The Cape

by RUSSELL JAMES

Sitting in a shitty hotel room on Clallam Bay, across the strait of Juan de Fuca from Canada, I could see the southern coast of Vancouver Island beyond the docks, where men anchor boats after a long day in search of Halibut and other big commercial fish. My day started unassumingly enough, with a drive north on 101 towards the northwestern coast of the Olympic Peninsula. After ten days of weary touring through the Southwest and along the West Coast, performing my songs to small audiences who could care less that I was there, I was tired and frayed, in desperate need of a shower and a break from the rigors of being a small-time singer-songwriter troubadour-ing his way through the West. It was pouring, and I was in serious need of a warm, dry bed and a space to stretch that was bigger than the Honda Element I lived in on the road.

I secured the room in Sekiu and decided to visit the tribal lands of the Makah. Perhaps I could see the coast from the west as well. As a fellow native, I was always interested in visiting the reservations of other tribes. My own people hailed from the tidewaters of Virginia, along a river that was affected by and emptied into the Atlantic. Here was a tribe who lived by the rules of a different ocean, and the water drew me in, as it always has.

The drive to Neah Bay was a few short miles through emerald enshrouded by fog. When I passed the totem poles that declare the entrance to Makah lands, I realized I wasn’t sure where to go—where to begin. I saw a sign for the Makah Tribal Museum, so I parked and walked inside. The museum on my people’s reservation was the heart of the rez for outsiders, and I’ve always figured the same of any other tribe. This museum was cozy with golden light shielding it from the curtain of rain outside. It felt like home.

Displays depicting the plight of the Makah read like the narrative of every North American tribe: white people came, natives died, white people took land, natives died, often horribly. White people forced treaty, tried their best to wipe out culture by forced assimilation of native peoples, who kind of went along, but eventually gave them a well-deserved middle finger. I saw ancient fishing nets and realized the people of this land were similar to my people, the Pamunkey, whose ancestral lands were on an opposite coast: different fish, different water, same people. Warriors, fighters, survivors, resistors.

My footsteps slapped the hardwood floor and echoed around the great bones of Orca and Humpback. The small building was silent and empty save for a woman at the counter who struck up a conversation with me as I purchased some gray Olivella shell earrings for my wife. The Makah Museum sits, along with the rest of the town, on Neah Bay. The woman told me that the small, waterlogged tribal community beyond the windows and doors of the museum had lost one of its youngest and brightest stars. A kid, only nineteen, died while diving for shellfish for food just a week ago. The community was already reeling from the suicide of a tourist a few weeks back, and then this happens. The village is small and close-knit. It consists of a gas station, a miniscule marina, the museum, and a handful of sea-battered houses. So much pain on the shoulders of such a small population.

The boy was a leader at the age of nineteen. “He had such a voice,” she said, and she played me his singing at a recent tribal dance. She was right. There was a power in his voice that seemed to come from the might of the sea itself. He was deeply rooted in his culture and spoke at other tribal councils about the need to preserve hunting and fishing traditions. He was attending university and studying biology and was known to walk into his classes still smelling of whatever dead, beached sea creature he had just been dissecting. “The professors told him he had to stop doing that,” she smiled.

She said he died out at Cape Flattery, at Hole in the Wall, a cove at the westernmost point of the contiguous United States. A wave came in and swept him out to sea. A trail led to the place, she told me, and it was important that I go there. “It’s a spiritual place, you will feel it, I know you will feel it.”

She directed me out of the village, which now looked tired with grief, soaked to the bone, and looking for simple rest. It was raining steadily as I took the sharp curve that put me on the Cape road. I first climbed, then descended the winding two-lane that follows the Sekiu River. Great white beech trees tunneled the road, and jade-green clubmoss clung to bare, skeletal branches that still awaited the spring awakening. Farther back I saw the ever-present Douglas firs towering in the wet hills. The road began to climb again towards the trailhead; the rain continued to fall.

At the trailhead I saw few cars, which wasn’t a surprise on a Monday like this at the end of the country. This really was the end of the road, I thought to myself, as I struggled to pull my rain pants on while sitting in the driver’s seat. Snug in my rain gear I began the descent, which was steep, wet, and shimmering a glorious green. I could feel something stirring in this place. The trail was muddy, and soon my shoes were covered, and I was thankful for choosing the waterproof sneakers for this trip. The rain beat staccato against my plastic jacket and I walked with the syncopation. Every ten hits or so I would get bombed by a fat drop falling from one of the trees rather than the sky. It was fun to anticipate them when I walked under the canopy.

After about half a mile, the trail leveled off and a boardwalk came into view. As I approached I saw that it sat about three to four feet above the ground cover—a litter of giant ferns, tangled roots, and various flotsam that had collected over years of heavy storms. I followed the boardwalk. Below me, I could see huge, yellow lilies bursting from the forest floor. Everything was covered in clubmoss and the earth smelled rich with life. Eventually I began to hear the roar of waves crashing against the rocky Washington coast mingling with the tap-tap-tap of rain on my jacket’s hood. The boardwalk gave way to more duff. I reached a clearing in the rocks, the haze parted, and I saw it. Cape Flattery.

“I didn’t know,” I whispered to the sky, the rain, the trees, anything around me. I didn’t know something could look this beautiful. This powerful, yet fragile. I walked to the clearing and the carved coast came closer into view.

The turbulent northern Pacific waters raged on to the west, smashing against two green islands about an eighth of a mile off the coast. The water flowed into a deep gouge in the coastline: the Hole in the Wall. Blue-green waves moved in and out of the cove, like deep breaths: in-out, in-out. The water towards the center of the inlet was a deep navy, sighing up and down like the belly of Earth softly sleeping. It could wake up in a fury with no notice, filling the hole and carving farther into the rocks. This is where it happened, where the sea took him, I thought. I listened.

I walked toward land’s end. My steps felt light on the spongy earth. I had the vague sensation that I was hovering rather than walking. I saw the trail lead first down, then up towards the final lookout. Trees towered above me, rain poured down, and the wind pounding the Strait of Juan de Fuca began to pick up. I felt the spirit of the Cape flowing from the ocean, the rocks, the ground, the trees. The great song of the North Pacific rang through the sea caves that littered the northern side of the Cape. The terminus of the trail was another boardwalk, opening onto a great, wooden platform overlooking the angry sea below. I went to the very end. Tatoosh Island floated about a mile off into the sea, a green stalwart against the pounding surf, with a small, white lighthouse adorning the highest point. I looked again towards the Hole. I thought of the young man who went diving there.

It was a violent-looking place. Only the stoutest heart would be able to navigate those waters, and he and his people have been doing it for millennia. They fought back the Spanish who raped tribal women and tried to steal their lands. They fought for the right to hunt and fish as they have done for centuries when the US forced them to sign treaties. They retained their culture even when Americanization did its best to take it from them. Their spirit lingers here in this place, tugging their people to continue the old ways. I dreamed a young man with power in his voice, muscles honed and trained to dive into the roil and emerge with food for his family. I dreamed him smiling, conversing with invisible but tangibly present ancestors as he rests upon the rocks, a net bag full of the tarnished, green shells of abalone. I sat in the rain and let it pass through me. I let the water clean my heart and mind. I smelled the salt in the air, mixed with the deep, rich loam.

Then, strangely, I felt the spirits of Powhatan, and his brother, Opechancanough, his daughter Matoaka, and all my ancestors. I heard the gill nets slap the water of another ocean over three thousand miles away, the slight swishing as they are gathered in and Shad harvested. I heard the screams of mothers, husbands, children, fathers, sisters, brothers. A musket cracked the silence of the forest on both sides of a continent and another one of my people fell. The Pamunkey, the Makah at the other end of the land. Here, on this wet and remote chock of coast, I felt that we are the same. We are a people forgotten, stolen from, beaten, raped, and killed. And we have survived.

I perched myself on various dangerous ledges to watch the sea, and after a long time I began to make my way back up through the forest on the steep trail. My body felt hot under my rubbery rain gear, and the trail kept climbing. My feet slipped on the muddy slopes, slick as ice. While each step took effort, I felt as if I were gliding up. My heart felt peace, even as it beat ever harder within my chest. When I finally reached my car I stripped down to my tank in the pouring rain and let it wash the sweat off. I breathed in the spirit of that place, something so old yet so fresh.

I got in my car and drove towards the village. The Strait of Juan de Fuca, a memorial to the Spanish that tried and failed to take this land from the Makah, loomed gray on the horizon. I passed a few people on the streets, and I could see that their faces wore the same badge of grief that the woman at the museum did. May you feel peace, I chanted as I made my way past the totem poles. Quiet reverberations echoed through me, like the Pacific swells crashing into the caves at Cape Flattery. I imagined the face of the young man, somehow both serious and smiling, stern and joyful, bobbing in water before it took him to sea. His face, glowing from the divinity of this place. A place far away from my own lands, removed by both time and distance, where my ancestors and I could still find each other and speak.