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any case, the Swan trajectory now loops from the frontier Washington to the governmental Washington. But only until Stevens’s term in Congress concludes. Swan then swerves like an oiled windvane to the Pacific Northwest again.
    Not again to Shoalwater and the oystering life, however. On some amalgam of advice from Stevens that the community might be a comer and his own none-too-well-formed notion that he maybe would set up a supply station for whaling ships, Swan decides this time his site will be the customs port for Washington Territory, an aspiring frontier village called Port Townsend.
    The location was, and is, one of the most intriguing on this continent. The Strait of Juan de Fuca swings broadly in from the Pacific, a fat fjord between the Olympic Mountains of Washington and the lower peaks of British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, until at last, after a hundred miles and precisely at the brink of land which holds Port Townsend, the span of water turns southward in a long, sinuous stretch like an arm delving to the very bottom of a barrel. The topmost portion is Admiralty Inlet; the rest of the thrusting arm of channel is Puget Sound. I live at its elbow. This small valley which holds my house is one of the wrinkles in the Sound’s tremendous timber-green sleeves.
    So it is that there is a route I walk regularly, a few hundred strides along this suburban valley, to the bluff above my house for a studying look northwestward, to where the Sound bends off toward the Strait. Around that horizon, at six on the morning of February 13, 1859, Swan awakes aboard the schooner
Dashaway
to find the ship passing the lighthouse at Dungeness Spit, coming on the wind into these waters where he will spend the rest of his years.

Day Four
    Sour ink today, Swan’s and mine both. Again I am alone in the house, a week now, and the fact echoes. The cottony moodless weather which arrived yesterday does not help. No winter I have spent in the Pacific Northwest—this will make an even dozen—ever has been as grayly bland and excitementless as the season’s reputation. (“Oh,
Seattle
,” anyone from elsewhere will begin, and one of the next three words is “rain.”) There can be winter weeks here when the Pacific repeatedly tries to throw itself into the air and out across the continent, an exhilarating traffic of swooping storms. Other durations when the days arrive open-skied and glittering, the mountains of the Olympic and Cascade ranges a spill of rough white gems along two entire horizons. All else quiet, this modest valley invites wind, the flow of air habiting to the southwesterly mood of winter and arriving into this green vee like rainflow to a stream bed. Oceanburst or brave thin days of sun or spurting breeze, Northwest winter I enjoy as restless, startful; except that this gray first of morning, it has followed me onto dead center.
    To work, the reliable season of the alone. To Swan, that other winterer. As I have told, by the time Swan spoke good-bye to Matilda and the East in the first month of 1850 there were two children of the divided household: Ellen, four, and Charles, seven. In that moment Swan jettisoned them. Left daughter and son to Matilda and her lineal Boston colony as part of his passage price, which he seems to have been little enough agonized about assuming, for his leaving of New England.
    At about the age of Charles, I was jettisoned myself, by the death of my mother. Following my father up and down our Montana ranching valley I began to learn that a sundered family can heal strongly across the break. If, that is, the remaining parent possesses the strength of stubbornness, and I think it can be granted that Matilda likely had her share of that. Hard witness that I am today, then, I am able to wish for Charles and Ellen only that they could have come argonauting with Swan. To reverse him in the imagination from stepping aboard the ship to San Francisco is merely to see