Winter Brothers (33 page)

He amply qualifies. Washington Territory was not yet created when Swan sailed into Shoalwater Bay that late autumn of 1852, and now, the eighteenth of November of 1889 at Olympia:

This is the Inauguration day when we become a State.

The town is crowded to excess The pioneers met at Columbia Hall and each one had a nice badge furnished....

At 10 AM we marched out and took our places in the grand procession. First the Tacoma Band, then the Pioneers headed by E C Ferguson President, James G Swan Vice President, Frank Henry Secretary, & Geo A Barney Treasurer. Then followed some 50 or 60 Pioneers, men & women Then the Military, more bands the Governors members of the Legislature and citizens generally....

This has been a stormy cold disagreeable day,
the first of February of 1893.
Snow falling all day. The worst day this winter. I have felt much depressed with the many deaths of friends since New Years. Felix Dobelli lies dead at the Undertaker and Capt Sampson died last Sunday and Mrs. Morrison is very low. My turn may come soon.

 

The diaries of the 1890s. Common tan pocket notebooks for the decade's opening year. Not auspicious. But for 1891, an elongated Standard diary with maroon leather covers and gilt page edges. Notebooks again for 1892. Then beginning with 1893, five volumes in a row with
Excelsior Diary
in gilt script across a maroon cover. 1894 is longer and slimmer than the other Excelsiors, but the group is more uniform than any other of Swan's sets of years.

For Swan and his town, the decade itself is not at all so orderly, and red ink the more usual coloration than maroon. Port Townsend had boomed at the end of the 1880s; seven thousand population, streetcar lines, an electricity plant fed with slabwood; the big downtown buildings which still stand, three-and four-story dowagers of stone and brick, were built then. Naturally, railroad hopes had freshened. A line called the Port Townsend Southern, the first mile laid by the townspeople themselves, caught the attention of eastern railroad men—officials of the Union Pacific this time—and drew a promise of completion to Portland. The acreage Swan bought west of town twenty years earlier at last looked as if it would pay off; an offer of $100,000 had been made to him, he exulted to his daughter Ellen. Swan had bet as well by investing in a fish processing plant, and Franz Boas was salarying him to do some artifact collecting for the famous Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Then with the depression of 1893, financial fizzle for both Port Townsend and Swan. Again no railroad, again no profit from the long-held land.

 

Whether the dull day,
the eleventh of January, 1894,
or as a precursor of bad news I have felt remarkably dull and low spirited. The times are very dull, taxes are due and no money to pay them and I feel as if I have lost all.

But there are thousands of people worse off, and I have good health. I have much to be thankful for, but I feel very despondent.

 

As when he explored the west shore of the Queen Charlottes, Swan now is going into territory where I, as a modern winterer, cannot follow. Just once have I experienced the dearth of money which plagues Swan now—sixteen years ago, when I arrived back to Montana out of the Air Force, stepping off the train at Ringling with two dollars, both of them borrowed—and mine was only a moment, tiniest fraction of his new chronic brokeness.

 

Stormy day,
the twenty-sixth of December 1895,
remained at home and dyed my pilot jacket which had become jaded and rusty I used diamond navy blue dye and tomorrow I can tell how I have succeeded.
The next day:
Pressed out my navy jacket and it looks as good as new. The old pantaloons which I dyed and pressed a few days ago, and this fresh dyed jacket make my friends think I have just bought a new suit of clothes. I am much pleased as now I can renovate my old clothes with but small cost....

 

Nor can I truly share the fact of age as it works now on Swan. I can watch his reports of decline in the diary pages of 1896 and 1897, how the wide days of Northwest summer seem to mean less to him now, and the days of coastal winter grow newly treacherous—
Snow showers this evening. I slipped down on the crossway and sprained my right thumb.
How he records as ever the letters sent and received, whom he has called on, met on the street, borrowed two dollars from, but all the while the incidents of his life becoming smaller and smaller, a walk around town chronicled as a canoe trip to Neah once had been.

I see, and am moved by, the way Swan begins to be cared for by his coastal friends. The women who were the Roberts sisters of Swan's smitten sentences of twenty years before, Dolly Biondi and Mary Webster, take turns with Sarah Willoughby, wife of the Makah Reservation agent during Swan's last trio of years at Neah Bay, in hearing again his stories, seating him to the table:
Dined at Mrs Websters on Stewed chicken, mushrooms and huckleberry pudding—delicious.
His landlord forgives him his office rent, the family of Jimmy Claplanhoo—Jimmy has fledged into
Capt fames Claplanhoo
in the diary, owner and skipper of a schooner of his own—provides frequent visits from Cape Flattery and an occasional gift of a suit of clothes.

Study as I may, however, I know I do not grasp this process, silent as spiderspin, which is happening to Swan here and which is called age. My belief is that we cannot truly see ourselves as we will be when old; perhaps dare not; and so are unable to imagine very far into the oldness of others. All I can learn for certain from Swan, and it may be plenty, is that now some of his days are better than other of his days, but no day is easy.

Yet if such information must be secondhand until I encounter age myself, this would not be Swan's wordstream if it were not also clear as a diary pen can make it. On the first of April of 1898, Swan's eightieth year, he begins to use an old but unfilled pocket diary, a mustard-colored Standard published for 1890. Generally he remembers to add the tiny loop of ink atop the 0 of 1890 to transform the year, but when he doesn't, it is as if his entries ebb back and forth between the years the way—life imitates life—this winterbook has traveled between his time and mine.

 

The twenty-eighth of June:
Weighed myself on Joe Gates scales I weighed 143 pounds the lightest I have weighed in some time My long sickness pulled me down but I am getting better slowly.

 

The twelfth of July:
Mr. Springs of Everett was here to day and talked against Port Townsend, said...if the rail road is completed it will do no good as vessels will all load at Seattle and a lot more such rot. I told him if the road is completed to here, that trains of cars can bring their grain direct to Port Townsend as well as to Seattle or Everett, but he would not admit that....

I told him he is an old fossil & he had better remain in Everett as it is an evidence of ignorance and bad taste to go into a town and run it down before its residents. He is a regular crank and is fit for such a place as Everett.

 

The second of August:
Have felt very much depressed all day. Think there is to be a change of weather.

 

The seventh of August:
I did not go to church, as it seemed
that everything was wrong about my clothes and I did not get ready to go out till 12 o'clock noon.

 

The twenty-fourth of August:
A lot of Quilliute and Makah Indians arrived today and camped at Point Hudson They are going to pick hops I went down to the beach to see them. They all tyiew me and were glad to see me. It looked like old times to see so many Indians on the beach.

 

The eleventh of September:
Commenced a letter to my daughter Miss Ellen M Swan. The letter I received from her on the 7th I burned as it was a very disagreeable one.

 

The fifteenth of September:
Mrs. Webster gave me a bag full of doughnuts for bringing her mail from the Post Office to her however I took the doughnuts to Mrs Biondis and her sharp perceptive faculties soon found out the contents of the parcel and she soon had an impromptu course of hot coffee cake and doughnuts we enjoyed them.

 

The tenth of October:
Dr Brooks O Baker examined me for vertigo which has troubled me at intervals since last January. He said it proceeds from heart weakness and gave me a prescription of his own preparing, of which strychnine forms one of the ingredients Commenced taking Dr Bakers medicine this afternoon.

 

The thirtieth of December:
Have had quite an attack of vertigo this evening.

My first birth day in the new century,
the eleventh of January 1900.
82 years old. May this new Era bring new prospect and may I live to see its so glorious promise unfold....I have been
reading evenings in my diaries and it seems singular to see half my life therein
...50
years ago I left Boston and 411 began my daily journal but yet my early years at Neah Bay are fresh to my mind Only when I recall the deaths of so many friends Prof Baird Maj Van Bokf{elin friend Webster Bulkley & store-peeper Gerrisk my own dear son Charley last year, does the time seem so long as it is. And the Indians I formerly knew are gone Swell Duke of York old Edinso Capt John only Peter alive...Ellens letters and the little sums she sends are all I have now to tide me over to improved times. My wish is that Pt Townsend will yet take its rightful place as the most magnificent city of the west and that my burden of debt will pass from me. As the Poet John G Whittier writes “for all sad words of tongue or pen The saddest are these, it might have been!” But if it is ordained otherwise I have other remuneration in life my collecting for the Smithsonian Institution the Makah memoir The “Northwest Coast my expedition to the Queen Charlottes Archipelago the knowledge of Indian ways and language which otherwise would have been lost for future generations, I would not trade for more worldly wealth. For if I have not prospered greatly in my western life yet I am greatly prosperous in what I have done....

 

Swan did not write those words. I have written them for him, or rather, for both of us, this dusk of winter and of his life. The archival diaries end with 1898, the volumes of 1899 and 1900 held in a private collection, but the entries have been dwindling anyway, Swan lamenting to his daughter Ellen his failing grip:
My hand and wrist are still painful and I have to write slow. I don't think this is so much of a Rheumatic affection as it is the pen paralysis from over exertion writing....But it is very annoying to me to have such continual pain in the cords of my hand when I attempt to write. I have been trying a little instrument called the “Electropoise” which my cousin Edward kindly sent from New York. It sends a gentle current of electricity to the part affected but it is too much bother for me to use it properly.
Swan hooked to an electrical rheumatism gizmo rather than a pen is Swan become an old bewildered stranger to himself, I am afraid. From that eighty-second birthday of his, where my imagination takes over the telling, he has four months and a week to live.

But I discover an odd thing as this companion of my winter begins to fade from life. There at the first days of this century Swan comes into view to me in a strong new way: as if a white-instead-of-tawny cat suddenly has padded into sight at the forest edge. Swan stepping to the century-line which I crossed in his direction almost three months ago now has endured into time which touches my own. A little more than a year from that eleventh morning of 1900, my father will be born at the homestead in Montana. The grandmother who will share in raising me already is a seven-year-old farmgirl in Wisconsin. (In history's less personal terms, put it this way: Swan was born when James Monroe inhabited the White House and Napoleon was yet alive, and now he is almost to Theodore Roosevelt's America, and Einstein already is thinking the world into a nuclear future.) Connection of lifespans is added to our shared places, our intermingled Wests.

So much of Swan I still do not know, even after studying him through the fifteen thousand days and two and a half million words of his diaries. In his lamplit times alone in the schoolhouse tower at Neah or the narrow office at Port Townsend, for instance, what urges of the night worked in him, moving behind his brow, under his thatch of beard, atop his thighs. Or why, like me, he chose to invest his life at this edge of America over all other—although I think it has most to do in both our cases with a preference for gossamer possibilities, such as words, rather than hard and fast obligations, such as terms of employment. Or why he would admit into his pages whatever peeves he held, but no hatreds; details of infatuation with a choirgirl, but none of the fact of it; hints of whiskey, but never direct confession of too many bottles. Unlearnable, those beneath-the-skin frontiers. Even the outer ones leave questions, for I believe now that no one winterbook—no book—can find nearly all that should be said of the West, the Wests. Profundities of westering there undoubtedly are, but do they count for more than a liking of mountains and of hearing a waitress say,
There you go...?

What I do take from this time of musing in Swan's Wests is fresh realization that my own westernness is going to have to be a direction of the mind. Personal geography shifts restlessly in America, much as plates of bedrock are said to grind and jostle against one another far under the surface of the earth. My West, or Wests, inevitably are going to be smaller and a bit more skewed than Swan's and the more intensely held, felt, worried over, for that reason.

Yet any separations between Swan's territory and mine mysteriously close at some moments. Scenes of this winter and of Swan's own western-edged seasons do flow together, in the way that beings mingle in one of those magical carvings of the Haidas. (“They weren't bound by the silly feeling that it's impossible for two figures to occupy the same space at the same time.”) Perhaps atoms merge out of the landscape into us. However it happens, the places are freshly in me. Whidbey Island, gulls balleting along the roofs of wind. Dungeness Spit, days there glossed with sea ducks and crowned with an eagle. The thrusting Capes, Flattery and Alava, their surfs bringing in perpetual cargoes of sound. This suburban valley, at its mouth the greater gray-blue water valley, Puget Sound. The cabin at Rainier, summing all these sites by being abode for a dweller rather than a citizen.