The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [67]
In political terms too a coastline of erasures, contentions. Late in the eighteenth century the Spanish arrived to christen melodious names onto geography the local Indians long since assumed they had adequately denominated; next, the British editing severely over the Spanish. Some honest drama was gained in that last transaction. Destruction Island for Isla Dolores. Cape Flattery—just now momentarily rebaptized yet again by Karlsson as Cape Etholen—for Punta de Martinez. But some poetry lost, too: Point Grenville for Punta de los Martires. And even as Karlsson and Braaf and Wennberg have arrived to it, one more incongruity, American now, is being affixed over all. This upper-outside corner of the United States is about to be dubbed Washington Territory, making this ancient sea margin the Washington shore.
Nomenclature and latitude and logic say in chorus, then, that here south of the Strait of Juan de Fuca the canoemen at last have trekked down from the crags of the North Pacific's coast to its lowlands. Yet there was that first view of disordered coast ahead, as if lower shore was not necessarily less troubled shore.
At dusk's start, the paddling men were just to the north of a procession of close-set seastacks out into the ocean, like a caravan of cliffs and crags crossing the canoe's route. Older than old, as though preserved by the Pacific brine ever since creation's boil, these pyramids and arches of rock appeared.
Day-worn as the canoemen were, Karlsson did not want to risk rounding this coastal salient into whatever its far side might hold.
"Shore," he called to Braaf and Wennberg above the surf noise. "We've done the day."
... Moon. First in—God's bones, how long? Since New Archangel, and an age before that. "Stone on the stomach of heaven'll make the weather mend." That we could use. In plenty. Mend all night every night, I wouldn't mind, moon....
Sometime in these days the canoe had slid them out of winter into not-winter.
No calendar can quite catch the time, and the cluster of moments themselves is as little possible to single out as the family of atoms of air that pushes against the next and has begun a breeze. Yet the happening is unmissable. Out of their winter rust, ferns Unroll green. Up from the low dampnesses of the forest the blooms of skunk cabbage lick, a butter-gold flame and scent like burnt sugar. The weather calms, sometimes as much as a week of laze and non-storm. Seals bob forth in the offshore swells. Salmon far out in the Pacific reverse compass, start their instinctual trace back from under-ocean pastures toward the rivers where they were spawned and must now seed spawn in turn. Baja California has been departed by gray whales, the Bering Sea is to know them next. Geese and ducks and whistling swans write first strokes of their calligraphy of flight northward. To the north too, glaciers creak with the earliest of the strains which at last will calve icebergs into the azure bays. Within the white rivers, Yukon and Stikine and Susitna and Alsek, Kuskokwim and Kvichak and Nushagak, currents begin to pry at their winter roofs of ice.
In stirrings tiny and mighty, the restive great coast was engendering spring.
... One meal of deer left. Then beans. Two, three skoffs of those. And biscuit corners, maybe a meal's worth. Already Wennberg is saying his guts think his throat's been cut. An idea there, Braaf tells him, how'd he like help? The tWO of us to hold Wennberg into bridle, it takes....
The moon reminded Karlsson of ¡111 egg, and his stomach regretted that he had looked up. But the shine on the waves compelled it, a soft dazzle that began to lie gone even as ¡t showed itself; an eye could not help to wonder where that flitting sheen had been borne from.
Just from the chance at last to do so, stroll a