Читать книгу The Starship and the Canoe - Kenneth Brower - Страница 19

The tree house is not home to George Dyson. He thinks of his Douglas fir as the anteroom of a much larger dwelling. The entire Inside Passage province, the nine hundred miles of protected waters from the southern end of Vancouver Island to Glacier Bay in Alaska, is George’s place. He would like to build rooms here and there all along that coast.

Few coastlines on Earth are so convoluted. If you could unravel all George’s promontories and indentations and lay them end to end, they would run out nearly forever. There is no conclusion to the gulfs, bays, coves, straits, sounds, canals, channels, passes, passages, inlets, arms, entrances, or surprises around the corner. The coast contains, in other words, a universe. There are several Aegeans worth of islands. Ulysses never had so many archipelagos to wander in. Aeneas met no stranger people, nor did Captain Cook, nor Flash Gordon. There is the Island of the People Who Sing to Whales. There is the Island of the Indians Who Bury Their Dead Under Singer Sewing Machines. There are logging camps and fishing villages. Hidden away in deep inlets are communes of bearded men and long-haired women. Monasteries of strange religious sects stand inland in the mountains. “On D’Sonoqua,” says George, “I learned to move in that whole society of people.”

“Our friend wants a steak!” a logger demanded, his burly arm around George’s slender shoulders.

The cook protested that he had no more steaks.

“That’s all right,” said George, who seldom ate meat now. “I don’t want a steak.”

“You want a steak,” said the logger. “The cook ran out of steaks, that’s his own fucking fault. He better find a steak. If he doesn’t find a steak, we aren’t working tomorrow.”

Late one night on Denman Island, some kids from the village staggered down to the wharf.

“They were drinking,” says George, “making a lot of noise, throwing their bottles down into D’Sonoqua. That was their drinking place. They always came down to the wharf to drink. It’s the kind of thing where I just turn over and try to go back to sleep. Or if there’s too much noise, I get up and read. It was their wharf. We were the strangers there. But one guy on our boat got really pissed. ‘You kids get the hell out of here so I can get some sleep.’ They just cursed him, so he went down and got the old Winchester we kept on the ship—it was empty—and he came up and waved it at them. It was the wrong thing to do. Those guys hunted deer for their families on that island. They went home and got their guns. They set up behind their cars and shot up the boat. They didn’t actually hit it, but they did real good. They came real close. Ping! Zip! We lay low. Then some lady came down in a nightgown. She was really mad. ‘Johnny! Jim! Stop that and come home!’ She was somebody’s mother. So they stopped shooting and they all went home.”

D’Sonoqua contracted with the Indian village of Church House, on Raza Island, to deliver groceries. The Indians of Raza Island once had been consummate canoebuilders, but they no longer made canoes. They bought speedboats and big outboards and booze with their government allotment. They wore the liners from hard hats as headbands. Hard-hat liners were the craze at the time. “We had to get there a day or two after the welfare checks came,” says George, “or they would have spent all the money.”

Sailing the Inside Passage, George met the people who would become his models, insofar as George has models. Besides Dr. Spong, the psychologist who became a student, then champion, of killer whales, he met Michael Berry, a marine biologist who became a fisherman and jack-of-all-trades, and Jim Land, who scavenges the alleys of Vancouver’s Chinatown for the beautiful handmade crates that come to Canada from Communist China, and who, with the empties, has built himself a palace. He met an old woman who subsisted on crows and potatoes—an interesting dietary experiment, in George’s opinion.

He met a young man who made his own wooden shoes and lived in a hammock. Few humans have dwelt more lightly and immaculately on this Earth than the young man of the hammock. He had been a librarian and a logger once, but all that had fallen away. He had simplified. He now slept everywhere in his hammock—in forests, in greasy freightyards—it didn’t matter, for he levitated above all inconvenience. His toothbrush and other articles had their places on his hammock line. His whole life was suspended between two points. He was a Houdini of self-containment. He was not much older than George. Remembering him, George shakes his head with envy.

One of the nicer things about this society was how easily it was left behind. When George and Jim Bates tired of people, they simply weighed anchor, sailed around the point, and found themselves alone in the wilderness. (Passing Lasqueti Island recently, George nodded toward it. “They’ve got beautiful ladies on that island,” he said. “Healthy. Cook their own bread.” It was a nice encapsulation of most of what he wants from the world of people. But he did not want it right then, and he did not go ashore.)

George’s universe has a center.

The Queen Charlotte Islands, according to his acquaintances who have visited, are a northern Eden. The Queen Charlottes lie at the midpoint of the Inside Passage, and are the most seaward of its archipelagos. They are a quintessence of the Northwest, a promised land of virgin forest, game, and shellfish. It was on the Queen Charlottes, say the Tlingit Indians, that Raven taught humans to build canoes. At first, according to the Tlingits, the early humans were afraid to climb into Raven’s prototype. “The canoe is not dangerous,” he assured them. “People will seldom drown.” D’Sonoqua never had business in the islands, and George has never visited, but from the day he first learned of them, he has thought of building a vessel that would take him there. In the Queen Charlottes, he has heard, there is an Indian girl who daily swims a mile out into the ocean, and a mile back. Two miles in the frigid North Pacific! He would like to see if she is true.

British Columbia’s coast range is a nine-hundred-mile fold in the Earth’s crust. Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlottes are parts of a parallel seaward fold, most of it submerged. Both folds—the entire Inside Passage province—were covered by the Cordilleran ice sheet, which in grinding its way over George’s country carved the final touches upon it. The glaciers were enormous, and so are the land and seascapes they left behind. The fiords are deep and labyrinthine. The landforms are all out of scale, belonging on a larger planet. The peninsulas between the fiords are big, steep, and dark, like negatives of the vanished tongues of ice. The darkness is less geology than botany. A dense forest of Douglas fir, cedar, Sitka spruce, and hemlock has sprung up after the thaw. As the forest colonized above waterline, the Pacific and its seaweeds were colonizing below, and today the two influences make for a jarring disconformity. Above waterline a traveler sees subboreal forest; when the tide is running, he might be on any northern river, or, when the tide is slack, on any northern lake. But below waterline he watches kelp lean with the current; from time to time a seal surfaces, or the fin of a porpoise. He’s not on any northern river or lake. The water is salt. The lower boughs of the hemlocks are trimmed straight by the high tide. The river is the Pacific, and it flows both ways.

The Inside Passage is a country shaped by water. Water is responsible for its character, just as wind is responsible for the butte country of the Southwest, or meteors for the surface of the moon. Water, in one form or another, did all the work. Glacial ice carved the country steep. Heavy rainfall dark-greened it. Fog grooved the needles of the conifers and tipped the guard hairs of the wolves. Cold stream currents thickened the pelts of the mink and otter, fattened the grizzlies, streamlined and silvered the flanks of the trout, chambered the salmon’s indomitable, homewardleaping heart. The high annual precipitation sends the Douglas firs up two hundred feet and more, broadens their boles to seventeen, furrows their bark, and then, after a millennium or so, undermines their roots, topples and sends them out to the Pacific, which soaks and rolls and deposits them, smooth, barkless, and colossal, in the beach windrows whose chips feed George’s fire at night.

Most of the Inside Passage lies under water, in one or another of its forms. The Pacific insinuates from the west, and year-round snow covers the summits to the east. The dry land between is seldom truly dry. Parts of the coast receive more than two hundred inches of rain a year. Streams run everywhere. Rivers rise at every opportunity and after a few turns become mighty, running clear when their source is snow, milky when their source is glacier. The glacial milk is ground-up continent in suspension, for inland the ice continues its whittling. The Ice Age is not over in George’s country, and continues to enlarge it for him.

The skies of the Inside Passage belong above a more vaporous planet, like Venus. The waters rule up there, as they rule below, marching in different densities to different drummers. The sun seldom burns through the leaden overcast. Clouds boil up from the cold cauldron of the North Pacific, white against the high gray. Fogs flow tidally in and out the inlets. Mist mystifies the forest. Vapors heighten the headlands. White lenticular clouds cap the foothills. The gray inverted sea of cloud decapitates the peaks.

George, unlike his father, never has to look for water. George has to look for shelter from it.

The aborigines were water people. They built their villages on the shore, usually at the mouths of rivers. They hunted land animals—deer, elk, goats, and bear—and they were good at it, but it was more like sport than work with them. Their real business was the sea.

The Northwest Coast culture divided into seven language families. From south to north the people spoke Salish, Bella Coola, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, and Tlingit. These linguistic groups divided into dozens of tribes, and all were sea people: whalers, shell gatherers, fishermen. Their civilization developed in isolation, shut off by the sea in front and by the mountain wall behind. Their few foreign influences came along the coast, primarily down it, for they borrowed most from the hunting technology of the Eskimos to the north. Unlike the Eskimos, they conducted true wars—campaigns intended to exterminate their neighbors or at least to move them elsewhere. True warfare was rare among Native Americans. The wars here were probably fought for living space. The land between mountains and sea was so slim and steep that village sites were hard to find. The armies wore armor of animal hide or wood, and wooden helmets carved with terrifying faces.

The artists of the Northwest Coast were the finest in the Americas.

“To their taste or design in working figures upon their garments, corresponds their fondness for carving, in everything they make of wood,” wrote Captain Cook “Nothing is without a kind of freeze-work, or the figure of some animal upon it.” This Northwestern decoration, strong, animistic, stylized, polychromatic, was several centuries ahead of its time. Rediscovered in the 1900s by men like Picasso, it had a delayed influence on the art of the world. The Indians achieved it without agriculture. Agriculture is the invention that is supposed to let a people lay in the food reserves that permit the idle periods that allow experimentation with art, and the coastal Indians practiced no agriculture at all, except for planting a little tobacco. It was the sea that allowed them to break the old rule. The coastal waters were as rich as any field. Shellfish were easy to gather in great numbers along the Inside Passage. The coastal women shucked clams and mussels instead of peas, and over the centuries their patient fingers built huge shell middens. (In a rainy climate where intentional art in wood decays, the middens endure, great banal monuments standing everywhere along the shore. They make good soil for berries, and George Dyson likes to forage them, his fingers stained purple or red.) There were also the big salmon runs on the coastal rivers. Salmon was the Northwestern maize. The Indians smoked or dried the fish in great quantities, gathered bushels of clams, then turned to their art.

They were fine basketmakers. They made ingenious fishhooks and harpoons. They wove excellent blankets from the wool of mountain goats, and one group, the Salish, raised a breed of woolly dogs that they sheared to make hair garments. They knew how to make moccasins but preferred, like George Dyson, to go barefoot. The Inside Passage is a good country for that. The rainfall carpets the forest understory with moss, and the beach stones make a pleasant cobbling underfoot. When you wear shoes there, George explains, it is not from fear of cuts or stubbed toes, but to circumvent that force which leads you to step in something unpleasant just before bed.

The Indians made seagoing canoes. These were dugouts carved from cedar logs, the hulls sculpted, painted, and rubbed regularly with oil to keep them from cracking. War canoes were sometimes sixty feet long and could carry eighty warriors. They were given names—Halibut Canoe, Gull Canoe, Crane Canoe. The prows of some were equipped with tall shields fenestrated for archers—aboriginal landing craft. In their war canoes, one group, the Nootka, hunted whales.

At the University of British Columbia there is a new art museum devoted almost entirely to the material culture of the Northwest Coast. George’s sister Katrina works there as a receptionist. I visited the museum once with George, and after we had chatted with his sister, he led me briskly through the place.

One bright, high-ceilinged hall, all glass and pale-gray concrete, is forested with totem poles. The poles are huge. On each, the massive heads of demigods, semihumans, eagles, bears, and killer whales succeed one another up to the roof. The painted eyes have weathered away. Wooden eyeballs stare blind and splintery at the concrete, or gaze out the glass. The poles face this way and that, like guests at an unsuccessful cocktail party. To my mind, the sterile concrete and glass made a fine setting for the weathered wood, and I would have liked to linger, but George rushed me along. We walked beneath Raven’s outsized beak and made our exit from the totem forest.

We passed storage chests carved in geometrical designs and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. We passed bowls, food dishes, ladles, rattles, daggers, halibut clubs, headdresses, wool blankets, togas; none of it unadorned, as Captain Cook had observed. George hardly glanced around him. At his pace, Northwestern art passed as a blur. I was left only with the impression of being watched. The Northwestern artists liked to fill all available space, and they filled it most often with formalized eyes: eyes in the middle of an animal’s chest, eyes marking its joints, eyes looking out from the least representational of the geometric designs.

We passed a wall of masks. They grimaced and leered at me. The masks, I thought, had most to say about the people. The old Northwestern Indians would have liked Boris Karloff movies. A pantheon of demons gibbered against the black felt of the display. They were carved with great imagination and humor. They jumped time and the culture gap to scare me in the twentieth century. There were clownish masks too, full of a more raucous humor. There was sharp parody in the few masks depicting white men. The black backdrop was a fine idea, I thought, especially for the demon masks and death’s heads. They seemed to be materializing in the darkness of the aboriginal unconscious. I would have liked to study them longer. But George had moved ahead, and I followed.

We came to the canoes.

The success of Northwestern art, I had decided, was in the grace of its curves, and that grace reached apogee in the canoes. Looking at the canoes, I wondered where that Northwestern curve came from. What had inspired it? Was it the glacier-shaped curve of the fiord headlands? Was it the curve of the lens clouds, or the dorsal curve of a fleeing whale? Or could it have derived from the canoe lines themselves? Maybe all Northwestern art began in that pragmatic solution to the problem posed by the waves. It was a happy solution, certainly, both in form and function. The designers of the clipper ships had thought so, and had let it influence them in lofting their bowlines.

The finest lines, for me, were those turned by the Haida, the inhabitants of the Queen Charlottes, where canoes began in myth. The leafbladed Haida paddle is surely one of the classic shapes devised by man. It has all the inevitability of the leaf-bladed African spear, or, for that matter, of the leaf. But George walked past. He finished the museum almost at a dead run.

“You liked it?” he asked me at the door, surprised. He shook his head. He didn’t like the museum at all, he confided. It made him nervous. He hated the glass and concrete. He preferred finding his totem poles under blueberry bushes, overgrown where they had fallen.

“Doesn’t it seem like a graveyard to you?” he asked. “A bunch of rich white people get this stuff and bring it here. As if it was dead.”