PORT ANGELES — The past paddled into Freshwater Bay on Thursday afternoon, bound for a bright future.
The first four canoes to reach the Port Angeles area arrived from the Quinault and Hoh River tribes.
They had hoped to paddle to the mouth of the Elwha River, but stopped short due to rising winds and strong tides.
Among them were the three Quinault canoes “Hay-mee-si-soos,” “LeechoeEese” and “May-ee,” the last skippered by Alaina Capoeman, who’ll turn 31 before the 2005 Tribal Canoe Journey — the Paddle to Elwha — is over on Aug. 6.
She and her crew left Tahola on July 23 and then paddled into the mouth of the Hoh River.
“That was awesome,” Capoeman said as the paddlers beached their canoes at Freshwater Bay before towing them by trailer to the Lower Elwha Klallam Reservation.
“That was a pretty rough day,” she said, recalling 6- to 8-foot-high swells on the Pacific Ocean, high winds and fog.
From Hoh River, they paddled to the Quileute Reservation at LaPush and to the Makah Reservation at Neah Bay, reaching Pillar Point on Wednesday.
The journey was exhilarating, physically and spiritually, said Capoeman, in her second year as a skipper and on her ninth canoe journey.
“When you’re out there, it just sings,” she said of the water.
“It’s in my blood.”
Drawn into canoe culture
Capoeman said she was following an unwise path in life when a tribal elder involved her in the Quinaults’ tribal dancing program.
Eventually she was drawn into the canoe culture.
She and the 80 young “pullers” who paddle the canoes spent all the past year carving their paddles and learning the dances they will perform during the six-day festival that will run from Monday through Aug. 6.
With the journey over, “now it’s about visiting and catching up with old friends and singing songs and eating lots of good food,” she said of the coming weeklong celebration.
