THE BRAVEST BOAT
287
"You found our note, my darling."
Astrid drew from her pocket a scrap of paper and holding it
between them they bent over (though it was hardly legible by now ·
and they knew it off by heart) and read:
Hello.
My name is Sigurd Storlesen. I am ten years old. Right now I
am sitting on the wharf at Fearnought Bay, Clallam County, State
of Washington, U.S.A., 5 miles outh of Cape Flattery, on the Pacific
side, and my Dad is beside me telling me what to write. Today is
June 27, 1922. My Dad is a forest warden in the Olympic National
Forest but my Grandad is the lighthouse keeper at Cape Flattery.
Beside me is a small shiny canoe which you now hold in your hand.
It is a windy day and my Dad said to put the canoe in the water
when I have put this in and glued down the lid which is a piece of
balsa wood from my model airplane box.
Well must close this note now, but first I will ask you to tell
the Seattle Star that you have found it, because I am going to start
reading the paper from today and looking for a piece that says, who
when and where it was found.
Thanks. Sigurd Storlesen.
They came to the desolate beach strewn with driftwood, sculp–
tured, whorled, silvered, piled everywhere by tides so immense there
was a tideline of seaweed and detritus on the grass behind them, and
great logs and shingle-bolts and writhing snags, crucificial, or frozen
in a fiery rage-or better, a few bits of lumber almost ready to burn,
for someone to take home, and automatically they threw them up
beyond the sea's reach for some passing soul, remembering their own
winters of need-and more snags there at the foot of the grove and
visible high on the sea-scythed forest banks on either side, in which
riven trees were growing, yearning over the shore. And everywhere
they looked was wreckage, the toll of winter's wrath: wrecked hen–
coops, wrecked floats, the wrecked side of a fisherman's hut, its boards
once hammered together, with its wrenched shiplap and extruding
nails. The fury had extended even to the beach itself, formed in hum–
mocks and waves and barriers of shingle and shells they had to climb
up in places. And everywhere too was the grotesque macabre fruit of
the sea, with its exhilarating iodine smell, nightmarish bulbs of kelp
like .antiquated motor horns, trailing brown satin streamers twenty feet
