Saturday, June 04, 2005
Ungrateful Dead
In order to penetrate the landscape of Washington state from the Pacific Ocean, one has two entrances to choose from: 1. Juan de Fuca Strait--which leads between Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula to Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, and 2. the Columbia River--which traverses the interior plateau and basin from Canada to Oregon and descends through the gorge on its way to the mouth at Ilwaco.
Having spent many a vacation camping on the Makah Indian Reservation at Juan de Fuca's Cape Flattery, as well as at Ilwaco's Cape Disappointment, I often wondered how these rocky, fog-bound promontories got their names. Not enough to look it up, but enough to ponder what prompted some early Euro-American explorer or government cartographer to come up with such dramatic designations. And after fifty-some years of living and traveling throughout the lava-strewn and moss-laden lands of the two climatic zones created by the Cascade Range, I'm still puzzled at what could be either disappointing or flattering in this marvelous territory between the 46th and 49th parallels--at least, that is, at the time they were so named.
Yet, a lot has changed since the British and Spanish and Russian and American traders and explorers first encountered the Chinook at Ilwaco and the S'klallam, Nootka, and Makah on Juan de Fuca Strait. And maybe now--two or three centuries hence--flattery and disappointment have come to be appropriate terms to describe the majority of people who now inhabit the topography of the region.
Perhaps they have become symbolic concepts of the insatiable, superfluous culture that spawned such disdainful settlers on a coastal paradise that is anything but a flattering disappointment. Then again, maybe there's a belated message in these nautical expressions: something about the whole notion of failure to fulfill our expansive desires; about the frustrations associated with foiled expectations; the silly sentiment of feeling let down by a bountiful world Americans simply failed to appreciate.
Having spent many a vacation camping on the Makah Indian Reservation at Juan de Fuca's Cape Flattery, as well as at Ilwaco's Cape Disappointment, I often wondered how these rocky, fog-bound promontories got their names. Not enough to look it up, but enough to ponder what prompted some early Euro-American explorer or government cartographer to come up with such dramatic designations. And after fifty-some years of living and traveling throughout the lava-strewn and moss-laden lands of the two climatic zones created by the Cascade Range, I'm still puzzled at what could be either disappointing or flattering in this marvelous territory between the 46th and 49th parallels--at least, that is, at the time they were so named.
Yet, a lot has changed since the British and Spanish and Russian and American traders and explorers first encountered the Chinook at Ilwaco and the S'klallam, Nootka, and Makah on Juan de Fuca Strait. And maybe now--two or three centuries hence--flattery and disappointment have come to be appropriate terms to describe the majority of people who now inhabit the topography of the region.
Perhaps they have become symbolic concepts of the insatiable, superfluous culture that spawned such disdainful settlers on a coastal paradise that is anything but a flattering disappointment. Then again, maybe there's a belated message in these nautical expressions: something about the whole notion of failure to fulfill our expansive desires; about the frustrations associated with foiled expectations; the silly sentiment of feeling let down by a bountiful world Americans simply failed to appreciate.
