Two Miles Perched on the Lower Circle of a Rainbow
A Shelton legislator's private letter describing a steamer passage up Hammersley's Inlet becomes the best prose in the paper — a circle of prismatic color, starfish, glaciers and one awestruck captain.
Hon. A. H. Anderson, of Shelton, ought to have been a newspaper man, or a novel writer, instead of a capitalist. Here is something, says the Shelton Sentinel, from a portion of a private letter written by Mr. Anderson, with no thought that it would ever be made public; but all intelligent readers will enjoy it as an exquisite bit of word painting, and therefore its possessor felt justified in placing it on exhibition:
"Last Tuesday as we steamed from Olympia to Shelton and entered that wonderful arm of the sea called on the maps 'Hammersley's Inlet,' a watery ingress that is always interesting, because never twice alike; a river without source or delta; nervous and quiet; deep and shallow, flowing with the swift eagerness of a cascade and eddying in concentric circles among the constellations of star fish that gem its sombre shores, and then again flowing with the silent, stately majesty of a great river; a marvelous avenue to the sea that glacial chisels have sculptured out of almost adamantine cement; we saw an exquisitely beautiful phenomenon. From the deep green water, and athwart a high bank of tan brown just ahead of the boat, there seemed to rise a great band of prismatic color. Slowly it ascended and then with graceful curve dropped toward the opposite shore, and sweeping down to us mirrored the semi-circle in the water, so that a perfect circle of iridescence was formed around about us. We steamed for fully 15 minutes aureoled by its heavenly hues and apparently on the lower edge of the semi-circle; then the magic loop dissolved, and sweet Iris floated far away toward her Peacock Palace in the mystic recesses of the Olympics, as if afraid to linger longer in Neptune's embrace. The bronzed captain, always loquacious with anecdote and tales of his adventures, was silent in the awe-inspiring presence of the lovely visitant. With a face radiant with the inspiring scene just witnessed, he turned to me and said: 'Ah, my boy, my steamer may be old, slow, small and humpbacked, but I'll bet my life she is the only steamer in the world that has steamed over two miles perched on the lower circle of a rainbow.' He was right. The little dingy boat was the central figure in a picture that the art of ages could never hope to match."
“"My steamer may be old, slow, small and humpbacked, but I'll bet my life she is the only steamer in the world that has steamed over two miles perched on the lower circle of a rainbow."”
Hammersley's Inlet is still the crooked water road between Olympia and Shelton, still changing with every tide and light, and still crossed by people who mostly watch it through a windshield rather than a steamer's rail. Anderson's letter is a reminder that the South Sound's most quotable writing has often come from people who were not writers at all — legislators, captains, diarists — describing a place they assumed no one outside the county would ever read about.
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