Authors: Jan Morris
The Pacific north-west is in a period of change. Vast engineering projects are altering the character of its economy. The Grand Coulee Dam, with its associated works, is providing great quantities of electric power and is irrigating thousands of square miles of unproductive land. The lumber industry, too, is feeling the impact of scientific progress. I was lunching one day in Seattle with a well-known lumberman, talking not of this and that (for such is not the custom with American businessmen) but specifically about the future of the forest industries. Suddenly he reached for the briefcase that lay beside him, and sweeping a few knives and mustard-pots heedlessly on to the floor he emptied upon the table an ill-assorted collection of objects. There were small pots of various fluids; a bottle of sugar; some molasses; a cake of wax; a square piece of brown textile; a little box boldly labelled “Rabbit Food”; several pieces of cardboard; and some plastic ashtrays. “D’you know what they have in common?” said he. “They’re all made of wood!”
For years the lumber people have tried to make good use of all the waste materials of wood—bark and shavings, in particular—and in Europe progress was hastened by the need for synthetics during the war. Now the Americans are catching up, and the bigger firms are spending large sums of money on research; the huge metal incinerators in which they burn their waste have become marks of shame. “Mark my words,” said my friend at Seattle, who turned out to be an enthusiast on the subject, “before many years are out the waste product will be more important than the wood.” Certainly, despite the obvious fact that wood is no longer used for many of its traditional purposes, the lumber men show no sign of despondency about the future. By the nature of their calling, they think in terms of generations. In the early days, one generation of tree was all they could envisage. Now the tree farms are
organized with a view to logging trees in fifty or 100 years’ time. Whereas in the old days most of the wood cut was of great age, soon it will be rare to buy lumber more than a century old; and eventually to buy wood not especially grown for lumbering will be as unusual as to buy a chicken not reared for domestic purposes. Progress is affecting the forests as it affects the very nature of the Pacific Coast, once so rugged and untamed, now contentedly sinking, almost everywhere, into genial commercialism. Sometimes there are setbacks, though. Tractors have not proved altogether suitable for hauling felled logs out of the wood, for their tracks cause much damage to young trees and shrubbery. Thus, though the Redwood bark is turned into ashtrays, and the forest firefighters jump to their targets by parachute, and the great machines whine through the day at the sawmills, we may yet see teams of horses in the woods again, and hear the forgotten cries of their drivers.
And whatever changes occur, the fight continues between the lovers of trees and the lovers of lumber. However enlightened and cautious the lumbermen, there will always be men and societies to oppose the felling of trees, and there will always be woodsmen to give them characteristic answers. I remember a forester in California discussing, with a gentle degree of asperity, the attitude of some local organization which loved the woods a little too well, and which particularly objected to the damage caused by the removal of felled logs. “Now I put it to you,” he said, pointing to a colossal cross-section of a Redwood tree, as big as a room, cut with enormous labour and soon to be laboriously transported out of the forests to the mills. “I put it to you as a fair and impartial observer, how can you get a thing like that out of here without disturbing a few of the ferns?”
A
t the northern end of this timber country the land and the sea become inextricably mixed, and the map is a mass of small blue streaks, patches and fingers, where the inlets and lagoons of the Pacific eat their way into Washington State. The stalwart capital of this region is Seattle, standing on the edge of Puget Sound, and to grasp the watery affinities of the place you can best approach it by ferry-boat, across the sound from Bremerton.
Some of the ferries are very grand, for they play an important part in the life of Puget Sound. It is difficult to drive about this district, for the roads are constantly being intercepted by protrusions of the sea; so here
the ferry-boats, whose steam-whistles elsewhere all too often have a dying ring, are still in their heyday. Some of them are streamlined and look like electric irons; some are double-deckers; a few are ferries of the old school, with black upright funnels and much clanking of metal parts. On to one of these craft we once loaded our car at Bremerton (a naval base, with the grey masts of warships standing above its rooftops) and it took us tortuously through various cool winding waterways into the sound and across to Seattle.
This big city has few beauties of structure, but its position on the water’s edge is splendid. As the ferry creeps around the corner of an outlying island the city edges into view: a cluster of skyscrapers, in the universal American manner, like mother buildings surrounded by their broods; and a long row of warehouses and cranes; a ship steaming out for Japan, Alaska or Honolulu; a few tall radio masts; the endless busy comings and goings of the waterfront, tugs and ferries and big diesel trucks; the puff of smoke from a train, the distant hooting of a whistle; and above and behind it, beyond wooded ridges, the graceful snow peak of Mount Rainier, Seattle’s Fujiyama. Of all the great cities of the United States, only San Francisco has a natural setting to compare with this.
But if from the sea, in the half-light of evening, it has a certain delicacy of manner, Seattle is by no means a lady-like city. It still has a trace of the elemental brutality of the Klondyke days, when the gold-diggers in their hopeful thousands sailed from here to Alaska. Its people are bold and bluff, and its police are probably as rough-and-ready as any in America. I stopped my car for a moment outside a hotel in the city in order to ask for a room; but when I returned to collect my bags, without even pausing to register, some passing constable had seen it there, and had interrupted his lawful progress to fine me five dollars for unlawful parking; terrible indeed are the penalties of Seattle, and inexorable its enforcement of the law (only the very agile visitor, calming his conscience, can skip on into the next State without paying his fines). The push, rush and bustle of Seattle is at once daunting and invigorating; its waterfront is less colourful and exotic than it used to be, but the city is still the
de
facto
capital of Alaska, and many are the ships that sail north to Anchorage. It is only suitable that nowadays Seattle, a brawny place, should build bombers and jet airliners: on the road to the east you pass the plant, one of the biggest in the world, and may see some of its latest products standing there gleaming and pompous, rather like the Cranbury fire-engines.
Seattle is so particularly brash and booming that it is difficult to
realize, as you stand in its deafening main streets, that it is the centre of a region of idyllic peace and enchantment. Along the neighbouring Pacific shore, peopled by fishermen, oystermen, lumberjacks and Indians, is a sea-area enshrouded in mists and mystery, like some Norse coastline of antiquity. I drove out one day to the very tip of this shore, to the extreme north-western point of the United States. The road runs along the edge of the Olympic Peninsula, an area deliberately preserved as wilderness, with lofty and inaccessible mountains and impenetrable stands of timber. This was the last part of the United States to be properly explored, and there are a few romantics who claim that some of it is unknown country still. Certainly as you drive along its fringes on a day of fog and drizzle it still has a magnetic and secretive quality about it, like the Himalayan foothills in the monsoon.
On one side, then, is this rugged mountain region; on the other, the Strait of Juan de Fuca. (This was named for a lie, for the Greek seaman de Fuca never did succeed, I need hardly say, in forcing his alleged passage down the strait, across the continent, and into the Atlantic.) Almost within sight is the city of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, the most doggedly British city in Canada, where ladies in floral silk and restrained hats sip their afternoon tea beneath portraits of the English military or nobility, or guard their treasures from Kashmir and Khartoum, or open their air-mail edition of
The
Times
in scrupulously chronological order—Canadian citizens, most of them, but
plus
royalistes
que
le
roi.
On the American shore of the Strait the coastline is dotted with lumber mills, surrounded by their huge contributory rafts of logs, tucked away in secluded coves below the level of the road, beside the streams that flow out of the mountains. Beside one of these mills (when I drove past) two dignified steam engines stood back to back, snorting a little, encrusted with brass ornamentation, while their elderly crews sprawled on benches inside a nearby shed, drinking fizzy lemonade out of bottles. Sometimes, out in the Strait, you may see the small black outline of a tug, straining through a choppy sea with its long line of logs; and sometimes from an unsuspected lane a battered car emerges from the woods with a complement of gay lumber-jacks in loud shirts. There are still lumber-camps in these forests, drenched by the frequent rains; for there are few towns nearby, and nowhere convenient for families to live.
At the end of the peninsula, where the Strait meets the Pacific Ocean, stands the small fishing port of Neah Bay. In spirit it is directly related to Venice, Louisiana, that small sticky village where the Mississippi meets the sea; for both are extremities, where the traveller can go no
farther, and both have the character of the absolute. The road swings into Neah Bay around the edge of a pebbly beach, and you find yourself abruptly among its meagre rows of wooden houses. It is a damp place; its nature is impregnated with the rain, so that the roads seem muddy even when they are dry, and the trees on the surrounding hills smell wet and fresh, and the waters of the bay are constantly churned with rain drops. The attractively bleak and remote quality of the settlement is due to the fact that it forms part of the Makkah Indian reservation, and is thus relatively immune to the diseases of commerce. There is one inn, a good old wooden house overlooking the water, whose landlord runs fishing boats and whose landlady may have a box full of grey kittens in her kitchen. At the end of the jetty is the Fisherman’s Cooperative, partly a store, partly a market where the fishermen pool their catch for an agreed price. Out in the bay are the fishing boats, the
raison
d’être
of the place, row upon row of trim diesel craft, with intricate riggings and neat cabins, and a few hardy fishermen fiddling with ropes or greasing their engines in the rain. They sail far out to sea and up the Canadian coast in their search for salmon, red snapper and halibut; but their profits are not always dazzling (nor are there jobs, in these small boats, for such employees as the plutocrat skippers of Grimsby, who earn more in their early thirties than Admirals of the Fleet).
The Indians of these parts have never been among the indigent, for their country has always given them plenty to eat. In fact, of all the American Indians they have been the most consistently prosperous. They have always fished for salmon and shot their deer, elk and mountain goat among the Olympic Mountains. Even the climate has been kind to them, for though it is wet, it is also mild, and a century ago many of the men were able to wear the economical summer costume of nothing whatsoever. Some of the north-west Indians are extremely skilful with their boats. One tribe used to harpoon whales in the open sea, and may (who knows?) even have preceded the Basques as pioneers of the trade.
They are still prosperous, within reason, for their reservations include some splendid stands of timber. In the days of cut-throat lumbering these Indians were ruthlessly cheated of their rights; today they are generally treated fairly, and consequently live comfortably enough. They are a taciturn and rather surly people, plain of countenance and unimaginative of dress; but in the days of their eminence, when the trade of the western fur trade was making itself felt in the peninsula, they produced fine wood-carving and enjoyed a lively culture.
Some outsiders have joined them in their outpost. Many of the
fishermen are white Americans. I met one who was a schoolmaster for most of the year, and who came to Neah Bay in his vacations, to take his powerful diesel boat to sea, three or four nights at a time, and thus supplement his modest academic income. One sometimes sees servicemen in uniform sipping their slow coffees in the village. The Pacific Coast is powerfully defended against attack—Seattle is about equidistant from Pearl Harbour and New York, and these western centres are understandably bristling with missile bases and fighter stations. Out beyond Cape Flattery, constantly veiled by mist, buffeted by winds, and washed by grey seas, there lies a small island. Its buildings cling together among the seas, as if they were trying to keep each other warm, and it bristles with radio masts and installations. There are radar stations far to the north of this, in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic; but Tatoosh Island lies there like an outrider, all the same, with its eyes on the northern Pacific.
All this salt-spray activity occurs to the west of Seattle; and the port faces the sea, and feels close to Alaska, to Japan and the islands of the South Pacific. But not far to the east of the city (if you turn your back on the ocean) you will cross one of the great climatic barriers of America, and soon find yourself in spirit a million miles from Puget Sound, among the airy spaces of the Great Plains. It is a dramatic road to take. It runs out of Seattle staidly enough, leaving the sea behind, and passing through the endless dreary suburbs, all petrol stations and car dealers, that have settled like a blight upon the periphery of every American city. The country outside is the wettest in the United States, and the air is misty and moist. There is a genuinely English flavour to these fresh, fertile regions; the fields are green and lush, the produce abundant; at the State fair at Olympia you are likely to meet many shy lean folk with English names, looking very like countrymen attending some sleepy Cotswold market. One distinguished Englishman, indeed, finds this combination of worlds, this happy amalgam of English countryside and American living, so appealing that he has settled on a Washington farm, and, as he sits in his library among old prints, first editions and excellent brandy‚ hears the scream of the whistle outside as the diesel “streamliner” pounds north to Seattle.
But the Pacific north-western States are cut down the middle, almost symmetrically, by the line of the Cascade Mountains, which offer their splendid profiles to the observer from the Canadian border to the northern part of Nevada. It is not long before the traveller encounters this range, and at once the character of his journey alters. The road climbs steadily into the mountains, through forests of Douglas pine,
beside the great railway tunnel which pierces these highlands from one side to the other. Behind, the narrow green plain stretches away to the sea, enveloped in a warm and friendly haze, with an atmosphere of damp, and timber, fishing Indians, ships, gentle fields, homely farmers and oysters. But once over the crest of the Cascades, and you are in another America. It is miraculous. Here all is dry, hot and sunny; there are huge apple orchards, cornfields of theatrical gold, wide empty plains awaiting irrigation, dams, deserts and raw-boned horsemen. So significant are the Cascade Mountains that their presence makes two countries out of one. To the west of them, you are attuned to the call of the Pacific; to the east, you are entering the heartland of America; and as you drive across those great expanses of plain and farmland, you find yourself moving imperceptibly, through infinite gradations of mood and appearance, into the Middle West.