Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

Killing a whale the Makah way is a highly specialized undertaking, and I can’t imagine anyone doing it for kicks or as a show of bravado or even as an incautious stab at reviving culture. There are other ways to go about getting your daily bread, most of them drier and warmer.

At the Makah Museum there are a couple of bow and arrow sets but they’re really pathetic-looking and I thought, seeing those flimsy toys, man, it’s a pretty good bet these Makah didn’t eat a whole lot of bear meat. The arrows were hardly longer or stouter than hot dog sticks; the bows didn’t seem flexible or tensile enough to generate enough velocity to puncture hide, let alone find the heart of a bull elk from forty feet. But then you walked around and saw the whale and seal harpoons and the massive halibut hooks and the fishnet ingeniously fabricated from nettles — nettles! — and you realized that here was the sphere where these people really kicked ass.

Even in the long-gone Ozette olden days, five centuries ago, they had little baby harpoons for kids to play with, complete with mini-fingerholds, a kind of bridge or granny stick crotched for launching harpoons, so these little Makah boys would get the exact right feel of the weapon and begin to perfect their stroke from the moment they reared back and stuck their very first — I don’t know — tree stump. What little Willie Mayses developed their form and a sense of the world’s exact rightness playing with these sticks on the sandlot beaches of what’s now the Makah Nation? And the big-league harpoons their daddies used — what fantastic inventiveness it must have taken to figure out the logistical details of that first hunt, what holy-making number of Makah bones are buried and scattered beneath the sea around Cape Flattery, what lives were lost, what women cried, what children wondered, what brothers went silent, while these men worked out the kinks in their whale-killing prowess. Some amazing man, some Moses of the Makah, had to have had a vision powerful enough to lure and lead the others on. That magical moment alone should be saved from extinction. Think on it — you take the biggest body of water in the world, and it’s the edge of winter, it’s maybe lonely and horrifying and you’re melancholic in some affective-disordered way and all around you there’s an extra-heavy-duty cobalt rain battering down, and there at your feet on the beach you’ve got a pile of old bones and a couple of tree branches and somehow, looking at them, and looking out to sea, somebody comes up with the idea of sticking a thirty-ton whale? It stuns the mind, it blasts and levels the imagination.

Up to my knees in nature, I get mighty cold, naturally. I shiver in paroxysmal fits and feel what’s possibly the onset of hypothermic derangement, and so I head back to the tent, dry off, do ten jumping jacks, then ten more, pull on a pair of clammy jeans and a fleece jacket and a goofy crushed duck-cloth cap I favor in the fall, and start a fire. Twigs and bark and moss and a few credit card receipts to kindle the flame, larger sticks of driftwood propped tepee-style to keep it going. As I work and warm myself the sky lightens from one shade of unhopeful gray to another. I collected and chopped wood half the night, hoping to exhaust myself and hold bad thoughts at bay. It didn’t work. Poise and stability are not about never moving but rather about nimbly keeping step with the world as it pitches and rolls below your feet — one of several Hallmark-isms I try to live by.

When I go to feed the dog I find I’ve forgotten to bring her bowl; I pull off my cap and fill that with kibble. The waxed cotton holds water nearly as well as it repels it and she laps up a cool hatful after eating. I smack the hat against my thigh and set it back on my head. For entertainment and edification I’ve got Field Guide to North American Weather and Pascal’s Pensées , but right now I’m not in the mood to sit in the fog and read about fog, nor do I, feeling skeptical and doubt-ridden, much care to read what the brilliant transit planner has to say about skepticism and doubt. My mood? Fuck the whales! This too is nature — all of it, and maybe when I get back to Seattle I’ll place a personal in the Weekly , truthfully saying, like most do, that I’m into nature, the woods and long walks, red wine and fires and poetry, philosophizing and fucking, the dawn light and the starry night, and all the other inadequate and hugely depressing analogues for unique and heightened sensitivity.

The real tragedy in this state isn’t the healthy run of migratory whales that hug the coast in October/November but the passing of the salmon, the magnitude of which is equivalent in scale to the disappearance of sixty million buffalo from the plains in one short murderous span of the nineteenth century. Fewer and fewer people in the region have any memory of real, living salmon and seem satisfied with the bullshit touristy display of tossed fish at the market, and so nothing will ever actually be done and those coho and kings — kings! Tyees! — are gone and gone, it’s horrible to say, with a whimper. No single salmon is big enough to be a cause célèbre on its own, whereas one whale the size of a Winnebago is, and so people notice. And, noticing, they get all drippy about whales, remotely enlivened and stirred to abstract opinion, when, in fact, the loss of salmon should rouse them to enormous, cetacean-sized outrage, and doesn’t, since who cares where it comes from — salmon raised on farms! in frog ponds! — as long as filets and steaks of it are still served on plates around the city? Nary a salmon fighting to spawn in your local stream, but down the street there are plenty cooling on beds of ice behind the local grocer’s display case.

I had no luck getting any whale. I asked. I did. I made phone calls and inquired at the museum and stopped strangers on the street and said to my waitress at the diner, you don’t have any whale, do you? I even checked the freezer section of the grocery store. Along the way many, many Indians — men, women, and children; the old and the young; workers and loafers; thin, fat, tall, and short; braided and shaved — laughed right in my face. They weren’t unduly snickering or snide about it; generally the laughter was big, hearty, frank, and guffawish. They seemed to find in my question a new comical low point, even after months of talking to journalists.

No whale — so the meager larder I laid in for this trip includes a supply of Wellbutrin, Mylanta, ground coffee, a gallon of fresh water, a package of Hostess cupcakes, kibble for my dog Kala, and a fresh filet of salmon off a small resident silver I caught in the Sound the day before.

Communion

we worship

the salmon

because we

eat salmon

— Sherman Alexie

I prop open the hood of my truck, pull out the dipstick, burn the excess oil off in the fire, and skewer my salmon by interlacing four or five clumsy sutures through the skin. (Better prepared, I would’ve baked a few potatoes on the engine manifold. A woman in Montana told me I should always keep a can of black pepper in my tool kit, because in a pinch it’ll plug a radiator leak. When I asked her if there were any other spices I ought to store in the car, she said an onion in your glove box isn’t a bad idea for your DUI situations. Had I heeded her advice, my truck would’ve been pretty much as fully equipped as my kitchen.) Anyway, I get my unadorned filet sizzling over the fire and the skin instantly starts dripping gobbets of crackling fat on the coals. I set some coffee on my stove and crank the flame. I lean back against a log and look at my watch, angling the face into the firelight. It’s a quarter to five.

The men in my family have undone themselves in some kind of grand westering impulse gone awry. We ran out of land and then went one step farther, west of the West. We’ve shot ourselves and jumped from bridges and lost our minds and aborted some of our babies and orphaned others, and now reproducing and carrying on the family name is down to me, and the truth is soul-wise I’m likely a bigger monster than either of my broken brothers or my father. As the extant capable male in my family I either perpetuate our name or wipe it off the earth forever. The hints about what I should do haven’t been so awfully subtle that even a mental clodhopper like myself can’t catch the drift. Nature in me has come up empty, and so be it. I figure it took thousands of years to make Irish and Italians of my grandparents; America undid that in a scant generation. We’ve come to nothing — so soon?