The inverted pyramid

Item: one boy aged eighteen, name Roderick Norquay; one girl aged fifteen, named Mary Thorn; one gaudy cedar dugout canoe got up in the Siwash style of high-curving bow and stern, both ends grotesquely carved and brilliantly colored in flaming red, blinding yellow, piercing blue; one stretch of tiderace running swiftly between an island shore and a forbidding rock-strewn point.The tides of Fundy and the maelstroms of the Scandinavian coast have been variously hymned since Jules Verne vulgarized holy science and proved himself an unwitting prophet with Captain Nemo's submersible. But there are tides and maelstroms on the Pacific seaboard as worthy as these others, which have as yet no place in literature save through the dull medium of admiralty charts and blue-bound North Pacific pilot books. These sheets and tomes are thumbed and conned by men nowise concerned with that color, form, and substance which imparts magic to the written word. They seek therein only knowledge of reef and shoal, of anchorages, currents, depths, for the safe passage of their sea-borne keels.Rod Norquay, sitting on the shore of Little Dent, waiting for the flood tide to wax strong and the race of it through the choked pass to grow swifter, found himself wondering why no poet had sung the song of this swirling water; why no novelist had lovingly portrayed this land as a back drop for his comic and tragic puppets? Why was there no Iliad of the pioneers, no Human Comedy of men and manners peculiar to the North Coast? If McAndrews sighed for a Burns to sing the song of steam, so young Norquay found himself wishing that some one with the gift of living words could catch and transfix the beauty and majesty, the invisible yet pulsing spirit of his native land. That it deserved a Homer and a Burns he did not doubt. Rod had been reading Homer with his tutor that morning. Perhaps the thought in his mind now was only the reflex of a question put then.