Winter Brothers Read online

  “Hullo, Solo, hey, Solo Solo Solo,” I offer and coax him into being petted. At once he wags ecstasy, devotion, worship. But as I step down the path from the cabin Solo moves to my heels and yammers steadily all the way to the car.

  Before gathering the next armful of cargo I again Solo Solo Solo him, stroke his back until the hair threatens to fray off, scratch his belly and the place between his ears, seem to have sent him irretrievably giddy. He then rolls to his feet and yaps me every step back to the cabin. One more round trip we make, Solo yawping determinedly whenever my hand isn’t stroking him. I face the issue.

  “Solo, goddamned if I’m going to spend four days petting you. Go home.”

  He wavers, somewhere between another aria of barking and a demand for further ransom of petting.

  “Get-the-hell-outa-here.”

  Off Solo scampers through the ghostly alders, looking faintly regretful about having overplayed me. The silence that arrives along his retreating tracks fills the forest, reaches instantly down from the upthrust of fir trees and the hover of the mountain, vast Rainier, somewhere above their green weave. After the unquiet introduction, an avalanche of stillness.

  I am here for stillness. For pause in this winter at Swan’s heels and, I suppose, in my own strides across time. Coming to this underedge of snow country is a brief reflective climb back to my first life in the West, the Montana life. I grew up in powerful winters of white, amid stories of even mightier ones: the arctic seasons which have swept western Montana each three decades since the first of them was registered, to the everlasting shock of the rangemen, in 1886–87. 1919–20, which broke our family homestead under its six-month burden of frozen snow. 1948–49, when I watched my father struggle to save two thousand sheep, and our future, on the blizzard-lashed ranch at Battle Creek. Now, again, another thirty-year giant. For weeks Montanans have been telling me by phone or mail of the deep lock of cold in the Rockies, of snowdrifts across porch railings, concern for beleaguered cattle soon to begin calving. Sentences from a Missoula friend: “Anything bad about this winter in Montana that you happen to hear, believe it. It is the worst ever, and it started November 9. The ground has been under snow since, and it hit -28 here on January 1, -50 in Butte.”

  I have had urges recently to return to Montana, go there for the experience of the great thirty-year winter. It may after all be the last to fall within my lifespan, and that ink of Swan’s will not drain away in spring runoff. But I would be returning on a tourist’s terms, on whim and mere spectatorship, which to me are tarnished terms for such an occasion. Any honesty about earthdwelling tells me I have not earned this Montana winter by living with the land’s other moods there, by keeping my roots within its soil. Half my lifetime ago I decided the point, although I did not then know how long-reaching the decision would be, that the ranch-country region of my grandparents and parents is no longer the site for me to work out life. I could not divide myself, a portion to the words I wanted to make, another to the raising of livestock and coping with furious seasons. Not winters of white steel but the coastal ones of pewter-gray, soft-toned, workable, with the uninsistent Northwest rain simply there in the air like molecules made visible, are the necessary steady spans for me to seek the words. Yet the white winters have not entirely let me from their grip. A time or two a season, snowline will help me see the margins of what I am doing and I migrate to some place such as this, a silvered edge of the Northwest where I can sit above my usual life for a few days. Hear what is being said in my skull. Watch mountain dusk draw down.

  And scrutinize deer. The boldest of them wintering here is a doe which made her appearance soon after I arrived, and has ghosted back into the near-dark now. Black-tailed and gray-furred for winter she eases past this cabin a time or two each evening, Trudy and Howard told me, and can be recognized by the nick in her ear. A wide screened-in porch rambles about three sides of the cabin, a pleasant half-hidden promenade up among the first branches of the trees, and from it she can be seen for several minutes on her route.

  As I watch down from the porch the motion of the doe’s each step seems to recoil slightly into her as if some portion of poise is being pulled back each time in reserve. This tentative grace of deer which stops them just short of being creatures of some other element. Hoofed birds, perhaps, or slim dolphins of the underbrush. Who would have thought, on a continent of such machines of the wild as bison and elk and the grizzly, that it would be deer to best survive? For once, the meek have inherited.

  Before bed I look up Swan on deer. The blacksmith at Neah Bay was undertaking to raise one from a fawn. The twenty-sixth of January 1865: Mr Phillips tame deer has been missing for several days and I strongly suspect the Indians have filled it in retaliation for sundry dogs which Phillips and Mr Maggs have shot.

  But the next day: The deer made her appearance this morning much to my satisfaction....It is very tame and looks very pretty running about among the cattle.

  Day Thirty-Three

  New snow, two inches of dry fluff. The entire forest has been fattened by it, everywhere a broad white outline put onto all branches of trees and brush. The effect comes odd against yesterday’s green and gray of the forest, like a white blossoming gone rampant overnight.

  Day Thirty-Four

  I intend as mild an afternoon as can be spent aboard snowshoes. Whop around on the slope above the National Park buildings at Paradise, watch the weather seethe around the summit of Rainier nearly two miles above. When my thigh muscles make first complaint about the pontoons at the bottom of my legs, ease off the fluffy ridge, try to keep the car from becoming a bobsled on the white-packed road down to Longmire Lodge and coffee and pie: then the forest’s miles back to the cabin, and dusk and deer.

  But halfway above Paradise I wallow onto rodent prints stitching a path in and out of the stands of firs. Fate has jotted in the snow. No choice but to become a tracker. Along tilts of slope, over drifts, up, down, across. After several minutes I glance back from the tiny pawprints to my wake in the snow. It is what a whale might chum up in hot pursuit of a minnow.

  Shameless, I plow on, occasionally deserting the tracks for the pleasure of creating my own didoes in the white. I discover that the south face of every fir I pass is gray-white with ice: frozen melt at the very end of the branches, in fat cellular conglomerates sectioned by the green fir bristles. Grenades of ice. A sudden thaw would put me under bombardment. Doves of peace—no, gray jays ambling through the air to me, pausing just off my shoulder as if kindly offering to search my pockets for any loaves of bread which might be burdening me.

  The jays sortie off to elsewhere and time drifts out of mind after them, replaced by attention to the weather atop Rainier, lowering, rising, brightening, darkening. As though the mountain when it ceased being a volcano of fire became a cauldron for weather. Like all else in this region of the Cascades, this casual slope I am on, still not far above Paradise and its visitor center and lodge, points quickly up toward Rainier as if in astonishment at how the glacier-draped mound looms. I was surprised myself, far back along the highway when arriving to the cabin, how the lift of the mountain made itself felt even there, the road suddenly jerking into rising curves.

  Inventorying the arc of mountains which surround Rainier, themselves lofty but less than half the giant peak’s three-mile height, I come onto the thought that the geographical limits of my Northwest winter are Tatoosh and Tatoosh: Tatoosh Island offshore from the outermost perch at Cape Flattery, the Tatoosh Range of crags in view to the south here at the crest of the Cascades, jagging white up through the high-country fabric of forest. At Swan’s first mention of a visit to the Tatoosh lighthouse I looked into a place-names guidebook, found that the derivation could be from the Chinook jargon word for “breast” or the Nootkan word for “thunderbird.” Divvy the deriving, I decide: give these cleavaged profiles their due, let the thunderbird have the island.

  Bulletins from below. Thighs are threatening open rebellion. Snowshoes still
want more country. Tatoosh-tatoosh tatoosh-tatoosh the webs sing into the snow as I go onto a fresh drift.

  Day Thirty-Five

  Strange, to be again in a lodging of entirely wood. Under the rough brawn of ceiling beams and amid the walls’ constellations of pine knots. Almost two decades of suburban wallboard intervene from when ranchhouse and bunkhouse nightly surrounded me with board walls.

  What is it about a cabin within a forest or beside a shore that sings independence from the common world of dwellings? Something more than hinterland site or openly outlined strokes of beams and rafters; some inherent stubbornness against ever being thought an ordinary house shouts through as well. Cabination or antidomicility or some such rebellious shimmer of the atoms of wall-wood; a true surmiser of cabins would have the term. I simply know that cabin-y distinctness says itself and I step across the threshold as if going into some chamber of a far year. The broad central room of this cabin, for instance, trades adamantly back and forth between the family who spend summers and weekends here and the abiding forest outside. A wall-beam aligns the china plates which sit on it as if they were shiny droplets on a branch; beneath runs a long bank of mullioned window, the small panes fondling separate bits of the forest as if they were scenes on porcelain. On another wall is the cabin item that interests me most, a crosscut saw. Blazon of sharpened steel, the crosscut is a remarkably elegant tool to have inspired its epithets: “miser^ harp” the least profane description Northwest loggers had for it as, sawyer at either end, they ground the blade back and forth through Douglas fir or red cedar. Having caught from Swan the winter virus of measure-and-count I’ve learned by yardstick that this slicer of forests is six and a half feet long, by careful finger that it has sixty-eight beveled sharp-nesses interspersed with sixteen wider-set prongs which make space for the sawdust to spill away. A giant’s steel grin of eighty-four teeth and as innocent and ready in this cabin amid these woods as a broadsword on a Highlands castle wall.

  Sawed wood—firewood—decides my site when I am here inside the cabin. I settle at the kitchen table, close by the cookstove which must be fed each hour or so. (Howard has told me he will harvest his own firewood when summer comes, from the stand of alder woven within the mullioned window. A neighbor who owns a team of workhorses will skid the downed trees in for sawing. I wish the harnessed horses were there now, the leather sounds of their working heft coming down the mountainside. Instead, if anything is out there, it will be either Solo on reconnaissance to see whether I have mended my anti-dog ways, or the slowly gliding deer.) Today out of the mound of mail which has been building on my desk since Swan’s diaries moved into my days I finally have winnowed the letter from Mark, in his faculty office in Illinois—we may be the last two American friends who write regularly and at such length to one another—and the quote which he found during his research on mid-nineteenth-century frontier missionaries. The Reverend John Summers, reporting from Benton County, Iowa, in July of 1852:

  “A young man recently left for California, who for two years has been very anxious to go, but during his minority had been restrained by the influence and authority of his parents. They offered, for the sake of diverting him from his purpose, to furnish him the means to travel and visit the Eastern cities. He derided the idea. He would not turn his hand over to see all that could be seen in the East, but he must go to the Utopia of the New World; and he has gone.”

  Gone west and cared not so much as a flip of his hand to know any of that lesser land behind him. In all but flesh, that young Iowan was my grandfather, my great-uncles, my father and his five brothers, me. After my Doig grandparents sailed from Scotland and crossed America to a high forest-tucked valley of the Rocky Mountains, nobody of the family for two generations ever went to the Atlantic again. When I journeyed off to college I was spoken of as being “back east in Illinois.” My father adventured to Chicago once on a cattle train and twice to visit me. My mother, after her parents moved from Wisconsin to the Rockies when she was half a year old, never returned beyond the middle of Montana.

  This westernness in my family, then, has been extreme as we could manage to make it. We lived our first seventy years as Americans on slopes of the Rockies as naturally, single-mind-edly, as kulaks on the Russian steppes. (Nights when I have been at my desk reading Swan’s pages I have noticed that my square-bearded face reflected in the desk-end window could be a photographic plate of any of those museful old Scotsmen who transplanted our family name to the western mountains of America. If we have the face we deserve at forty—or thirty-nine and some months, as I am now—evidently I am earning my way backward to my homesteading grandfather.) My own not very many years eastward, which is to say in the middle of the Midwest, amounted to a kind of instructive geographic error. (Instructive, literally: Montana as evaluated at Northwestern University in Evanston, 1957: “youse guys,” confides my new college friend from the Bronx, “youse guys from Mwawntana twalk funny”) The journalism jobs in the flat-horizoned midland turned my ambition in on itself, impelled me to work the salaried tasks for more than they were worth and to sluice the accumulating overflow of ideas into pages of my own choice. Also, happiest result of my brief misguess of geography (chiding from a friend who had stepped back and forth among writing jobs: “It doesn’t matter anymore where you live in this country.” It matters.), I met Carol there, already edging west on her own, and when the two of us turned together, away from editorial careers and ahead to independence, we strode a fourth of the continent farther than any of my family had done. Puget Sound’s salt water begins but a half mile from our valley-held house close by Seattle.

  And so with Swan, I judge. When the Midwestern reverend wrote those opining words, Swan of Boston already had been on the Pacific shore for two years and was about to head onward to Shoalwater Bay and ultimately the Strait and Cape Flattery. Finding the place to invest his life meant, as it has to me, finding a West. (Roulette of geography, of course, that the American frontier stretched from the Atlantic toward the Pacific instead of the other way around. Erase Santa Maria and Mayflower, ink in Chinese junks anchoring at San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound four hundred years ago, reread our history with its basis in Confucianism, its exploit of transcontinental railroads laid across the eastern wilderness by quaint coolie labor from London and Paris, its West Coast mandarins—the real item—aloofly setting cultural style for the country.) What Swan and his forty-year wordstream will have told me by the end of this winter, this excursion back where I have never been, I can’t yet know. But already I have the sense from his sentences and mine that there are and always have been many Wests, personal as well as geographical. (Even what I have been calling the Pacific Northwest is multiple. A basic division begins at the Columbia River; south of it, in Oregon, they have been the sounder citizens, we in Washington the sharper strivers. Transport fifty from each state as a colony on Mars and by nightfall the Oregonians will put up a school and a city hall, the Washingtonians will establish a bank and a union.) Swan on the Strait has been living in two distinct ones, Neah Bay and Port Townsend (and sampled two others earlier, San Francisco and Shoalwater Bay) and neither of them is the same as my own Wests, Montana of a quarter-century ago and Puget Sound of today. Yet Swan’s Wests come recognizable to me, are places which still have clear overtones of my own places, stand alike with mine in being distinctly unlike other of the national geography. Perhaps that is what the many Wests are, common in their stubborn separatenesses: each West a kind of cabin, insistent that it is no other sort of dwelling whatsoever.

  Days Thirty-Six, Thirty-Seven, Thirty-Eight

  At Neah Bay, Swan writes on. Writes the daily diary entries, frequent newspaper articles, writes letter after letter in the series which, as I began to crank 120-year-old words into sight at the University of Washington library, filled a roll of microfilm thick as my fist. From the files of the Smithsonian Institution, “SWAN, JAMES G., Official Incoming Correspondence.”

  Eventually nearly half a thousand
pieces of correspondence flowed from Swan to the savants within the Smithsonian’s castle-like museum. It was—is—a spellbinding cataract of mail. Swan’s machine-magnified handwriting reads like lines from a Gulliver who every so often pauses on one North Pacific promontory or another to empty out his pockets and his thoughts.

  I have now ready to ship by first opportunity a case containing 16 birds shins, mostly large 2 Indian skulls 1 backbone of fur seal with’skull 2 grass straps for carrying burthens 1 dog hair blanket specimen sea weed 1 fur seal skin 2 fur seal skulls 4 specimen fossil crabs 2 miniature hats 2 down blankets shells taken from ducks’ stomachs....

  The Indians here judge of the weather for the following day by observing the stars whenever there happens to be a clear night in this humid atmosphere. If the sky is clear and the stars “twinkle brightly” they predict wind for the following day and with uncanny certainty. If on the contrary the stars shine tranquilly they say there will be but little wind, and consequently, prepare themselves at midnight to go off to their fishing grounds some 15 to 20 miles outside Cape Flattery. They believe the “wind in the air” makes the stars twinkle.

  I have been reading with great interest the work on archaeology by Mr Haven, which was received among other books from the Smithsonian....On page 148 Mr Haven remarks in his conclusion while speaking of the Indians at the Columbia River & Nootka, “There too prevails the singular and inconvenient custom of inserting discs of wood in the lips and ears.” Now the fact is, that there is not an Indian from the Columbia to Nootka who has, or has had, a disc of wood in either lips or ears....