The Land Remembers

FROM THE BEGINNING Americans have been a bit ill at ease with the out-on-a-limb experiment in self-reliance. Restlessly searching but separated, often with no one to talk to and little to read, they spent much of their time after securing survival trying to take stock of what the hell they were doing with all their rimwalking and trailblazing. Thrown to their own devices, turned in on themselves, lacking any real literary tradition of their own, early Americans typically wrote diaries, journals of life as transit and exploration.

One of these diarists was James Gilchrist Swan, one of the first whites to spend a lifetime on Puget Sound. Jettisoning a young family and comfortable life in Boston, Swan followed the feverish impulse to scrap it all and go west. From 1858 until his death in 1900 he inhabited the Olympic Peninsula, beaching his canoe in Neah Bay or Port Townsend most of the time, trekking about as loiterer, notary public, drunk, author, woodcarver, schoolteacher, friend and student of Makah Indians, explorer, correspondent and collector for the Smithsonian, sketcher, hokumist, unsuccessful lover, misfit entrepreneur, and most of all, perpetual journal-scribbler. Whatever else he was, or wasn't, he unceasingly recorded the early Northwest. Winter Brothers is Seattleite Ivan Doig's memoir of his bloodbrotherhood with this remarkable pioneer via the millions of words he left behind.

Doig, like Swan, came west to Puget Sound. Raised on a rough succession of sheep and cattle ranches in Montana's high country and in those stark, one-street towns with a post office, filling-station, store, and three saloons, he felt drawn farther west--to Seattle with its more "workable," "soft-toned" winters, a better environment for a young journalist. After 20 years of magazine writing, Doig published his first book, This House of Sky, in 1978, composing it of memories of his early life in Montana with his father. He was surprised to find himself nominated for the National Book Award and acclaimed as a "powerful new American writer."

IN HIS NEW BOOK, an unusual linking of historical investigation and authorial reflection, Doig creatively re-imagines Swan's experiences by living his own life in close contact with the thousands of pages he is studying. In the process he moves to a new understanding of himself and what it means to be a westerner. For the 90 days of winter, 1978-79, Doig holed up with Swan's words in the most intimate of relationships, becoming his great admirer. As Doig writes of Swan's friendship with a young Makah chieftain, "Such a growth of regard sometimes will happen when two people are cupped together in a single happenchance season of closeness...a kind of adopted kinship, stronger than differences of blood can ever be."

Doig closely repeats Swan's travels, shares his observations, and wonders about the mind behind all those words, always patiently braiding their century-separated lives together until they become one. The book itself is another diary, a log that grows as Doig's embrace of his adopted kin from another century grows closer. Doig's thoughts, Swan's life, and the natural surroundings are organically fused into a new whole. This observation of the Hoh rainforest takes on deeper meanings as we read the book:

The fascination of the rainforest is that all flows into and out of all else; here I can sense how the Haidas, whom Swan went among in their own clouds of forest, could produce art in which creatures swim in and out of each other, the designs tumble, notch together, uncouple, compress, surge. The flow of growth out of growth, out of death...

As Doig and Swan come to occupy the same mental space, Doig's book takes on the same fertility and resonating complexity of the rainforest ecosystem.

It is a wintry sort of book. It belongs to the wet, inturned season when nights are long and there is plenty of time to let thoughts roam. Time seems suspended; thoughts float across a century back and forth, scenes and words fade in, become sharply realized, and then mist into Doig's own reflections. The foggy, drizzling winter is always beautifully present to induce a daydreamy readiness for time travel and introspection; it is Doig's favorite climate, and he knows one can't move too fast in our sluggish, droopy winter. A page-turner Winter Brothers is not; it needs plenty of time to unfurl.

Doig calls his writing a "cottage-industry" employment, and the result is what you would expect from a tireless home craftsman. Winter Brothers is well-conceived and well-crafted. Every piece is carefully set in its proper position, the seams lovingly shaved smooth, every link subtly interconnected to the larger piece. The wit is quiet, the words understated and nuanced, homely yet precise and evocative. Intrigued, you may soon want to stay up late with the retiring, lumberjack-shirted fellow thumbing through browned pages in his patient, archivist's enthusiasm, joining him and Swan as another "winter brother."

IT ALL WORKS because Doig manages to compress meaning into the details of the natural surroundings. Rooted in the soil, always sensitive to weather and view, Doig evokes the Northwest with such an intimate touch that we actually re-experience it. His words and thoughts are religiously down to earth. Nothing can be understood without knowing the land, hugging it, runnings one's fingers over it, as he does at the end when he locates a swan and the initials "JGS" which his "winter brother" had carved in the sandstone at Neah Bay. If he reads Swan's dairy about the place where the trail from Cape Alava to Lake Ozette crosses a stream he goes there and traces the exact footsteps, finding the exact place and evoking it in detail:

The little stream that dives under the boardwalk runs very loud, and sudsy from lapping across downed trees. Where the water can be seen from under its head of foam, it ripples dark brown, the color of strong ale.

And now the lake, obscure and moody.

When he speaks of "patches of fog snagged in the treetops above," or "the uninsistent Northwest rain simply hanging there in the air like molecules made visible," we know exactly what he means. He takes our impressionistic links to the land and turns them into printed words. Here he is capturing the bustling life of a bluejay:

A Stellar's will alight on the garden dirt, cock his head in disdain, scream twice, burst off into the hemlock and set the lower branches dancing almost before its blue sheen has blazed on my retina. What a vacancy a jay leaves in the air.

Though he says he's not a mystic, Doig affirms a haunting interconnection of our present lives with what has gone before, and with everything around us. Winter Brothers is an astonishing effort to make sense out of a region, both historical and geographical, even as it begins its modern development. One finds here a vibrant, keenly felt consideration of what it means to live in the Northwest--or anywhere, for that matter. Ivan Doig brings the sense of space and time to a wonderful new tingle.