As The Sailor Loves The Sea

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Text originally published in 1951 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

AS THE SAILOR LOVES THE SEA

BY

BALLARD HADMAN

Illustrations by the Author

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

DEDICATION 6

ILLUSTRATIONS 7

FOREWORD 8

CHAPTER 1—WHY THE PIONEER 9

CHAPTER 2—HOW THE SOURDOUGH 15

CHAPTER 3—DARK DAYLIGHT 29

CHAPTER 4—NO WIND THAT BLEW 39

CHAPTER 5—ALL TO CATCH THE FISH 55

CHAPTER 6—HEARTH AND HOME 62

CHAPTER 7—I SWALLOW THE ANCHOR 68

CHAPTER 8—TWENTY-EIGHT TO THIRTY-FOUR FEET 79

CHAPTER 9—PASSES LEAD BUT TO IMPASSE 91

CHAPTER 10—SITKA, OR HELL WON’T HAVE IT 98

CHAPTER 11—PAINTER INTO SAILOR 100

CHAPTER 12—WEATHER PERMITTING 109

CHAPTER 13—MISERIES LARGE AND SMALL 118

CHAPTER 14—TIDERIPS AND DENIZENS 127

CHAPTER 15—OUR LAVISH LAND 135

CHAPTER 16—SOUTH AND NORTH AGAIN 141

CHAPTER 17—WHEN THE HELM IS FOR HARBOR 147

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 154

DEDICATION

This books is for my Mother, Mimi,

for her continuing gallantry and

courage in the face of all possible adversity.

ILLUSTRATIONS

The camp had a look of serenity, of peace

The one and only Shorty

The potato garden

Jamie

The Naiad

Cape Addington

Harbor party

The Naiad running

The day we are not stormbound but should be

Map

Sperm whale blowing

Limestone headland below Cape Felix

Poles down—gear spread

FOREWORD

THERE are two points which should be explained in this book. First the map in the endpapers. I have telescoped distances radically along the axis of the coast from southeast to northwest. This was done in order to show in the greatest possible detail the capes and headlands of my favorite stretch of seacoast, which is by no means the most rugged but is to me the most lovely in that it is familiar, decorative, and expresses well the character of our country. My fishermen friends, looking at this map, will suffer a strange sensation of having overrun their landmarks all at once. For this I hope they will forgive me, because it is otherwise recognizable.

The other point has been a curious difficulty. By now I’m a bone-marrow Alaskan; his attitudes are mine, almost without my knowing how it came about. Matters both dramatic and dangerous fall into one of two categories to your Alaskan. They are either cause for monumental belly laughter, or damned foolishness. So when it comes to dangers and dramatics about them, I have by no means been able to measure up as occasions demanded.

CHAPTER 1—WHY THE PIONEER

IMMUTABLE processes of nature being what they are, quite a few Alaskans are born. But most are made, and made by happenstance, pure and simple. To the category of happenstance Alaskans I belong. Before I unwittingly became an Alaskan, I was a citizen at large all over the western states—from Wyoming to Montana to Arizona to California.

Originally, I came north on what was to be a painting trip of some six or eight weeks’ duration. Twelve years have vanished in a mysterious, limber-legged fashion since then. A state of affairs which causes me to be jolted at times by a sense of dislocation common to all mortals, when they must wonder just what witless operation of fate has brought them to their present pass.

Then I say to myself: You’ve missed too many boats. This is standard Alaskan to cover this particular circumstance and it means that, for better or worse, you are inexorably bound to a land remote, immense, lonely and dark; as savage a wilderness as ever challenged man.

A pioneering heritage eases the path exceedingly for the neophyte Sourdough, and to have that is a large portion of my good fortune—a double-barreled pioneering heritage, in fact. There were nothing but pioneers behind both my parents since the country began.

Mimi, my mother, was born in a mining camp in Arizona, north of the present town of Kingman. Mineral Park is a ghost town, filled with silence, fabricated of hopes long since dead in the desert heat. Among the crumbling adobe houses, there is a deep square walled in stone. In that deep square, which used to be a basement, Mimi’s family were all killed, most tragically, when their adobe house caved in upon them. Mimi, then three and a half years old, and her brother Madison were the only survivors. So, for all the circumstances of her birth, Mimi, who was sent east to her aunt, had a most conventional upbringing. A Scotch Calvinist upbringing, executed by the Shorter Catechism, back in Wisconsin. The free-footed pioneer and the inhibited Calvinist have battled within Mimi ever since, tug-of-warring, pulling this way and that, most uncomfortably.

There was no conflict in my father, who was a doctor. He couldn’t have been anything but a pioneer in his own particular way. He was very tall, very dark, with soft deep-set eyes and a powerful high-bridged aquiline nose. This nose is a persistent family mark. It is always asked of another: Does he have the nose? Yes, I have the nose, in a somewhat reduced, more feminine version. In total effect, my father looked rather like a cross between Somerset Maugham and General MacArthur.

After Dad had finished his medical training, his inherently restless blood drove him far and wide. He was for a time in the Florida Everglades, then sailed as ship’s surgeon to the Orient. When word of the gold rush in Alaska filtered through to him, he abandoned the sweating Philippines with all possible speed and headed north in late ‘98 or early ‘99. He was shipwrecked in Robert Louis Stevenson’s old yacht the Casco and lived with the Eskimos for a time until he could make his way to Dutch Harbor.

It was shortly after his return from Alaska that he and Mimi met and were married. Mimi had made a pilgrimage to Arizona to see the mining camp where she had been born and to meet her relatives, particularly her aunt, Ida Crozier, who had run her immense cattle ranch since before Arizona attained statehood. It was then that Mimi came to know and love the West. Those were the days of the private hospitals, which served great stretches of the raw, growing western states. And so it was that Mimi and Dad built a life that suited them, working together in their own private hospital, and made their contribution to the development of their area. They had a wonderful time doing it too, because it took a pioneer to be a doctor in the West during the early years of this century—and it took a pioneer to be that doctor’s wife.

Thus it came about one early evening, just in time for dinner, I was born in Laramie, Wyoming. If I have to be specific about this matter, I can only say that I’m now crowding the time when life is supposed to begin. I was a most unprepossessing bantling of some four pounds displacement, the runt of the litter. Though after the fashion of mothers—and a touching tribute to her devoted nature—Mimi thought me beautiful. Various neighborhood Cassandras prophesied an early, if not immediate, doom for me, which reduced Mimi to tears, because she secretly thought so too. God knows, considering the thorny times I’ve given her down the years, she surely must have wished they had been right.

Dad snorted with professional disgust at the witchwives’ predictions, dried Mimi’s tears, and took us all on a big game hunt into the Jackson Hole, which was not then furnished with tourists. It took twelve days by pack train. Mimi packed me, then three months old, on a papoose board bought from the Shoshone Indians in Fort Washakie. Mimi tells me that I flourished and grew plump teething on elk and moose steak. If, as we are told, early impressions are most important, this probably predisposed me to much that has since happened. And I still prefer venison or moose to beef or lamb.

Father stopped again in Fort Washakie to have the moose and elk hides he had taken tanned and painted with magnificent pictographs of the Buffalo hunt. He had a small tepee made of the painted hides, which was the only doll house I ever had. From the painted hides my brothers and I learned to read pictographs as other children do kindergarten books.

I like to think that one of my earliest memories is, in the very nature of things, not known to many of my generation. It is a memory of deep emotional happiness, made of a mountain road bumping along between towering walls of timber, the smell of horses, the small sounds of their harness. In it, too, are the warm voices of Mimi and Dad on the wagon seat ahead. But the very essence is the beat of rain on a canvas top. This memory is somehow out of its time, it is a covered-wagon memory.

Dad’s theories for bringing up his brood consisted of liberating them into an unfettered childhood. Necessities were an open sweep of country, furnished with mountains, lakes and rivers, a catholic assortment of animals, a pony per child, and a breech-clout for modesty. Wherever we went a library of some five thousand volumes went, because this scheme of life required mental furniture, and Dad had a trenchant belief in books as a medium of education. We never had to be coaxed to read, in our quieter moments.

The wide horizons of our childhood were not serene; we did our best to fill them with varied projects, for the most part hazardous in the extreme. Passers-by, in consternation, used to say, You children are going to get hurt! And we always answered them cheerily, and as we thought reassuringly, Oh, that’s all right—our father’s a doctor! It gave us great confidence. Though Father did much free practice patching up abrasions, contusions, lacerations and broken bones for the neighborhood children who got themselves involved in our pursuits, he took the long view of his children’s injuries, believing them minor in comparison to the heritage of health and resilience we were acquiring.

We ranged far and wide on our ponies, making our own cross-country shortcuts to distant ranches, sometimes as much as forty miles in a day. We must have had excellent bumps of direction, for we were never lost. We knew many strange places, great broken rimrock country, mountain trails others didn’t know, and an old emigrant trail which snaked about through the foothills. It was grassy and soft, with rut upon rut cut deep by many wagon wheels, spreading hundreds of yards wide in places.

We had curious lunch packets Dad had found somewhere, capacious canvas envelopes which, stuffed to bursting, buckled onto our belts. For us no saddlebags, because we whooped along bareback. At times we rode with an Indian war bridle, a long rope tied to the pony’s lower jaw. This was for convenience—with the rope we could picket the animal to graze. We had endless postures. We rode standing up, we rode crosswise, we rode with an elbow over the withers and a leg hanging downward, we rode full length on our tummies; but only at a walk—too bumpy otherwise.

We swam our ponies along with ourselves and sometimes shampooed them from nose to tail in an excess of cleanliness. We used up the family shoe polish on their hooves, roached their manes, trimmed their foretops and clipped long hair out of their ears like conscientious barbers. We shoved sugar lumps in their mouths which they promptly spat out, though a horse is not supposed to be able to spit. Not only could my pony spit, he had other exotic accomplishments. He could shake hands, answer questions, play dead and kiss me; and why he didn’t bite the daylights out of me, I shall never know. He went through this repertory in an attitude of obdurate disgust.

This all came about because I had badgered Father into buying me a correspondence course in training horses. I do not think the S.P.C.A. would approve such goings-on, but they got results, even with my pony. His name was Billy, and to me he was the very perfection of equine excellence, though I now know that he was a recalcitrant beast—amazingly unattractive. He looked more like a mule than a horse and wore a perpetually brooding cynical look in his half-shut eyes, as well he might, considering the life I led him.

My brother John’s black mare Topsy was a dreamy beast who appeared to inhabit a world of her own. She was for the most part tractable, but daft, which caused our rabbit hunts to be unexpectedly sporting. No matter who shot the rabbit, I stood by to run down Topsy, who went blind and bolted at the spat of our .22 rifles. John always stuck like a limpet, but he could neither stop nor turn her. Topsy caught, we then retraced our course to see if we’d got our rabbit.

Returning from a rabbit hunt one day, we found a man camped by the river who wanted to sell a buggy, harness, mare and colt for twenty dollars. We galloped home bearing tidings of this phenomenal bargain to Father. We had instantly earmarked that colt for a peculiarly evil fate, which was to us the solution of an uncouth problem involving our monkey, Jocko, who was an enthusiastic participant in all our doings. Of course, riding with Jocko had specialized hazards of an unpleasant nature. He rode all over the horse from ears to tail. He would slide down the pony’s tail, race to the roadside, pluck a wild sunflower, race back and shinny up the pony’s leg. The pony kicked at this, because horses have the inborn conservatism of the Philadelphian. But worse was Jocko’s uninhibited attitude about natural necessities. When Jocko piddled down the pony’s flank, the pony bucked with resentment, unexpectedly. Since Jocko bestowed his favors impartially from horse to horse, our progress was somewhat in the nature of a traveling rodeo.

We did want that colt. Father bought the entire outfit, though he swore that it must have been stolen. First we set about to halterbreak that poor little bay baby. She kicked every child in the neighborhood in the process and Dad had a busy time of it. Once she could be led, we strapped a surcingle around her, chained Jocko to it, and she was Jock’s own mount. She bucked wildly, but soon became reconciled to her premature start in a life of servitude. If she lagged behind, Jocko bit her. Not unreasonably, she developed into the meanest filly ever known.

Jocko had entered our lives with a cageful of monkeys for Father’s research, but since it was obvious that he had been a pet, he promptly became ours. He loved my father and me, tolerated my brothers, and loathed Mimi, who returned the favor—with ample reason. Jocko invented tortures both subtle and outrageous to inflict upon Mimi. There was the day the church ladies called, for instance. As they were leaving, Jocko raced into the yard chasing Patsy, the terrier. He caught her, and with a sly leer reached between her legs and pinched her indelicately. He then executed, with impertinence and abandon, an exhibitionistic gesture—a gesture of the sort that causes idiots who do likewise to be put in jail for the public good. No, Mimi had no love for Jocko.

We must have had at one time or another every known pet or animal. There was an owl, impassive and unsocial, a fey wild coyote cub and Mike, the deodorized skunk, who feuded with the cats, stamping his feet and firing what we referred to as blank cartridges. There were a pair of Angora goats to drive in harness, a delightful mode of travel in which the destination was never ours, but the goats’. Cats were ever present with kittens in countless numbers. There was Vixen, the cat who slapped us if we whistled and Blackamoor, the savage tom who whipped all the dogs for blocks around. Jill, the beautiful Airedale, filled our lives with puppies of rare and raffish charm—if inelegant parentage. And there was Oz, a large, black lanky hound. Oz drooped at both ends and slogged about on his big feet and I don’t know now why I loved him so desperately, but I did. Oz had two main occupations: paving the lawn of the people next door with hospital garbage and holding a galloping witches’ sabbath on the roof over Mimi’s defenseless head during the night. He never did this when Father was home—he knew.

Mimi was the very soul of patience about our alfresco zoo; even the hideous treatment dealt out by Jocko she managed to tolerate. She never minded the frogs and toads we collected, though once we liberated a five-gallon canful of them—a fruitful morning’s take—in the sun porch. Under duress, we removed them from the sun porch and put them under the house, where they carried on nobly, singing their frog song under the floors each evening at dinner time—to the exquisite bafflement of guests. But it was the snakes we carried about buttoned into pockets on our briskets that were Mimi’s cross. At the sight of one, she would shriek and fall to pieces. John used to be mystified when he would find an eloquent loop of string where he had just tied up a valuable snake. Our pockets were much safer; we coiled the snakes carefully around our fingers, shoved them in and buttoned the flaps. No snake ever poked his head out of the pocket, flickering a red, forked tongue, unless Mimi was close, and the closer the better.

Father went east periodically to keep up with new developments in medicine and surgery, and so it happened that this wholly satisfying mode of life was interrupted by periods of formal schooling. This was, too, in concession to the more conventional family connections to eastward, who seemed to feel that we children were not precisely being fitted for life in the beau monde. These were times of nightmare, for if our eastern schoolfellows found us exotic, it was nothing to what we found them. My principal discoveries were certainly not in the curriculum, and caused me forever after to have a sort of suffering compassion for other little girls.

Unhappily, and amazingly, other little girls had not such treasures as were mine. They could play cooking, they could play sewing, they could play house, they could play dolls. Most depressing of all, they had always to mind their manners and keep clean. So firmly restricted were their tidy lives they couldn’t know they had no horizons, no freedom.

These eastern interludes, however, opened the world of art, the world of galleries and museums. I shall never forget my first, the Chicago Art Institute. It was such an overwhelming experience that even now the sight of the great bronze lions standing guard above the steps raises the same anticipatory thrill that used to all but burst apart my spindling ribs at eight years old. There is no time within my memory when I was not drawing and painting. I painted with house paints, with barn paints. There exists somewhere an early venture into landscape, executed when I was about age four, of three trees and three mountains, topped by a violent sunset executed with Mimi’s lipstick. Once introduced to art, I had no doubts whatever of my medium and my objectives—no small discovery for a youngster.

To my fledgling artist’s eye, Mimi and my father were so beautiful a sight together that it gave me much pleasure during all my childhood. They complemented each other well, my dark and handsome father, and Mimi of the red-gold hair and soft heavy-lidded brown eyes, the rose-petal skin. Mimi’s hair was a marvel; it swung, fascinatingly, below her knees, the luminous red-gold of a new-minted coin. This is literally true. My father derived much pleasure matching a gold coin to Mimi’s hair, while we children marveled. Mimi loved beautiful clothes, which she adorned so well, and luxuries and jewels. Dad had an admirable system for each new baby—Mimi had more jewels. There was a big diamond for redheaded brother Charles, rubies and diamonds for brother John, a diamond fleur-de-lis set with a big pearl for me.

The devoted relationship between Mimi and Dad was as lovely as their charming looks; if they ever had a hasty word, we never knew it. Dad, leaving the hospital on some trivial errand, gave an impression of departure for foreign parts in executing his farewells. No peck on the cheek, but sumptuous kisses, lingering and heartfelt, ardent and numerous. A block or two away, he’d speed back for just one more. Though they had been married something more than twenty years, marriage was never routine. It was nothing so immature as a perpetual honeymoon, but rather a hard-working, shoulder-to-shoulder marriage, filled with gaiety, with intimate fun. We children always knew we never came first with our parents because they came first with each other. After each other, we came first, which gave a deep security to us when small.

So it was even more of a tragedy for Mimi than it would have been for most people when my father died very suddenly on Thanksgiving Day, when I was fifteen years old. Because no one could replace Dad, Mimi