The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (27 page)

Though the inside may seem like a newborn, the rest of the mountain is growing like a toddler. Three months after the eruption, asters, fire-weed, lupine and avalanche lilies sprouted. A few elk were spotted nibbling on alder saplings. Weyerhaeuser foresters brag about trees they planted in the summer following the blast which are now twenty feet high. The ash, which is sterile and has the chemical composition of glass, doesn’t help the trees; they were planted in the topsoil that’s buried beneath the volcanic cover. Inside the blast zone, John Fraenzl, a Forest Service ranger, is showing off the new trees he’s planted. This tree-growing-in-a-wasteland business can get competitive. On the other side of the mountain, Weyerhaeuser is raising a tree farm, not a forest—a “plantation,” as it’s called in industry parlance—which will be cut in thirty to fifty years. Their trees, greenhouse-bred for maximum growth, are to the rest of nature what silicone-filled breasts are to a beauty contest. They stand out, but there is something … odd … about them. No snags. No variety. No slow succession through the different life stages of a forest. No sense of what came before.

“Time is nothing to nature,” says Fraenzl, standing at the head of the slowly recovering Clearwater valley, east of the crater. “We want to see trees out here right now. We’re in a hurry. Nature could care less. A natural forest will come back here, but not for a long time.”

Two days before the May 18 eruption, Fraenzl worked in a section of woods so thick and overgrown it looked like the Olympic Rain Forest. On Monday when he returned to work, he flew over the gray, desolate land that he used to know as well as his own backyard, and he could not find a single landmark. That summer, his boss asked him if he wanted to be transferred, perhaps to some national forest with trees in it. The work ahead would be tough; never before had anyone tried to reforest an area that had been so thoroughly bereft of life. In places, the ash was three feet deep. Fraenzl decided to stay. He did a literature search, looking for hints on how to proceed, a model from anywhere else in the world—
nothing. For a forester, working on a surface that resembled the moon, the job was like that of a war zone medic.

Two years after the eruption, he started planting trees in earnest: a patch of lodgepole pine here, a quilt of Douglas fir there, a few noble and silver firs higher up, even some cottonwoods. On weekends, he would return with his seven-year-old boy, to plant more trees as volunteers. Standing among the skinny saplings with his son, he thought about the future—fifty years down the road—when the boy would come to look at the forest he helped to plant with his father. It took three hundred years to grow the old forest, John Fraenzl told his son, and just a few minutes to wipe it out.

By the mid-1980s, Fraenzl noticed that the firs were growing up to three feet a year. Soon, he would need to start thinning them. To his astonishment, a few trout started showing up in Clearwater Creek. Now, even in the worst part of the blast zone, no more than five miles from the crater, some trees are ten feet tall. The scraggly hardwoods, particularly alders and willows, grow without help in the draws where moisture gathers. Fireweed and lupine, the vanguard of a forest that will take hundreds of years to return to climax phase, seem to need nothing more than air and water to proliferate. We walk over a flat stretch where the pumice is so deep nothing will ever grow, and pass a small lake which survived because it was covered by a protective floor of ice. We go up the hill, and then drop down a little bit.

“I want to show you something,” says Fraenzl, leading me to his secret.

“There—look at that.” A few acres of lodgepole pine, green and thick, among noble fir, Douglas fir and hemlocks. Not a plantation, but a slice of forest. Like most scientists, foresters are not given to emotion or descriptions tinged with romance when discussing their subjects. Under this volcano, lost in his thatch of green, Fraenzl now hoots like Tom Sawyer on a rope swing over the river.

When young Winthrop headed up the Willamette Valley, the deepest lake in America had yet to be discovered by white men. The Klamath and Modoc Indians knew about it, but for a long time the secret never leaked outside tribal circles. The great mysteries of the world, natural and spiritual, were kept in the caldera of cobalt blue buried inside the Oregon Cascades; it was a place so sacred the natives were forbidden to speak of it to others. Only a few Indians were allowed to even gaze upon it. By
the 1820s, the Hudson’s Bay Company had a fur-trading post on the Umpqua River to the west. They conducted a vigorous business with the Indians, married their women, raised families, and crisscrossed the mountains within sight of the Big Secret. Still, no native told them about the blue waters inside the old volcano. The natives grew up with legends, born in eyewitness accounts, about the fiery fight between gods that led to the decapitation of a twelve-thousand-foot mountain. To have told others of the living conclusion of those legends would have been to risk further disruptions of the land. Throughout the 1840s, wagon trains pushed over the Continental Divide on the Oregon Trail and emptied twenty thousand people into the new country of the Willamette. Before long, they spilled into the south, to the Rogue and Umpqua river valleys and into the Siskiyous. At the same time, goldminers from the spent lodes of the Sierra pushed north, finding precious metals in the Rogue, which drains the west slope of Mazama. Still, the natives kept the secret of Crater Lake.

Then, on June 12, 1853, just a few days after Winthrop left the Umpqua valley and returned north, three prospectors looking for a lost goldmine came up to the seven-thousand-foot rim of the hollowed volcano and fell to their knees. A thousand feet below the rim was the bluest lake any white man had ever seen, filling a crater six miles across, with a cinder cone growing inside it, and off to one side, a basaltic rock that looked like a ship. The entire mountain had been sheared off at its midsection. No water flowed into the lake, and nothing poured out. With all the imagination expectable of someone who spent his life scraping at the rocky edge of the planet looking for gold specks, John Wesley Hillman named his discovery Deep Blue Lake. And then he led his prospectors back down the slopes of Mazama and continued looking for that lost goldmine, which he never found. There is no record of any whites returning to the lake for ten years. Then, found again, it was called Crater Lake.

The lake has a proselytizing effect on most people who stare down the pumice and ash slopes to its surface. By 1902, less than fifty years after the prospectors’ accidental discovery, Crater Lake became the nation’s seventh national park—a Teddy Roosevelt legacy—a few years after another volcano, Rainier, was added to the park system. Justifiably suspicious, Roosevelt felt that the forests and rock around Rainier and Crater would be scraped bare if they weren’t locked up. He was right.

I come to the rim of Crater Lake, arriving at the spot where the prospectors fell to their knees, on a day when a small, one-man submarine
with two mechanical front arms is being lowered by helicopter down to the lake. I walk over to a park rangerette in a Smokey Bear uniform and ask about the sub. She tells a story about the struggle for the inner power of Crater Lake, a fight over geothermal vents. The land is alive here in a caldera that lost five thousand feet of its summit in an eruption forty times greater than that of Mount St. Helens. A power company from south of the border—those hated Californians, the scourge of Oregon—has leased seventy-six thousand acres in national forest property just east and south of the park. They are drilling a series of holes four miles from Crater Lake to find the best place to construct a hydrothermal power plant. Once built, the plant is supposed to pipe steam out of the ground and use it to power turbines for producing electricity. The power, of course, would not go to Oregonians—who still have such abundant supplies of hydropower they sell it to California—but would be sent to users in the San Francisco area.

The company was encouraged to drill near Crater Lake by James Watt, the early 1980s Secretary of the Interior and trustee of all the national parks. Watt once told a Senate committee that man was ordered by God to take over the earth and conquer all living things, a view that used to be shared by many of the new residents of the American West.

The scientists guiding the submarine are trying to find hydrothermal vents on the floor of America’s deepest lake, in Oregon’s only national park, hoping to use the evidence to stop the power plant. Perhaps, they theorize, these vents influence the color and water level of the lake. In some places where geothermal vents were tapped into for power purposes, hot springs and geysers have been reduced to warm carbonated spit. The rangerette explains it this way: “Ever try taking a shower when all the other water faucets in your house are turned on? You can’t get much water, because you don’t have any pressure. We’re afraid if you start tapping into these vents just outside the park, you’ll reduce the pressure underneath the lake.”

The rangerette also wonders what it would look like to have an industrial plant on the border of a national park that has consistently been judged to have the cleanest air in the country. People drive up here to the seven-thousand-foot rim of the broken volcano, far removed from any population center, just to breathe. Random comments from the Crater Lake Lodge guest book: From a Texan—“Fantastic! I’ve died and gone to heaven.” From a New Yorker—“What do you do to the air up here?” From a German—“Eighth wonder of the world.”

In the evening, I walk along the rim away from the crowds. Like most
of America’s national parks, Crater Lake is designed to funnel thousands of drivers into one main visitors center where they can buy a Crater Lake Twinkie and take a picture and then be on their way. A few hundred feet away from the traffic jams, the natural wonder comes into better focus. As Rachel Carson said, you don’t need to be able to identify a pine tree to love nature; at Crater Lake, you don’t need to be a geologist. Windprints track across the wide surface of the lake; stiff-limbed, anorexic trees grow in pumice slopes; the mystery of the rock island called the Phantom Ship enchants.

Meditations in blue: because there is almost no marine life in Crater Lake—all the water comes from rainfall and snowmelt—the color is a product of the interplay of sun and water. As sunlight passes through the lake, it is absorbed color by color. The reds fade first, followed by orange, yellow and green. Blue, the strongest hue in the color spectrum, is the last to be absorbed. From a depth of three hundred feet, the limit of light’s ability to penetrate water on the planet, the blue gets reflected back.

Crater Lake is a product of destruction, essentially Mount Rainier without the upper mile of its cone. In the year 4860
B.C
.—carbon-14 dating of charcoaled wood has established the exact date—the volcano erupted with a force that hurled eighteen cubic miles of pumice and ash all over the West. St. Helens sent forth little more than half a cubic mile. Parts of this mountain have been found 1,500 miles away, scattered over eight states and three Canadian provinces. Mazama has not stirred for nearly a thousand years.

At night, when the blue disappears and the stars press through the dark ceiling and all the motor homes have turned off their generators, campers walk through the forest to a small outdoor theater run by the National Park Service. Some of the visitors clearly miss television; they bring potato chips and beer to listen to the story of how Crater Lake was formed. Tonight’s narrator is a small, elderly ranger, Carrol Abbott, a native of Pittsburgh. He talks about the volcano the way you’d expect somebody from an old city in the East to explain the odd landscape of the West, and it makes sense. The eruption here was like indigestion, says Abbott: “When I was a little boy, a long time ago, we would always have a big picnic on the Fourth of July. I remember one time I played a little baseball and then ate half-a-dozen hotdogs, a whole bunch of sauerkraut and then went out and played some more baseball, came back and ate a few more hotdogs. Then I topped it off with a whole lot of ice cream.
When I got home, I exploded.” Pause. Chuckle. “That’s sorta like what happened here.”

He urges everyone to step outside the cocoon of their motor homes and spend at least an hour walking somewhere in the park, “trying to read the landscape.” They will find pumice deserts where the volcanic deposits are so thick that nothing has grown back; they will find wildflowers growing from the insides of ancient, gnarled trees called
Krummholz
, a German word meaning “twisted wood”; they will see in Wizard Island, a hood that rises eight hundred feet from the surface of the lake, the shell of the magma chamber. What’s more, he concludes, if they walk the mile-long trail down the steep, pumiced slopes from the rim to Crater Lake, they will find “the tenth wonder of the world—a place without a Coke machine.”

Early morning, sun just over the eastern crater rim. Atop Garfield Peak, two thousand feet above the surface of the lake. Timberline follows the steep grade right up to the eight-thousand-foot summit. With a growing season of about seven weeks, clusters of weather-harassed, soil-deprived, crabby alpine fir are holding tight to volcanic afterthought like a dying man clutching his photo album. Life springs from the past. A few thousand years down the road, the summit of St. Helens may look much the same. Older, more broken down, but alive—inside and out. This morning, in a demonstration designed to back its case that an industrial plant would not harm the national park, the California energy company has set up a pair of hundred-watt speakers on the park border and floated a host of balloons above the treetops. They are trying to simulate a 120-megawatt geothermal power plant to show that the project won’t be much of an obstruction.

I turn to the south, where the cone of Mount Shasta is undergoing the slow turn from rose to white, 106 miles away and clear as the neighbor’s apple tree. I think of the three prospectors who fell upon the rim in the year that Winthrop visited southern Oregon. They never found the lost goldmine in the country of ice-covered cones, but they discovered this treasure: air so clean the eye can wander for a hundred miles or more, and a volcano transformed from beast to beauty. For now.