The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (2 page)

My intention is to toss Grandpa’s remains on the east side of the mountain, away from Camp Muir, so the ashes will scoot with Rainier’s runoff
until they blend with the trout streams below. First, though, I have to get him to the high point of the White River, where the drip of glacier melt and gravity conspire to form a common flow. We park the car at Sunrise Lodge, 6,400 feet above sea level, just below timberline, facing a crest of the Cascades where William O. Douglas roamed as a boy. The late Supreme Court Justice, a thin-haired noodle of a man who favored lonely alpine meadows and young wives, was that rare breed from another time, the Renaissance Man of the American West: lawyer, author, outdoorsman, lover. He was equally at home under a dripping canvas pup tent or in the halls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In his later years, the sage of Goose Prairie, a hamlet just over the crest, was quite worn down; paranoid in the Nixon era, he feared that the FBI would grow marijuana plants on his Cascade Mountain ranch in an effort to trap him. In fitting tribute, a large tract of wild country that surrounds Goose Prairie is now the William O. Douglas Wilderness. The growing season is too short, the winds too harsh, for pot, something the FBI or a good defense lawyer would soon have learned.

The old visitors center at Sunrise is closed for the season. The grass nearby has the stiff, brown look of vegetation which has felt the sting of first frost. We find a trail leading up to the headwaters of the White River, Grandpa in the pack on my back, Joni carrying a bottle of a local Chardonnay. The day, by midmorning, is as bright as a calendar page. The huckleberry bushes are aflame, low red borders holding berries sweetened by the chill set against subalpine spruce. The cold nights have not been enough to freeze up the tarns and small lakes filling scooped-out bowls along the way. Here and there, deer poke around the edges.

After a thousand feet or so of elevation gain, the 12,307-foot summit of Mount Adams first appears to the southeast, in and out of view as we scale the ridges, its ice crown shining like a bald man doing chin-ups in the morning sun. Adams, in most other parts of the world, would be revered, a national park at least; here, in an area once said to have enough mountain scenery to fill a half-dozen Switzerlands, it is a seldom-visited sentinel in a ravaged land. Weyerhaeuser, the world’s biggest lumberjack, owns most of the land between here and Mount Adams, at least that which is not ice or rock. They’ve left their usual calling cards, stumps and clearcuts.

We are breathing heavily now, taking in the chill air and exhaling exuberance. I kiss Joni, a native of Pittsburgh, where the rivers struggle to hold some hint of natural life. With every step upward, I feel a deeper attachment to this land. The trail peters out, disappearing among rock
and wind-blown moraine dust. A few bony tufts of tree, polished skeletons at the edge of the alpine zone, protrude from the hard ground. At glacier’s edge, several thousand feet above the White River valley, nothing grows or lives. In just over an hour, we have passed from full-throttled vegetation of the lower forest to the dead zone. We half-step our way to a rocky edge worn and wrinkled by the persistent moisture. Below, the valley drops steeply; a shout takes several seconds to land, and then bounces away.

“Here,” I say to Joni. “This is the place.” We laugh, both realizing the echo of Brigham Young, multiple wives and a caravan of zealots in tow, when he crossed the Wasatch Range and used those same words, now immortalized on the statue in the center of Salt Lake City.

I take out my map, the sweat atop my forehead dripping, and follow the glacier fingers down the summit. We are close to the Emmons Glacier, the longest ice mass in continental America, four miles of frozen precip, at its core as deep as the Seattle Kingdome from playing field to roof. I trace the glacier on the map and see that it is not the Emmons which feeds the White River. A lesser glacier, the Winthrop, appears to be the source.

I take Grandpa out of the pack and set him next to a rock. No wind. From below comes a marmot whistle, a high pierce. I think: Winthrop. What is an old Puritan’s name doing up here, on the frozen side of a mountain that wasn’t even spotted by white men until after the Revolutionary War? What cartographer’s trick, or cheap flattery, placed the name Winthrop here, a country of noble Indian names—Tacoma, the original word for this mountain; Sluiskin Falls, named for the native who first led whites to the demon-dwelling pit of fire at the summit; Ohanapecosh, where the rivers meet below. Most of the English names were coined by syphilitic prospectors and timber beasts—the Frying Pan Glacier, Old Scab Mountain, Anvil Rock, Panhandle Gap. Why Winthrop? It’s too genteel for this massive chunk of glacial anarchy, like an Eskimo in an Izod.

I will investigate later. Now, I’m shivering, the sweat turning cold on my skin. I put on a vest while Joni opens the wine. We sip, and soak in the scenery, seeking the rhythm of late October at eight thousand feet, the countryside slow to close down for the winter. I eat some smoked salmon, bread, an apple, drink more wine, all products of this land.

When he died, Grandpa was almost fifty years older than I, and I now wonder about my life at full term. This country of misted forests and untouched islands, of living volcanoes and a tidal shoreline that would stretch from Seattle to New York and back if laid out, has changed so
much in the course of his lifetime. Holding Grandpa, his eighty years reduced to these ashes in a cylinder, I realize we have gone from the canoe to the hydrofoil, from cedar longhouse to thousand-foot-high skyscraper, in slightly more than the span of his life. Despite the material insulation in which we wrap ourselves, these tousled forests and ocean currents pushing through inland passages still determine how we live; the landscape overwhelms. We are not that removed—yet—from the arms of the land.

I do not live in the Northwest, nor did he, out of habit, although that is part of it. There are just under 12 million people in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia, a bit more than the population of Sweden, and most of them live within one hour of the mountains. In the last light of day we can look up, from the low point of urban stress, and see the high point of outdoor relief—the natural neon of alpenglow. Is that the connective link from his generation to mine?

The wind has picked up some. A cloud cap, one of Rainier’s mood halos, hustles over the summit. Joni is shivering. My ears are numb. It’s time to finish up with Grandpa. I open the cylinder and stand. We say nothing, although she smiles. Solemnity does not fit either of us for long; like an itchy sweater, it is soon discarded. I tiptoe out to the edge of the rock. The wine, at this elevation after hard work, has made my head light and my feet slow to react. I swing back all the way and toss the ashes out. They shoot up and then curve down in a grand arc, a sepia-toned rainbow, stretching from this glacial edge to the dawning trickle of the White River, a thousand feet or more below. We watch until all the ashes have scattered from view. And then we say Goodbye.

In Seattle, I go to the library and look for something about Winthrop. I will face queries from family members, and I want to know as much as possible about this source of the White River. The Winthrop Glacier, says a thick, valuable book called
Place Names of Washington
, was so named by Theodore Winthrop during his summer visit to the Pacific Northwest in 1853. It must’ve been nice to be a tourist in those days: instead of returning home with a credit-card debt and a suitcase full of “I’m With Stupid” T-shirts, you left a legacy—peaks and rivers and glaciers named on whim. Theodore Winthrop was the great-great-great-grandson of John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the original Puritan. A stuffed shirt, a humorless Yankee, I presume, out to manifest his destiny in a still-unspoiled part of the frontier.

Further investigation leads me to the
The Canoe and the Saddle
, Winthrop’s account of the three months he spent in the Northwest that summer. At the time, he was twenty-five years old, well traveled and looking for fresh adventure, a Yale graduate who called himself a writer, and a humorist at that—he had yet to shake a tag as the family gadfly. I go to the oldest bookstore in Seattle, Shorey’s, and ask about
The Canoe and the Saddle
. The clerk looks up from a written ledger (there is nothing even remotely late-twentieth-century about this bookstore) and smiles broadly. That book, he tells me, is not only one of the first ever written about the Pacific Northwest, but one of the best, to this day.

Three weeks later I go back to Shorey’s and pick up my copy, on special order. In the meantime, I’ve learned a little more about Winthrop. He was a frustrated novelist, and it was only after his highly publicized death that his books—five works of fiction, all of which had been initially rejected by publishers, and
The Canoe and the Saddle
—became a sensation. As the first American officer killed in the Civil War, he was profiled and praised by virtually every paper in the northern states.

Like the legions of 1960s kids who took to the West in Volkswagen vans, he came to this corner of the country on a lark, looking for a new way of life and some high times and a clear fount of writerly inspiration. He found all of that, and more. His book was a song to the infant Northwest, and it was prophetic.

Winthrop arrived in the Oregon Territory in the early summer and quickly caught smallpox, the scourge of the native population. While convalescing in a fort above the Columbia River, he fell in love with the land. He felt as if he were living in a painting, one of those rich, pre-Impressionist oil renderings that had so gloried the Hudson River Valley. Stricken with the pox, he missed an early caravan back east. Rather than brood, he decided on a quick adventure—north of the Columbia. Late in the summer of 1853, he sailed to Victoria, then a handful of homes and a trading post on the large island which the British were trying to remake into an outpost of old England and had named for George Vancouver, a chubby, iron-willed explorer whose cartographic legacy is everywhere in these parts. It was on the southern tip of Vancouver Island that Winthrop began his journey back south and then east. That adventure is the story of
The Canoe and the Saddle
.

The trip of 320 miles took him by canoe down Puget Sound, by horseback around the north and east flanks of Mount Rainier, across the Cascades into the dry, fertile valley country around Yakima and then down to The Dalles, a desert cleave in the Cascades where the Columbia
River has carved out the magnificent gorge. At the time, there were less than four thousand whites living north of the river, in what is now Washington State and British Columbia, visited annually by 20 million people. Today, they come to see what Winthrop saw: the ice cone of Mount Baker rising off the horizon of the San Juan Islands; the whales playing in clear water surrounding the islands; the unbelievable bulk of Rainier, with its thirty-five square miles of eternal ice; the thousand-year-old evergreens thriving on Pacific storms that pummel the wet side of the Cascades; the desert flowers growing in rain shadow east of the crest, now orchard and wine country; the Columbia River, last great hope for a Northwest Passage, called the River of the West; the snowfields of Mount Hood, the juniper-tree high country surrounding Oregon’s sawed-off volcanoes, and the sublime violence of that state’s coastline.

Opening his book, I find that Winthrop, contrary to my perception of his Puritan breeding, is a renegade with the language—an unhoned Twain set loose in a country where no one can challenge him. His writing is undisciplined, given to flowery flights of description and sweeping racial denigration of the Coastal Salish Indians, who were then fast dying from the smallpox epidemic. He has little time for the characters he meets, hardscrabble prospectors, drunken explorers and natives who stink of body odor and campfires; he prefers the company of forests and creekbeds and durable horses.

Even so, he makes a few good points that are still pertinent nearly a century and a half later. Near the end of his journey, he concludes that a new human order can rise in the wilderness, a civilization ennobled by the wild, leaving behind the rusted thought and social patterns of the East, which he views as an America not yet a hundred years old but already showing signs of enfeeblement. In the Northwest, where the mountains meet the Pacific, Winthrop prophesied that a special breed would predominate, one infused with the spirit of the land; he hoped that the American character would mature at last in the far corner of the country.

He wrote:

Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the future. These Oregon people, in a climate where being is bliss—where every breath is a draught of vivid life—these Oregon people, carrying to a newer and grander New England of the West a full growth of the American Idea … will elaborate new systems of thought and life.

New systems of thought and life—is that what’s clogging the freeways of the Puget Sound megalopolis, the Willamette Valley and the urban forest above the Fraser River? After setting Winthrop aside for several years, I resolve to follow his footsteps and look at what’s developed in the presence of a countryside “strong, savage and majestic.” Forget the boundary of Canada and America at the 49th Parallel; the Northwest is united by landscape, not divided by latitude lines. The regional icons—salmon and trees and mountains and water—spring from the elements. If people here become too far removed from those basic sources of life, then they lose the bond to a better world.

Winthrop completed his trip in fourteen days, a virtual sprint by horse and canoe. I will take a year, attempting to follow the Yankee from Oregon desert to green-smothered rain forest, from storm-battered ocean edge to the inland waters, from the new cities of the Northwest to the homesteads of the Columbia Plateau, to see what a century can produce from scratch, and maybe … come to some understanding of why Grandpa belonged in the wellspring of the White River, as do I.