Excerpt | My Site

August 1915

Edna couldn’t understand why anyone, given the choice, would prefer to stay inside on a beautiful day. But sometimes, she wasn’t given the choice.

So she stole it. Like she had today.

The pungent, salty smell of mud hung on the air. It seemed to be the very air itself. Coasting gulls called out over the bay, and the afternoon sun beat down on the top of her head, warming her dark-brown braids.

The heat created a heaviness all around her that made her ears buzz and her head spin. She gingerly touched the part in her hair, her fingers grazing the tender skin. With the shimmering seawater and sticky mudflats at her back, she headed—tired, happy, and hungry—toward the footpath that led up the shady green bank.

Her scalp hurt, just slightly. She knew she’d have to hide the burn from her mother’s sharp, dark eyes.

On her way down to the shore hours earlier, Edna had left her yellow straw sunhat under a tree on the side of the road, tucked safely in the shade, out of the reach of the wind and dust, and hidden from the curious eyes of passersby. Travelers were often seen on Bay View Road. Neighbors used it to reach the cemetery and the white Bay View Methodist Episcopal Church. A main route from La Conner in the south to Edison up north, the dirt road was also one way to reach Samish Island, where the US Navy was building dykes and digging ditches to create a connection with the mainland.

Her home, the Breazeale family farm, was just a half mile up the road from where she’d picked her way down the bank that morning. She was one of only a few young ladies living in the vicinity, and her house was the closest one to the steep footpath to the beach. Even though she was nineteen and a recent high school graduate, anyone who spotted her black-ribboned sunhat could easily have raised the alarm with her mother. And she definitely needed that less than she needed her hat flying off her head.

When she’d hidden the hat away on the far side of a giant fir hours earlier, she’d placed a stone on the wide brim to make sure it stayed in place. Edna knew that if she’d worn it to the beach, the strong wind that flowed down from the Strait of Juan de Fuca and played along the shores of Padilla Bay could have easily and happily plucked it from her head and sent it sailing, just for fun, out into the mudflats. Or even the bay. And she couldn’t risk losing it and having to return, no hat in hand, to her mother’s accusing, rapid-fire questions.

She’d figured a light-pink scalp would be easier to hide than a missing hat.

Edna went as carefully as she could up the footpath she and her older brothers, Fred and Marcellus, had worn into the hillside over the years. But it wasn’t easy in her long dress—even the lightweight but durable one she’d chosen that morning. She’d known she’d be subjecting it to the beach, the bank, and the mud. Now, as she climbed back up the bank, her skirt kept catching on twigs, and the blackberry brambles reached out and snatched at her as if to say, “No, don’t go.”

She envied the boys their pants.

Edna smiled, remembering the day she’d borrowed a bicycle from a boy at Burlington High School, determined to ride it home instead of taking the train. She’d pulled up her skirt, climbed on, and ridden happily along despite all the shocked faces of the people she sailed past. Their expressions made it clear that girls weren’t meant to ride bicycles. Sometimes she thought girls weren’t meant to be free, have opinions, or follow the ways of their own minds.

“A girl has two legs just like a boy has, of course. And a brain. They work just the same,” she told a squirrel that was watching her slow progress up the bank.

When she was about halfway up, the bottom of one shoe slid a little bit on loose pebbles, and she gasped as she froze, arms out to her sides, balancing herself. One pebble skittered off the path, bounced over the side, and disappeared with a thwack into the salal growing out of the side of the hill. The beach, with its crazily arranged driftwood, was far below her. The thought of falling scared her and made her heart pound. But she also felt a little thrill—a shiver of adventure and danger.

The feeling of freedom.

As she continued working her way up the familiar path, A few kind branches offered helping hands as she pulled herself along, using muscle memory from more than a decade of scrambling up and down the hillside that stood between Bay View Road and the mudflats.

That morning, she’d told her mother, Anna, that she was going down to Farm to Market Road to visit Elsie Lowen, a friend from school, to talk about a charity the church was organizing. She’d begged a few hours of freedom from the kitchen, promising her assistance with dinner and any other chores her mother wanted to heap on her in exchange.

But she’d never had any intention of sitting inside on a glorious summer day, talking about collecting supplies for the war-torn Belgians and listening to gossip about classmates.

It was a low tide. So instead, she’d headed for the beach.

Herons, kelp, and otters were far more interesting than Elsie and her stories about her sweethearts. The sandpipers had long left their nests and were foraging along the tideline—running and stopping, running and stopping—and leaving tiny, shallow footprints that disappeared in a blink.

Edna loved to sit on a piece of smooth, gray driftwood to watch the seagulls floating on the breeze, their little heads tilting this way and that. Sometimes, harbor seals would bob and bark in the waves. She might also see a bald eagle fishing in the bay. They built their huge nests in the trees that lined the road so they’d have the best of both hunting worlds—the fields behind her, where rabbits and mice hid, and the bay before her, which provided the eagles with a diet of fish and careless shorebirds.

That morning, the sun had warmed the mud, where water the tide had left behind looked like sapphire lace under the blue sky. Edna had explored the shoreline, watching the water sparkle and feeling the wind. She’d stretched out her arms on the vacant beach and let the wind ripple her dress, snapping it behind her as she smiled, eyes closed, up at the sun. The wind smelled salty and reminded her of the fish her father, John Henry, sometimes brought home for dinner. When it gathered steam for an extra-strong gust, it snatched her breath away as it roared around her and battered her ears. She knew that the wind pushed the water and shaped the land and the trees, which could not get out of its way. But she was just a girl, standing on the mud, who could run to the safety of the bank or jump behind a log if she chose.

When she opened her eyes, she looked around at the green-and-black humps of little islands that spread out across the water. They reminded her of the lumps her cats made when they napped on her bed under a quilt—happy little mounds that planted themselves where she otherwise wouldn’t expect them to be.

Scattered white clouds bounced above the islands, sending shadows gliding over trees and the water. She liked to imagine those clouds starting their journey in Alaska, then finding their way into Puget Sound like the ships that came pouring in with goods from California and the Far East.

Everywhere she looked above her and beyond, there was something interesting to see.

But the world below her feet was just as fascinating. Air bubbles popped in the black mud, and she’d tried to picture the clams and geoducks deep below the surface. She thought about the Indian women and children she’d seen over the years, digging on the beach, their slouching, woven baskets heavy with piles of tightly closed gray shells.

Edna always hoped to see the family when she visited the beach. She liked their glossy black hair and the quiet, efficient way they caught fish and dug clams. As far as she knew, none of them lived near her. But she’d seen them walking softly down the hill and through what was called the cedar breaks—an area of springs and giant trees. She’d been told they made fires from driftwood and cooked their clams up there, in the cool, damp shade. In that area, her father and brothers had found baskets and chisels—including a beautiful jade-colored one that made Edna think of frozen moss. John Henry had told them that Indians had left them behind. Edna, Fred, and Marcellus would examine the items and try to guess what they’d been used for and how they’d been made.

She’d heard some classmates say unkind things about the Indians. But she couldn’t imagine what those graceful, quiet people could ever have done to make others talk about them so. They lived differently and dressed differently from Edna and her neighbors. And she was wildly curious about the language they spoke. But differences intrigued her. Edna couldn’t see how they made anyone better or worse than anyone else. For all she knew, the Indians thought the white people were the different ones.

Of course, she’d heard in school the stories about massacres and scalpings in the Midwest. But her own personal experience didn’t give her any reason to hate the local tribes. She’d rather draw her conclusions based on what was right in front of her. And as much as she respected what she learned in school, it didn’t always match what she learned at home.

Although Edna didn’t remember life before Washington, she’d heard her parents’ nostalgia-laced stories about their time in Indian Territory, where her oldest brother was born. Belle Starr, the famous outlaw, had been their neighbor, and her Cherokee husband, Jim July, had offered to give the newborn boy an Indian pony if her parents gave him an Indian name. Her brother had ended up being Albert Marcellus instead and didn’t get the pony, but her parents always spoke kindly of Belle, Jim, and their Cherokee family. John Henry and Anna had been young and newly married, living away from family, and navigating life on their own for the first time. Belle and her people had offered advice, help, and friendship.

Now, on the Pacific Coast and far away from the plains, her parents still looked kindly and respectfully on their native neighbors. As for Edna, every time she saw someone from the Samish tribe, she thought with awe about the most remarkable sight she’d ever witnessed.

She’d been very young at the time. One late spring day about dusk, her brothers were outside finishing up chores they’d neglected, and her mother was down the road, helping a neighbor woman who’d just had a baby. Edna was playing on the kitchen floor with her brothers’ toy train when her father came in from the fields. He bent over her and whispered, “Come with me. I have something to show you.”

Curious, she took his hand and stood up as he wrapped a small blanket around her shoulders.

Then they walked hand in hand out of the house and into the spring twilight, down the path, and across the road to the edge of the bank, her small feet hurrying to keep up with his larger ones. As they got closer to the cliff, Edna heard a strange and unfamiliar sound floating up from the water.

When they stopped, her father picked her up, blanket and all, and pointed down into the bay below them. Together, they peered through the gaps in the trees, and he said, “There. See the lights?”

The sun had just set over the mountains on the other side of Puget Sound, bringing a tender, new darkness. But a small amount of light lingered, like the memory of the day just passed. In that fading slip of sun, she could see a dozen or more dark shapes moving smoothly on the surface of the water, solemnly gliding just off shore. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular. Instead, it was like they were pacing, up and down the shoreline, back and forth.

But what struck Edna with awe was that each dark shape carried a single glowing flame, casting fiery sparkles onto the inky, rippling bay. Rings of golden light spread out from each shape, intersecting with the rings from the other shapes as a dozen paddles dipped in and out of the gold and black water.

“Those are Indian canoes,” her father said reverently.

She couldn’t imagine why anyone would be out on a boat in the dark. Her parents had stressed to her and her brothers the dangers of being near the water after nightfall. Fearing for the Indians’ safety, Edna dragged her gaze away from the sight and turned to her father. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was shaped like an O, prepared to ask the questions that were tumbling through her head.

However, John Henry shook his own head before she could start. “They have torches of some sort,” he said, his eyes still on the sight before them. “But no, I don’t know why.”

Edna looked back out to the water, processing his answer.

“What’s that sound?” she whispered.

“I think they’re singing.”

The Indians chanted all night long as they paddled back and forth just beyond the shore. Edna and her father stood on the side of the road for the longest time, him holding her up so she could see the golden firelight drifting on the ever darker water. The songs were mournful but beautiful, and they made Edna’s heart ache with sadness and a strange kind of peace.

When her father finally carried her home through the pitch black, her head on his shoulder, she thought long and hard about what she’d seen. Where did they come from? she wondered. And why are they so sad?

Her family hadn’t lived in Bayview long. So, the next Sunday at church, her parents asked neighbors if they knew what had happened that night. The neighbors reported that the Samish chief had died.

Edna and her father had been uninvited guests to his otherworldly funeral.

Ever since then, she’d thought of the Indians as magical. The combination of fire and sea, and peace and pain intrigued her. She would have loved to ask them about it—having always wondered if perhaps she’d dreamed the whole thing. But the Indian women and children, when she saw them, would stare briefly at her, then quietly turn their backs. They didn’t seem to want to talk to her. They spoke only to each other, then hurried away with their harvest.

The women and children came to the beach to work. The beach was a source of food for them. It was something valuable that they used, much like Edna and her mother used their kitchen at home. The Indians came, worked, and then left. No one else seemed to come to the mudflats just to be. Which was why Edna usually had the beach to herself.

Thinking again about the canoes of fire, she bent over and poked a hole in the mud, marveling at how silky soft it was as it closed over the tip of her finger. Farther down the beach, she picked her way around a mound of black bullwhip kelp. She was tempted to stomp on its giant bulbs to watch the water squirt out.

Just before heading back toward the path, she’d found a fat, purple starfish the fickle tide had left behind. It was slowly inching toward the water while tiny waves—more like gentle breaths of the sea than waves—licked at it, calling it home. She imagined that the creature had found its fill of the sun and longed to return to the cool, dark depths of the bay.

“If you just wait long enough, you see,” she said to the starfish, “the tide will come back for you.”

Edna never tired of the beach. The ever-changing space where salt water met the land—not far from where the Skagit River flowed into the sea—was magical, like the Samish themselves. Filled with movement and change and noise and scents and sensations, it felt like a place where life pulsed and emerged from the earth itself, filling the sky with wonder.