Winter Brothers Quotes

“know the importance of making these collections and writing the Indian memoirs now, while we are among them and can get reliable facts, he once avows to Baird. The time is not distant, when these tribes will pass away, and future generations who may feel an interest in the history of these people will wonder why we have been so negligent.”
― Ivan Doig, Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America

“When we think of our once glorious Union, from its struggling commencement, to the culminating glory of its zenith, as Longfellow says, “We know what master laid the keel/What workmen framed thy ribs of steel . . . ” and then look upon the old ship of state as she now lies wrecked, broken, and apparently a total loss, it is almost enough to make a man doubt whether that Providence who has hitherto watched over us, has not for some national sin withdrawn from us for a season his protecting care. . . . But I am digressing from a commonplace letter on bird skins into topics that have puzzled wiser heads than mine.”
― Ivan Doig, Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America

“So laced and lush is this ecosystem that we walk our several miles through it today without making a footfall, only scuffs. Carol tells me that these Olympic rain forests and the rough coast to their west provide her the greatest calm of any place she has been. That she can walk in this rain forest and only be walking in this rain forest, moving in simple existence. Surprising, that, because neither of us thinks we are at all mystic. Perhaps, efficient dwellers we try to be, we simply admire the deft fit of life systems in the rain forest. The flow of growth out of growth, out of death . . . I do not quite ease off into beingness as she can. Memories and ideas leap to mind. I remember that Callenbach’s young foresters of Ecotopia would stop in the forest to hug a fir and murmur into its bark, brother tree. . . . This Hoh forest is not a gathering of brothers to humankind, but of elders. The dampness in the air, patches of fog snagged in the tree tops above, tells me another story out of memory, of having read of a visitor who rode through the California redwood forest in the first years of this century. He noted to his guide that the sun was dissipating the chilly fog from around them. No, said the guide looking to canyon walls of wood like these, no, “The trees is drinkin’ it. That’s what they live on mostly. When they git done breakfast you’ll git warm enough.” For a time, the river seduces me from the forest. This season, before the glacier melt begins to pour from the Olympic peaks, the water of the Hoh is a painfully lovely slate blue, a moving blade of delicate gloss. The boulder-stropped, the fog-polished Hoh. Question: why must rivers have names? Tentative answer: for the same reason gods do. These Peninsula rivers, their names a tumbled poem of several tongues—Quinault, Quillayute, Hoh, Bogashiel, Soleduck, Elwha, Dungeness, Gray Wolf—are as holy to me as anything I know. Forest again. For comparison’s sake I veer from the trail to take a look at the largest Sitka spruce along this valley bottom. The Park Service has honored it with a sign, giving the tree’s dimensions as sixteen feet four inches in diameter, one hundred eighty feet in height, but now the sign is propped against the prone body of the giant. Toppled, it lies like a huge extracted tunnel bore. Clambering onto its upper surface I find that the Sitka has burls, warts on the wood, bigger around than my body. For all that, I calculate that it is barely larger, if any, than the standard nineteenth-century target that Highpockets and his calendar crew are offhandedly devastating in my writing room. Evening, and west to Kalaloch through portals of sawed-through windfalls, to the campground next to the ocean. In fewer than fifty miles, mountain and ocean, arteried by this pulsing valley.”
― Ivan Doig, Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America

“Downtown is divided again, between the blocks of brick emporiums of the 1880s and a straggle of modern stores which look as if they have been squeezed from a tube labeled Instant Shopping Center.”
― Ivan Doig, Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America