Tony Platt GoodToGo

NO LONGER TRIVIAL MATTERS

“Oh no, we haven’t done the British Museum,” said Cece as she reviewed our checklist of things to do with our grandson Nate on the last full day of his first trip to London. So with lunches packed, we walked over from our flat in Fleet Street to the museum. I was ready to discuss with a ten year-old the ethics of displaying the dead to strangers, but I wasn’t prepared for a display of Native American artifacts that originated in Trinidad, about ten miles away from our cabin in Big Lagoon on California’s northwest coast.

Our strategy with Nate during the whole trip was to expose him to the variety of museums and galleries, give him a taste of a particular exhibition or display, stop before he got bored, and discuss the experience over food. It worked well.

Our first stop at the overwhelming British Museum was an easy decision: the display of Egyptian funerary materials. The two thousand year-old mummies, as they are popularly known, are a big attraction to kids. It’s no longer possible in the United States to display preserved human bodies without the donors’ permission, though not too long ago Native American human remains were a staple of museums. But here in London, the British Museum still shows off its star-power attraction in a large, refurbished, and well-organized room with expansive cabinets and clear explanatory texts.

Cece, Nate, and I joined the procession of teachers and mommies shepherding their charges in blazers and pleated skirts past the shrouded bodies, surrounded by objects needed to “ensure the transition of the individual from earthly existence to immortality.” I found the whole experience unnerving and troubling, but it was a teaching moment. Over tomato and cheese sandwiches we discussed issues of patrimony. “They should give them back to Egypt,” said Nate succinctly. “Can I have dessert?”

After lunch, while Cece took Nate to check out the samurai exhibition, I popped in to the JP Morgan Chase Gallery of the North Americas to see how the British Museum deals with its trove of Native American artifacts. The room is stuffed with objects from all over the United States, displayed artistically. It’s a familiar hodgepodge of stuff, minimally linked to historical contexts, but what caught my attention in the California section were two elk spoons familiar to me from the research I’ve been doing on the history of the Yurok in Humboldt. They look exactly like artifacts I’ve seen in collections back home. How did they get here, I wondered.

Three days later, after we’d sent Nate back to California, I returned to the museum’s Centre for Anthropology to do research on the two spoons and the museum’s third Yurok artifact, described in its data base as a “chert knife.” While the museum’s description of the artifacts and their uses is shaky, its evidence of provenience and provenance is compelling. I couldn’t contain my excitement when a helpful curator placed in front of me the Hewett papers: a handwritten volume, dated from its watermark as “clearly eighteenth-century,” and a folder of original correspondence. Most historical research is a plodding duty. A serendipitous find such as this one happens rarely.

After less than two hours of gingerly exploring the documents, I was convinced that the three Yurok items were acquired by George Goodman Hewett (1765-1834), a doctor who served as a surgeon’s mate on the Discovery, captained by George Vancouver on his celebrated four-year exploration of the Pacific Coast on behalf of the British government. When the Discovery arrived in May 1793 in Tsurai – renamed Porto de la Trinidad by the Spanish, and later Americanized as Trinidad – the ship was greeted by “natives in a canoe; they approached us with confidence and seemed to be friendly disposed,” recalled Vancouver in his well known memoirs. The Yurok were eager to trade for iron – “in their estimation the most valuable commodity we had to offer.”

While Vancouver regarded the items traded by the Yurok as “trivial articles,” he was not a collector like George Hewett. A few years after the Discovery returned to England in 1798, Hewett created a detailed inventory of the materials he had acquired on his voyage with Vancouver, including their provenience. The two Yurok spoons and knife are listed in his carefully handwritten log.

After Hewett died in 1834, his collection and inventory passed on to his family. Many of his “curiosities,” noted a relative, were lost or disappeared. But in 1891, almost one hundred years after the Discovery docked in Trinidad Bay, a resourceful British Museum curator named Augustus Wollaston Franks bought what was left of Hewett’s collection, including his inventory and Yurok items, for 150 English pounds, not a small amount of money in its day. Like Hewett, Franks was a dedicated collector. “Collecting is a hereditary disease and I fear incurable,” he once admitted.

Thanks to this unpredictable chain of event – including my own last minute decision to check out the North Americas collection – I learned that the British Museum owns three artifacts that were made by the Yurok in Tsurai more than two hundred years ago. What Captain Vancouver considered “trivial matters” in 1793 are now displayed for the public in one of the world’s most famous museums, where they are reverentially described in terms reserved for objets d’art: “very fine carving” with “finely incised decoration.”

London June 2009

SKULLDUGGERY

    The Indian leader Goyathlay, popularly known as Geronimo, died in captivity and was buried at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909. This fact about his death is generally agreed upon. But the current location of his skull and where his remains should be buried are matters of a longtime and acrimonious dispute, and now a lawsuit that pits tribe against tribe, and the descendants of the man whom Teddy Roosevelt showed off in his 1905 Inaugural Parade against Yale’s most exclusive private club.

    On February 17th – the centennial of Geronimo’s death – his great-grandson and nineteen other lineal descendants filed a suit in federal court against Yale University, Yale’s Order of Skull and Bones, and – for maximum impact – the President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of the Army. The suit seeks to “free Geronimo, his remains, funerary objects and spirit from one hundred years of imprisonment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Yale University campus at New Haven, Connecticut, and wherever else they may be found.”

    According to Harlyn Geronimo, the defendants are in violation of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), under which any institution receiving federal funds is required to acknowledge and repatriate skeletal remains and artifacts derived from Indian graves.  “It has been claimed and widely repeated,” argues the suit, “that in 1918 or 1919 a group of Yale University students, members of a campus organization called the Order of Skull and Bones… opened the tomb of Geronimo and removed his skull, other bones and items buried with the body and took them to the Order’s premises on the Yale campus.”

    The case is a little bit of a fishing expedition because nobody has convincing evidence that any part of Geronimo’s skeleton was removed from Fort Sill. And it’s mostly speculation at this point that the hush-hush club kept the Apache warrior’s cranium in a trophy case in The Tomb, their hangout at Yale. The allegation relies on a letter written by a senior Bonesman in 1918 in which he informs a colleague, “The skull of the worthy Geronimo The Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club … is now safe inside the T[omb] together with his well worn femurs, bit & saddle horn.”  One of the alleged conspirators was Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of presidents.

    Experts on this claim are divided. Judith Schiff, an archivist at Yale, thinks “it has a very strong likelihood of being true, since [the letter] was written so close to the time.” The Skull and Bones Club, true to its name, had a longtime reputation for stealing or acquiring desirable objects. The ritual was called “crooking” and members tried to outdo each other’s “crooks.” As early as 1869, a Yale alumnus asked a colleague at the Smithsonian if he could acquire a “spare human cranium” to present to his club.

    There’s no doubt that the Club sought out Indian skulls. For the countless middle class men who joined fraternal clubs in the second half of the 19th century, notes historian Curtis Hinsley Jr., “backyard archaeology served as a field for male play.” But David Miller, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, is convinced that the Bonesmen “could not have located Geronimo’s grave in 1918 since it was unmarked at the time.”

    It’s just as plausible that the Bonesmen dug up an anonymous Indian or soldier from Fort Sill and made up the story that the remains were those of Geronimo to impress the lads back at Yale. It’s not hard to imagine Prescott Bush and his chums trying to come up with an action that would enhance their cred in The Tomb. Or maybe they purchased the skull from a trader and, back at Yale, somebody made up the name Geronimo as a stand in for the generic Indian: “Say hi to Geronimo, he’s our mascot. Charge!”

    Geronimo vs. Obama will hopefully unravel this historical mystery. In addition, Geronimo’s descendants not only want to make sure that his cranium is buried with his skeleton, but also demand that his remains be exhumed from his granite tomb in the Apache Indian Prisoner of War Cemetery at Fort Sill and repatriated to a gravesite at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico, where he was born. The Fort Sill Apache Tribe opposes this request on the grounds that “there is nothing to be gained by digging up the dead.”

    While the suit may not be built on the most compelling legal evidence and there’s no right-and-wrong resolution to the inter-tribal conflict, the case deserves serious attention, and not only because of its roster of celebrities: in addition to Geronimo, there is also ex-Attorney General Ramsay Clark for the plaintiffs, burnishing his reputation as a crusader for social causes; and a typecast villain played by the paterfamilias Prescott Bush, grandfather of a political dynasty, who may have taken his penchant for headhunting too literally when he was based at Fort Sill in 1918.

    The legal case, in my opinion, could be easily settled. First, the Skull and Bones Club should do the right thing – disclose and repatriate all the skeletons it has closeted, and make public all paperwork related to the collection of Indian body parts and grave goods. Secondly, military and Apache archaeologists should collaborate on a respectful exhumation of Geronimo’s grave at Fort Sill to see if his remains are intact. When these two steps have been taken, the two tribes, not the government, should try to resolve the thorny issue of whether Geronimo should be interred where he was born or where he was died. Unless Judge Solomon is available, this shouldn’t be a matter for the courts.

    More importantly, Geronimo vs. Obama will provide an opportunity to explore the long, sorrowful history of respectable grave looting. Between 1788, when Thomas Jefferson dug up an Indian burial mound near his home, and the 1970s when the Red Power movement began to put amateur and professional archaeologists on the defensive, the harvesting of Native American human remains was widespread, authorized, and even celebrated as good science.

    Through much of the 20th century, while the government built memorials to unknown victims of World War I and World War II, and tried for years to account for every missing person in the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of Indian remains were stored anonymously in dank basements and bankers’ boxes, or displayed as mementos of a “vanishing race” or freak show curiosities. We are long overdue for a public debate about why and how this happened. 

TO DIE FOR

    I went back to England in the summer of 1994 to commemorate the first anniversary of my dad's death.  On the way from London to our family reunion in Edinburgh, I stopped to visit an old friend, whom I had known since our undergraduate days in the early 1960s. Despite his professional success, Roger was suffering from long bouts of deep depression, punctuated with sighs and proclamations of uselessness.  At his lovely, quayside flat in Liverpool I found books on wills casually left on his desk and manic-depressive art on the walls.  He had even scripted out his own self-inflicted death, which, he hoped, would be considered an accident so as to spare his children any embarrassment.  Only an English, Protestant chap, trained at a minor private school and Oxford could be concerned with the etiquette of suicide.

    I was worried until he cooked up a meal of garlicky gazpacho, a rare leg of lamb cooked with crushed red currants, buttery slices of eggplant fried Greek-style in a batter of flour and ouzo, and a desert of plums slathered in cinnamon cream.  It was a sumptuous dinner, filled with pleasure and creativity, far too subtle and generous for somebody who had decided to say no to life. Not too long after, he remarried and started a new family.

    Having just hit the big 50, matters of life and death were on my mind. My then law school daughter was bugging me to write a will and a student doing her thesis on living wills had told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to address the issue of how I want to die.  Should any extraordinary measures be taken to sustain my life when I'm hanging by a thread in hospital?  When is life no longer worth living?  Do I need insurance for long-term care if I'm incontinent or incompetent or both so that my kids' inheritance doesn't go for bedpans and feeding tubes?

    It took me years to make these decisions, but I was clear on one thing: you have my permission to take me out and shoot me when I no longer have any taste.  I'm not talking aesthetics here.  That'd be a loss, but I could manage with cable.  It's the physical, mouth-chewing, swallowing kind of taste I'm talking about: crusty baguettes with sweet butter, oysters on the shell with vinegary shallots, rare prime rib with mashed potatoes and freshly grated horseradish, creamy risotto with fresh mushrooms, crème caramel topped with burned sugar. That kind of taste. Once I lose my hankering for, say, a frozen Snickers bar at the movies, you'll know I'm close to the end of the line.  Last stop coming up, the terminal.

    "She doesn't have a yen for anything any more," my mum told me in 1996.  "I can't tempt her.  She used to like a drink or a bit of chocolate.  It's very sad really to see her losing her taste."   My mother was talking about her mother Edith, my grandmother who had just suffered a stroke and was dying.  Slowly, without appetite, after living for so many of her one hundred years with the sharpest tongue in our extended, scattered family.

    I know how mum felt.  I felt the same with my dad when he was in his last year of a slow cancer death.  He had always loved food and fancied himself quite a restaurant connoisseur.  Never cooked for himself until he was living alone in London in his last years, and even then his repertoire was pretty thin.  He could fry or boil an egg, and he could make an exquisite salmon dish.  He steamed it whole over a bouillon of fish broth and vegetables, just as my mother, his ex-wife, had done for years when they were married. Mum served it with small, steamed new potatoes and fresh peas or asparagus.  But the key component – which dad once asked me to get secretly from her many years after they were divorced – was mum's sweet and sour sauce, made simply and fast from a whisked mixture of egg yolks, sugar, and lemon juice.  The yin-yangness works so well against the salmon's lush meat and the bland delicacy of the potatoes.  You need something pretty bold if you're going to go up against salmon.

Sweet and Sour Sauce

4 egg yolks
Juice of 2 lemons
Tablespoon of sugar
Ground pepper

Beat all the ingredients in pan on stove,
Very low light, until thickened.
The low light's important.  Don't stop stirring. 
If it's too thick, add juices from the salmon
Until you get it the way you want it.

    What I like about this recipe, aside from its simplicity and ability to impress guests who think homemade sauces separate a chef from a cook, is its encouraging tone and room for personal variations.  My mother, unlike her mother, tried to demystify cooking.  She communicated her recipes according to the conventions of modernity: amounts, numbers, timing were not anathema to her.  My Grandma Daniels, the one hundred year-old Jewish-Roumanian immigrant who came to Manchester, the textile center of northern England, when she was a young girl, was another matter.  It took years before she was willing to pass on her culinary knowledge to her first-born grandson (who, like her, left home for distant shores, in 1963, before I knew what was what) because in her world men stayed out of the kitchen (and the bedroom too, if she’d had her way). 

    But, being a seasoned pragmatist, Edith conceded when she had to.  She knew when to give up and move on.  After her only son left his wife for another man, she had to modify her homophobia, and she did.  She grew up a staunch racist, hating all "schwartzes" but never knowing one, until the Caribbean-black cooks at the fancy Jewish retirement home she lived in during her last years adopted her recipe for chicken soup.  Last time I went to visit her, she called out a cook to meet me and there they stood, the Jamaican and the Jew, arms around each other.

    So, after a while, Grandma gave in and started giving me her recipes, if you can call them that.  I'm not an essentialist, but I do believe that some people are more talented than others.  I think of myself as a solidly good cook now, something I tried to pass on to my kids (my daughter’s first husband was a cook and my son went to a culinary academy for a year).  My mother, from whom I learned most of my skills and strategy, was very accomplished, with a nose for the tempo of cooking.  But my grandmother, who taught my mother how to cook  (even cooked for her during the first year of my parents' marriage, both of them keeping it a secret from my dad), my Grandma Daniels was an artiste.  Since it was very hard for her to write in English  – she could barely write her name, though until her eyesight faded she read quite fluently – I sat, listened, and took notes in the tradition of oral history, as I had been trained to do. 

    Her instructions were always given theatrically, with animated facial gestures, gesticulating arms, and arguments with my mother (who was usually present) over amounts and times.  A short recipe might take thirty minutes easily, if you included all the fascinating detours through regional variations and evocations of celebrated meals.  The drama was important to me because I was as much interested in the historical context of, say, borscht with boiled potatoes as I was in how to stop the soup from curdling. Another four years and her life, since her conception in 1893, would have spanned the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Her recipes were always deceptively simple and the ingredients quite common.  She learned her craft as a tenacious immigrant who had to excavate taste from unlikely sources.  Take her recipe for green beans, named by my mother with a lovely sense of irony:

Haricots Verts à la Roumanian

Green beans, fresh or can
White flour
Sugar
Lots of pepper
Water from beans
Butter

Put some flour in a frying pan and cook it until it's brown, 
Almost burned. 
Cook beans or open can of beans. 
Mix together the brown flour, some water from the beans, 
some sugar and pepper, lots of pepper. 
Put the beans and everything else in casserole dish,
Cook in a low oven for several hours.
The longer the better. 
Add butter before serving.

    I can't give you the exact amounts.  You'll have to experiment like I did.  "A handful of flour, a pinch of salt," she'd shout at me like I was a foreigner, clenching her fist to show me the amount.  "Salt?" I'd ask,  "You didn't mention salt in the ingredients."  She threw her hands up in mock disgust and looked away.  "Salt?  Of course, salt.  Always a little salt."  After I'd experimented with the dish a few times, and ended up with something that resembled what I remembered from my 20s, I realized that her craft was about mixing, balancing, and tasting, just like a creative actor who knows the basic discipline but is not afraid to improvise.  The end result can be quite stunning.  When the dish works well, the beans and sauce become one, velvety and sensual, the peppery sugar an unexpected finish.  It’s great with lamb or a dense fish like halibut.  My mother would also occasionally serve it as a starter so that the taste got undivided attention, sharpening our appetites for the next course.

    My mother and her mother preferred strong, rich flavors that left no doubt about their authority.  The subtlety was in the construction, rarely the taste.  Later in life, as my parents became more bourgeoisified and my mother more influenced by the cosmopolitan tastes of the Continent, especially classic French cuisine, we'd eat more refined meals.  But mum never abandoned her peasant roots or her love of my Grandma's basic ingredients: fat and sugar.  As a teen I learned little tricks about how to give ordinary food little booster shots, like my grandmother's luxurious chocolate meringues whose secret I later learned was the cheapest kind of instant coffee.  A quick, tasty lunch, for example, could be Buck Rarebit (a Welsh Rarebit or Grilled Cheese with an egg on top), followed by Mashed Bananas.

Buck Rarebit

Sharp cheese, cheddar or Lancashire
Milk, two eggs, butter, white bread, beer

Grate the cheese and mix with milk, one egg, salt and pepper.
Add some beer if you want to give it a bite.
Toast bread lightly, put mixture on toast and grill till puffy brown.
Fry egg in butter and serve on top of grilled cheese.

Mashed Bananas

Mash two very ripe bananas with sugar and cream

    When I was a child, the cream usually came from the top of the milk, a two-inch delight that was much sought after in my family.  "Yum yum, pig's bum," we'd say in the idiom of working class, rhyming slang.  The mashed bananas were a special favorite because they doubled as dessert and a plaything that could be squished between the teeth and drooled like baby food.  I'd still enjoy a meal of these two dishes because their flavors are so firmly locked into my memory bank, just like MacDonald's fries were already the potato of choice for my grandson David by the time he was four years old.

    A few years ago, my brother, sister and I traveled home from the far ends of the earth -- Scotland, Israel, and California -- to organize a party for mum's 70th birthday.  To celebrate the rare reunion, she made the three of us a traditional Jewish Friday night dinner, with a main course of roast chicken after we had plowed through a groaning table of hors d'oeuvre and chicken soup with matzoh balls.  The chicken tasted like dessert (my mother claimed the recipe doesn't include sugar, so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt).  Here's why.

Friday Night Chicken

Stick cloves of garlic under the skin of a whole chicken.
Roast the chicken at a very high heat for about 30 minutes, 
Hot enough for the fat to drip into the pan. 
Take out the chicken and remove the fat. 
Mix the hot chicken fat with spoonfuls of cold chicken fat
(You can buy "schmaltz" in the store in bottles),
Paprika, onions, salt and pepper. Lots of salt. 
Pour the mixture over the chicken and cook slowly,
At low heat, occasionally basting the chicken with its juices.

    Fortunately, mum didn’t give us the recipe until after we'd finished our seconds, when we took a moment to clutch our hearts.  Clogging of arteries was not something she worried about, unlike my middle-class contemporaries who by comparison seem overly obsessive on the topic of healthy diets.  All the things that we think hasten our demise -- such as animal fat and white sugar -- were the stuff of life to her generation.  Meat equals protein, the more of it the better, the fatter and richer the better. 

    My grandmother who cooked so wonderfully because she could taste the end result long before it was finished, both in her mouth and imagination, ended life with only the flavor of her own mortality.  But food was on her mind even in her last days when she lay sleeping around the clock, kept alive by a fierce will and intravenous liquids.  Rousing herself briefly from her dreams, she recognized and asked her daughter,  "Are you staying for lunch?"

    In 1993, when I went to look after my dad a few weeks before he died, I did everything I could to spark his pleasures.  All the things that he used to love – like strolling on London’s Hampstead Heath, arguing politics, or playing cut-throat chess not very well – he now found too much effort, and all the things that he used to hate passionately  – like physical dependency and watching endless television – had become what was left of his life.  While I knew that I was there to help him into death, this was not the easiest thing for me to do.  He was the first person whose intimate end I witnessed.  For fifty plus years of my life I had managed to avoid the messy details of dying.  So while I tried to ease his passing, I also tried to keep him alive with taste treats. 

    I made elaborate dishes, recreated family menus, and went off to obscure ethnic neighborhoods and chi-chi London department stores in search of his favorites -- chocolate-covered gingers, Cadbury's milk chocolate with fruit and nuts, pickled herrings with onions, smoked salmon on dark rye bread.  I even made eggplant for him the way my mother made it, based, she claimed, on my grandmother's recipe, but I find it hard to imagine the Jews of nineteenth-century eastern Europe doing it this way.  In England, the French word is used for the purple-black vegetable, making it even more exotic. In our family we only ate it this one way, as an appetizer:

Aubergine

2 or 3 medium-sized eggplants
Onion chopped very fine
Good oil
Cucumber or radishes, parsley

Roast the eggplants over an open flame
Until all the skin is burned black. 
Remove skin and chop up the eggplant with onions and oil. 
Salt and pepper to taste, lots of salt. 
Serve cold on large circular plate edged with cucumber slices or radishes,
Sprinkled with parsley. 
Serve with a good fresh dark bread.

    Of course there are other ways to cook eggplants.  You can roast them in the oven, then cover with a cloth until the skin sweats off. Much less work.  But there's something very dramatic about the sight and smell of fiery eggplants blackening on the top of the stove.  And the smokiness adds an interesting flavor that you just don't get any other way.  It's a hell of a mess to clean up but, when I have time, I like to make it this way so that taste and memory become one.

    Dad showed polite interest in all my offerings but preferred a cocktail of straight scotch with his morphine.  And near the end, unthinkable of a man who never went through one day without at least a couple of stiff drinks, he refused liquor, even French champagne or the very best cognac.  "No taste," he said, about three weeks before he died. 

    Earlier, before he abandoned food, I'd written to him about the benefits of smoking grass.  I told him that it would help to cut out some of the nausea caused by chemo and make food interesting again.  As he had no moral objections to the personal use of any kind of drug, legal or otherwise, and was by now grasping for any straw, no matter how thin, he welcomed my suggestion and asked a journalist friend to procure him a lid of grass, hoping that it would revive all his flagging appetites.  A few weeks later, I visited him in London and found him slumped in a chair, depressed and irritable.  Had the grass helped at all, I asked him.  "Couldn't figure it out," he replied.  "Too complicated."  I opened up the baggie of marijuana and read the instructions left by his friend.  The recipe, I admit, was a touch rococo:

Shaun's Joint

King-size rizla papers
Low-tar cigarettes
King-size rolling machine
Strips of thin card

Take about one-third of tobacco from a cigarette,
Mix with about half as much dope, 
Which should previously have been de-seeded
And shredded between the fingertips. 
Put mixture in rolling machine and roll. 
Insert paper in rolling machine and place a rolled up strip
Of thin card at top of roller to serve as a filter. 
Remove joint, light and smoke.
Inhale.

    I threw out the instructions and rolled him some joints. It was good to see him get the giggles and he even showed some mild enthusiasm for Grandma's version of stuffed cabbage that I had learned to make via much trial and error.  The recipe's not complicated but you need lots of time, both to make and cook the dish.

Holishkis

Half a pound of minced meat (hamburger)
Grated onion
Lemon juice, salt, sugar, two eggs
Large can of cooked tomatoes and ketchup
Cabbage leaves

Soak cabbage in salt before boiling in water, until tender. 
Use only the greenest leaves, remove stems or hard vein with scissors. 
Put leaves on paper to absorb excess water. 
Fill each leaf with mixture made of meat, eggs, salt, sugar, and lemon juice. 
Put empty cabbage leaves on the bottom
Of a large casserole dish and fill with layers of filled leaves. 
With each layer, add more sugar, lemon juice, canned tomatoes and ketchup.
Cook in oven at low heat for a long, long time.

    For this recipe, even my mother was not able to come up with amounts.  Sweet and sour is apparently a mystical experience.  "Lots of sugar, lots of lemon juice," she'd say.  "Just keep tasting, just keep tasting."  I plan to, as long as I can.

Edith Daniels, 1895-1996    Monty Platt, 1915-1993 Eileen Platt, 1920-1997

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Death changes the meaning of a place. Since the mid-1970s, I’ve been coming from the Bay Area for vacations and time–outs to a cabin in the village of Big Lagoon, some thirty miles north of Eureka on California’s northwest coast. Until two years ago, I’d never associated this wondrous place with the end of life. But since mid-2006, it’s been impossible for me to separate the living from the dead.

I’ve never liked the idea of burying family members, myself included, in a cemetery. This has nothing to do with religious beliefs or the lack thereof. I find no relief in parables of an afterlife nor do I feel any obligation to follow age-old religious rituals. My parents are buried hundreds of miles apart in England in anonymous cemeteries that have not and likely will never be visited by any of their relatives, certainly not by me, five thousand miles away. I don’t even know where my grandparents are buried.

There’s no solace for me interring my family’s remains in a place with which I no longer have any connection, or reducing days of the dead to prescribed visits to a gravesite. It’s not that I’m opposed to ceremonies of remembrance, quite the contrary. I have all kinds of totemic mementos of my parents in our Berkeley home.

In the kitchen, there’s the family breadboard on which I still cut baguettes, and bulky steel cooking pots that have boiled potatoes and vegetables for close to a century. I wear my father’s watch on special occasions, and Cecilia has kept some of my mother’s once modish furs. In our living room you’ll find a landscape painting by Jacob Einstein, known during my childhood as “the fried egg” for its orange moon hovering over a snowy Epping Forest. And interspersed with folk and modern art throughout the house are all kinds of silver knickknacks that my parents kept in segregated splendor after they crossed the tracks and moved us into a faux Elizabethan mansion in the Cheshire countryside.

I get a sense of comfort from these fixed reminders, though I know, intellectually, that there’s nothing more chameleon-like than memory. And since my son’s death a little more than two years ago, I’ve become quite ritualistic.

Daniel had four close calls and one final call in his forty-year life – all stemming from a brain tumor the size of a small orange discovered when he was a teenager – so I had plenty of opportunities to rehearse his death.

In January 2006, with time running out, I began to seriously address quality of life issues with him.  I consulted a specialist in palliative care. “It’s important for the whole extended family to know what you want for yourself,” I passed on to the patient. By way of reply, he bought himself a new bike. “I don’t want to tip-toe through life,” he told me.

He packed a lot of living into his last few months. He threw a huge, surprise 40th birthday party for Anna, his wife and sweetheart of fourteen years, on her 39th birthday; he requested and we gave him for his 40th birthday in March a night of ooh-la-la in a deluxe San Francisco hotel. Worried about his kids’ lack of vitality, he enrolled 7-year old Nathan in karate, took 11-year old Jonah to a weekly workout in his gym, and hustled them both into a baseball league. In between these activities, he rode his bike precariously around Chico, deaf to passing cars, a balancing act to behold.

Late in May of 2006, Daniel managed to get away by himself for a weekend at our family cabin in Big Lagoon. He’s been coming here since he was a child and his deep love of this area is one of the reasons that I’ve held on to my share of the property.

Even on a calm night, in our cabin some two hundred yards from the Pacific you can hear the kettledrum booming of waves hitting the shore. At the coast, a barrier beach runs for about three miles north until you reach a place where Big Lagoon, fattened by streams and rain, occasionally leaks into the Pacific and where the ocean at extreme high tide pours its salty waves into the lagoon.

For most of the year, however, these two extraordinarily different bodies of water coexist one hundred yards apart. And this détente has lasted “from time immemorial,” as we know from stories passed on by the Yurok, who considered Oket’o (Big Lagoon) a sacred site. Until the Gold Rush they also lived here year-round, digging out their canoes from the then plentiful redwoods and eating more than their fill from the land and water. No wonder they imagined themselves at the heart of the universe, between an earth and sky that floated on an ocean bisected by rivers, everything put in order by spirits inhabiting the sea stacks and under-water caves.

Before Daniel left Big Lagoon for the last time on May 28th, he wrote in the cabin’s journal: “It’s been too long since I was here last. I’ve had a weekend of beautiful weather and salvation. The jade gods have been good to me on this trip. I love the porch on the side of the cabin and have spent time there when I’m not on the beach. Walked down to the point yesterday. Saw whales from the beach today. So many great memories from Big Lagoon. When my well-used body gives up, which I hope is not for a while, I’d like a Viking funeral and put out to mother ocean. Doesn’t have to be here, this beach is a bit treacherous. Muchos besos, love Daniel”

Six weeks later he was gone, no deus ex machina this time. On July 22, the family gathered in Big Lagoon to fulfill his written request. Anna brought his physical remains, a few pounds of ashes in a cedar box. He and we had no interest in preserving his well-used body. Together we all made a raft from long pieces of buoyant driftwood washed up on the shore, lashed together by strands of twine. At twilight, we built a small pyre to hold the cedar box on top of the driftwood. There were rose petals for us to scatter, and two bouquets of herbs to accompany the ashes: rosemary, oregano, lavender, sage, yarrow, thyme, and a little bit of forget-me-not. “And we never will.”

We carried the three-tiered edifice to a promontory jutting into the lagoon, a sanctuary of calmness facing the treacherous ocean. The pyre lit up immediately and moved gradually off shore. Sooner than we expected, the section holding Daniel’s ashes separated from the raft, now ablaze too. But, inexplicably, both kept burning for ten or more minutes, with the pyre moving further and further into the distant heart of the lagoon. “Just like Daniel,” somebody shouted as we watched his Viking self sail off into the lagoon, the fog lifting to reveal a crowded sky.

I’ve been back to Big Lagoon regularly since then, enough time to hone my rituals. I collect black-green jade on the beach to place on a memorial bench – made by a local artist from reclaimed redwood – that sits in our cabin. During each visit I walk along the western shore of the lagoon to pay my respects to Daniel's launch site, now marked magically by three sentry-like limbs of a beached tree sprouting through the sand.

I usually chat with Daniel here, not unlike the Yurok who used to visit nearby Nrgr’i-o-il (“As far as it comes”), where the cliffs and beach meet, the site of a spirit who helps you “if you go and talk to him.” On a warm day, like it was yesterday, I sit by the lagoon, propped up against Daniel’s tree, and imagine the place where, according to the Yurok, disembodied souls pass through a lake into the underworld. 

Daniel Bernard Platt, March 22, 1966 – July 13, 2006

WHEN THE STARS FELL

“If not here before, not here now.”

(Yurok saying)

It’s only a short walk from our cabin down to the ocean-side lake that gives this west coast village, north of Eureka, its modern name, Big Lagoon.  But there’s a long history inscribed in the landscape.

I head out down Big Lagoon Park Road, passing signs announcing Private Property, Home for Sale, and Neighborhood Watch – “If I don’t call the Sheriff, my neighbor will” – and walk along a narrow, country road, skirting on my right what remains of a spruce forest. Here, for hundreds of years, Yurok basket makers collected tough, pliable roots to make watertight containers. Today, some of my neighbors in the private estate are reluctant to allow Yurok artisans from local communities access to the forest; they worry that the preservation of a tradition might segue into a proprietary claim.

I continue until the road opens dramatically to a stunning backdrop of water, ocean, sky, and low hills.  Here the private community of cabin-owners becomes a public county and state park. Fronting the vista is an apron stage of a meadow that serves on summer weekends as an overflow parking lot for day-trippers. About a thousand years ago, Yuroks traveling south from the northwest had the good sense to choose this fecund spot for Opyuweg, one of their largest coastal settlements. The site is “certainly very pleasing to the eye,” conceded one of the first Berkeley anthropologists to map the area in 1909, “and Indians are not at all insensible to scenic beauty.”

The Yurok enjoyed more than a “romantic setting” at Big Lagoon. They also had timber for housing and fires, redwoods to fashion sturdy canoes, and enough food to trade after they had eaten their fill. It’s recalled that mud hens grew so fat that they couldn’t fly, and salmon were easy pickings when they got trapped in nearby Maple Creek. “The lagoon was thick with ducks,” noted a visitor in 1850.

The Yurok had it all at Big Lagoon until the Gold Rush uprooted one of the oldest sedentary communities on the West coast. The descendants of the inhabitants of the region refer to that cataclysmic moment of turmoil and warfare as “the time when the stars fell.” To scholars, what happened in Northern California was emblematic of “the greatest human demographic disaster in the historical record.”

The miners, settlers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers who headed north or east when they disembarked from ships in Trinidad harbor in 1850 took a route that inevitably went by Opyuweg. Some Yurok hired themselves out as guides and beasts of burden; some women lived with or were appropriated by white miners and settlers; some fled to join a guerrilla movement in the hills; and many died from syphilis and in massacres.

Within sixty years of contact with whites, the Yurok population declined by almost seventy-five percent, and between 1850 and 1950 life expectancy halved.

As I walk towards the lagoon on this cloudy summer day in 2008, I’m reminded of how close to this place in 1850 Thomas Gihon witnessed his traveling companions engage in the “cowardly and wanton murder of poor naked savages.”  A few weeks later, a vigilante force swept through Big Lagoon, burned the main village, and took prisoners back to Trinidad where they were executed by a firing squad. “I was associated with men who thought nothing of murder,” lamented Gihon. “My heart was heavy…. I had never seen such an affair before, and it made me sick at heart.”

I continue past the unmarked site of Opyuweg on my left, past garbage and recycling cans and public toilets on the right, over a paved parking lot to a lovely wooden bench perched on a grassy mound, looking out over Big Lagoon ahead, and the beach and Pacific Ocean to the left. If the redwood forest – so central to the Yurok economy – had not been clear-cut some fifty years ago when lumber companies owned most of Big Lagoon, it would be visible to my right.

Here in front of the bench is an informational plaque in the style of a triptych. Its theme emphasizes how Big Lagoon is an extraordinary confluence of natural and social elements: “Where streams and ocean mingle… An assembly of wildlife... Gathering in the shadows of tradition.” Two sections of the plaque educate us about the waterways and bird-life of the area.

The third section informs us that Big Lagoon used to be called Oketo or Where It Is Calm, so named by the “Yurok tribe who first came to this area hundreds of years ago.” To illustrate that “ceremonies are important to Yurok life,” there’s a photograph of Yuroks celebrating the Brush Dance. Pity that it was taken miles away from here on the Klamath River.

Another photo – of a young boy and an Indian women holding up two large, recently caught salmon – is designed, I suppose, to illustrate everyday Yurok life. But this too was taken on the Klamath, around 1918. By this date, it was tourists, not Yuroks, who mostly fished Big Lagoon. A text accompanying the photograph identifies the white boy as Harry Roberts, while the second subject – the celebrated Native American leader, Alice Spott – is reduced to a generic “Yurok woman.”

Visitors can sit comfortably on the bench, enjoying the view, undisturbed. We are not prompted to consider why the stars fell on Big Lagoon in the 1850s or how Yurok women continued to live here after the Gold Rush against all odds. It’s a challenge, I know, to reconcile this wondrous place with its sorrowful past. But the solution is not to shroud our public history in amnesia. There’s time to correct this.  As Toni Morrison says, “it’s never too late to honor the dead.”

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

“Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.”
        (Frederick Douglass’ “Fourth of July Speech,” July 4, 1852)

    It’s sunny and mild at the coast today, July 4th. While fires and heat rage inland, some tourists are taking refuge in northwest California’s small coastal towns. I see them strolling the camera-ready sights when I drive in to Trinidad from Big Lagoon to get our three daily newspapers from Murphy’s and to download my e-mail from outside the globally-minded Beachcomber, surprisingly closed on this nationalist of all holidays.

    It’s a lovely morning, I’m in no hurry, so I join the straggling tourists heading to Trinidad’s focal point: a lighthouse on a tiny promenade high on a cliff with panoramic views of a sweet harbor below, the craggy coastline unfolding left and right, and the Pacific stretched out to the horizon, fog willing.

    No wonder when Spanish adventurers stopped here on Trinity Sunday in 1775 in search of supplies and a northern port, they stayed nineteen days. They planted a cross on the Indian settlement of Tsurai’s highest hill and claimed “all these lands, seas, and its landmarks” in the name of Charles III and their Catholic god. But the local Yuroks, who’d been here for centuries, were not intimidated: when another ship arrived a few years later, its crew found what remained of the “sign of possession” on the beach.

    Today’s day-trippers are pointing and talking animatedly about what they’re seeing. There’s a lot to look at, with the sun in combat with the fog, and winning. Eventually, inevitably, they look around for the first time at the place from which they are looking out and realize that they are standing in the grounds of a cenotaph. A text case explains that the lighthouse – a replica of the one on Trinidad Head – “is a memorial to those lost and buried at sea.”  It’s no longer just a lighthouse.

    To emphasize its sorrowful context, the memorial is framed by a wall of names and years of births and deaths that remind me of the Vietnam monument in Washington, except here the aesthetics are local and vernacular. Plaques and engravings are added every few years to keep up with the short-lived lives. The sheer number of names – from the late 19th century to now – always makes me pause. There are dozens of entries. But I’m drawn also to their ages. I think of many men in their prime with families who, like my 40 year-old son, died before their parents did. 

    Visitors come to this spot for the spectacular views, but leave with serious matters on their minds. “So many,” I hear a woman say to her silent husband.

    Slowed down after seeing the “Memorial Lighthouse,” newcomers look more closely at their surroundings. Now they might see a nearby plaque erected in 2006 as a “tribute to the Armed Forces of America.” It’s prominently displayed between two huge roadside ads for Katy’s Smokehouse and the Seascape restaurant.

    In the same area, there’s also a historical marker of Trinidad, installed in 1981. It instructs us that the birth of this port town in April 1850 coincided with the gold rush. Trinidad, says the plaque, is “the oldest town on the northern California coast during the 1850s.” There’s nothing inscribed here about the people who made this their home from, say, the 12th to 19th centuries. But a sign behind the lighthouse hints of previous inhabitants when it points out the  “Primary Trail to Indian Beach.”

    Such everyday references to something Indian in the landscape are not unusual in northern California. On a recent journey inland for a vacation, I ran into them everywhere. While Cecilia fly-fished the Pit River – so named after a technique used by local tribes to trap large animals – I became one of the 200,000 annual visitors to scenic Burney Falls, named after one of the area’s pioneers who “was killed by local Indians.”

    On a trip from Ashland to Klamath Falls to visit the Favell Museum of Western Art and Indian Artifacts, we drove along “Dead Indian Memorial Road.” A few days later, rafting on the Rogue, I was reminded that the river’s name derived from Karok and other long-time inhabitants who in the 1850s mounted such fierce resistance that they became known by white settlers for their “fierce and roguish behavior.”

    Most people when they see “Primary Trail to Indian Beach” behind the lighthouse in Trinidad show no interest, unless they want to walk down to the bay. We’re used to seeing Indians frozen in the past, as Rebecca Solnit observes, like “insects in amber.” The public signage doesn’t make you pause because it doesn’t evoke flesh and blood human beings with dates of birth and deaths, like the fishermen who didn’t return to Trinidad.

    But if you’re persistent, you can find some information about Trinidad’s Indian past. About a hundred yards south of the lighthouse, there’s a historical marker of Tsurai, erected by State Parks and Recreation in 1970. It describes the Yurok settlement as a “prehistoric permanent Indian community … first located and described” by Spanish explorers in June 1775. The plaque notes that Yuroks lived in houses made of “hand-split redwood planks” and that the village “was occupied until 1916.” Then, apparently, everybody vanished or moved to Stockton.

    It might surprise many people to find out that there are more than 5,300 people currently on the Yurok tribal rolls. Or that just last weekend some five hundred descendants of local tribes encamped a few miles up the road at the Yurok village of Sumeg in Patrick’s Point state park in order to continue the ancient rituals of the Brush Dance.

    Most visitors to Trinidad don’t ponder the mystery of erasure and resurrection because they don’t even see the Tsurai plaque. None of the tourists I hang out with in town on July 4th walk south to its location. Instead, after pausing at the lighthouse, they head in the opposite direction, beckoned by Katy’s and the Seascape down the hill.

    And so they are not prompted to consider one of northern California’s most important coastal Indian settlements. And even if they did find the Tsurai plaque, they would learn nothing about the wave of terror that exterminated, infected, and drove out most of the area’s permanent residents in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Imagine a trip to Germany during which you visit memorials that commemorate pre-World War II Jewish culture but skip the holocaust.

NOT NATIVE

    We’re spending a good part of this summer at our cabin in Big Lagoon, about 30 miles beyond Eureka on the northern coast of California, between Trinidad and Orrick. Walking the beach the other day, I was glad to see an array of glittering plants flourishing so close to the ocean, but it also reminded me of a mournful experience here in January of 2004.

    Winters at Big Lagoon tend to be short on light. And deep in rain, averaging 65 inches a year, most of which falls in the winter months. We keep a wood fire going twenty-four hours, sealing our small refuge against the chilly damp nights. Storms are commonplace at this time of year, it’s when the Pacific takes its best shots at the long stretch of beach that goes from the northern point of Big Lagoon down to jagged rocks at Patrick’s Point. In December and January, a huge section of the beach is impassable and most locals keep their dogs on a short leash. Even on a calm night, in our cabin over two hundred yards from the Pacific we can hear the waves booming on the shore: a deep kettledrum sound.

    This year, the winter of 2003-4, it’s rained even more than usual. Maybe there’s been one full day without rain in the last two weeks. Usually it lets up for a while and I take the opportunity to go out for a walk. With my dog Wilbur urging me on, I head to the spit that threads the ocean and lagoon. Here, a barrier beach runs for about three miles north of our cabin until you reach a place where the lagoon, fattened by streams and rain, occasionally leaks into the Pacific and where the ocean at extreme high tide pours its brackish waves into the lagoon. One of my new year’s resolutions has been to make it along the barrier beach to the northernmost tip of the lagoon, but I’m easily distracted by the glint of black green jade in the sand or I’m run off home by a stinging rain.

    Usually, in the winter my only company is Wilbur. Occasionally we see another lone hiker or a beachcomber, back bent, eyes down searching for agates, jasper, and petrified wood. As I set out this wintry weekday, however, I can see people in motion about half a mile away. The beach seems crowded for early January. As I get closer, I realize there are two groups of men, one near the ocean, the other near the lagoon. To my left, where the surf breaks on the beach, a couple of big guys in uniforms are sitting on their stationary dune buggies, squinting out to sea. I stop to talk with them – a common courtesy between strangers around here – and they tell me they’re with the sheriff’s search and rescue team. There’s always plenty of work for them.

    About a month ago, a friend of a friend watched her indestructible dog, a strong swimmer at ease in the ocean, disappear into the waves at Agate Beach, his back broken. And before the new year is two weeks old, Robinson Martin, a young student from Berkeley, will walk into the surf at night on nearby Clam Beach and reappear three days later, washed up dead on the beach at Luffenholz. Today, the deputies tell me they’re hoping to find what’s left of eight-year old Joseph Bailey who was sucked under by a rogue wave just up the coast a few days earlier. At the entrance to the beach at Big Lagoon, there’s a sign that says, “Warning: Dangerous Undertow,” but many visitors from out of town don’t read the local obituaries until it’s too late. The day that Joseph died, so did his uncle, Jeff Russell, trying to rescue him.

    One of my ritualistic pleasures on this daily pilgrimage is to stop, face the ocean, and look out with eyes wide open. There’s always movement, always something to watch: whales, otters, and sea lions, the lights of the crab boats, herons and egrets skimming the water. But today I notice that the roiling ocean is a sullen green, the surf lipped with scum, and I’m hungry for the stillness of the lagoon.

    As I turn east, I see that the other group consists of three men, also in uniforms, on their hands and knees in the wet sand, digging and pulling at the ground, as though rooting out potatoes. I go up to greet them. “Good afternoon, looks like you’re doing some weeding,” I say to them. The park rangers greet me back, chuckling at the absurdity of my observation. “Sure looks like that,” says one of them. “We’re pulling out the ice plants. They’re not native. All the way from there” -- he indicates the place where I started my hike -- “to all the way down there to the end,” he says, pointing to some imagined place where the ocean breaches the lagoon.

    “Must be hard on your backs,” I offer. “Not really, you get used to it. We need to do it because the ice plants are starting to invade the whole area,” he says. “Not native.” When I return in the spring, they tell me, there’ll be more space for the sea figs, beach strawberries, seaside daisies and other salt-resistant plants to reclaim their home here between surf and lagoon. I wish the rangers well in their work and walk on further down the spit.

    Soon, I stop to look back. Their bodies have faded into the ghostly fog, but it’s reassuring to hear murmuring voices holding their own against the ocean’s dirge.

BEYOND THE FRINGE

    I love coming to California’s northwest coast for its seemingly pristine setting and in order to get away from it all, but it’s a nice bonus that I feel in sync with the region’s cultural life and politics.

    Most mornings you’ll find me hanging out at the Beachcomber Café in Trinidad, a few miles away from our cabin in Big Lagoon. Here I catch up on my email, succumb to fresh pastries, and start to slow down. The environmentally conscious owners frown upon ordering to go and make you feel guilty if you use more than one paper napkin. But they know what you like to drink even if you’ve not been around for a while. “Here’s Tony from Berkeley, medium coffee with foam.”

    Trinidad was once a center of the Yurok universe, then an entry point for gold rush speculators, later a whaling port. Now it’s mostly a stop for tourists heading north or for folks looking for a second or retirement home. But it’s also a place for locals to shop, drop off their kids at school, and hang out at the Beachcomber.

    In 2004, voters here delivered Kerry by 188 to 69 votes, a landslide. In the February 2008 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton won handily by almost ten points throughout the state, but her fortunes were reversed in Humboldt county, where Barack Obama trounced her by15 points (53 to 38 percent). Obama did even better in Trinidad, winning by a whopping 27 points (59 to 32 percent).

    On Saturdays you’ll usually find me at the weekly market in the Arcata plaza, buying the sweetest of tomatoes in the summer and organic squashes and chestnuts in the fall. I’ll get a sandwich at Brio’s and, on a sunny day, hang out in the plaza, watching the hula-hoopers, jugglers, and tie-dyed hopheads swaying trance-like to Grateful Dead wannabes. The People’s Republic of Arcata is a bastion of progressive activism, a 60’s town for the 21st century. In 2004, Bush-the-Clear-Cutter received only 16 percent of the presidential vote. In 2008, Clinton was no match for Obama, losing by two to one (31 to 62 percent) in the primary.

    If gambling is your thing – it’s not mine – you can drive inland a few miles to the booming Indian casino in Blue Lake, which lacks a lake of any color. Here in 2004, Kerry drubbed The Decider almost two-to-one. In 2008, Obama cruised to a 22-point victory.

    Or if you’re interested in Victoriana, there’s a day outing to cutesy Ferndale – where 56 percent of voters supported tax breaks for the oligarchy in 2004. Even here, Obama had no trouble out-polling Clinton 54 to 37 percent.

    A few miles north of Ferndale and south of Arcata is Humboldt’s largest city, Eureka, once made prosperous by the lumber industry. During the 1950s, about one of every two working people in the county were involved in lumber production, and families were better off than most folks in the country. As the job market expanded with the housing boom, the local population doubled. But by the 1960s, as lumber-based jobs declined, Eureka began its steep descent to hard times. And by the 1990s, more people were leaving than moving to Humboldt.

    In recent years, prior to the mortgage crisis, there were some signs of economic revival in Eureka. There’s an expanding, charmless mall at the city’s southern funky edge, and the old downtown has been reborn as a lively, mixed-use destination. I like to browse its bookstores, get lunch at multicultural Los Bagels, and look for quirky bargains at the original Restoration Hardware. But Eureka is still a hardscrabble place, with one out of five people living below the poverty line. And like the rest of the county, it’s overwhelmingly white.

    Yet – bucking expectations of poor, white, semi-rural counties – Humboldt tends to vote Democratic in decisive numbers. You have to go back to Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1984 to find a plurality for Republicans (52 to 47 percent). Since Reagan’s victory, Democrats have won all five presidential races in Humboldt.

    You would think that Eureka embodies the perfect demographics for Hillary Clinton. That’s why her campaign orchestrated a rock-star appearance by Bill Clinton in Eureka a few weeks before the 2008 primary, hoping to mobilize his wife’s supposedly bread-and-butter base of working class, salt-of-the-earth white folks. But, surprisingly, she still lost by four points (43 to 47 percent) to Obama in Eureka.

    Big Lagoon’s peace and quiet may lure me to the northwest, but I also like Humboldt’s receptivity to quirky and noisy politics, and that it challenges the expectations of pollsters who like to divide up the country into neatly separated red and blue regions. Here on northern California’s coast, the country’s political polarization seems more blurred than clear-cut, the mainstream edging closer to the fringe.

WHO'S ON FIRST?

    Who did what first matters a great deal to historians. The California Story is filled with narratives that credit explorers, pioneers, and adventurers – preferably or allegedly white – with putting their mark on the landscape: such as the agents of the Spanish crown who entered Trinidad Bay in 1775, or Jedediah Smith and the Mountain Men who trekked through northern California in 1828.

    Who gets credit for first writing into History a place called Big Lagoon – my home away from home, located by the Pacific Ocean in northwest California, a few miles above Trinidad – has also been a matter of some interest, though there is a tendency to forget that people lived for at least hundreds of years at Big Lagoon – from “time immemorial,” as the Yurok tribe put it – without committing it to literary memory.

    Since the late nineteenth century, the conventional wisdom had been that a Bostonian trader, Jonathan Winship – captaining an American ship on a Russian mission with Kodiak hunters to kill otters --for the China market in furs – was the first to write about Big Lagoon in 1806. According to Hubert Howe Bancroft, the pioneer of California history, the O’Cain “anchored just north of Trinidad Bay, where Washington Sound, now Big Lagoon, was discovered, named, and partially explored.”

    I checked out Bancroft’s footnotes – not only because of my inherent skepticism of all secondary sources, but mainly because I wanted to find the original source and a direct quote for an interesting story: the man who first mapped Humboldt Bay also checked out Big Lagoon and named it after the Great White Father.

    The source for Bancroft’s unambiguous assertion turns out to be an obscure, handwritten, mid-19th century manuscript, with the quirky title of Solid Men of Boston in the Northwest, attributed to a seafarer named William Phelps. Luckily for me, the Bancroft Library in Berkeley has the original. After reading it, however, Mr. Phelps’ provenance seems anything but solid.

    I followed a thread to see if anybody has questioned Phelps as a source and came across a published essay by Warren Heckrotte, who is merciless with poor Phelps’ geography, but accepts his view that Winship’s crew came into Big Lagoon: “they anchored just north of Trinidad Bay … reported that otter were abundant and the existence of a sound….”

    But it turns out that neither Phelps nor Heckrotte had seen a copy of the O’Cain’s original log, so there was still no primary source to illustrate my story. End of investigation, so it seemed.

    But, wait, there’s more! Right at the end of Heckrotte’s essay is a postscript. He informs us that “after the paper was submitted for publication.” he’s been in touch with somebody who does have a copy of the original O’Cain log. The man with the ship’s log is a Mr. Giesecke, who subsequently wrote a scholarly and popular account of his research that gives him the last word, for now.

    It turns out, contrary to Bancroft and Phelps’ claim, that the O’Cain anchored south, not north of Trinidad, and that Big Lagoon was never mentioned in the log. The “spacious sound” entered by Winship’s crew was Humboldt Bay, where they found otters “in the greatest plenty.” Winship had both “discovered” and profited from Humboldt Bay. “Big Lagoon was probably not seen” by Winship, concedes Heckrotte.

    I found my quote, but not the one I was expecting: “Our Indian Hunters this day,” Winship wrote in his journal on June 10, 1806, “I believe experience Perfect happiness.”

    Winship was referring to what he assumed was the state of mind of his forced Kodiak laborers from Alaska, not the free Wiyot Hunters on shore who a generation later would experience their own Perfect sorrow.

    Giesecke has persuaded me that the Bostonian Jonathan Winship was not the first person to document Big Lagoon in 1806. So, if not him then, who when? That’s another story.

    Meanwhile, let’s remember that while the Yuroks of Big Lagoon did not publish their memoirs, they were not mute. For many years, they called the big lagoon O-ke’to or, in English, Where It Is Calm. And they explored every cranny of the area around the lagoon, naming some thirty identifiable places. When the first white settlers and gold miners, and later, the first generation of Berkeley anthropologists showed up, the Yuroks passed on this information. The calm was quickly broken.

SLOW DOWN

   

    I’m up in Humboldt at our cabin in Big Lagoon for a few days in April. I’m here to start a new project on the history of the area, but there’s also time to unwind too. I have Wilbur, our eight-year-old terrier mix, with me for company.

    My first day I wake up to gray skies and a fog-shrouded lagoon, an edgy chill launched off the placid ocean. But by early afternoon the sky has cleared pale blue and there’s a full warm sun as far as I can see up and down the coast.

    I walk Wilbur down to the lagoon. He sniffs, I look everywhere. The spring flowers are glad to have made it through another dour winter. The hedges are ablaze with wild iris, purple and red poppies, and white daisies.

    The lagoon is full and fat, ready to burst its banks. I walk to the end of the jetty and lie down on my back. Wilbur agonizes from the shore. He doesn’t like to be in or on water, and he’s phobic about gaps or metal on the ground. To get the twenty yards to me he needs to walk on the planks of a swaying wooden jetty, over metal attachments and gaps that he imagines will suck him into unknown depths.

    I call him to me, a whistle that signals food and comfort, and he eventually dares all. With his stomach almost on the ground and his ears pinned back, he slowly, oh how slowly, sidles and tacks his away along the jetty until he can burrow his body into mine. We both lay flat on the warm wood, eyes closed against the sinking sun. I relax by listening to Wilbur’s anxious panting, the lapping waves under my head, the steady rumbling and shushing from the ocean a quarter of a mile away, my slowing breath, and, eventually, Wilbur’s too.