In the spring of 1880, five lives arrive at the edges of the Port Washington Narrows.

Piapach has been reading these tideflats for fifty years, recording the shore in cedar bark notation that no land office will ever recognize. Nathaniel Sargent crosses from Tacoma in a Croatian fisherman's dory, carrying a phrase he will never translate and an axe he intends to use. William Webster drives a fence post into the Illahee clay and finds something his mind declines to name. Charles Mitchell watches from the stern rail of a Mosquito Fleet steamer as the survey stakes go ashore. And in a Seattle office, a young German immigrant named William Bremer looks west across the Sound and begins to draw a city that does not yet exist.

By 1891, the city exists. The Puget Sound Naval Station rises on the west shore. The east shore — Enetai and Illahee — is designated a strategic buffer zone, and the ground that five people spent eleven years building lives on is reduced to a line item on a federal appraisal.

ENETAI AND ILLAHEE, AND THE PAPER CITY is a novel about what the grid cannot see — the tidal record, the fence line with its inexplicable jog, the six-note phrase carried twelve miles inland and played for birds that do not know its language. It is a novel about the difference between a deed and the ground the deed describes, between the city that gets built and the world that gets cleared to build it.

The water carries both shores in a single indifferent channel.

It remembers everything.

A Novel of the Port Washington Narrows