IT WAS A DAY of spindrift and blowing sea-foam, with black clouds presaging rain driven over the mountains from the sea by a wild March wind.
But a clean silver sea light came from along the horizon where the sky itself was like glowing silver. And far away over in America the snowy volcanic peak of Mount Hood2 stood on high, disembodied, cut off from earth, yet much too close, which was an even surer presage of rain, as though the mountains had advanced, or were advancing.3
In the park of the seaport the giant trees swayed,4 and taller than any were the tragic Seven Sisters,5 a constellation of seven noble red cedars that had grown there for hundreds of years, but were now dying, blasted, with bare peeled tops and stricken boughs. (They were dying rather than live longer near civilization. Yet though everyone had forgotten they were called after the Pleiades and thought they were named with civic pride after the seven daughters of a butcher, who seventy years before when the growing city was named Gaspool had all danced together in a shop window, nobody had the heart to cut them down.)6
The angelic wings of the seagulls circling over the tree tops shone very white against the black sky. Fresh snow from the night before lay far down the slopes of the Canadian mountains, whose freezing summits, massed peak behind spire, jaggedly traversed the country northward as far as the eye could reach. And highest of all an eagle, with the poise of a skier, shot endlessly down the world.
In the mirror, reflecting this and much besides, of an old weighing machine with the legend Your weight and your destiny7 encircling its forehead and which stood on the embankment between the streetcar terminus and a hamburger stall, in this mirror along the reedy edge of the stretch of water below known as Lost Lagoon8 two figures in mackintoshes were approaching, a man and a beautiful passionate-looking girl, both bare-headed, and both extremely fair, and hand-in-hand, so that you would have taken them for young lovers, but that they were alike as brother and sister, and the man, although he walked with youthful nervous speed, now seemed older than the girl.
The man, fine-looking, tall, yet thick-set, very bronzed, and on approaching still closer obviously a good deal older than the girl, and wearing one of those blue belted trenchcoats favored by merchant marine officers of any country, though without any corresponding cap—moreover the trenchcoat was rather too short in the sleeve so that you could see some tattooing on his wrist, as he approached nearer still it seemed to be an anchor—whereas the girl’s raincoat was of some sort of entrancing forest-green corduroy—the man paused every now and then to gaze into the lovely laughing face of his girl, and once or twice they both stopped, gulping in great draughts of salty clean sea and mountain air. A child smiled at them, and they smiled back. But the child belonged elsewhere, and the couple were unaccompanied.
In the lagoon swam wild swans, and many wild ducks: mallards and buffleheads and scaups, goldeneyes, and cackling black coots with carved ivory bills. The little buffleheads often took flight from the water and some of them blew about like doves among the smaller trees. Under these trees lining the bank other ducks were sitting meekly on the sloping lawn, their beaks tucked into their plumage rumpled by the wind. The smaller trees were apples and hawthorns, some just opening into bloom even before they had foliage, and weeping willows, from whose branches small showers from the night’s rain were scattered on the two figures as they passed.
A red-breasted merganser cruised in the lagoon, and at this swift and angry sea bird, with his proud disordered crest, the two were now gazing with a special sympathy, perhaps because he looked lonely without his mate. Ah, they were wrong. The red-breasted merganser was now joined by his wife and on a sudden duck’s impulse and with immense fuss the two wild creatures flew off to settle on another part of the lagoon. And for some reason this simple fact appeared to make these two good people—for nearly all people are good who walk in parks—very happy again.
Now at a distance they saw a small boy, accompanied by his father who was kneeling on the bank, trying to sail a toy boat in the lagoon. But the blustery March wind soon slanted the tiny yacht into trouble and the father hauled it back, reaching out with his curved stick, and set it on an upright keel again for his son.
Your weight and your destiny.
Suddenly the girl’s face, at close quarters in the weighing machine’s mirror, seemed struggling with tears: she unbuttoned the top button of her coat to readjust her scarf, revealing, attached to a gold chain around her neck, a small gold cross. They were quite alone now, standing on top of the embankment by the machine, save for a few old men feeding the ducks below, and the father and his son with the toy yacht, all of whom had their backs turned, while an empty tram abruptly city-bound trundled around the minute terminus square; and the man, who had been trying to light his pipe, took her in his arms and tenderly kissed her, and then pressing his face against her cheek, held her a moment closely.
The couple, having gone down obliquely to the lagoon once more, had now passed the boy with his boat and his father. They were smiling again. Or as much as they could while eating hamburgers. And they were smiling still as they passed the slender reeds where a northwestern redwing was trying to pretend he had no notion of nesting, the northwestern redwing who like all birds in these parts may feel superior to man in that he is his own customs official, and can cross the wild border without let.
Along the far side of Lost Lagoon the green dragons grew thickly, their sheathed and cowled leaves giving off their peculiar animal-like odor. The two lovers were approaching the forest in which, ahead, several footpaths threaded the ancient trees. The park, seagirt, was very large, and like many parks throughout the Pacific Northwest, wisely left in places to the original wilderness. In fact, though its beauty was probably unique, it was quite like some American parks, you might have thought, save for the Union Jack that galloped evermore by a pavilion, and but for the apparition, at this moment, passing by on the carefully landscaped road slightly above, which led with its tunnels and detours to a suspension bridge, of a posse of Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen mounted royally upon the cushions of an American Chevrolet.9
Nearer the forest were gardens with sheltered beds of snowdrops and here and there a few crocuses lifting their sweet chalices. The man and his girl now seemed lost in thought, breasting the buffeting wind that blew the girl’s scarf out behind her like a pennant and blew the man’s thick fair hair about his head.
A loudspeaker, enthroned on a wagon, barked from the city of Enochvilleport,10 composed of dilapidated half-skyscrapers, at different levels, some with all kinds of scrap iron, even broken airplanes, on their roofs, others being moldy stock exchange buildings, new beer parlors crawling with verminous light even in mid-afternoon and resembling gigantic emerald-lit public lavatories for both sexes, masonries containing English tea-shoppes where your fortune could be told by a female relative of Maximilian of Mexico, totem pole factories, drapers’ shops with the best Scotch tweed and opium dens in the basement (though no bars, as if, like some hideous old roué shuddering with every unmentionable secret vice, this city without gaiety had cackled “No, I draw the line at that.—What would our wee laddie come to then?”), cerise conflagrations of cinemas, modern apartment buildings, and other soulless behemoths, housing, it might be, noble invisible struggles, of literature, the drama, art or music, the student’s lamp and the rejected manuscript; or indescribable poverty and degradation, between which civic attractions were squeezed occasional lovely dark ivy-clad old houses that seemed weeping, cut off from all light, on their knees, and elsewhere bankrupt hospitals, and one or two solid-stoned old banks, held up that afternoon; and among which appeared too, at infrequent intervals, beyond a melancholy never-striking black and white clock that said three, dwarfed spires belonging to frame façades with blackened rose windows, queer grimed onion-shaped domes, and even Chinese pagodas, so that first you thought you were in the Orient, then Turkey or Russia, though finally, but for the fact that some of these were churches, you would be sure you were in hell: despite that anyone who had ever really been in hell11 must have given Enochvilleport a nod of recognition, further affirmed by the spectacle, at first not unpicturesque, of the numerous sawmills relentlessly smoking and champing away like demons, Molochs fed by whole mountainsides of forests that never grew again, or by trees that made way for grinning regiments of villas in the background of “our expanding and fair city,” mills that shook the very earth with their tumult, filling the windy air with their sound as of a wailing and gnashing of teeth: all these curious achievements of man, together creating as we say “the jewel of the Pacific,” went as though down a great incline to a harbor more spectacular than Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco put together, with deep-sea freighters moored at every angle for miles in the roadstead, but to whose heroic prospect nearly the only human dwellings visible on this side of the water that had any air of belonging, or in which their inhabitants could be said any longer to participate, were, paradoxically, a few lowly little self-built shacks and floathouses, that might have been driven out of the city altogether, down to the water’s edge into the sea itself, where they stood on piles, like fishermen’s huts (which several of them apparently were), or on rollers, some dark and tumbledown, others freshly and prettily painted, these last quite evidently built or placed with some human need for beauty in mind, even if under the permanent threat of eviction,12 and all standing, even the most somber, with their fluted tin chimneys smoking here and there like toy tramp steamers, as though in defiance of the town, before eternity. In Enochvilleport itself some ghastly-colored neon signs had long since been going through their unctuous twitchings and gesticulations that nostalgia and love transform into a poetry of longing: more happily one began to flicker: PALOMAR, LOUIS ARMSTRONG AND HIS ORCHESTRA. A huge new gray dead hotel that at sea might be a landmark of romance belched smoke out of its turreted haunted-looking roof, as if it had caught fire, and beyond that all the lamps were blazing within the grim courtyard of the law courts, equally at sea a trysting place of the heart, outside which one of the stone lions, having recently been blown up, was covered reverently with a white cloth, and inside which for a month a group of stainless citizens had been trying a sixteen-year-old boy for murder.13
Nearer the park the apron lights appeared on a sort of pebble-dashed YMCA-Hall-cum-variety-theater saying TAMMUZ The Master Hypnotist, Tonite 8:30, and running past this the tramlines, down which another parkwise streetcar was approaching, could be seen extending almost to the department store in whose show window Tammuz’ subject, perhaps a somnolent descendant of the seven sisters whose fame had eclipsed even that of the Pleiades, but whose announced ambition was to become a female psychiatrist, had been sleeping happily and publicly in a double bed for the last three days as an advance publicity stunt for tonight’s performance.
Above Lost Lagoon on the road now mounting toward the suspension bridge in the distance much as a piece of jazz music mounts toward a break, a newsboy cried: “LASH ORDERED FOR SAINT PIERRE! SIXTEEN YEAR OLD BOY, CHILD-SLAYER, TO HANG! Read all about it!”
The weather too was foreboding. Yet, seeing the wandering lovers, the other passers-by on this side of the lagoon, a wounded soldier lying on a bench smoking a cigarette, and one or two of those destitute souls, the very old who haunt parks—since, faced with a choice, the very old will sometimes prefer, rather than to keep a room and starve, at least in such a city as this, somehow to eat and live outdoors—smiled too.
For as the girl walked along beside the man with her arm through his and as they smiled together and their eyes met with love, or they paused, watching the blowing seagulls, or the ever-changing scene of the snow-freaked Canadian mountains with their fleecy indigo chasms, or to listen to the deep-tongued majesty of a merchantman’s echoing roar (these things that made Enochvilleport’s ferocious aldermen imagine that it was the city itself that was beautiful, and maybe they were half right), the whistle of a ferryboat as it sidled across the inlet northward, what memories might not be evoked in a poor soldier, in the breasts of the bereaved, the old, even, who knows, in the mounted policemen, not merely of young love, but of lovers, as they seemed to be, so much in love that they were afraid to lose a moment of their time together?
Yet only a guardian angel of these two would have known—and surely they must have possessed a guardian angel—the strangest of all strange things of which they were thinking, save that, since they had spoken of it so often before, and especially, when they had opportunity, on this day of the year, each knew of course that the other was thinking about it, to such an extent indeed that it was no surprise, it only resembled the beginning of a ritual when the man said, as they entered the main path of the forest, through whose branches that shielded them from the wind could be made out, from time to time, suggesting a fragment of music manuscript, a bit of the suspension bridge itself:
“It was a day just like this that I set the boat adrift. It was twenty-nine years ago in June.”14
“It was twenty-nine years ago in June, darling. And it was June twenty-seventh.”
“It was five years before you were born, Astrid, and I was ten years old and I came down to the bay with my father.”15
“It was five years before I was born, you were ten years old, and you came down to the wharf with your father. Your father and grandfather had made you the boat between them and it was a fine one, ten inches long, smoothly varnished and made of wood from your model airplane box, with a new strong white sail.”
“Yes, it was balsa wood from my model airplane box and my father sat beside me, telling me what to write for a note to put in it.”
“Your father sat beside you, telling you what to write,” Astrid laughed, “and you wrote:
“Hello.
“My name is Sigurd Storlesen.16 I am ten years old. Right now I am sitting on the wharf at Fearnought Bay, Clallam County, State of Washington, U.S.A., 5 miles south of Cape Flattery on the Pacific side, and my Dad is beside me telling me what to write. Today is June 27, 1922. My Dad is a forest warden in the Olympic National Forest but my Granddad is the lighthouse keeper at Cape Flattery. Beside me is a small shiny canoe which you now hold in your hand. It is a windy day and my Dad said to put the canoe in the water when I have put this in and glued down the lid which is a piece of balsa wood from my model airplane box.
“Well must close this note now, but first I will ask you to tell the Seattle Star that you have found it, because I am going to start reading the paper from today and looking for a piece that says, who when and where it was found.
“Thanks. Sigurd Storlesen.”
“Yes, then my father and I put the note inside, and we glued down the lid and sealed it and put the boat on the water.”
“You put the boat on the water and the tide was going out and away it went. The current caught it right off and carried it out and you watched it till it was out of sight!”
The two had now reached a clearing in the forest where a few gray squirrels were scampering about on the grass. A dark-browed Indian in a windbreaker, utterly absorbed by his friendly task, stood with a sleek black squirrel sitting on his shoulder nibbling popcorn he was giving it from a bag. This reminded them to get some peanuts to feed the bears, whose cages were over the way.
Ursus Horribilis:17 and now they tossed peanuts to the sad lumbering sleep-heavy creatures—though at least these two grizzlies were together, they even had a home—maybe still too sleepy to know where they were, still wrapped in a dream of their timber-falls and wild blueberries in the Cordilleras Sigurd and Astrid could see again, straight ahead of them, between the trees, beyond a bay.
But how should they stop thinking of the little boat?
Twelve years it had wandered. Through the tempests of winter, over sunny summer seas, what tide rips had caught it, what wild sea birds, shearwaters, storm petrels, jaegers, that follow the thrashing propellers, the dark albatross of these northern waters, swooped upon it, or warm currents edged it lazily toward land—and blue-water currents sailed it after the albacore, with fishing boats like white giraffes—or glacial drifts tossed it about fuming Cape Flattery itself. Perhaps it had rested, floating in a sheltered cove, where the killer whale smote, lashed, the deep clear water; the eagle and the salmon had seen it, a baby seal stared with her wondering eyes, only for the little boat to be thrown aground, catching the rainy afternoon sun, on cruel barnacled rocks by the waves, lying aground knocked from side to side in an inch of water like a live thing, or a poor old tin can, pushed, pounded ashore, and swung around, reversed again, left high and dry, and then swept another yard up the beach, or carried under a lonely salt-gray shack, to drive a seine fisherman crazy all night with its faint plaintive knocking, before it ebbed out in the dark autumn dawn, and found its way afresh, over the deep, coming through thunder, to who will ever know what fierce and desolate uninhabited shore, known only to the dread Wendigo,18 where not even an Indian could have found it, unfriended there, lost, until it was borne out to sea once more by the great brimming black tides of January, or the huge calm tides of the midsummer moon, to start its journey all over again—
Astrid and Sigurd came to a large enclosure, set back from a walk, with two vine-leaved maple trees (their scarlet tassels, delicate precursors of their leaves, already visible) growing through the top, a sheltered cavernous part to one side for a lair, and the whole, save for the barred front, covered with stout large-meshed wire—considered sufficient protection for one of the most Satanic beasts left living on earth.
Two animals inhabited the cage, spotted like deceitful pastel leopards, and in appearance like decorated, maniacal-looking cats: their ears were provided with huge tassels and, as if this were in savage parody of the vine-leaved maples, from the brute’s chin tassels also depended. Their legs were as long as a man’s arm, and their paws, clothed in gray fur out of which shot claws curved like scimitars, were as big as a man’s clenched fist.
And the two beautiful demonic creatures prowled and paced endlessly, searching the base of their cage, between whose bars there was just room to slip a murderous paw—always a hop out of reach an almost invisible sparrow went pecking away in the dust—searching with eternal voraciousness, yet seeking in desperation also some way out, passing and repassing each other rhythmically, as though truly damned and under some compelling enchantment.
And yet as they watched the terrifying Canadian lynx, in which seemed to be embodied in animal form all the pure ferocity of nature, as they watched, crunching peanuts themselves now and passing the bag between them, before the lovers’ eyes still sailed that tiny boat, battling with the seas, at the mercy of a wilder ferocity yet, all those years before Astrid was born.
Ah, its absolute loneliness amid those wastes, those wildernesses, of rough rainy seas bereft even of sea birds, between contrary winds, or in the great dead windless swell that comes following a gale; and then with the wind springing up and blowing the spray across the sea like rain, like a vision of creation, blowing the little boat as it climbed the highlands into the skies, from which sizzled cobalt lightnings, and then sank down into the abyss, but already was climbing again, while the whole sea crested with foam like lambs’ wool went furling off to leeward, the whole vast moon-driven expanse like the pastures and valleys and snow-capped ranges of a Sierra Madre in delirium, in ceaseless motion, rising and falling, and the little boat rising, and falling into a paralyzing sea of white drifting fire and smoking spume by which it seemed overwhelmed: and all this time a sound, like a high sound of singing, yet as sustained in harmony as telegraph wires, or like the unbelievably high perpetual sound of the wind where there is nobody to listen, which perhaps does not exist, or the ghost of the wind in the rigging of ships long lost, and perhaps it was the sound of the wind in its toy rigging as again the boat slanted onward: but even then what further unfathomed deeps had it oversailed, until what birds of ill omen turned heavenly for it at last, what iron birds with saber wings skimming forever through the murk above the gray immeasurable swells imparted mysteriously their own homing knowledge to it, the lonely buoyant little craft, nudging it with their beaks under golden sunsets in a blue sky, as it sailed close in to mountainous coasts of clouds with stars over them, or burning coasts at sunset once more, as it rounded not only the terrible spume-drenched rocks, like incinerators in sawmills, of Flattery, but other capes unknown, those twelve years, of giant pinnacles, images of barrenness and desolation, upon which the heart is thrown and impaled eternally!—And strangest of all how many ships themselves had threatened it, during that voyage of only some three score miles as the crow flies from its launching to its final port, looming out of the fog and passing by harmlessly all those years—those years too of the last sailing ships, rigged to the moonsail, sweeping by into their own oblivion—but ships cargoed with guns or iron for impending wars, what freighters now at the bottom of the sea he, Sigurd, had voyaged in for that matter, freighted with old marble and wine and cherries-in-brine, or whose engines even now were still somewhere murmuring: Frère Jacques! Frère Jacques!19
What strange poem of God’s mercy was this?
Suddenly across their vision a squirrel ran up a tree beside the cage and then, chattering shrilly, leaped from a branch and darted across the top of the wire mesh. Instantly, swift and deadly as lightning, one of the lynx sprang twenty feet into the air, hurtling straight to the top of the cage toward the squirrel, hitting the wire with a twang like a mammoth guitar, and simultaneously flashing through the wire its scimitar claws: Astrid cried out and covered her face.
But the squirrel, unhurt, untouched, was already running lightly along another branch, down to the tree, and away, while the infuriated lynx sprang straight up, sprang again, and again and again and again, as his mate crouched spitting and snarling below.
Sigurd and Astrid began to laugh. Then this seemed obscurely unfair to the lynx, now solemnly washing his mate’s face. The innocent squirrel, for whom they felt such relief, might almost have been showing off, almost, unlike the oblivious sparrow, have been taunting the caged animal. The squirrel’s hairbreadth escape—the thousand-to-one chance—that on second thought must take place every day, seemed meaningless. But all at once it did not seem meaningless that they had been there to see it.
“You know how I watched the paper and waited,” Sigurd was saying, stooping to relight his pipe, as they walked on.
“The Seattle Star,” Astrid said.
“The Seattle Star ... It was the first newspaper I ever read. Father always declared the boat had gone south—maybe to Mexico, and I seem to remember Granddad saying no, if it didn’t break up on Tatoosh, the tide would take it right down Juan de Fuca Strait, maybe into Puget Sound itself.20 Well, I watched and waited for a long time and finally, as kids will, I stopped looking.”
“And the years went on—”
“And I grew up. Granddad was dead by then. And the old man, you know about him. Well, he’s dead too now. But I never forgot. Twelve years! Think of it—! Why, it voyaged around longer than we’ve been married.”
“And we’ve been married seven years.”
“Seven years today—”
“It seems like a miracle!”
But their words fell like spent arrows before the target of this fact.
They were walking, as they left the forest, between two long rows of Japanese cherry trees, next month to be an airy avenue of celestial bloom. The cherry trees behind, the forest reappeared, to left and right of the wide clearing, and skirting two arms of the bay. As they approached the Pacific, down the gradual incline, on this side remote from the harbor the wind grew more boisterous: gulls, glaucous and raucous, wheeled and sailed overhead, yelling, and were suddenly far out to sea.
And it was the sea that lay before them, at the end of the slope that changed into the steep beach, the naked sea, running deeply below, without embankment or promenade, or any friendly shacks, though some prettily built homes showed to the left, with one light in a window, glowing warmly through the trees on the edge of the forest itself, as of some stalwart Columbian Adam, who had calmly stolen back with his Eve into Paradise, under the flaming sword of the civic cherubim.
The tide was low. Offshore, white horses were running around a point. The headlong onrush of the tide of beaten silver flashing over its crossflowing underset was so fast the very surface of the sea seemed racing away.
Their path gave place to a cinder track in the familiar lee of an old frame pavilion, a deserted tea house boarded up since last summer. Dead leaves were slithering across the porch, past which on the slope to the right picnic benches, tables, a derelict swing, lay overturned, under a tempestuous grove of birches. It seemed cold, sad, inhuman there, and beyond, with the roar of that deep low tide. Yet there was that between the lovers which moved like a warmth, and might have thrown open the shutters, set the benches and tables aright, and filled the whole grove with the voices and children’s laughter of summer. Astrid paused for a moment with a hand on Sigurd’s arm while they were sheltered by the pavilion, and said, what she too had often said before, so that they always repeated these things almost like an incantation:
“I’ll never forget it. That day when I was seven years old, coming to the park here on a picnic with my father and mother and brother. After lunch my brother and I came down to the beach to play. It was a fine summer day, and the tide was out, but there’d been this very high tide in the night, and you could see the lines of driftwood and seaweed where it had ebbed.... I was playing on the beach, and I found your boat!”
“You were playing on the beach and you found my boat. And the mast was broken.”
“The mast was broken and shreds of sail hung dirty and limp. But your boat was still whole and unhurt, though it was scratched and weatherbeaten and the varnish was gone. I ran to my mother, and she saw the sealing wax over the cockpit, and, darling, I found your note!”
“You found our note, my darling.”
Astrid drew from her pocket a scrap of paper and holding it between them they bent over (though it was hardly legible by now and they knew it off by heart) and read:
Hello.
My name is Sigurd Storlesen. I am ten years old. Right now I am sitting on the wharf at Fearnought Bay, Clallam County, State of Washington, U.S.A., 5 miles south of Cape Flattery on the Pacific side, and my Dad is beside me telling me what to write. Today is June 27, 1922. My Dad is a forest warden in the Olympic National Forest but my Granddad is the lighthouse keeper at Cape Flattery. Beside me is a small shiny canoe which you now hold in your hand. It is a windy day and my Dad said to put the canoe in the water when I have put this in and glued down the lid which is a piece of balsa wood from my model airplane box.
Well must close this note now, but first I will ask you to tell the Seattle Star that you have found it, because I am going to start reading the paper from today and looking for a piece that says, who when and where it was found.
Thanks.
SIGURD STORLESEN.
They came to the desolate beach strewn with driftwood, sculptured, whorled, silvered, piled everywhere by tides so immense there was a tideline of seaweed and detritus on the grass behind them, and great logs and shingle-bolts and writhing snags, crucificial, or frozen in a fiery rage—or better, a few bits of lumber almost ready to burn, for someone to take home, and automatically they threw them up beyond the sea’s reach for some passing soul, remembering their own winters of need—and more snags there at the foot of the grove and visible high on the sea-scythed forest banks on either side, in which riven trees were growing, yearning over the shore. And everywhere they looked was wreckage, the toll of winter’s wrath: wrecked hencoops, wrecked floats, the wrecked side of a fisherman’s hut, its boards once hammered together, with its wrenched shiplap and extruding nails. The fury had extended even to the beach itself, formed in hummocks and waves and barriers of shingle and shells they had to climb up in places. And everywhere too was the grotesque macabre fruit of the sea, with its exhilarating iodine smell, nightmarish bulbs of kelp like antiquated motor horns, trailing brown satin streamers twenty feet long, sea wrack like demons, or the discarded casements of evil spirits that had been cleansed. Then more wreckage: boots, a clock, torn fishing nets, a demolished wheelhouse, a smashed wheel lying in the sand.
Nor was it possible to grasp for more than a moment that all this with its feeling of death and destruction and barrenness was only an appearance, that beneath the flotsam, under the very shells they crunched, within the trickling overflows of winterbournes they jumped over, down at the tide margin, existed, just as in the forest, a stirring and stretching of life, a seething of spring.
When Astrid and Sigurd were almost sheltered by an uprooted tree on one of these lower billows of beach they noticed that the clouds had lifted over the sea, though the sky was not blue but still that intense silver, so that they could see right across the Gulf and make out, or thought they could, the line of some Gulf Islands. A lone freighter with upraised derricks shipped seas on the horizon. A hint of the summit of Mount Hood remained, or it might have been clouds. They remarked too, in the southeast, on the sloping base of a hill, a triangle of storm-washed green, as if cut out of the overhanging murk there, in which were four pines, five telegraph posts, and a clearing resembling a cemetery. Behind them the icy mountains of Canada hid their savage peaks and snowfalls under still more savage clouds. And they saw that the sea was gray with whitecaps and currents charging offshore and spray blowing backwards from the rocks.
But when the full force of the wind caught them, looking from the shore, it was like gazing into chaos. The wind blew away their thoughts, their voices, almost their very senses, as they walked, crunching the shells, laughing and stumbling. Nor could they tell whether it was spume or rain that smote and stung their faces, whether spindrift from the sea or rain from which the sea was born, as now finally they were forced to a halt, standing there arm in arm.... And it was to this shore, through that chaos, by those currents, that their little boat with its innocent message had been brought out of the past finally to safety and a home.
But ah, the storms they had come through!
1 “The Bravest Boat”: In a letter to Albert Erskine (October 1952), an editor at Reynal and Hitchcock, Lowry explained that “The Bravest Boat” is “based on a true story, occurring here 2½ years since, though it was my idea to have the couple meet, married, & of different religions. The story received no publicity, & was no more than a ‘filler’ of two paragraphs, turned in by a rewrite man on the Vancouver Sun” (SC 2.606). Sherrill Grace observes that in a letter to Harold Matson (29 August 1952), Lowry’s literary agent, Margerie Lowry also noted that “The Bravest Boat” was based on a newspaper item about a model boat that travelled from Vancouver Island to Vancouver over twelve years (SC 2.607).
2 Mount Hood: A volcano in northern Oregon. Part of the Cascade Range.
3 “mountains ... advancing”: See notes to p. 294.
4 “the park of the seaport”: Stanley Park in Vancouver, in which are found the Seven Sisters and Lost Lagoon, and from which the Lions Gate Bridge links Vancouver to North Vancouver, including Dollarton, the model for Eridanus.
5 “the tragic Seven Sisters”: Lowry wrote a letter to the Vancouver Sun, in response to an article of 3 April 1951, about “our six great Douglas firs and the one cedar, seven hundred years old, that have been so long the guardians of Stanley Park, but are now all dead and must come down.” In the letter he linked the trees to the Pleiades: “In mythology the Pleiades were, as of course you know ... the seven daughters of Atlas & Pleione: Electra, Maya, Alcyme, Merope, Sterope, Taygeta, & Celano were the names of the sisters. As stars six can be seen with the naked eye, but there used to be an almost universal legend there were seven stars you could see in the group, & that one has been lost. Hence the seven sisters & the myth of the Lost Pleiad. The one cedar in the seven firs might correspond to the Lost Pleiad” (SC 2.367).
6 Gaspool: Presumably a variation on “Gastown,” the settlement on Burrard Inlet that was incorporated as the City of Vancouver in 1886; it was named for John Deighton, a gold prospector known as “Gassy Jack.” Lowry’s “Gaspool” also suggests “cesspool,” accurately reflecting his poor opinion of Vancouver.
7 Your weight and your destiny: In Lowry’s October Ferry to Gabriola, the protagonist, Ethan Llewelyn, encounters, at a bus station in Nanaimo, a “weighing machine” that promises to tell “Your weight and your destiny”; he refers to these machines as “Slut machines.”
8 Lost Lagoon: An artificial lake in Stanley Park, created in 1916. Prior to 1916 it was a true lagoon, part of Coal Harbour. The name “Lost Lagoon” derives from Pauline Johnson’s poem of the same name, first published in 1910. Johnson, known as the “Mohawk Princess,” was a wildly popular Canadian poet, famous especially for her dramatic readings.
9 “a suspension bridge”: The First Narrows, or Lions Gate, Bridge opened in 1938, spanning Burrard Inlet and connecting Vancouver to the North Shore, where Dollarton/Eridanus is located.
10 Enochvilleport: Lowry’s name for Vancouver. In a letter to the editor Robert Giroux (c. 15 January 1952), Lowry wrote that he and Margerie “have an admirable apartment in the old English part of ‘Enochvilleport,’ hard by the park and the scene of the Bravest Boat” (SC 2.493). In a letter to Clarisse Francillon, his French translator (November 1952), he expressed some concern, in reference to “The Bravest Boat,” that “the insult to Vancouver—or Enochvilleport—could be construed by certain people as a kind of insult to Canada itself—which everywhere advertises itself as being proud of its vast industrial advance, as no doubt it is & even has cause to be” (SC 2.613). Lowry further noted that “To a certain kind of immigrant of course Canada is heaven. But to a certain kind of artist it can be hell too. And this unprecedentedly great industrial advance ... [that] British Columbia particularly is so proud of also threatens much of the old way of life & its simpler cleaner values. From this aspect the story is almost completely reactionary, & as it were conservationary. I hate to see trees cut down, & pulp mills go up in their place, no matter how inevitable the latter.” In view of Lowry’s admitted conservationist impulse, the name “Enochvilleport” may allude, if obliquely, to the early nineteenth-century English industrialist Enoch Taylor, whose name was given to the iron hammers used by the Luddites to destroy textile machines: “Enoch made them, Enoch shall destroy them” was a Luddite slogan. The name also suggests the biblical Enoch, who was the son of Gain (Gen. 4:17).
11 “ever really been in hell”: Lowry wrote an untitled sonnet (1937) that begins “You were in hell fire? had been all your life? / And thought that nothing had been forged there?” Although the sardonic tone of this section of “The Bravest Boat” differs from the self-castigating tone of the poem, the two texts demonstrate a shared fascination with the descent into the underworld—and appear to consider such a descent a very real possibility.
12 “permanent threat of eviction”: One of the recurring, choral phrases in Hear Us O Lord. In a letter to Clarisse Francillon (c. November 1952), Lowry describes the material circumstances of the time during which he wrote “The Bravest Boat”: “Margerie was ill, & ourselves bitterly poor, when wrote the story, at the same time were being threatened by eviction” (SC 2.613). As the Hear Us O Lord stories make clear, the residents of the Dollarton foreshore—including Lowry and his neighbours—were continually faced with public opposition and commercial and industrial development.
13 “trying a sixteen-year-old boy for murder”: In a letter (31 October 1951) to David Markson, an early scholar of Under the Volcano who became a friend of the author, and a novelist in his own right, Lowry writes that he has “been preparing a public objection to a local injustice where a 16 year old boy was sentenced to hang ... for a rape he had not committed. Fortunately they reprieved the poor fellow ... but neither the ritual pardon nor the near ritual murder on the part of our barbarous public, who has now sentenced him to life imprisonment, is something you would leave alone, if you had studied the evidence, the feeble & neurotic protests, the bloodthirsty cries for revenge, & you were the only writer in the community” (SC 2.443). The boy was Francis Sykes, accused in June 1951. However, Sherrill Grace observes in her note to Lowry’s letter that she has found no record of the “public objection” (SC 2.444).
14 “It was a day just like this ... : A similar conversation takes place in October Ferry to Gabriola between Ethan Llewelyn and his wife, Jacqueline. It leads to a scene of reverie: “The cloudy October night with the inlet dark and Styx-like. And the mountains and mountain shadows immense in the gloom. And themselves on the beach, not one light in the fishermen’s cottages, but with such a sense of from the dark night withdrawn, and of love within the cabin and of being a little family happy in one another.” This passage emphasizes the Styx-Eridanus association that Lowry invokes several times in Hear Us O Lord. “[L]ove within the cabin” corresponds to “love in a cottage,” a recurring phrase in “The Forest Path to the Spring.”
15 Astrid: The name, from the Old Norse, means “beautiful goddess” and is not etymologically connected to “astral” or related Latinate words. But Lowry, given his fascination with astronomy, might well have intended the name to suggest “star,” as Sherrill Grace remarks (Voyage 104). In addition, Lowry might have had in mind the lovers in Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), whose names mean “star” (Stella) and “star-lover” (Astrophel, from “aster” and “phil-”).
16 Sigurd Storlesen: Sherrill Grace explains that the name means “uproarious laughter” (Voyage 103). More generally the name is indicative of Lowry’s fascination with Scandinavian culture, which is evinced as well by the name Sigbjørn Wilderness, a recurring character in Hear Us O Lord.
17 Ursus horribilis: Ursus arctos horribilis is the scientific name for the grizzly bear.
18 Wendigo: A cannibalistic creature in Algonquian mythology. Richard K. Cross makes a useful association between the Wendigo and Lowry’s obsession with Herman Melville: “Melville read in [Nathaniel] Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘Earth’s Holocaust’ a lesson that changed the course of his art. Moby-Dick differs from the South Sea romances that precede it in recognizing that the human heart itself engenders the corruption of Eden. One need not suppose that Lowry derived this insight from Melville in order to perceive the close kinship between his lions [see “The Forest Path to the Spring”] and the white whale, for the significance of the beasts may be understood only if we look into the somber depths of the men who confront them. In their souls we discover a ‘ferocious destructive ignorance’ that is the exact counterpart of ‘the avenging, man-hating spirit of the wilderness’ (see p. 311) known to the Indians of British Columbia as the ‘Wendigo.’ The characteristic means by which this dreadful force expresses itself are the forest fire and suicide” (“Columbian Eden” 27–28).
19 “Frère Jacques! Frère Jacques!”: Lowry uses the words to the song “Frère Jacques” to describe the sound of ships’ engines throughout Hear Us O Lord, and in other works as well—for example, in the screenplay for Tender Is the Night, which is in parts identical to or highly similar to “Through the Panama.” In “A Note on Romantic Allusions in Hear Us O Lord,” W.H. New refers to the song in a fascinating speculation about an intertextual link between Hear Us O Lord and Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a picture of Peele Castle, in a storm, painted by Sir George Beaumont” (1805): “The poem was written to commemorate [Wordsworth’s] brother John, who was drowned in a storm on February 5th, 1805; the Peele Castle of the poet is on an island off the Lancashire coast. The immediate textual connection between this poem and Lowry’s book might at first seem forced, were it not for Lowry’s recurrent use of puns and double meanings ... Given this technique, and given also the allusions to storm and drownings that occur in both the poem and the book, it seems not unacceptable to seek significance in the recurrent canon round fragments in the stories (‘Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?,’ which most English versions render loosely as ‘Brother John’) and in the title Lowry chose (at least as early as 1951) for the book as a whole. ‘Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place’ is a Manx fishermen’s hymn, invoking God’s aid to ‘little barks’ on a ‘raging’ sea; the tune to which it is sung is called ‘Peel Castle.’ Though that particular reference is to a Manx castle, the name and the storm associations are likely to have caused Lowry to make an implicit Wordsworthian connection” (citation p. 132).
20 “Tatoosh ... Puget Sound”: Tatoosh is an island off Cape Flattery, at the extreme northwest of the state of Washington. The Juan de Fuca Strait is the channel between southern Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, and the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. The Gulf Islands lie in the Strait of Georgia, between mainland British Columbia and Vancouver Island. Gabriola Island, which figures prominently (yet elusively) in Lowry’s October Ferry to Gabriola, is one of the Gulf Islands. Puget Sound extends from the Juan de Fuca Strait south to Olympia, Washington.