles, and not incidentally was on hand to claim a windfall: an inheritance of $6,427.14 from an uncle. About half the sum he rapidly poured off for merchandise consigned to Port Townsend (
1 doz money belts,
the pocket diary begins enumerating day by day,
1 covered wagon...1 set harness...cod lines...pistols etc.).
Much of the rest flowed away in gifts for Ellen and Charles and in an astounding number of $25 checks written to himself. By the first of June, 1867, he had his bank balance successfully decimated to $647.32, and took ship for the west again.

In mid-July Swan was back here at Port Townsend—he had shortcutted by way of Panama—and in mid-August drifted out the Strait to visit at Neah Bay. Near year's end he went off on a buying trip to San Francisco for one of the Port Townsend storekeepers. In 1868, at last I find pages where he begins to settle in to town life.

Swan has had another windfall, of sorts. The ship
Ellen Foster
smashed apart on the rocks near Neah Bay and he undertakes to salvage the wreck. Beachcombing in the truest sense of the word, this is, and Swan holds no illusions about it. The warehouse he rented on the Port Townsend waterfront to sort the
Foster's
bounty is consistently dubbed in his diary
the junk store.

Simultaneous with the junkwork Swan begins to take on paperwork. As the customs port for the Puget Sound region and county seat and the biggest dab of settlement between Victoria and Seattle, Port Townsend had become a kind of official inkwell for the Strait frontier. Swan always swims best in ink. Rapidly he plucks up semi-job of some official sort after semi-job.

I have established myself here at Port Townsend,
he soon confides in one of his letters to Baird at the Smithsonian,
having been appointed by the Governor as a notary public and Pilot Commissioner, and by the Supreme Court as United States Commissioner, and having appointed myself as a commission merchant and ship broker. Thus you see honors are easy with me....I reverse the saying that a prophet is without honor for I have the honors without the profit.

Swan has come down with railroad fever.

How strong and delusory a frontier ailment, this notion that wherever you Xed in your town on the blankness of the west, a locomotive soon would clang up to it with iron carloads of money. I admit for Swan and Port Townsend that they had a germ of reason for their railroad hopes: the attractive harbor sited closer to the Pacific and its trade routes than any other of the contending anchorages of Puget Sound. And a single germ can bring on delirium. Swan's breaks forth in letters to Thomas H. Canfield, an executive of the Northern Pacific Railroad:

Had the most skillful engineer selected a site for a great and magnificent city, he could not have located a more favored spot than the peninsula of Port Townsend....It may be of interest to you as a meteorological fact, that while during the past winter, the snow on the Sierra Nevada has been so deep as to obstruct the Central Rail Road, causing the mails and express to be transported for a time on snow shoes, and while at San Francisco, snow has fallen to the depth of two inches, yet in the mountain passes north of the Columbia River, the greatest depth
of snow does not exceed five feet, and on Puget Sound particularly Port Townsend from whence
I
write, there has not been
a
particle of snow this winter....The whole of the rich valley of the Chahalis, which empties into Grays Harbor, and the valley of the Willopah the garden of the Territory, which connects with Shoalwater Bay, would be tributary to a city at Port Townsend, and could furnish supplies for
a
population larger than the dreams of the most sanguine enthusiast....A ship could sail direct from New York with a cargo of Railroad iron, which could be landed at any desired point on Hoods canal....

 

Swan, I would turn you if I could from this railroad courtship. I know its outcome, and you would be better off spending your ink money and postage to bet on fistfights in your favorite waterfront saloon. The commercial future lay in wait here along the eastern shoreline of Puget Sound, not across there with you at pinnacle-sitting Port Townsend. Seattle and Tacoma, these points where the westward flow of settlement quickest met deep harbors—they became the region's plump rail-fed ports. (While Swan still was busheling oysters at Shoalwater Bay in 1853, a territorial newspaper already was crediting the barely born town of Seattle with “goaheaditiveness.”) Had Swan and his hamlet of destiny been able to admit it, the very sweep of water which served as Port Townsend's concourse, Admiralty Inlet and Puget Sound, now made its moat.

 

The letters to Canfield flew on, however, and in the sixth of the series Swan made bold to say that the Northern Pacific not only needed Port Townsend, it required him as its local eyes and ears:

I would respectfully submit to you whether it would not be for the interest of the company to have some careful reliable person to prepare a statement of all matters of interest relative to the harbors of Puget Sound....For $150, a month I will undertake to furnish every information, and pay all the expense of obtaining it, such as travelling expenses boat and canoe hire &c....

Swan in this Port Townsend life is showing something I have not seen much of since his time among the Shoalwater oyster entrepreneurs. He has a little bright streak of hokum in him, which begins at his wallet.

It is the thing I would change first about the West, or rather, about an ample number of westerners. Their conviction that in this new land, just because it is new, wealth somehow ought to fall up out of the ground into their open pockets. Such bonanza notions began with the Spaniards peering for golden cities amid buffalo grass, and surged on through the fur trade, the mining rushes, the laying of the railroads, the arrival of the loggers, the taking up of farmland and grazing country, the harvest of salmon rivers, and even now are munching through real estate and coal pits and whatever can be singled out beyond those. Besides a sudden population the West—the many Wests—have had to support this philosophy of get-rich-quicker-than-the-next-grabber-and-to-hell-with-the-consequences, and the burden of it on a half-continent of limited cultivation capacities has skewed matters out here considerably. The occasional melancholy that whispers like wind in westerners' ears I think is the baffled apprehension of this; the sense that even as we try to stand firm we are being carried to elsewhere, some lesser and denatured place, without it ever being made clear why we have to go. And the proper word for any such unchosen destination is exile.