From Sea to Shining Sea (145 page)

“Cap’n, sir, is that a ship?” someone yelled.

Something dark and tall stood offshore ahead, looming through the mist.
Oh, Lord above, let it be a ship!
William prayed, suddenly longing so keenly for a dry berth, dry clothes, order, furniture, oaken walls, biscuits, salt, coffee, brandy—
brandy!
—that he did not care whether it was a British ship or French, Portagee or Chinee; it had been so long since he and his fine hardy fellows had been under roof and on wooden floors that for a moment now the thought of setting foot on a ship was as important as setting foot on the edge of the long-sought Pacific Ocean. “Pull, pull, boys!” he shouted at the paddlers.

It was a rock, not a ship. It was a pillar of dark stone fifty feet high and twenty thick, streaked with sea-fowl droppings, standing half a mile off the rocky shore. Eh, well, he thought, luxury later. First then let’s us find that ocean.

He could hear something now, or thought he could, under the plashing of the waves against the prow: a deep, regular rush on the air, like the breathing of some immense leviathan beyond the haze.

“Listen! Y’ hear it? That’s the sound of the ocean, I’ll swear it! We’ll see the ocean now or tomorrow, I swear we will!” They found a shelf of boulder-strewn land under a high cliff, a niche where a spring poured down, just opposite the ship-shaped rock. By moving some wet-glistening stones, they were able to make enough space above the high-tide mark to pull the five dugouts up and secure them, and lay down their sleeping mats on the stones. There was no wood for a fire.

They huddled in the rain under the glossy dark cliff face and watched the water swirl and seethe just below their feet, in a hissing, howling world the colors of slate, putty and coal, with the stark pillar of rock fading in the fog, watching huge floating trees rise and fall on the swells, visited only by ghostly gulls hanging in the wind with their catlike calls. But William stood facing the west, and whenever someone would come by him he would say, “I swear sometimes I can see the rollers out yonder.”

“I can’t,” Lewis said, “and you can’t either. You’re just wanting to, as I am.”

But the men were convinced that they could see it too, or sense it, the great, salty expanse out there, and there was no doubt that they were hearing it, and they were happy, very happy, despite their misery.

And William wrote in his notebook that evening, hunching over to keep the rain from washing away the ink:

But morning showed that he had supposed wrongly. They could see farther to the westward now, and could discern more spits and headlands beyond the surging waters. They were still in the estuary of the Columbia. So they launched the canoes again at nine o’clock and paddled westward through the rain, which continued off and on throughout the day. Evening found them searching for a landing place on another rocky point, most of the men seasick from the rising and falling and rolling of the canoes, everybody wet to the skin and disagreeable. And they still were not on the Pacific.

The wind had increased all day, and the waves were so high now that there was desperate danger of being dashed against the steep cliffs. At last they found an indentation in the cliffs, a small, rocky shelf where high tides had thrown perhaps a hundred huge drift logs—gigantic wet gray trees, bigger than any trees anyone had seen before. In a pelting rain and howling wind they made a perilous landing, unloaded the tossing canoes, and drew them up onto the shelf amid the tangle of driftwood.

It was a wretched place for a camp. Their backs were against a stone cliff too steep to climb, and there was not enough level ground clear of the tide to lie on or place the baggage. There was no source of fresh water. The men had to find places to sit or lie down on and among the pile of logs, and there was not enough small wood or dry wood to fabricate shelters or make a satisfactory fire. “This is no camp,” moaned Pryor, “it ain’t hardly a seagull perch!” But there was nothing to be done about it. The waves now were pounding against the rocks, bursting into gray foam, so powerfully that it was impossible to escape from this rugged niche.

“Pray we don’t have to stay here long,” William shouted to Lewis over the roaring of the waves as the last gray light faded. “It was a flood tide put these logs here where we sit, and I don’t relish being here when the tide’s in next!”

But it seemed they had no choice. A winter storm was building on the coast they had come so far to reach, and they could neither go on to the coast nor retreat inland. The immediate
question was in fact whether they could hang onto this seagull perch.

T
HE NEXT MORNING THE CANOES WERE FOUND ENTANGLED
among the drift logs and filled with water by the last high tide, and they groaned and rubbed against the logs, the strain threatening to crush or split them. The men worked much of the morning in water to their shoulders, prying and moving them to keep them safe until the tide receded. That was only the start of the day. William wrote in the damp pages of his battered journal:

White light. A crash like cannon.

Heart thumping, William started out of his stupor. The spray from the pounding waves was still soaking his blanket; the wind was howling louder than ever; the huge logs were still grinding and groaning. Lightning illuminated the swollen water and the whitecaps offshore, then another thunderclap rolled over the water and was swallowed by the pulse of the surf. Something hard was clattering against the cliff above him and the log on which he lay:
Hailstones! Damnation! What next?

He could hear men’s voices in the thundering darkness. He pulled his watch from his pocket and waited for another lightning flash.
Three in the morning.
He put the watch away and shielded his face with his arm to fend off the hailstones and waited for another lightning bolt to show him how the boats
were. They were still there; the boat watch sat precariously on a gigantic root bole, blanket over his head, watching them, hailstones beating on him. William wanted to get up and do something,
something
, but in this blackness it was dangerous for anyone to move. Another flash of lightning showed the men stirring, shifting their wrapped bodies on their hard beds of log and boulder. William knew they were all as wet and shivery-cold as he was. Sleep was impossible now. There was nothing to do but hang on till daylight and look the situation over by lightning flash.

At six o’clock, the hail was still pounding. He thought he could hear little Pompey crying, a shrill wisp of human voice in the shrieking, booming, hissing, rumbling tumult. Outside his blanket now the darkness was graying; all was motion: a gray, marching, swelling turbulence, the waves higher than ever. A violent shudder shook him and left him feeling hollow, soulless, and he admitted to himself for the first time that he and these people of his were utterly, irrevocably at the mercy of the elements now, in deadly danger, and that for once there was not a thing that he or Meriwether Lewis could do to lessen that danger.

I reckon they’re all praying now
, he thought.
Lord in Heaven, we’ve come four thousand mile in peace to look at that ocean and to add to the knowledge and prosperity of men. We’ve not hurt a one of thy native children, and we’ve kept the best of brotherhood amongst ourselves. There’s no set of souls I’ve ever seen that’s better than these. Now, if in thy Divine wrath some souls has got to be destroyed, let them be some crew o’ heathen sea-pirates out of Algier, or, or those treacherous Teton Sioux back at Bad River, or … or … If nothing else, the Spaniard king and all his blaggard ministers. But not these of ours—as fine a people as ever did walk in thy garden. And not my particular friend Lewis! Not such a rare head and heart as his! Nor Janey. Oh, she’s a heathen, I know, but no gentler or braver a woman have I ever seen!

Spare us, O Lord, and I’ll serve you well all the days of my life. My man York I’ll make free, as any brave man ought to be. And that little innocent boy Pomp. Lord, I’ll take him back and raise him an educated Christian so’s his life won’t be wasted. Heavenly Father, we have walked through thy great garden peaceable and sober—generally—with proper respect and wonder. We’ve writ a million words to tell all men of your wonders we’ve seen. Deliver us safe Lord and this wilderness will flourish under
the care of an industrious Christian people. I swear it, Our Father. You have my word on it as a Clark!

T
HE SKY LIGHTENED, THE HAIL STOPPED, AND THE CAPTAINS
could make their way amid the drift to look after all their people, who were wretched and soaked and hungry and fatigued, but all still alive and safe. Then from the southwest a huge, low, black cloud came running, bringing darkness and sheets of rain. The rain fell and blew in blinding sheets all morning, and the southwesterly wind coming straight up the estuary from the sea piled the waves higher and higher. These gray hills of water roared onto the shelf and over the bobbing canoes, burst foam-white against the rocks and among the drift logs, sending spray twenty feet high, driving everyone into a huddle against the very base of the cliff, where they set their jaw muscles and hung onto each other and their baggage and watched the giant logs shudder and lurch on the force of the surf, and waited.

They waited until about noon, when the tide was out. “Now,” Lewis shouted, “we’ve got to get off this point and into the lee somewhere! Colter, make your way along there and see if there’s a cove of some kind! Rest of you, come with me!”

He led them over the logs and down to the boats. They lifted large rocks into the canoes to sink them, to stop the lurching and bobbing that threatened to break them into splinters. Colter returned in fifteen minutes; he had found a small brook-mouth, a quarter of a mile back, choked with brush and driftwood and no bigger than their present niche, but at least out of the direct road of the wind and waves.

Now they all took up their sodden, rotting bedding, some tools, and their last bag of molding fish, and, taking advantage of the low tide, waded around the base of the cliff to the new camp.

Late that day Privates Bratton, Gibson, and Willard volunteered to take the Indian canoe and try to go around the point and look for a safe harbor. But the waves tossed them so violently that they could not make any headway, and they put in at the cove, panting and puking and glad to be alive.

That evening William forced his way through briars and brush a few yards up the brook, where he speared three salmon trout.

It was the first fresh food in five days.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, W
ILLIAM CLIMBED THE STEEP RAVINE
along the tumbling brook, climbing three miles through dense thickets of pine and thorn bushes, often pulling himself up by
his hands. He reached the top of the spur of the mountain fatigued, bleeding from thorn-scratches, and stood on the ridge in the rain trying to make out the ocean or a safe harbor. But he could see only the treetops below him, and curtains of rain beyond them, and clouds. Even through the hush of rain and whiff of wet wind in his ears, he could hear the measured thunder of the waves on the cliffs below.

By the time he had returned to the camp, both sleeves of his rotted elkhide hunting shirt had fallen off through his exertions, and the back had split from collar to waist.