Passage to Juneau Read online

  Vancouver saw Old England, miraculously re-created in the reign of George I. To the urns and obelisks, he added church towers of chipped Norfolk flint; busy ports with blazoned customs houses; a handsome manor on every barbered eminence; a thriving agriculture, with sheep on the hillsides and fields thick with wheat. His articles of commission charged him to assess the land for possible settlement. Now a grandiose plan took shape in his mind, as he dreamed into being a paradisal New Albion: an orderly, green redoubt of his own ancestral Toryism.

  Archibald Menzies, botanizing in the woods, saw a wide-open frontier of scientific exploration. His job on the voyage was to extend the enormous taxonomic enterprise begun by Linnaeus, and each day he returned to the ship with more specimens destined for the royal gardens at Kew. (Most would wilt and die in the quarterdeck garden, or be eaten by the ship’s goats.) At Port Discovery he found a new species of arbutus, with a prettily twisted trunk and papery red bark: he called it the Oriental Strawberry Tree, Arbutus menziesii. He also had a close, odious encounter with a skunk.

  Peter Puget saw the wild habitat of Natural Man. Puget, a Londoner from a Huguenot banking family, was on nodding terms, at least, with the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he spent every spare moment trying to make contact with the Indians. He quizzed them, in sign language, about the meaning of certain peculiar wooden structures at New Dungeness, about their food and clothing, about their marital and funerary rites. Puget was no intellectual—Menzies, thinking him a metropolitan lightweight, tried to block his promotion—but he was bright, even-tempered, popular on all decks, and as comfortably abreast of his times as Vancouver (only eight years older) was behind them. As an amateur anthropologist, Puget was thoughtful, imaginative, and zealously modest in his observations. In Port Discovery he found a canoe burial, and puzzled over its meaning in his journal.

  This … argues Strongly, that the Indians believe in a future State, or else why bury with them Eatables with their Weapons for procuring more & place the Body in a Canoe suspended in the Air, which we may reasonably suppose is to prevent its being damaged by Insects or Animals, that it may be of Service to the Deceased hereafter. However at present our knowledge of the Language is so very Imperfect that it would be impossible to form from it any Idea of their Religion or of the Deity—or do I ever think from the very Short time we remain at any Place either in the Ships or Boats, that we shall ever be well acquainted with their Manners or Customs.

  This is the late-night scribbling of an instantly likable, alert, and open-minded man. Puget stands out among his colleagues for harboring no grudges, being always in good spirits, nearly always having fun.

  In morning fog, and a rising wind from the southeast, the small boats felt their way gingerly along the shore until, six miles to the east of Port Discovery, they came to the entrance of an important inlet, to judge from the speed at which the tide swept them through. At noon the fog lifted, and the explorers could see they were at the seaward end of a great inland waterway: a broad channel, several miles wide, trending southward past a fringe of substantial islands.

  To starboard, sequestered from the main channel, lay a “more capacious harbour than Port Discovery.” Far to the south, a gigantic snowcap appeared to float above the clouds like an inverted blancmange, its color an unearthly shade of pale violet. Vancouver named the mountain after Captain (soon to be Rear Admiral) Peter Rainier. For the harbor he settled on Port Townshend, after the Marquess Townshend. Midshipman Thomas Manby, whose acquaintance with the Townshends secured his place aboard Discovery, got out his penknife and carved into the trunk of an ancient cypress:

  Anne Marie Townfhend

  T.M. 1792

  Whoever thou art, Traveller,

  Know that fhe poffeffes

  Every beauty as a Woman

  This unequaled Cyprefs

  Poffeffes as a Tree,

  Without fault or blemifh.

  Was this, perhaps, why the marquess had busied himself to find a berth for Manby—to put 20,000 miles between Anne Marie and this breathless young romantic?

  Meanwhile, Menzies emerged, flushed, his topcoat bespattered with pink petals, from a deep bosk of rhododendrons new to science.

  Puget was dispatched in a cutter to take soundings in the main channel. It was a rough and splashy ride, with the six oarsmen rowing hard upwind and the waves breaking short on one another’s backs. Driven south on the tide, Puget’s boat was soon out of sight of the Port Townshend shore party. He began sounding in mid-channel.

  The sounding line, of three-quarter-inch hemp, lay stacked in coils on the bow thwart. Strips of ribbon, pulled through the braid of the rope, marked off the depth at five-fathom intervals. The conical fourteen-pound lead had a hollowed-out base, which the leadsman “armed” with sticky tallow to pick up samples of the seafloor. With the boat stopped, the leadsman, wearing leather gloves, allowed the hemp to feed steadily through his fingers, coil after coil of rope snaking its way off the thwart; the lead sank, and sank, and went on sinking, the line bellying-out in the turbulence below and thrumming in the leadsman’s hands as violently as if a big fish were on the end.

  “Sounded with 100 fth. line. Found no bottom,” wrote Puget in his notebook. His handwriting is all fluency and dash. The upright strokes of his terminal d’s rise in cheerful swirls and billows, the pencil taking flight from the word in an impulsive doodle.

  To recover the lead from its fruitless journey to the deep took several minutes. Puget ordered the rowers closer inshore. Again, the same result. “Sounded but had no bottom.” Apparently, the land sloped gently to the water’s edge, then fell away into a submarine abyss.

  From behind the headland to the south came a drift of smoke, blown flat by the wind, from an Indian campfire.

  If the surrounding countryside sometimes gave Puget the illusion of being back home, or in some greener, wilder England, this unfathomable water reminded him sharply otherwise. It was as deep as America itself.

  My dawn was damp, still, gauze-gray. The inked needle on the barograph drum had fallen steadily overnight and now was sinking past the 1,000-millibar line into the foul-weather 990s. Waiting for the kettle to come to the boil, I turned on NOAA Weather Radio and listened to the forecast for Juan de Fuca Strait.

  “Small craft advisory: winds, west, ten to twenty knots, rising to twenty-five to thirty knots in the afternoon; rain changing to showers.” The affectless male voice might have added that by afternoon, with the ebb tide running full tilt into a near-gale, the sea would be heaped and growling, every wave baring its teeth. The vernacular translation of small craft advisory is: “You will be cold, wet, and scared. You will curse yourself for having been fool enough to leave home.”

  I’d planned that day to sail up Admiralty Inlet and cross the strait, meeting Vancouver’s expedition as his small boats made their way south into the sound. Now I’d have to take another route through the labyrinth—sneaking up the sheltered backside of Whidbey Island while Puget & Co. came down the front. Maybe playing cat-and-mouse with the eighteenth century was a better idea than trying to confront it head-on.

  There was no wind when I left Edmonds. The smooth surface of the water was tooled with scrolls and curlicues of current, as the flood tide divided—the main stream going south while the branch line, on which I was riding, curled around to fill the northern backwaters. I steered the boat through the swirls, where an angry parliament of gulls shrieked and squabbled over fetid tidbits turned up from the deep.

  The sea had the same faint scent of putrescence that greets you upon opening the door of the fridge after a three-week absence. The water was thick and dusty. Always reluctant to mirror even the bluest sky, it had a stubborn residual color of its own—a scummy, dark, greenish gray. It might have passed as soup at Dotheboys Hall.

  But it was wonderful water. The immense depth of Puget Sound was interrupted in several places by shallow sills of rock, over which the tide poured
in hidden undersea cascades. Great plumes welled up from the bottom, spinning off eddies, boils, meanders, spirals. One needed the technical vocabulary of chaos, with its fractals, Mandelbrot sets, strange attractors, and homoclinic tangles, to do justice to the disorderly ebb and flow of the tide in this basin.

  Frigid, lightless, saline water from the deep was being continually churned up with warm, oxygenated, brackish water from the surface—making a perfect hatchery and habitat for every kind of plankton. The sea-drifters (from the Greek planktos: drifting) were true creatures of chaos.

  Stowed away in a compartment under the couch in the saloon was a yard-sale microscope. Dodging work during a writing retreat on the boat, I would sometimes haul it out and lower a bucket over the side, to check out my fellow drifters under the 97 × lens. A teaspoonful of Puget Sound water yielded a whole world of Hollywood monsters: copepods; rotifers; flagellates, their whips flailing on the glass. Each time I dipped the slide in the bucket, the cast changed: new wrigglies waved spiky antennae, inflated their balloon-like luminescent torsos, flexed their cilia, flapped rubbery watery wings, or gazed up at me with vacant soccer-ball eyes. They put me in mind of Hieronymus Bosch. Imported to Venice from Holland by some doge, Bosch was so impressed by the scampi from the Venetian lagoon that his painted Purgatory (in a triptych in the Doges’ Palace) is administered by an officious bureaucracy of giant prawns. If plankton were a little bigger, they would figure in everyone’s bad dreams.

  The phytoplankton—diatoms, spores of green algae—provide food for the shrimp- and jellyfish-like zooplankton. Zooplankton are food for fish. Fish are … It takes only two or three links in the food chain to arrive at the killer whales, sea lions, bald eagles, black bears. At the bottom of the whole animal hierarchy lay the ceaseless tumbling of the water in the basin, as it answered to the drag of the moon.

  In the morning calm, this productive turbulence was revealed in the snaking S-shaped lines of kelp and driftwood that collected on the margins between eddies; in finger-sized whirlpools; in windrows of slick water that ran in twisting paths across the surface; in threads and seams of current, like whorled fingerprints. The slightest breeze would wipe these legible signs of disturbance clean off the face of the sea.

  The surest measure of the tumult that was going on below was the GPS, which kept up a running commentary on the boat’s course and speed from its perch above the chart table. This clever instrument, the size and shape of a TV remote, tuned itself into a clutch of military satellites, measured the time that each satellite’s signal took to reach it, and translated the times into a position, accurate to within a few yards, anywhere on the earth’s surface. The Global Positioning System always knew how fast the boat was moving over the ground, and could make a reliable map of the turbulent motion of the sea.

  From the compass and the knotmeter—which gave the speed of the boat through the water, measured by a small spinning paddlewheel mounted beneath the bow—I could tell I was on a steady course of 005° at a speed of 5.9 knots. But when the water itself is moving, course and speed through the water are very different from course and speed over the ground. The GPS showed that the real speed of the boat was constantly changing. From 9 knots it dropped to 3.8, climbed to 7.5, dithered for a while around 6.0, went up to 7.2. Likewise the course. The lubberline on the steering compass stayed more or less glued to 005°, but the simulated compass card on the GPS was swinging through a 25-degree arc. The boat’s true progress was revealed as a tipsy foxtrot over the sea, as it was seized by gyres, thrust suddenly sideways, sped along by an onrush of current, brought nearly to a standstill by the countervailing force of the next eddy.

  The arrival of the $250 GPS set had been a revelation. Before, I’d been lulled by the compass card, barely stirring in its bowl, and by the even ticking-away of miles on the knotmeter. I professed to know where I was headed, and how fast I was getting there, when all the time I was lurching waywardly about, veering off on one tangent after another, my illusion of a steady career given credence only by the random reversals and corrections built into any chaotic system. Eventually, detours tend to cancel each other out, as chaos itself appears to cohere around a “strange attractor.” But at any given moment you’re probably going in quite the wrong direction, and at a speed that would certainly surprise and might frighten you. As $250 lessons in the navigation of life go, this one seemed cheap at twice the price.

  Nursing a mug of coffee in the cockpit, I left the steering to the autopilot and watched the world slide by in fifty shades of gray. A tug was hauling a low island of logs crabwise across the tide. An epic freight train supplied the only trace of green in the entire landscape as it inched along the trestles at the edge of the beach, on the Burlington Northern line to Vancouver. The chimneys of Everett’s derelict pulp mills stood out against the trees, and the miles of waterfront subdivisions, condo blocks, and gated retirement communities showed as a disfiguring rash of pale spots in the hills.

  Yet from this sea-distance it was extraordinary how little the land had altered since Captain Van projected onto it his vision of a genteel Augustan future; even now one could see how the addition of a few obelisks, gazebos, and classical temples might set it off to its best advantage. After 150 years of white settlement, it still looked like a forest—a badly vandalized forest, it’s true, but a forest nonetheless.

  In this moist and temperate climate, fir, salal, alder, fern, and salmonberry swarm over every inch of unattended ground. The gardeners of the Northwest spend a great deal of their time trying to fight off the encroaching forest. As I know well, whenever you clear a fresh space for a rosebush in one part of the yard, snakelike tendrils of camouflage-green will busily be colonizing another patch behind your back. If some disaster hit the people here—if Boeing and Microsoft both went bust—it wouldn’t be long, a few months at most, before the advance troops of vine and bramble took over the highways and strip-malls, closely followed by an occupying army of young Douglas firs. In less than half a human lifetime the place would be back to wilderness again. Bears and cougars (who even now are regular summer visitors to the outskirts of Everett, where they upend trashcans and breakfast on household pets) would make their dens in the urban ruins.

  Here, more than anywhere else I know, the tenure of civilization appears unexpectedly provisional and insecure. It didn’t take to this soil as it took elsewhere. The Indians had lived on tiptoe, in small numbers, on the extreme fringe of the forest, barely grazing the surface of the water. Then the great self-important juggernaut of American capitalism rumbled through the Pacific Northwest, clearing it with chainsaws, paving it with asphalt, building bridges, banks, insurance towers, tract housing, and all the rest. Yet on this overcast morning, only a mile offshore, you’d hardly notice, so modest seemed its impact, compared with the urgent press of the forest and swirl of the tide. Squint a little and you might, for all intents and purposes, be back in 1792, looking out on a nature that still awaited men with grandiose designs on it.

  Mukilteo, Darlington, Everett dissolved into the woods astern. Unreal cities … Abreast of Gedney Island, the entrance to Tulalip Bay opened up to starboard, with a faded red marker posted at the end of Mission Beach. The mile-wide bay was like a lake enclosed between the jaws of two low fir-encrusted headlands. Deep inside, the spire of the old white-painted Catholic mission church marked the location of the tribal dock and its huddle of small gill-netters. The bay was glassy. No boats were moving, and neither, though I scanned the dock closely through binoculars, could I see any people.

  The reservation economy had turned away from the sea to the six-lane highway, where the Tulalips ran a round-the-clock casino. Fishing and salmon-smoking had lost out to bingo, blackjack, poker, keno, and roulette. Tulalip Bay was largely unvisited by whites, because the channel leading to the dock was a narrow, crooked pathway through submerged rocks and gluey shoals. Their beautiful but forbidding harbor ensured for the Indians a lonely privacy that would be the
envy of any pretty seaside village, and they had conspicuously refrained from buoying the channel, to make themselves less accessible to strangers.

  On the hill behind the church, I could pick out the red-and-black killer whale motif on the wall of the longhouse, the tribal court, the crescent of plain gray wooden bungalows. The “res”: half tax haven, half open prison. Even at this remove, one could catch its uneasy quiet—a listless, Sunday-afternoon air that lingered on the reservation all through the week. A pickup with a broken muffler went snarling along the coast road. A cat’s-paw of wind, passing over the mirror-surface of the bay, made the inverted reservation shiver for a moment, then smash to bits.

  One mild Saturday afternoon in January 1992, I was one of two white guests invited to Tulalip to watch a night of spirit dancing. After driving out to the reservation, I found there’d been a hitch in the arrangements. The dancing, which usually took place by firelight in the timber longhouse, had been shifted to the Teen Center, whose fierce strip-lighting would rob it, I was warned, of some of its atmosphere. “You’ll have to use your imagination,” said my hostess, a tribal elder. “It won’t be quite the same tonight.”

  Visiting dancers from the Swinomish reservation, forty miles up the highway, were pulling up in rustbucket pickups and pink-and-aqua-painted clunkers from the age of chrome and tailfins. With one tribe paying a courtesy call on another, the event was as much a potlatch as a dance. Tulalip women were cooking up a feast in the kitchen at the back of the Teen Center, while in the main body of the hall, piles of ritual gifts had been laid out for the Swinomish visitors.

  In the nineteenth century, ceremonial cloaks were an important unit of currency between tribes. The most highly prized, made by the Tlingits of the Queen Charlotte Islands, were known as Chilkat blankets. Woven from cedar bark and the wool of mountain goats, with an elaborate checkerboard design of faces, eyes, fins, beaks, claws, and hands, they were worn by chieftains on formal occasions, and were a valuable part of the community treasure chest. “Blankets” was a misnomer, but the English word, applied by early travelers, had stuck fast. So, in honor of the word rather than of the thing itself, nylon blankets, still in their Kmart cellophane, were stacked on the floor of the Teen Center.