Driving Home, page 34
The language of paperwork is a perpetual bafflement to him. “What’s a per diem?” he inquires, in exasperation, as he fills out a form required by the tribal council. Later, he’s found puzzling over an ethnological document, propped on a soda can, which describes how portions of the whale used to be divided among the hunters in the old days, as well as more papers from the National Marine Fisheries Service:
“Look at this,” he said. “Look at all the stuff we gotta do with the biologists when we get the whale. We gotta assist in measurement of ovaries and earplugs, measure the”—he sorted through a stack of papers—“measure the whatever, but I mean, look at all this! And I’ve gotta get my butchering team up. I never knew how much work there was to be done but then I was always out in the boat.” He continued, “There’s all kinds of things we have to do. There’s spiritual training and there’s butchering. The saddle of the whale, it has to be cut out and it hangs for three days in the house of the captain with the eyeballs.”
Required to speak in public, Johnson usually dries up with stage fright. So it is strange to discover him, after the whale has been killed, staying up late into the night working on a speech, described by Sullivan as “not so much a speech as a simple list of people he wanted to thank.” It required long hours of revision and rehearsal. “He read it over and over. He vowed to read it carefully, not to be nervous, to stay calm.”
When the great celebratory feast of whale meat and Jell-O is served in the high-school auditorium, many speeches are made. The captain of the whaleboat waits his turn, but when the time comes he is not invited to stand:
The people in charge of the festivities never got around to letting Wayne speak. This made Wayne so angry. This made Wayne so angry, in fact, that he left his table and walked disgustedly over to his house. He sat there on the couch all night. He didn’t want to talk to anybody.
Yet the organizers clearly had a point: at this climactic episode of glorious unrealism and high-flown talk, they had no need of the services of a realist like Wayne Johnson at their feast.
On May 18, the morning after the killing of the whale, Sullivan called at Johnson’s house and found Wayne drinking coffee and looking flat-out exhausted:
… He’d give a press conference later. Then he took a shower and got dressed and drank a cup of coffee from his whale-art-covered mug and went downtown. “Come on,” he said, opening the door. “Let’s go see who hates me.”
There remains the problem of the whale. As the whale hunters, in all their fumbling inexperience, were very different from whale hunters in the past, Indian or white, so the whale they killed appears to have been strangely mild and docile, a late-twentieth-century sort of whale. Sullivan wasn’t out on the water when Theron Parker successfully lodged his harpoon in the whale’s flesh; his graphic close-up description of the kill seems to be based on a mixture of firsthand accounts by the whaling crew and action replays of the lavish video footage.
When the harpoon struck, the whale submerged, quite slowly, turned on its side, surfaced, flapped the water once with its tail, received a second harpoon thrown by Parker, towed the canoe along for a while—again quite slowly—and was then shot dead. It wasn’t in the least like any nineteenth-century account of a harpooned whale—the thrashing tail, the stoved-in boats, the enraged animal turning its great bulk and muscle on its pursuers.
Many of the protesters explained the whale’s behavior by saying that it—or rather she—had been tamed by years of exposure to whale watchers; that she thought of men in boats as her natural friends; that she was appealing to the whalers to rescue her from the inexplicable agony in which she had suddenly been engulfed. That is a plausible explanation. It might certainly be true of some whales, but may not be true of this one.
Another reason for its behavior presents itself. During 1999, a lot of gray whales washed up dead on the beaches of Washington’s Pacific coast and Puget Sound. Exactly why they died—and are still dying—isn’t known. The most likely cause, or at least the one most voiced in the Seattle press, is that gray whales have recently become so numerous that they are exhausting their supplies of food (they eat small crustaceans known as amphipods). In the last year or so, each spring and fall migration has been attended by an unprecedented number of apparently natural casualties.
Watching the hunt on television, my own first thought was that the Makah whalers had managed to home in on a whale that wasn’t long for this world anyway, and that only a sick whale was likely to fall victim to such amateurish hunters. If that’s true, it gives a flicker of life to the Seattle Times editorialist’s wan phrase about the hunt embodying “restrained stewardship after a species’ triumphant comeback.” Still, as so often when the word “stewardship” is applied to Native Americans and nature, in effect this means only that the Indians lacked the numbers and the technology to do much serious harm.
No very great harm was done last May. It now looks as if the whale killed then may be the last whale ever to be harpooned in U.S. waters. In 1998, the Makah Tribal Center’s Cary Ray told Sullivan that the whale hunt was “gonna be like a blood transfusion for this community,” and for a brief moment it was. It happens that this year the halibut and salmon fisheries have been in better shape than for several years, and the marina and the motels are full as I write this. But the flood of press attention has left no lasting economic impact, according to a Makah council member whom I spoke to on the phone. “Things are pretty much back to where they were.” One is reminded of the great blood transfusion described by William Empson in “Missing Dates”:
They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month’s desires
To which he added the characteristic footnote: “It is true about the old dog, at least I saw it reported somewhere.”
New York Review of Books, November 2000
Battleground of the Eye
LANDSCAPE—if you give that rather slippery term its full weight—is one of the great divisive issues in the Pacific Northwest. The landscape paintings of the region, from the eighteenth century to the present day, are pictorial dispatches from a long war that is more heated now than at any time in the past two hundred years.
Landscape is land shaped—land subordinated to a vision or a use. A picture frame or a Claude glass* converts land into landscape; so, too, does a logging road or a barbed-wire fence. The railroad magnate and the painter of majestic wilderness scenes have in common their designs on the land: James J. Hill and Albert Bierstadt are brothers under the skin.
Consider this curious tale of two pictures of the Pacific Northwest. In 1999 Slade Gorton, the Republican senator from Washington State, tacked an ingenious rider onto a bill intended to provide American aid for Kosovo. His rider concerned a proposed cyanide-leach goldmine in Okanogan County (he was for it). Eighteen months later, in the race between Gorton and his Democratic challenger, Maria Cantwell, this came back to haunt him. It probably lost him the election, which Cantwell won by a hair, after a string of recounts.
In the Gorton–Cantwell race, landscape turned into the central topic of debate, as the candidates fought over such questions as the Okanogan County mine, logging in national forests, and the breaching of dams on the Snake River. From the barrage of television ads that were broadcast by both sides, two pictures emerged, each executed in a style familiar to any Northwest gallery-goer. Gorton’s was a tame Augustan landscape, with irrigated farms and gardens and orderly plantations, in which nature was tailored to human needs and specifications. Cantwell’s was a landscape in the manner of Bierstadt or Thomas Cole—a Romantic wilderness, with free-swimming salmon and untouched stands of tangled old-growth forest where spotted owl called to spotted owl, a realm of aboriginal solitude and grandeur.
Rural voters east of the Cascade Mountains showed an overwhelming preference for the Gorton picture, with its promise of money and jobs. West of the mountains, along the urban corridor that stretches north and south from Seattle, the Cantwell landscape found favor with hikers, birdwatchers, fly fishers, and the mass of college-educated white-collar voters, who bear out the interesting paradox that Seattle is the first big city to which people have swarmed in order to get closer to nature.
One might hear echoes of that debate almost anywhere in the United States, but in the Pacific Northwest it is conducted with a peculiar and obsessive intensity, because here the wilderness itself seems to possess a tenacious memory. In this damp, dauntingly fertile climate the creeping salal and salmonberry, and the green spears of infant Douglas firs, are bent on restoring everyone’s back yard to the temperate rainforest that it was not so long ago. The towns and cities of the Northwest tend to have a makeshift, provisional air, as if the forest might yet swallow them alive. Because the region was settled by whites more recently than elsewhere, its Indian past—ten thousand years of it—lies very close to the surface, and Native American conceptions of landscape and land use remain live political issues here.
Last year’s Senate race was fought on terms that go back to the eighteenth century, as the painted landscapes of the Pacific Northwest remind one, with their endless variations on the themes of wilderness, white settlement, tribal rights, and the competing claims of industry and nature. These paintings haven’t dated. The questions they raise are all around us, even now.
John Webber was the first white artist to unpack his paint box in the Pacific Northwest. In the spring of 1778 Captain James Cook’s Resolution put in to Nootka Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, after a long northward haul up the Pacific Ocean from New Zealand, with stops in Tonga, Tahiti, and Hawaii. En route through Oceania, Webber, the official expedition artist, had painted a series of watercolors that are dominated by exotic tropical greenery in which every palm frond has a life of its own.
Cook’s ship left the palms, wili wilis, breadfruit, and hibiscus of Hawaii on February 2; on March 29 it sailed into the great funnel-shaped approach to Nootka Sound, on the same latitude as the mouth of the English Channel. To British eyes the Pacific Northwestern light falls at a familiar and homely angle. The vegetation is Scottish, the weather Irish. After Hawaii, Nootka Sound must have felt to the voyagers like a wet and windy corner of their own country, and they named it New Albion in honor of its teasing similarity to home.
Webber, who trained as a painter first in Switzerland and then in Paris, clearly seems to have experienced a bout of déjà vu. In sharp contrast to his Tahitian and Hawaiian watercolors, his Nootka sketches render the local scenery (and “scenery” it is) in brisk pictorial shorthand, the water, rocks, pines, and mountains composed into a strikingly efficient and conventional landscape. We might be on the shore of Lac Léman or Lake Windermere here.
Like Cook, in his posthumously published Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784), Webber seems to have barely noticed the land itself, so preoccupied was he with the Indians in the foreground—their swan-necked cedar canoes, their curious timber dwellings, the frames on which they dried their salmon. In Paris he had specialized in “picturesque peasant scenes,” a useful preparation for his studies of Indian life. Though the figures are small on the page, they are exquisitely detailed and individuated. With a magnifying glass one can pick out their conical hats, woven from cedar bark, and capes made from sea-otter hides. Given his education, Webber almost certainly had encountered the ideas of Rousseau, and his Pacific Northwest is the habitat of “natural man,” drawn with the fastidious zeal of a keen amateur anthropologist.
In 1791 and 1792, more than a decade after Resolution’s flying visit to the Northwest (from Nootka, Cook sailed offshore to the Gulf of Alaska, sighting land to starboard but not stopping there), Spanish and British expeditions cruised through the region, proving the insularity of Vancouver Island and charting Puget Sound. The Spaniards shipped professional artists (Tomás de Suría, José Cardero, Atanásio Echeverría), whereas the English, under Captain George Vancouver, made do with the artistic efforts of a bunch of talented young midshipmen, including John Sykes, Harry Humphrys, and Thomas Heddington. From the mass of sketches that came home to London and Madrid one can see something of the Pacific Northwest but much more of the tastes and interests prevailing among cultivated young Europeans in the last decade of the eighteenth century.
One catches the artists’ excitement at the strange customs, costumes, and architecture of primitive man, and their elation at finding themselves in a real-life Salvator Rosa landscape, with all its shaggy cliffs, tangled woods, blasted trees, and lurid skies. Rosa, the Sicilian Baroque painter, was a great and much imitated favorite in Georgian England, where the novelist Tobias Smollett called his work “dreadfully picturesque.” So the young men had a fine time, in their journals and sketchbooks, with granite precipices, waterfalls, and snow-capped peaks, as the land steepened around them along the Inside Passage.
Dread was in fashion in the 1790s, when the word “awful” still had a precise meaning and images of the vertiginous crag, the dark forest, and the storm at sea were calculated to induce a delicious sensation of vicarious terror. It happened that the Pacific Northwest was discovered by whites just as the idea of the Romantic sublime was gaining sway. The lonely and forbidding geography of the place perfectly fit the reigning conception of how a Romantic landscape ought to look. It conveniently combined, within a single view, the essential features of the Swiss Alps, the German forest, and the English Lake District.
There was a single dissenting voice on the voyage—that of George Vancouver, known by his men (though never to his face) as Captain Van. At thirty-four, Vancouver was far behind his time. He was a provincial (from King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, where his father was employed by the Customs Service); his education had been mostly acquired at sea (he’d been one of Captain Cook’s midshipmen); and the sublime left him cold. His posthumously published Voyage (1798) gives a candid, heartfelt portrait of the Pacific Northwest as seen through the eyes of a young fogey who was out of touch with the intellectual currents of his age.
Captain Van took a great shine to Puget Sound and its surroundings. Among the low hills and forest clearings he was able to imagine himself in a reborn England of close-shaven lawns, artful vistas, rolling fields, and country houses. Remembering the stretch of coast over which the retirement homes of Sequim are now sprawled, he wrote,
The surface of the sea was perfectly smooth, and the country before us exhibited every thing that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view. As we had no reason to imagine that this country had ever been indebted for any of its decorations to the hand of man, I could not possibly believe that any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture.
But his pleasure in this newfound land soon curdled into repugnance as the expedition sailed north and west into the narrow, mountain-walled channels of the Inside Passage. While his juniors, along with the expedition naturalist, Archibald Menzies, thrilled to the dramatic sublimity of their surroundings, Vancouver recoiled from what he saw. The snow-capped peaks were “sterile,” the cliffs of dripping rock and vertical forest were “barren,” “dull,” “gloomy,” “dreary,” “comfortless.” Of the much-admired waterfalls he complained that their incessant noise made it impossible for him to hear birdsong.
Vancouver’s voice seems to come from the wrong end of the eighteenth century, when mountains were conventionally seen as rude geologic excrescences—chaotic, useless, and offensive to the mind and eye (“vast, undigested heaps of stone,” as the theologian Thomas Burnet described the Alps in 1681). Yet most of the effusive paeans to the region’s scenic grandeur conspicuously lack the real depth of feeling in Vancouver’s response to a grim and spiritually corrosive landscape whose epicenter he named Desolation Sound. Captain Van ought to be adopted as the patron saint of all Northwesterners who have felt walled in by their mountain ranges, or suffered a jolt of depression when faced by the black monotony of the fir forest under a low, wintry, frogspawn-colored sky.
The back-of-beyond aspect of the Pacific Northwest heightened its romantic allure. Even after the Oregon Territory came within reach of the enterprising tourist, Washington and British Columbia remained comparatively remote. The famously grueling sea passage from Portland to Seattle was a serious deterrent, and it wasn’t until the Northern Pacific Railway at last arrived at its Tacoma terminus, in 1883, that Puget Sound became easily accessible to the casual traveler. In the meantime, a growing mystique attached itself to the area: people who had never been there spoke of it as the last resort of unspoiled wilderness, romantic solitude, and wild indigenous inhabitants.
It was the Indians who drew the Irish-Canadian painter Paul Kane to British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon on a long and adventurous trip in 1846–47. But Kane’s noble red men, alone with their primeval forest and steam-belching volcanic cones, are disappointingly generic and look as if they stepped straight out of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. What Kane’s pictures celebrate is, rather, the intrepidity of the artist—the solitary white man out in the Far West, ahead of the crowd, communing with primitive people in their natural state. His sketches and studio canvases document the progress of the artist as romantic hiker-hero. Kane’s journey is the real subject; his Pacific Northwest is an adequately wild backdrop for a sequence of pictures in which one’s attention instinctively fastens less on the land than on the personality of the painter.
