Passage to Juneau Read online

  It worked. The Indians paddled cautiously forward, quickly removed the gifts, and paddled quickly back to their original position.

  Now the launch was rowed back to the log. A peacock feather, a card of pearl buttons, a string of colored beads, a tin kettle, and a metal brooch were laid out as bait, and again the launch backed off. As before, the Indians came forward to pick up their booty, then retreated, despite Puget’s warmest efforts to persuade them to cuddle up alongside the launch.

  After the third pass in this floating tango, the Indians came close enough to the launch to receive their fourth installment of gifts hand to hand over the water; but they wouldn’t meet Puget’s eye, and their faces were knotted in swarthy scowls. Far from being bedazzled victims of the lieutenant’s boyish charm, they had the manner of heavies dunning cash from a persistent debtor. They pointed at the sack of presents and demanded more, shouting at the Englishmen in a language of popping glottal stops.

  As often happens with disappointed suitors, Puget’s mood of tender expectancy curdled quickly into bored distaste. He couldn’t wait to get away from the importunate savages with their bad skin and filthy hair.

  Later, when the tents were set up on shore, and an armed guard posted, Puget wrote up the incident by candlelight:

  Nor could all the signs emblematical of Friendship, such as a white Handkerchief—a Green Bough & many other Methods induce them to venture near us.… However I did not like to quit those Indians altogether without giving them some evident Proof that our Intention was perfectly friendly & an Expedient was hit on that soon answered our Purpose.… By the subsequent circumstances I am of Opinion that they had the Ingratitude to impute our Friendship to a fear of their Power.…

  The sea in Saratoga Passage frosted over, as the forecast wind began to fill in from the south. The wrinkled skin of the water became ridged with breaking wavelets; in less than half an hour, the waves were steep, regular, well-formed, hard-driven by the building wind. With the headsail out to starboard, the boat skidded through the sea—the winched sheet bar-taut, the sail molded into a white parabola as rigid as one of Frank Gehry’s curved concrete walls. The wind keened in the steel rigging. At my back, I could hear the forward rush of each new wave, then its sudden, violent collapse in a crackling bonfire of foam. Hauling on the wheel, driving the boat downwind as it tried to slew broadside-on, I was on a jittery high. I hadn’t had such sailing in many months. The three-step waltzing motion of the boat, the throbbing, strings-and-percussion sound of wind and water on the move, came back to me as an old, deep pleasure. But a pleasure tinged, as always, with an edge of incipient panic.

  At 35 feet, the boat was as small as I could comfortably live in, as large as I dared handle on my own. The stronger the wind, the bigger it seemed. Like a novice rider gripping the reins of a runaway mare in heat (not a fancy simile; I fell off—very painfully—when she took a flying leap over the first of three hedges that separated her from the stallion), I stood, legs braced, at the wheel, nursing first the bedroom, then the bathroom, then the kitchen, lounge, and study down the long reach of growling sea.

  A new sound entered the orchestra: the explosive chuff! of a Dall’s porpoise surfacing alongside the boat. Chuff! Chuff! Chuff! Six black-and-white torpedoes, in close formation, went scissoring under the bow, came up to exhale, then shot astern, where they wheeled around in unison before launching another mock attack. Bantamweight, pure muscle, they whizzed past on the beam, just a few inches below the surface, in a show-off wriggle of exultant flesh.

  The company of dolphins was a daily event in these waters—another by-product of turbulence and plankton. The animals would show up in a troupe, use the boat for five minutes’ worth of target practice, tire rapidly of the exercise, and swim off in search of alternative amusement. It was like being temporarily adopted by a teenage street gang.

  They appeared to bask in human attention. One could often prolong their stay by going up front, leaning over the rail, and showing an exaggerated interest in their under-the-bow maneuvers. Unable now to leave the wheel, with the boat trying to imitate the writhing motion of a demented snake, I remembered a tip picked up from a Key West charter captain who claimed he could always drum up dolphins for his customers’ entertainment by going below and doing a hornpipe, heel and toe, on the cabin sole. So I loudly stamped out on the teak grating of the cockpit floor the only rhythm I could think of: the silly drumroll that goes “Pom tiddley-om pom—pom! pom!” or, as Julia had learned to chant it in preschool, “Shave and a haircut—two bits!” I would have done better to make some subtler sign emblematical of friendship, such as waving a white handkerchief or a green bough, for the porpoises immediately fled. Not for the first time, I’d spoiled a relationship with my leaden-footed dancing.

  To steer a straight course was impossible. Overpressed, and unbalanced by its single sail, the boat corkscrewed downwind at 7.6 knots, held to that speed by the braking force of its own bow wave, which peeled away from the hull in a long, curling mustache of surf. The mizzenmast behind me shuddered with the strain taken by the rigging, and I was frightened that something up there was about to break. If one thing broke, so would a whole lot of things, in extremely rapid and disconcerting succession. It was a relief to gain the shelter of Strawberry Head on the Whidbey Island side, where the wind was reduced to muffled gusts and skirls, and I took in a half-dozen rolls of sail and let the boat saunter, gently, through a seascape so changed that it belonged to another nation.

  The buoyed channel had shrunk in depth from around three hundred feet to barely thirty, and narrowed to a winding trail that hugged the island shore. To the east, the tide thinly covered several miles of mud flats, where the water was a streaky violet, the color of a ripe bruise. Beyond, the Continental Shore showed as a level apron of low-lying land whose churches were taller than its trees.

  As Vancouver had imagined a reborn Tory England rising on the foothills of the Olympic Peninsula, so Dutch immigrants had happened on the delta of the Skagit River and seen it as the new Holland of the Far West. Quite improbably, their vision had been realized with something close to total success. There were Dutch names on the mailboxes; Dutch barns in the fields; gloomy Dutch churches; Dutch poplars fringing long straight Dutch country roads. The flat fields were fenced and ditched in the severely rectangular Dutch style, and in the fields the descendants of the original immigrants grew tulips for the cut-flower trade. Seen from a plane in spring, on the Seattle–Vancouver shuttle, the whole valley looked like a gigantic Mondrian of colored squares, black-bordered with dikes. Seen from any angle, the place was a startling trompe l’oeil, a measure of the power of strict Dutch Calvinism to replicate itself in a strange land.

  From the water, it looked uncannily like the north side of the Scheldt estuary between Flushing and Dordrecht—Beveland and Overflakkee—where I’d sailed ten years before. It was lacking only a Dutch barge, with a house and garden at its back end, a family of bicycles stacked against the wheelhouse, and a Volkswagen parked on the afterdeck.

  The great difference was that in Europe the Dutch had ingeniously stolen their land from the sea. Here they’d stolen it from the Skagit Indians. Immediately to the north of the rich floodplain stood the dark, loaf-shaped hill of the Swinomish reservation—really an island that the sea had failed to surround. The tulip growers had gotten miles of moist brown soil, whereas the Skagits’ end of the bargain consisted of crags of gray rock, fir trees, salal, food stamps, rehab clinics, and, from the tangled summit of their almost-island, a panoramic view of the wonders of Dutch horticulture.

  Lieutenant Whidbey, who sailed this way in Discovery’s cutter, noted with excitement that the ebb tide ran north out of Skagit Bay. He’d thought he was following yet another dead end to its muddy conclusion, but the northgoing ebb promised an alternative exit from the labyrinth. He followed the drift of the tide, expecting to find a passage through which the two parent ships could sail back into the
open sea.

  The ebb was running, for me as for him. Toward its northern end, the broad bight of ruffled water was studded with islets—irregular chunks of rock, each one just big enough to support a blackberry bush, a peeling madrona, a stunted pine. Cormorants, who used the rock as fishing platforms, had whitened almost every inch of bare stone with their droppings. The tide ran hard between these islets, and I sailed past their miniature cliffs with nine knots showing on the GPS.

  To port, Whidbey Island ended in a low, gnarled finger of rock that jutted out into the stream. As the boat rounded the point, Lieutenant Whidbey’s anticipated passage slid around the corner into view. He must have found it difficult to believe his eyes.

  The tide poured westward down a funnel-shaped corridor, steep wooded bluffs rising on either side. At the far end, a little over a mile off, a hairline crack showed between the bluffs like a white thread in a bolt of dark cloth. At least fifty square miles of sea were somehow draining through a slot that looked hardly wide enough to squeeze a rowboat between its rocky jaws.

  I turned back from the gathering surge of disturbed water and circled the approach, waiting for the ebb to weaken. Whidbey, already late for his rendezvous with Vancouver, went ahead in the cutter to take a closer look at his unwelcome discovery. He reported back that he had been duped by the tide: the passage was shallow, fouled with large boulders, turbulent in the extreme, navigable only by the smallest boats, and then only at slack water. Captain Van named the place Deception Pass.

  I spent much of the 1970s trying not to buy a lava lamp—colored chaos in a bottle. A prisoner of my insecure good taste, I feared the snobbish derision of friends if one were suddenly to appear in my sitting room. The lamps became fixtures in English pubs, and I consoled myself by perching on a bar stool and furtively communing with those iridescent, endlessly mutating lemon-yellow, green, and puce globules as they rolled tumescently behind glass. “Obscene” was the usual adjective, but I found them beautiful; an addiction I kept under my hat.

  Deception Pass was like a lava lamp on a heroic scale. As the tide entered the funnel, it felt the tightening constraint of the land; the bottom shallowed, and house-sized boulders tripped the water up and made it tumble. With far too much sea trying to escape through far too small an aperture, liquid panic broke out in the pass. The obstructed tide welled up vertically in mushroom-topped boils a dozen yards across or span impotently around in great saucer-shaped eddies. The surface of the water was pitted with small, traveling whirlpools. Everything was on the move on its own eccentric curvilinear track. Keeping even a small patch of water in focus for more than a few seconds was like trying to hold in the mind’s eye the sum of movements made by couples doing the quickstep in a crowded, old-fashioned ballroom, as they dodged, twisted, swerved, twirled, and went spinning off at tangents to each other.

  The tide table reduced this spectacular confusion to a dry set of numbers. Maximum ebb was at 1437. Speed 7.4 knots. Direction 270 T. That T, for true (270° measured by true, not magnetic, north), was a blithe fiction. The tidal predictions applied to some theoretical net transport of water through the pass. But inside the funnel, where water jostled violently against water to gain the freedom of open sea, the theory came hopelessly unstuck. The actual flow was in every conceivable direction at every conceivable speed. Where the edge of a boil met the edge of a strong eddy, the tide might easily be going due east at fourteen or fifteen knots.

  Better than the tide tables was a sentence I had culled from the 1930s WPA guide to Washington State:

  The narrow, high-walled gorge of DECEPTION PASS spills 2,500,000,000 gallons of water hourly at ebb tide into Rosario Strait.

  I liked the suggestion of armies of men with buckets but had no idea where the writer had found his modest string of noughts. One might usefully tack on another three or four, to make the essential point: anyone who tries to enumerate exactly what goes on in Deception Pass when the tide is running should make a prior booking for a long stay at a comfortably appointed madhouse.

  In the dwindling afternoon light, the water looked as black and thick as tar, its surface lumpy with boils and cratered with eddies. At ten past five, with 55 minutes to go before slack water, I fed the boat gingerly into the stream, running the engine at full blast to give it maximum steerageway through the turbulence. It was like driving a car on ice. Each time the boat’s head met a swirl, it went into a sideways skid, and I had to spin the wheel violently to maintain any semblance of control. At this stage of the tide, the net current should have been running at little more than 2.5 knots, but this diminished flow made little impact on the mass of tumbling water in the funnel, as it piled up behind the narrows in its rage to escape. Too busy steering to keep my eye on the GPS, I could only snatch glances to check the boat’s speed over the ground. It was 0.0 one moment, 13.5 the next.

  A gothic bridge spanned the bluffs ahead—a very short bridge, as I now could see. The water it soared over might have made a respectable trout stream, but as an arm of the sea it was grossly deficient. Seeing its steep downhill slope, I realized the chaos of waters was a product of simple gravity. The level of the sea in Skagit Bay was two or three feet higher than the level of the sea in Rosario Strait: a multibillion-gallon turmoil was provoked by a slight inequity of height.

  A log the length of the boat was twirling slowly around on the starboard bow. I hauled the wheel to port and passed backward under the bridge—a pity, since there were half a dozen pale faces up there, and I was sorry to find myself suddenly turned into a happy spectacle of nautical incompetence. I got the boat facing the right way, yawed on a boil, slewed on an eddy, and slammed into a line of low, breaking overfalls. Somewhere, as I came out of the pass like a cork expelled from the neck of a champagne bottle, I found room in my head for the thought that I would not at all like to be doing this in a motorless cedar canoe.

  The European explorers had a low opinion of Deception Pass, but it was an important locus in Salish culture: as a famous navigational hazard, a setting for stories, and a source of arcane knowledge. All these aspects conjoined in a single story, first collected by Franz Boas at the turn of the century, that crops up in several versions.

  A young woman (in one version she is given a name, Kokwalalwoot) was gathering clams on the beach, or she was on a quest for a sklakletut (a “spirit,” in its suspect English translation). The usual method of gaining intimacy with the powers of the sea was to go diving for them, and diving into whirlpools was a widely recommended way of getting a sklakletut. My hostess at Tulalip told me that her auntie obtained a “whirlpool spirit” in this manner. After ritual fasting and bathing, the adolescent boy or girl would go out alone into the woods or on the water, and, like a college graduate, return to the village in possession of a sklakletut—a useful qualification, and a mark of adulthood. So Kokwalalwoot was pursuing her study of whirlpools in the accredited Salish fashion.

  In Deception Pass, one vigorous whirlpool manifested itself to her as a lithe young man, and Kokwalalwoot fell in love with him. She left the beach and went to live underwater with her whirlpool-lover. When she went back to announce her marriage, the villagers quailed at the sight of her—skin encrusted with barnacles, kelp growing from her eye-sockets, ears, and mouth. Her family and friends condemned this grotesque sea-being to submarine life in the pass, where she became an established navigation aid, guiding canoeists to safety through the rips and eddies. In one version, the scrolls and curlicues of current are the waving tresses of Kokwalalwoot’s hair—though for me this detail has the ring of a white folklorist’s embellishment.

  All Indian stories are bedeviled by the fact that they generally have been lumped together indiscriminately and labeled “myths.” Some are clearly meant as fiction—light entertainment with human and animal characters. Some were meant for adult audiences, others for children. (It’s always interesting to note the gender of the original teller; many women’s stories have a distinct fl
avor of Clifford the Big Red Dog about them.) There are creation stories, tribal histories, allegories, gossipy anecdotes. To label all these as “myths” is to impute to the Indians a degree of naïve credulity that makes them seem quite unnecessarily remote.

  I’d prefer to read the story of Kokwalalwoot as a cautionary tale, not far removed in tone from Hilaire Belloc’s “Matilda, Who Told Lies, and Burned to Death.” It is about dangerous intercourse—a favorite subject in a society obsessed with the fine-print rules of kinship and status. Doing it with a whirlpool is like doing it with a wild beast, or doing it with a member of a tribe so alien to your own that it is beyond the reach of lawful exogamy. It is also a story about the dangers of education, especially for girls. To show an interest in whirlpools (or any other branch of physics) is all very well, but when it turns into a passion, dreadful things happen to the schoolgirl. Bluestockings threaten the social fabric. Kokwalalwoot, beautiful at the beginning, ends up by looking, literally, a fright. Be warned.

  Like many other stories from up and down the Inside Passage, this one spells out the importance of whirlpools as great powers of the sea. Power was always associated with motion (which was why a man could go on a quest for the “spirit” of a steam locomotive). Of all the turbulent movements of water, the sucking, spinning, vagrant whirlpool, like a disembodied hungry mouth on the lookout for a meal, comes closest to having a human shape and personality. At the top of the ebb in Deception Pass, a string of big whirlpools formed just above the bridge; they could ingest a twenty-foot log and spit it out again, and easily swamp a mismanaged canoe. As one of these great suckers veered out crabwise across the stream toward you, you’d readily credit it with volition, malignity, desire. As Catherine Earnshaw could fall in love with Heathcliff (himself another version of chaos in nature), Kokwalalwoot could fall in love with her whirlpool and, like Catherine, be destroyed by him.