Part 23

The theatres were vomiting their throngs of playgoers when we rolled under the row of electric arches which turns Tacoma’s chief thoroughfare into an avenue of dazzling light and drew up beneath the grotesque and towering totem-pole in the square in front of our hotel. Tacoma is as up-and-doing a city as you will find in a week’s journey through a busy land. It does not need to be rapped on the feet with a night-stick to be kept awake. Magnificently situated on a series of terraces rising above an arm of Puget Sound, its streets, instead of defying the steepness of the hills, as do those of San Francisco and Seattle, sweep up them in long diagonals, like the ramps at the Grand Central Terminal in New York. Tacoma is peculiarly fortunate in being girdled by a series of so-called natural parks, a zone ten miles in width in which the landscape architect has not been permitted to improve on the lakes and woods and wild-flower-carpeted glades provided by the Creator. But Tacoma’s chief boast and glory is, of course, a mountain whose graceful, snow-capped cone, which bears an astonishing resemblance to Fujiyama, rises like an ermine-mantled monarch above the encircling forest. The name of the mountain is Rainier or Tacoma, according to whether you live in Seattle or Tacoma, an acrimonious dispute having been in progress between the people of the two cities over the question for some time, the citizens of Seattle claiming that the mountain is far too beautiful to be used as an asset in Tacoma’s municipal advertising campaign, while the people of the latter city assert that, as the British Admiral Rainier, for whom the peak was originally named, fought against the Americans in the Revolution, he does not deserve to have his name tacked onto an American mountain.

For thirty miles or more the road from Tacoma to Mount Rainier (for that is the name to which the Federal Government has given its approval) strikes across a wooded country as level as the top of a table, until, reaching the base of the mountain, it sweeps upward in long and graceful spirals which were laid out by army engineers, for the region has been taken over by the government under its new and admirable policy of protecting the beauty-spots of the country through the formation of national parks. Nowhere, not even in the Alps, have I driven over a finer mountain road, the gradients being so gradual and the curves so skilfully designed that one scarcely appreciates, upon reaching National Park Inn, in the heart of the reservation, that he has climbed upward of five thousand feet since leaving tide-water at Tacoma. We spent the night at the Inn, a low-roofed, big-fireplaced tavern which has an air of cosiness and comfort in keeping with the surroundings. Everything about it reminded us of hotels we knew in the Alpine valleys, and when I drew up the shade in the morning the illusion was complete, for the great peak, its snow-clad flanks all sparkling in the morning sunlight, towered above us, just as Mont Blanc towers above Chamonix, dazzling, majestic, sublime. Leaving the Inn after an early breakfast, we motored up the mountain road as far as the snout of the great Nisqually Glacier, which is as far as automobiles are permitted to go. Take my word for it, this glacier—the largest on the continent outside of Alaska—is one of the most worth-while sights in all America. A river of ice, seven miles long and half a mile wide, it coils down the slope of the mountain like a mammoth boa-constrictor whose progress has been barred in other directions by the encircling wall of forest. We left the car at the glacier’s snout, and, after an hour’s hard climbing over loose rubble and slippery rock, succeeded, in defiance of the danger signs, in reaching a flat shelf of rock from which we could look directly down upon the ice torrent, and there we ate the lunch that we had brought with us to the accompaniment of the intermittent crashes which marked the glacial torrent’s slow advance.

We descended to the road in time to catch the four-horse stage which runs twice daily from the Inn to Paradise Valley, which the Lady insisted that we must visit, “because,” she said, “there are snow-fields and fields of wild flowers side by side.”

“But you’ve seen much the same sort of thing in Switzerland,” I objected. “Don’t you remember that place above the Lake of Geneva, Territet, I think it was, where people in furs were skating on one side of the hotel and other people were having tea under big red parasols on the other?”

“I remember it, of course,” she answered, “but that was in Switzerland and this is in my own country, which makes all the difference in the world. Evidently you have forgotten that German baron we met at Grindelwald, who asked us if we didn’t think that the view from Paradise Valley was finer than the one from Andermatt, and we had to admit that we didn’t know where Paradise Valley was. I’m not going to let that sort of thing happen again. The next time I meet a foreigner I’m not going to be embarrassed to death by finding that he knows more about my own country than I know myself.”

So she had her way and, leaving the car behind us, we took the creaking stage up the steep and narrow road to the valley, where we gathered armfuls of wild flowers one minute and pelted each other with snowballs the next, and peered through the telescope—at a quarter a look—at the thirteen glaciers which radiate from the mountain’s summit, and aroused perfectly shameless appetites for supper, and slept as only healthily tired people can sleep, and the next morning, half intoxicated with the combination of blazing sunlight and sparkling mountain air, we rattled down again to the Inn and the waiting car.

The run from Rainier National Park, through Tacoma, to Seattle is as smooth and exhilarating as sliding down the banisters of the front stairs. Auto-intoxicated by the perfection of the roads, I stepped on the accelerator and in obedience to the signal the car suddenly leaped into its stride and hurtled down the highway at express-train speed, while farmhouses and barns and fields and orchards swept by us in an indistinguishable blur. It was glorious while it lasted. But out of the distance came racing toward us a big white placard, “City Limits of Seattle,” and I slowed down to a pace more conformable with the law and rolled over the miles of trestles which span the swamps and lowlands adjacent to Seattle as sedately as though a motor-cycle policeman had his eye upon us. The builders of Seattle must have been men of resource as well as courage, for those portions of the city that have not been reclaimed from the tide-lands have been blasted out of the rocky hillsides, so that the city gives one the impression of clinging precariously to a slippery mountain slope midway between sea and sky. Instead of propitiating the hills, as is the case in Tacoma, the streets go storming up them at angles which give a motorist much the same sensation a rider has when his horse rears and threatens to fall over backward. Though Seattle is very big and very busy, with teeming streets and huge department stores and miles of harbour frontage and one of the tallest sky-scrapers in existence and a park and boulevard system probably unequalled anywhere, it gave me the impression of being a little crude, a trifle _nouveau riche_, and not yet entirely at home in its resplendent garments. Between Seattle and Portland the most intense rivalry exists, the two cities running almost neck-and-neck as regards population, although this assertion will be indignantly denied by the citizens of both of them. Standing at one of the world’s crossways, the terminus of several transcontinental railways and several trans-Pacific steamship lines, with a superb harbour and the recognised gateway to Alaska, Seattle has a tremendous commercial advantage over her Oregonian rival, but from a residential standpoint Portland, exquisitely situated on the Willamette near its junction with the Columbia, with its milder climate, its greater number of theatres and hotels, and its older society, has rather a more metropolitan atmosphere, a more assured air than its northern neighbour.

Seattle is the natural portal to the Puget Sound country, that wilderness of mountains, glaciers, forests, lakes, lagoons, islands, bays, and inlets which makes the upper left-hand corner of the map of the United States look like a ragged fringe. It is not an easy country to describe. Southward from the Straits of Juan de Fuca, an eighty-mile-long arm of the Pacific penetrates the State of Washington—that is Puget Sound. On its eastern shore are the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, at the head of the sound is Olympia, the capital of the State, and bordering the western shore rise the splendid peaks of the unexplored Olympic Range. If your imagination will stand the further strain of picturing an archipelago four times the size of the Thousand Islands, clothed with forests of cedar, fir, and pine, and indented with countless bays, harbours, coves, and inlets, dropped down in this body of water, you will have a hazy conception of the island labyrinth of Puget Sound, which is generally admitted, I believe, to be the most beautiful salt-water estuary in the world. Despite the narrowness of many of its channels, the water is so deep and the banks so precipitous that at many points a ship’s side would touch the shore before its keel would touch the ground, which, taken in conjunction with its innumerable excellent harbours, makes it the most ideal cruising ground for power-boats on our coasts.

I can conceive, indeed, of no more enchanting summer than one spent in a well-powered, well-stocked motor-boat cruising in and about this archipelago, loitering from island to island as the fancy seized one, dropping anchor in inviting harbours for a day or a week, as one pleased. There are deer and bear in the forests and trout in the rivers and salmon in the deeper waters, and, if those did not provide sufficient recreation, one could run across to the mainland and get the stiffest kind of mountain climbing on Mount Olympus or Mount Rainier. During the summer months scores of small steamers, the “mosquito fleet,” ply out of Seattle and Tacoma, hurrying backward and forward between the city wharfs and the fishing villages, farming communities, lumber camps, sawmills, and summer resorts that are scattered everywhere about the archipelago’s inland waterways, so that the camper on their shores, seemingly far off in the wilds, need never be without his daily paper, his fresh vegetables, or his mail.

Let us give ourselves the luxury of imagining—for, to my way of thinking, there is about as much enjoyment to be had in imagination as in realisation—that we have a fortnight at our disposal on which no business worries shall be permitted to intrude, that we have the deck of a sturdy power-boat beneath our feet, and that the placid, island-dotted waters of Puget Sound lie before us, asparkle on a summer’s morning. Leaving Seattle, seated on her stately hills, astern, and the grim, grey fighting ships across the Sound at the Bremerton Navy Yard abeam, we will push the wheel to starboard and point the nose of our craft toward Admiralty Inlet, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and the open sea. Our first port of call will be, I think, at Dungeness, whose waters are the habitat of those Dungeness crabs which tickle the palates and deplete the pocketbooks of gourmets from Vancouver to San Diego. At the back of Dungeness is Sequim Prairie, whose seventy odd thousand acres of irrigated lands produce “those great big baked potatoes” which are so prominent an item on dining-car menus in the Northwest. It is nothing of a run from Dungeness to Port Angeles, which is the most convenient gateway to the unexplored Olympics. A score or so of miles southward from Port Angeles by automobile, a portion of which is by ferry across the beautiful mountain Lake Crescent, and over a road which is a marvel of mountain engineering, are the Sol Duc Hot Springs, whose great modern hotel is in startling contrast to the savagery of the region which surrounds it. Laying our course from Port Angeles straight into the setting sun, we coast along the rock-bound, heavily timbered shores of the Olympic Peninsula to Neah Bay, where a crew of Macah Indians will take us in one of their frail canoes close around the harsh face of Cape Flattery, which is the extreme northwest corner of the United States. Westward of Cape Flattery we may not go, for beyond it lies the open sea; but, steering eastward again, we can nose about at will, loitering through the romantic scenery of Deception Pass and Rosario Straits, dropping in at Anacortes, whose canneries supply a considerable portion of the world with salmon, and coming thus to Friday Harbour, the county-seat of the San Juan Islands, which, despite the Robinson Crusoe-ness of its name, looks exactly like one of those quaint, old-fashioned seaport towns which dot the coast of Maine. The San Juan Islands, which are a less civilised and more beautiful edition of the Thousand Islands of the Saint Lawrence, like their counterparts on the other side of the continent, lie midway between the American and the Canadian shores. They were the scene of numerous exciting incidents in the boundary dispute of the late fifties, being for a number of years jointly occupied by British and American troops; but, though several crumbling British blockhouses still rise above the island harbours, the nearest British soil is Vancouver Island, across the Strait of Georgia. That the Stars and Stripes, and not the Union Jack, fly to-day over this picturesque archipelago is due, curiously enough, to the Emperor Frederick, father of the present Kaiser, who was asked to act as arbitrator between England and the United States and decided in favour of the latter.

[Illustration: THE UNEXPLORED OLYMPICS.

A forest fire sweeping across the flanks of the Olympic range near Lake Chelan. In the foreground is a sea of glacial ice.]

Did you ever, by any chance, drop into a sporting-goods store only to find yourself so bewildered by the amazing number and variety of implements for sports and recreations displayed upon its shelves that you scarcely knew what to choose? Well, that is precisely the sensation I had the first time I visited the Puget Sound country. I felt as though I had been turned loose in a gigantic sporting-goods store with so many things to choose from that I couldn’t make up my mind which to take first. And, mark you, everything is comparatively close at hand. If a Londoner wants to get some mountain climbing he has to go to Chamonix or Zermatt, which means a journey of at least two days. If, getting his fill of precipices and glaciers and crevasses, he wishes some bear shooting, he must turn his face toward the Caucasus, to reach which will require seven or eight days more. Should he suddenly take it into his head that he would like some salmon fishing he will have to spend ten days and several hundred dollars in recrossing Europe to reach the fishing streams of Norway—and then pay a good round sum for the privilege of fishing in them when he gets there. On the other hand, one can leave Tacoma by train or motor-car and reach the slopes of the second highest peak in the United States, a mountain higher and more difficult of ascent than the Jungfrau, as quickly and as easily as one can go from New York to Poughkeepsie. From Seattle one can reach the country of the big grizzlies as easily as a Boston sportsman can reach the Maine woods. From Victoria, the island capital of British Columbia, a gallon of gasoline and a road as smooth as a billiard-table will take one to the banks of a stream where the salmon are too large to be weighed on pocket scales in less time than a Chicagoan spends in getting out to the golf-links at Onwentsia.

There is no other region of equal size, so far as I am aware, which offers so many worth-while things in a superlative degree for red-blooded people to do. Where else, pray, can you climb a mountain which is higher than any peak in Europe save one (Mount Hooker, in British Columbia, is only eighty feet lower than Mont Blanc, the monarch of the Alps, while Mount Rainier, which, as I have remarked, is almost in Tacoma’s front yard, is nearly a thousand feet higher than the Jungfrau); where else can you look along your rifle barrel at such big game as grizzly, elk, panther, mountain-sheep, and even the spotted bear, the rarest of all North American big game; where else can you have your fly-rod bent like a sapling in a storm and hear your reel whir like a sawmill by a sixty-pound salmon or a six-pound trout; where else can you cruise, for weeks on end, amid the islands of an archipelago more beautiful than those of Georgian Bay and more numerous than those of the Ægean, without the necessity of ever dropping anchor twice in the same harbour; where else can you canoe by day and camp by night along rivers which have their sources on the roof of a continent and, after taking their course through a thousand miles of wilderness, empty into the greatest of the oceans; where else can you throw open the throttle of your motor on a macadamised highway which, in another year or two, will stretch its length across twenty-five degrees of latitude, linking Mexico with Alaska? Where else can you find such amusements as these, I ask? Answer me that.

* * * * *

Were it not for the complicated customs formalities that a motorist has, perforce, to go through at the Canadian border, one could, by getting an early start and not lingering over his lunch, make the one-hundred-and-seventy-mile journey from Seattle to Vancouver between dawn and dark of the same day. But the red tape which the American officials insist upon unwinding before you can leave the land of the beef trust and the home of the Pullman porter and the equal amount of red tape which the Canadian officials wind up before you are permitted to enter the dominions of his gracious Majesty King George make a one-day trip out of the question; so we did it comfortably in two and spent the intervening night in the seaport town of Bellingham. It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; indeed, I should think that the residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face. Twenty miles farther on, at a hamlet called Blaine, we were greeted by a huge sign whose staring letters read: “International Boundary.” On one side the Stars and Stripes floated over an eight-by-ten shanty; on the other side of this imaginary but significant line the Union Jack flapped in the breeze over a shanty a trifle larger. They are inquisitive, those British customs officials, and when they had finished with our car there wasn’t much they didn’t know about it. They inspected it as thoroughly as a Kaffir is inspected when he knocks off work in a South African diamond mine. Before entering Canada it is wise to obtain from the American authorities at the border a certificate containing a description of your car and all that it contains; otherwise you will be subjected to innumerable formalities upon entering the country again, while the Canadian laws require that a tourist desiring to remain more than eight days in the Dominion must provide a bond to cover the value of his car and make in addition a deposit of twenty-five dollars, both of which will be returned to him when he leaves the country. There is a grocer in Blaine—I forget his name, but he is a most obliging fellow—who makes a specialty of providing bonds for motorists, and by going to him we saved ourselves much trouble. It was all very informal. He simply called up the Canadian customs house on the phone and said: “Say, Bill, there’s some folks here that’s motorin’ into Canada. I ain’t got time to make out a bond just now, ’cause there’s an old lady here waitin’ to buy some potatoes, but you just let ’em skip through and I’ll fix it up the next time I see you.” Careless and informal, just like that. So all they did was to take the pedigree of the car for four generations, note the numbers of the spare tires, inventory the extra parts, go through our belongings with a dandruff comb, inquire where I was born, what the E. in my name stood for, and was I unfortunate enough to have to pay taxes; and, after presenting me with a list of the pains and penalties which I would incur if I broke any of his Majesty’s orders in council, permitted us to enter the territory of the Dominion.

[Illustration: WHERE THE SALMON COME FROM.

“It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; I should think the residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face.”]

I hope, for the sake of those who follow in our tire tracks, that the fifty miles of highway between Blaine and Vancouver has been materially improved since we went over it. Doubtless with the best intentions in the world, they had constructed a “crowned” road, which, as its name implies, is one that is rounded upward in the middle so as to drain the more readily; but, as a result of the rains, the sloping sides were so greasy that it was only with considerable difficulty that I kept the car from sliding into the ditch. There is one thing that the motorist must bear constantly in mind from the moment his front tires roll across the Canadian border, and that is _keep to the left_. Barring New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, British Columbia is the only Canadian province which retains the English system of turning to the left and passing to the right, and it takes an American some time to become habituated to it.

After seemingly endless miles of slippery going through dripping woods, we entered the outskirts of New Westminster, a prosperous seaport near the mouth of the Fraser and the oldest place in this region, as age is counted in western Canada. A splendid boulevard, twenty-five miles long, connects New Westminster with Vancouver, and the car fled along it as swiftly as an aeroplane and as silently as a ghost. The virgin forest dwindled and ran out in recently made clearings, where gangs of men were still at work dynamiting and burning the stumps; and on the cleared land neat cottages of mushroom growth appeared, and these changed gradually to two-storied, frame houses, and these again to the increasingly ornate mansions of the well-to-do, the wealthy, and the _rich_. Through the murk beyond them the white sky-scrapers of Vancouver shot skyward—memorials to the men who have roped and tied and tamed a savage land.

XIII

CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE