Taking the side-wheel steamer south form Bellingham Bay to the river mouth, they had to go through Deception Pass. All day John Ireland, standing on deck, heard the men talking about this narrow trickle on the coast between the cliffs, where current overpowered steam engines.
When their side-wheel steamer, the Patty Robinson, approached Deception Pass, John Ireland, piloting the rail, saw that there were two passages between the forested cliffs. In both, white foam swirled in whirlpools; the current was against them. The captain chose the wider channel. From the rail John Ireland reckoned the channel looked too narrow for the steamer; he judged the young captain "cold-out crazy" to crank up steam. The entered the foaming slot, the wind tore his hair. The gray and brown rock walls high overhead cast a chill shade. Gulls screeched and dove by the smokestack. The current was fast as the wind; it surged against the hull, rattled the deck, and splashed the passengers and freight. The captain tried to hug the south bank to catch the back eddy. Backwash rolled the boat and raised a wheel, whose spinning clattered in the air. Beside either rail, near enough almost to touch, the pitted rock walls, grown with green ferns, firs, cedar, and twisting red madrone trees, seemed to converge. When the wall crushed the steamer, the hissing whirlpools in the current would carry them under the sea. There yellow crabs as big as their faces would eat them alive, and their bones would swirl on forever.
At once, the deck's trembling doubled and the wheels slowed. The red madrone trees they had passed now reappeared, the cliffs loomed, and John Ireland saw himself sliding backwards, and the world receding. He looked up at Mr. Tamoree, beside him at the rail, and saw that the skin drawn over his cheeks was gray, and his expression frozen. The engineer, his father, and other men passed cordwood and slabwood into the firebox. In a brigade, shouting, they handed up every stick of wood on deck. In all the din he heard the captain, with pleasure in his voice, roar for bacon: "Get me the bacon, the bacon!"
Someone rushed two sides of bacon from the deck to the house; John Ireland watched the captain seize them in both hands and throw them whole into the firebox to stoke the boiler. Black smoke billowed from the stack, and the boiler roared as if it would bust. The deck groaned; the wheels churned and bit in. The boy's heart pounded in the racket while the balance of forces shifted. Now the rock walls slid back over the stern and delivered them into the wide and lighted world in perfect silence, in a glassy calm, on water hushed and pale as the sky.
From The Living by Anne Dillard.
An historic novel about life in Watcom
(what is now Bellingham, Washington) in the late 1800's.