Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1974 | Volume 25, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1974 | Volume 25, Issue 2
Among the visitors who tour Alaskan Way, the noisy street that arcs the Seattle waterfront, a few may wonder how to get to Alaska from there. Ships from Wrangell, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway used to berth there, but their last passengers crossed the gangway in 1954. Until then Seattle harbor was the jumping-off place for the North, steamships heading up through the Inside Passage and schooners coming down with yellow deckloads of spruce and hemlock. Now the takeoff is from the Seattle-Tacoma airport, where jets roar up into the rain. They touch down at Juneau three hours later, with breakfast on the way. A half century ago it was a week’s voyage to Alaska, and the lumber schooners took four times that long.
In 1923 downtown Seattle was beginning to spread northward and up the hill, and Pioneer Square with its tall totem pole in the little triangular park was not yet abandoned to skid row. Between voyages I lived down there in the three-story North Star Hotel, and I hung out in the Shipping Board’s hiring hall near the Colman Dock on Alaskan Way, or Railroad Avenue, as it was then called. One assignment I wanted was a run to Alaska. There were two regular services to what the travel literature called the “Top o’ the World,” the Alaska Steamship Company and the Admiral Line. When ships docked at Pier a, next to the Colman Ferry, I watched men come ashore—loggers, fishermen, old sourdoughs, young cannery hands, a few Indians—and wondered about the little towns up there under the huge mountains. Having made the China run in an Admiral liner, I was hoping for a job on one of their Alaska ships. There were four of them: Admiral Dewey, Admiral Rogers, Admiral Evans , and Admiral Watson . These “modern, fast and commodious vessels” were pictured in the Admiral Line’s window on Second Avenue. The Dewey was the newest and largest, but they all looked fine to me.
A recent reading of Ernest Gruening’s account of “Alaska: The Last Frontier” led me to unearth some old notebooks, and I found a grubby item called Pheasant Pocket Notes. Beneath a faded picture of a ring-necked bird are lines for Name and School. My name is inked there, less dimmed than one would expect after fifty-one years, and my school also. The school is “Pacific Ocean.” I think I remember buying the notebook in a secondhand bookstore on the corner of First Avenue and Yesler Way, but I had forgot about the pheasant and the school. At the top of the inside page is my word “Log.” In 1923 I was compiling thoughts rather than actualities—a literary error common to the young—and the log makes queasy reading now. It begins with the spacious observation that the countries of the world are encircled by the unknown, just as the continents are but islands in the encompassing sea. Box