Dungeness Read online

  Henning bites his lip and squirms. No fairytale princess, but an actual blood-and-flesh woman, that’s what he wants.

  Meanwhile, on the lost beach, beside the big log with its medusa-like roots, Annie drops her load of bearded oysters and kneels. With her fingertips she combs the infant’s wisps. The baby gurgles. Annie wiggles her index finger and recites the tale of Slap’u, wild woman of the woods. Listen: You can hear her whistling through the dank trees. Another warning sign (just in case you weren’t paying attention!) she smells bad. Slap’u, with the tangled seaweed hair, steals babies from the beach, and tosses them into the basket on her back. Bad children kidnapped by Slap’u never return.

  It’s not that her infant daughter is repellant, but rather oddly out of place, like a true word spoken out of turn, or liberated from context. For one thing, despite her noble lineage, she’s a “round head.” The practice of the tribal elite—to press flat stones against the baby’s brow, to flatten the forehead as a symbol of status and a beautifying feature—is now, according to the white territorial government, though not precisely a crime, a barbaric out-of-date ritual. At times, in the intimate dark of the hot cabin, the babe smells sweet enough to drink, like hot milk from a goat. At these times, Annie would like to fold her into her heart, but that wrought iron gate won’t give way. At other times, she would like to swing her like a club, shattering her round skull.

  The infant, roused by the salted-earth scent of the mother, nearly leaps out of her skin. Annie pries at the straps; then reverses, and pulls them down hard. Instead of loosening the leather laces, she secures a new knot. The infant attempts a lopsided grin as the vague portrait of her mother clarifies and blurs, solidifies and crumbles—

  Annie takes off.

  Without a backward glance.

  The baby, four months old and baby nearsighted, becomes flat and stiff like the cradleboard. Something in the active air has altered. As the sand holds onto the disappearing tide, she can feel the shape of her receding. The whole world yawns.

  The infant learns that outside is not inside.

  Outside is peopled with a physical reality of rocks, driftwood, water, and sky. The elements vibrate with their own style of chatter. Inside begins as a mute regard for other people and the world guided by the sensations of the body. When an infant perceives the difference between inside and outside, she makes a journey from the everywhere to what we are & where we stand.

  My mother, a noble S’Klallam. My father, a philosopher-king. I only wanted to be normal. To be loved. For me, the offspring of two distinct worldviews, “normal” had not yet been invented. I was like an ordinary rock turned into aerolite by conditions beyond my control. I disturb the universe. I became extraordinary, without really wanting it.

  Like so many people out there.

  Even you.

  The baby flaps its stubby limbs. She puffs up her cheeks and rounds her lips to scream, but instead gulps and inhales a burning ball that later she will rename Utterly forsaken. However, this impression of alone is merely an illusion. Sure, her mother, the life force, for the moment has fled. However, the world is alive. The timeless, teeming, evolving world.

  Rounding one end of the beach log, a slouching shadow passes through the reedy purple grasses.

  A band of small birds curves into the air. Jostling crows consult and dash off. A great blue heron, balanced on one backward knee, lifts up, hacking out his disdain.

  The shadow congeals into an identifiable shape: a creeping fox, advancing inch by inch. Its open jaw swings, unreeling translucent strings of saliva. The black tips of his sharp ears are cocked. The ill creature lifts its addled head and moves it from side to side.

  It hunkers down on its white paws. The sick fox leaps. A rifle explodes, followed by a turbulence of crows. A smell like burnt coffee wafts.

  Due north a quarter of a mile up the shore, Annie, meanders in-between the rocky pillars. Hopping over shore rocks like an ebullient child, she feels her freedom.

  The report of a hunting rifle recalls her to reality. When she is vexed, Annie’s forehead contracts into one brow of woe. She halts to listen. Then, she straightens her spine, pebble by pebble, and whirls. Her legs stretch, unfurling seaweed banners from the soles of her feet.

  Now she is flying.

  Meanwhile, like a pull toy, the soul of the fox is pulled back, and evulses from the grey-glove of its impermanence. The pelt somersaults and drops onto the wet sand, relocating a colony of leaping creatures, could-be-fleas and might-be-shrimp. Silently, its dead body curls up into a crescent moon-shape, the bleeding shadow of what once was.

  Who shot the sick fox? No one ever claimed the deed. In the Pacific Northwest, babies die. Oftentimes, they survive. Miraculously, like this one.

  To me, it was Annie who loosed me from my bonds. That day in September, to relocate past joy and escape the prison of the present, Annie escaped. Blue thunder. Annie hastened back to find: ME. She kicked aside the cradle board and lifted me UP. My head became the sky.

  My mother sees me; therefore I am.

  Before that moment, Annie and Carl were strangers: worse, hostile warriors, from alien worlds, with alien weapons, yet, in their own way, well-matched.

  That shot married them.

  But still, the crouching shadow lurked.

  Marriage certificate of Mr. Charles Lambert to Miss Annie Jacob.

  3.

  Vancouver “Discovers” The Strait

  (from the logs of Captain Vancouver)

  In April, 1792, Captain George Vancouver rounded the tip of Cape Flattery, the extreme northwest tip of the continental United States. Under a fair wind, the thirty-year-old navigator and mapmaker sailed east into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Between the latitudes of 47 and 48 degrees, Vancouver entered a broad inlet. For twenty days he followed the Strait past a series of harbors with towering bluffs, rocky platforms, and sentinel firs.

  In 1792, from the deck of his ship, Captain Vancouver kept a log in his own hand, noting the picturesque as it coalesced and dissolved. What he observed was not, “one uninterrupted wilderness” but instead, “in many directions, extensive spaces that wore the appearance of having been cleared by art.”

  What he described was a gentleman’s well-groomed estate. The unfurling coast, he later wrote, presented “a picture so pleasing it could not fail to our remembrances certain delightful and beloved situations in old England.” When they reached Protection Island, a sand-and-grass sanctuary for birds, “our attention was immediately called to a landscape, almost as enchantingly beautiful as the most elegantly furnished pleasure grounds of Europe . . .” Because the rolling green and purple valleys between the sheer bluffs reminded him of home, he named the curve of coastline protected by North America’s longest sandspit, New Dungeness.

  Along with his pastoral meanderings, Vancouver remarked in his journal on the savaged faces of children and old people marked by smallpox scars. When his ship The Discovery first entered the Strait, the log mentions twenty-five or thirty thriving villages. By the mid-nineteenth century, the waves of illness from explorers and colonizers had devastated the coastal tribes. Evidence of the pestilence was everywhere. Entire villages had sickened and died.

  Later on, near Whidbey Island, Vancouver suffered a minor scrape. He lost the 900-pound anchor from his vessel the HMS Chatham. The pestilent iron, for two hundred years, will remain buried underneath Juan de Fuca’s Strait. A reminder to the whites: despite the centuries, the invaders are still here.

  A chart showing part of the coast of N.W. America: with the tracks of His Majesty’s sloop Discovery and armed tender Chatham. Image courtesy of theGeography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

  4

  Swan Boat

  (c. 1880)

  My father, a driftwood sailor, thumbed the cardboard globe and incised it with his horny nail on a random longitude and latitude which he called home.

  The fall I turned four, Carl built a small loft for me over the entry of o
ur cabin. A hemp ladder reached up to a loft shelf covered with a bristling sack of squeaky feathers, my bed. I propped my doll on the roof beam curtained with cobwebs. Up here I could treasure my thoughts yet keep an eye on the people I loved in the chamber down below.

  At the far end, a fireplace provides heat to the bedroom alcove. Beneath my toes thrust out over the ledge, the kitchen: an iron cookstove, topped by three pantry shelves, with glass jars and clay vessels filled with flour, lard, dried berries, and spices; a slab table and two bright benches, which had somehow crawled out of a mean hunk of swamp maple; and one factory-made chair where Carl knitted or smoked his pipe. Annie’s mother Eliza II—I called her Seya; grandmother in Coast Salish—had twisted, urged, and abused a colorful rag rug out of scraps. Huge and heavy, it made the two halves of my world whole.

  “Millie, you’re wanted,” my father called.

  Woozy, I slid down.

  On the factory-made chair, my mother sat with her knees up. Her well-oiled locks dripped down. Not her usual self. INSIDE OUT, her essence revealed: pod and seed. Inkwell and ink. A candle guarding its own flame.

  She was—alarming.

  Carl, hand trembling, treated me to salted halibut in a chipped saucer. I thrust it back into his tough belly, which oofed in time to Annie’s ache, and then went soft. I looked up; he looked down. Instead of scolding me, he traded the lump of fish for a quarter loaf of stale bread, and pushed me out. “If you see your grandmother, tell her to come apace.”

  As the morning mist lifted, treetops nodded on a pillow of cloud. I crushed the bread, I wound up, and let go. A bufflehead with a teal mask nipped at the explosion of crumbs. After that, I stumbled down the dry trail to our curved beach, where Carl had toppled the skiff. The nether region, a barnacled topographic map of the world. I clambered up and balanced on top of the sharp shells. Still bleary, I shielded my eyes from the Strait which glinted like a rogue’s cutlass.

  Not long after, Seya appeared, picking her way over the green rocks. In the white light she was easy to spot, even at a quarter of a mile, with the grey-and-white Hudson’s Bay blanket tossed up over one shoulder. Striding after her, a jaunty gentleman in a bowler and powder-gray topcoat wafted. The graybeard, making his way with a cane, panted. Trailing behind them, Jacob Cook, Carl’s handyman.

  “Hullo! Hullo!” I wobbled on the keel of the upside-down boat. To my surprise, with the merest nod in my direction, Seya hobbled up to the house. The gentleman, in his mid-sixties, dropped his bruised leather satchel and held out his glove. I shook my head, leaped, and landed against the hard thigh of Jake, Carl’s fishing partner, who, as usual, refused to play. The tall Indian dragged my legs through the sand until I found my feet.

  James Gilchrist Swan: to me, a trumpeted name in a fairytale. Later I learned that Swan–explorer, artist, and ethnographer–even then, was famous, from coast to coast and in Europe, too. It was his pen that first described the Pacific Northwest. In the 1840s Swan served as a clerk for a shipping concern in Boston. When gold rush fever became epidemic, he abandoned his wife and two children, fleeing fusty New England to commune with cathedral trees in the final frontier. In vest-pocket notebooks he chronicled his travels: the damp winter harvesting oysters with the coastal tribes and his subsequent travels north up the untrammeled coastline to the Olympic Peninsula. These notes became The Northwest Coast, the first detailed description of Oregon and Washington. Later, he published articles, sketches of flowering plants and Indian artifacts, and a monograph of the Makah.

  Swan eventually settled in Port Townsend. A Renaissance man, he simultaneously served as a journalist, judge, and consulate of two countries. He tried to raise funds for an expedition in the Queen Charlotte Islands to gather more artifacts. Though warmly well-respected, no one seemed all that eager to back him. A dreamer, Swan, had lost money before: attempting to build a brand new port for the outmoded whaling industry, shilling for a proposed railroad, and more. Also, he was also known to binge on whiskey, which made him a bad risk.

  Addressing me as an equal rather than a child, Swan described his passage from Port Townsend to Dungeness: The mid-morning started out fine, but by mid-afternoon the weather turned bleak. As Jake’s dugout canoe rounded Dead Man’s Point, the wind began to shrill. With skill and fortitude, “and more luck than we deserved,” the paddler maneuvered his craft in between the sea stacks.

  Jake, the hero of the tale, looked bored. Either that, or he wasn’t listening. As Swan gossiped with Carl, the lean and rugged jack-of-all-trades poked holes into the sand with a pointy stick. He tossed up the wet clams until they accumulated in a heap on the beach. Every minute or so, he glanced up at our plank house.

  At last, the cabin door flew open on its rope hinges. My father, a scowling prophet, in India rubber boots medallioned with silvery fish scales, scuffed down over the rocks to the edge of the Strait, where, motionless, we waited.

  My father cried out, “Tell me! Can she, will she, survive?”

  Swan, startled, said nothing. With his kid glove he reached inside the pocket of his jacket for a bottle. Like an agate, or a sperm oil lamp, the mid-morning sun set fire to the amber liquid inside. My father received the vessel, embossed thusly:

  He lifted up the bottle, thrusting out his nob of chin. Abrupt brow, deep set eyes, thin bent nose; his white eyebrows looped down, a froth of steely grey which joined the sideburns of his beard at the temples. Like the rest of him, his neck was scrawny. His Adam’s apple went up and down. At last, he lowered it and declared, “What we should do now is pray.” He added, sadly, “But I can’t.”

  The seaweed steamed on top of the water.

  Swan replied, “Let’s go fishing.”

  Heave ho! Together, they lifted the rowboat and rolled it into the sputtering tide. Swan handled the oars; my father jealously guarded his bottle. Jake, the Makah, looked on with disgust. When Swan ordered him into the boat, Jake refused.

  “Hey!” I chirped up. “What about me?”

  Carl set down the bottle and lifted me into the boat.

  Jake remained there, standing on top of the rocky beach, gazing at us steadily. As the waves pulled us back he turned taller and thinner, a burnt-black tree blending into the stepped-up wood behind the plank house.

  Our skiff, off balance and anything but smooth, upset a clique of seagulls. A merganser dipped his black-feathered cap and disappeared. Here the Dungeness River collided with the salty Strait, causing the tide to rebound. Our skiff, despite Swan’s best effort, turned ’round and ’round. I imagined the fish looking up at the barnacled bottom of the skiff to gaze at a spinning map of the world.

  Carl, in his great misery, told Swan, “When Eliza gave her to me, I pledged to protect her. If she dies, it’s my fault.”

  He wound up. The bottle arched and disappeared into the mystic.

  He went on. “I have served on merchant ships and whaling vessels. One time, a brig. The deck all heaped up with sugar cane and casks of palm oil. Underneath, a hell: slave boys from the Congo, below the deck wallowing in filth, awash in their own fear. I’m not a good person. I’ve done nothing of value for others or me.

  “Not until I met Annie.” He squinted at the featureless sky. “Swan, do you think God, in order to punish me, will take the life of an ignorant girl?”

  Swan exhorted, “Gad, man. We’re not in heaven, we’re in the world. We suffer enough without the help of a higher power. I love Annie, too. But, what makes you think she’s less guilty, or less wise, than the sum total of humanity, a damnable lot?”

  He pointed his oar at my father. “Most whites, knowing very little about them, regard Indians as wayward children. They start out trying to protect them and end up damning them all to hell. However, Indians are not children, except, of course, those who are. Their men: intelligent, sensitive, and capable. Their women, wives and mothers by the time they are fifteen, even more so. We remove from their power to survive, and then condemn them as irrationally unethical. The mote in the eye, as
it were.

  “For example, we condemn the S’Klallam for stealing slaves from Native villages. However, this practice can in no way be compared to the trade in human chattel from Africa, which we have outlawed but only very recently.

  “Likewise, we condemn their system of justice. But why? Coast Salish justice maintains the balance of power. When a tribal member is killed, his village demands payment, in money or blood. More often than not, a settlement is reached and the goods are delivered without further ado. Overall, there is more peace than war. Can we say as much?

  “The decay of the living organism,” Swan went on, “the law of the conservationof energy, the transmutation of matter—to white man, these are the metaphysical theories, impractical and impersonal; to the shaman, life and death is a door that swings both ways. European men-of-letters claim that their minds are open; that may be, but their eyes are shut. They fail to take in the ample evidence everywhere in the natural world: nothing is past, and that which perishes remains.”

  The waves heaved against the side of the craft. A breeze edged in, side-swiping the tears that wobbled down my father’s cheeks.

  The clouds had descended, opened up, and vomited a pestilent rain.

  “Yes, yes, I know!” Carl exclaimed. “You’re a scholar, well-informed and broad-minded. I’m sure everything you say is true. But I want to know: will Annie die?”

  I began to cry.

  The two men looked abashed; both had forgot me, or maybe they assumed I was too little to understand.

  We had ended exactly where we started. By now the scalding breeze had carried our craft back to the shore. Jake Cook, gone. Swan shoved the handle end of the oar into the mud and pried up a stream of muck. Breathing hard, my mouth was open; the grit plashed against my teeth. Carl called out, “Capsize!”