The Lost Coast

We stood at the entrance to the bone room, thinking “man oh man what is this place?” It was a Phrenologist’s dream, with bones piled from floor to ceiling. Sea lion skulls and scapulae peeped amongst the horse tails that had thrust in under the plank walls. From the rough hewn ceiling skeins of smaller bones dangled, rattling gently. In the corner a pile of bleached whale vertebrae were stacked up like a cone of nesting chairs. Several students that we had met on the beach came in with us, and they were walking gingerly through the bones; cautious, silent, respectful. This was Cape Alava, the meeting place of the currents, the lost home of the Makah.
We had walked a day to get here. Actually, you can walk the loop trail from the Ozette Ranger Station to Cape Alava, along the beach to Sand Point, and then back again to Ozette in a 9 mile loop that takes a day. But we had wanted to stray a little bit along the trail, watching for wildlife and waiting for events to come to us. So we brought along some fried chicken from Port Angeles and while along the trail we stopped to eat, chatting about history, politics and the ecology of the Washington coast.
The trail from Ozette to Sand Point is great fun. From the ranger station a boardwalk of split cedar planks rises and descends through a charming coastal rain forest. Much of the walk is through prairie, with gnarled cedar giving way to sedges and grasses. Then you hear the surf in the distance and you stroll down through hemlock and salal to the beach.
If you turned to the south and walked along the beach eventually, after fifty miles, you would reach La Push. Instead we set our sights on Wedding Rocks, a couple of miles to the north and lost in the late afternoon mists. It was a desultory trek. We walked along a rocky monochromatic beach at low tide. With the mist, everything gradually faded to grey. It became cold, and while looking for a campground we quickly pulled on long pants over our shorts.
Along this portion of the coast the high tide line comes right up to the woods. Obviously, camping on the beach wouldn’t be advisable. Eventually we discovered a small patch of grass covered in tiny white goose flowers. We apologized to the flowers and spread out our tent. Down the beach a hundred yards away a tanin stained creek flowed into the sea- our water source! While Yasha set up the tent I pumped and hauled the water; it was a ritual we had learned on many a trek across mountain passes.
After diner we descended again to the beach. We had heard that there were petroglyphs in the Wedding Rocks area, and despite the mist and general gloom we decided to search until dark. The Rocks themselves weren’t too hard to find really; we almost ran into the huge eroding pillar as the beach narrowed down into the woods. But where were the petroglyphs? We stumbled around in the near dark until Yasha literally sat down on a rock with cup and ring marks. We found stylized faces and dozens of carvings that surprisingly resembled nothing more than a group of flying clams in an old Rainier Beer commercial. After shooting some photographs we resolved to return in the morning.
The following day we inspected the Wedding Rocks under a better light. We found carvings of dogs, of people, of ghosts and of killer whales. Who were these people? Was this some sort of ceremonial site? We continued on to Cape Alava to find out.
The walk from Wedding Rocks to Cape Alava is short- a mere mile or two.
Yet along the way we paused to inspect the rafts of seaweed that had washed up on shore, ducked under numerous fallen trees, and finally with Cape Alava in sight we sat down on a wave-scoured log to discuss the life of the Washington coasts’ most famous castaway.
In 1834 Otokichi was a 14 year old cabin boy on the Japanese rice freighter Hojun Maru sailing the Inland Sea for Edo. A storm came up before they could flee and the ship, rudderless, dismasted, drifted for the next 14 months across the trackless Pacific. During that time the crew dwindled through dehydration and starvation from fourteen to two men and the cabin boy, Otokichi. Finally the hulk of the Hojun Maru drifted onto the beach of the Makah, and the Japanese were promptly enslaved. In time Otokichi became a man, was saved by a factor from the Hudson Bay Company and traveled to London. Renamed John Matthew Ottoson, Otokichi returned to the Orient as a translator. He snuck back into Japan posing as a Chinese, married well and often, and in the end, played a minor part in the opening of Japan to the West. Such was the fate of a survivor. Sighing, we proceeded the last hundred yards to the Cape.
Sadly, even as Otokichi was returning to the Orient the Makahs were coming under increasing Western control. All the children of Ozette were ordered to attend the government school in Neah Bay for a “proper” education. A grim Fate. Ozette was abandoned. Not too long afterward the federal government forbade the Makah the use of fish weirs to capture salmon. Without the salmon the Makah steadily declined.
For the past thousand years the Makah at Ozette and Neah Bay have been part of a larger linguistically related group of natives living on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Nootka. Frequently in the old days the Makahs would sail across the Straights of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island, raising havoc and capturing slaves. All of that now is gone. In the 1970’s an eroding bluff at Cape Alava revealed a series of Makah longhouses buried by a mud slide more than three hundred years before. This was a treasure trove for archeologists and the Makah themselves, for suddenly they saw themselves for what they were.
It’s easy to see why the Makah would have liked it here. Offshore, an island guards the beach from storms. The beach itself is nice, broad and flat and with plenty of room to pull up your canoe. The mist swirled around us and we could almost see the beach as it used to be. In the kelp beds a quartet of cormorants raised their heads like spears and then dived in unison. We climbed up an unused trail through the horsetails and found an abandoned cabin sitting back amongst the grasses. When I tried the rusted doorknob it fell away in my hand, so I pushed the door open. Inside, a half opened backpack lay on the floor. Dirty dishes moldered in the sink. In a back room, sleeping bags were spread out on the bunks. I started getting uneasy like I was Goldilocks furtively searching someone else‘s house. There were carved wooden masks and thimbles, halibut clubs and sea lion scapulae. The floor was littered with bones and half drunk 40’s of Steel Reserve. It was spooky. I shot some photographs and we eased out the door.
From the beach again we could see another house, a small longhouse, with a group of students clustered around the door. This was the bone house. Inside the Makah had made a bronze plaque thanking the long vanished Ozette people for teaching them how to live. Overtime the bronze plaque was capped with a giant carving of a whale, whale ribs were added, and the longhouse eventually became a shrine of bones. Again it felt spooky. Life and death, abandonment and the passage of time were all co-mingled like fog in the sky. Shaken, we returned to the beach for air.
“Lets walk back to the car!” Yasha said, “I bet the sun is out and its warmer there.” She was right. We climbed up the bluff behind Cape Alava, leaving the lost coast behind. Before too long the sun began to burn through the mist. First the raincoat came off, then the first shirt and then the second. By the time we got back to the car I was in shorts and the travails of the Makah were fading into the darkness of memory…