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to me, on embellishing lips, very much as legends of the Eskimos must have arrived south to Swell. “The same winds blow spring on all men’s dreams,” I read once from a folklorist. Whether there were a dozen ro-deoers or just four; whether they all lofted themselves in the barbed-wire steeplechase or just the rider with that starred chin: in the tale as it has whiffed to me, they are twelve and they soar.

Day Five
    Christmas.
    Carol steps from the airport ramp at 6:03 P.M. , five lofted hours from New Jersey. Swan in his lifetime managed to go from one coast of America to the other, and back, a half-dozen times. In the fourteen years of our marriage Carol and I have crisscrossed the continent on family visits or business so many times we have lost count.
    The retributive pun I have been saving for days—“Hey, I’ve heard of you. The Christmas Carol, right?”—draws her groan and grin. We hold each other, amid the community of hugs of families reuniting. The New Jersey report is good; her parents are in health, and chipper.
    Our car enters the freeway aqueduct of headlights streaming north to the city. We are to stop for Christmas dinner at the home of friends. On the table we can predict will be sauerkraut from her Baltimore, pecan pie from his Texas. Christmas Day of 1861 on the Strait, I read in the pages this morning, Swan set to work at this business of holiday dinner with similar seriousness. Duck stew and roast goose he produced for his guests, a pair of other batching pioneers, then brought out his gamble of the day. That autumn when a Makah canoeman had presented him a chunk of whale meat, Swan thoughtfully boiled it and chopped it, plopped in apples, raisins, wild cranberries, currants, brown sugar, salt, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, and a quart of rum, then crocked the works in a stone jar. These months later he cautiously offers to his guests slivers of the baked result. Lifts a forkful himself, chews appraisingly for a moment. The eyes of the holiday trio light in elation, and they hurry on to further helpings of the whalemince pie.

Days Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten
    I have begun to follow Swan exactly year by year through his long muster of diaries. His own brevets of identification still are on them—a small paper label on each cover where the title of a book would appear, the year inked there in his slanting hand—and upon opening the earliest diary, 1859, I found that it advertises itself as
Marsh’s Metallic Memorandum Book WITH METALLIC PENCIL The writing of which is as permanent as when written with
a claim I could now tell Swan is not nearly true. Luckily his experiment with Marsh’s wan stylus ended when Swan ran out of pages in the memo book on the last day of August and switched to a plain tan pocket notebook and an ordinary pencil of blessed black clarity. But it is back in those dimmest of pages, early 1859, that Swan’s daily words of his Pacific Northwest life commence: the twenty-ninth of January, when he embarked at San Francisco
on board ship Dashaway Capt J M Hill...bound for Pt Townsend, W.T.
    Â 
    When the
Dashaway
hove into Port Townsend on a morning in mid-February, a few weeks past Swan’s forty-first birthday, almost precisely at the midpoint of his life, the diary shows that Swan at once ruddered himself as many directions as there were routes of water spoking out from the little frontier port. The editor of the San Francisco
Evening Bulletin
had agreed to buy from him a series of articles about Washington Territory; what San Francisco didn’t take, Swan could readily place in one or another of the weekly papers in the fledgling port towns of Puget Sound; and there still hovered that proclaimed notion of his
to examine certain harbors, with a view of ascertaining the best
locality for a whaling station.
Whenever a ride could be hitched by schooner, steamboat, or canoe, then oil Swan would jaunt along the Strait or