The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (31 page)

CLIMB TREES! screamed the headline on Earth First! publications. They also urged the climbers to bring along little plastic bags in which to store their body wastes. When metal detectors were used to trace tree spikes, some of the Earth Firsters shifted to ceramic nails.

In an Earth First! column by someone with the byline Budworm, the
writer noted the dangers of tree-spiking. “If you are spiking, assume your ass has a big green target on it. You are wanted. Don’t tell me or anyone else what you’re up to (exception: if you’re willing to be an anonymous spiker on a tv news documentary, get in touch with me for details).” Other stories carried tips for the serious monkeywrencher: “Spray paint, though environmentally destructive even without chlorofluorocarbons (weigh the cost benefits of your actions as always) still works best.”

Earth First! put out a comic book featuring a revisionist history of the Forest Service’s favorite mascot, Smokey the Bear—in the cartoons he became Stumpy the Bear, born in a clearcut. When the Earth Firsters were called terrorists, they countered that tree-spiking was an honorable tradition first used by the Wobs almost a hundred years ago.

“Tree-spiking is fine with me as long as nobody gets hurt,” said Bobcat, who became the spokesman for Earth First! in southern Oregon.

The Earth Firsters quoted Bob Marshall, the Depression-era wilderness advocate who worked for the Forest Service. Marshall, raised in New York City, could walk thirty miles a day through rugged terrain, and still stay up half the night telling stories. In the 1930s, he proposed that a million-acre Kalmiopsis wilderness area be set aside. At the time, no roads penetrated the Siskiyous from Crescent City in Northern California up the coast to Coos Bay. A small wilderness was established in 1946, and later enlarged in the late 1970s. That was it for wilderness. As the Forest Service moved toward a plan in the 1980s to sever the remaining roadless area with clearcutting through the untouched forest, people threw themselves in front of bulldozers and chained themselves to the road gate. The battle centered around the Forest Service road proposed for the wilderness. If they could stop the road, they figured the forest would be saved, since helicopter logging is far more expensive. Less-militant environmental groups—the Sierra Club, the Oregon Natural Resources Council—obtained court injunctions against the logging plan. Earlier this summer, the Forest Service had stopped construction of the road when it was nine miles into the wild forest, saying further study of the spotted owl was needed. For the moment, it looked as if the forest would not be cut.

“We thought we’d won,” says Bobcat, sitting inside his ramshackle shed deep in the forest near Cave Junction. He has a braided beard that goes beyond his navel, which he strokes as he talks. At the shack where he lives, the walls are covered with pictures of clearcuts, Indian artifacts and sayings from David Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First! Foreman’s book
Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching
is on a
table. The shack is at the end of a dirt road, overgrown with brush, and cluttered with junked cars which are pasted with bumper stickers that read, “We Are All One Species.” Inside is a woodstove. I ask him if it isn’t a conflict to burn wood and keep junk cars while advocating a litter-free habitat for the other creatures of the Siskiyous. “Not at all,” says Bobcat. “We selectively cut the trees here for burning, without harm to the environment. And the junk cars out back? Yeah, somebody’s supposed to do something about that.”

Tree-spiking, blockades, ecotage—those kinds of things, says Bobcat, work as delaying tactics until the lawyers can move in with court injunctions. And all those loggers at the Rough and Ready mill, what are they supposed to do? He says the future of the Siskiyou valleys must be in orchards and vineyards and farming and tourism. It’s time for the people of Cave Junction to adapt or die. In increasing numbers, tourists come to sample the local wines here and float down the wild water of the Rogue and Illinois. Californians, cashing in their home equity and using it to purchase houses here that cost a fraction of property farther south, have taken to the old ranch homes of the valley as a retirement haven. They have no interest in scarred ridges and debris-filled streams. By some measures, the most valuable resource in the West is land, and the fastest-growing Western counties are within a mile of wild areas. “We will win,” says Bobcat.

In late August, Forest Service officials release their proposal for the roadless area of the Siskiyous. They’re done studying the spotted owl and have made up their mind: the owl will get more land set aside than previously planned, but it’s time to get on with the business of the Siskiyous. They call for a return to the previously announced logging schedule of six thousand acres a year, and construction of more than two hundred miles of roads, including completion of the symbolic main road, in the biggest tract of ancient forest up for grabs in the Northwest. Earth First! calls for battle. But two days later, in the midst of a long dry spell, on a night when the air is so still that a whisper travels far, a thunderstorm rumbles up from California.

The sky goes very dark, then explodes in a blitz of electricity. No rain comes with the storm, just thunderbolts fired down at the ancient forest. Boom! Crack! Followed by the smell, dry wood engulfed in a firestorm. Dogs howl, then retreat for cover. Birds screech across the sky. Horses stampede against sharp fences, panicky, looking for a way out. In Cave
Junction, the loggers run outside and stare at the sky; at road’s end near the junked cars, the Earth Firsters do the same thing. The night is full of smoke and flames and desperate voices, awed by the force of nature. All the tree-spiking and lawsuits and detailed forest-management plans and blockades are meaningless: the Kalmiopsis wilderness is on fire, burning out of control. The wind pushes the flames north, making them leap from tree to tree, hopscotching over the giants. The inferno creates its own winds, and its own sound, the swoosh of oxygen being sucked out of the atmosphere and into the maw of the furnace.

The next day the sky is dark; smoke fills the Illinois Valley, blots out the sun, and drifts east up the Rogue River Valley to Crater Lake. From around the state, firefighters are mobilized. A few days later, some reserve units from the National Guard are flown in. But it looks hopeless; there is no way to get people into the steep roadless area, and the winds are racing at such a speed as to make firefighting a fatal mission. The Siskiyou fire burns for ten weeks, consuming nearly 100,000 acres of old forest in the north Kalmiopsis—Oregon’s largest fire in half a century. When fall rains from the Pacific finally douse the great blaze, the two sides start arguing over whether the dead trees should be left as is to nurture the next forest, or harvested to keep the mills of the Rogue River basin running.

Chapter 10
S
ALMON

T
he secret of life in the Northwest runs in packs of silver; as with most mysteries, it lies just below the surface, evident to anyone who thinks it important enough to look. At Willamette Falls, this secret reveals itself in rare flashes amidst the industrial clutter of Oregon City. The river here is a beast of burden, powering the street lights of nearby Portland, grinding wood pulp to paper, settling into locks that lift ships on their way. Against this metallic frenzy a few chinook salmon hurry upstream, driven by a singular impulse to pass on the baton of life and then die. To the continued befuddlement of biologists, they return to the neighborhood of their youth after seeing the world. In the fall, as the ground goes cold and the fields die, they bring a dose of fertility in from the sea, carrying the collected natural history of the Willamette in their gene
pool. Fornication, in the ritualized style of the Pacific salmon, is never more charitable—or fatal.

On a morning bundled in mist, I count eight chinooks scouting the overworked passage here at Oregon City. Their stomachs empty since they crossed the Columbia River Bar into fresh water, they seek a square foot of gravel in the natal stream. Once the female finds a home, she will drop a load of perhaps five thousand eggs. If not already attached, the males may compete for paternal rights. Usually the bigger fish win, but occasionally a small salmon darts out from hiding and quickly fertilizes the eggs before the slower-moving studs have finished their mano-a-mano routine. From there, the upstream struggle is over, the salmon’s skin loses color and protective oil; death is a few days away. The carcass is eaten by eagles or is washed downstream to somebody’s farm—the salmon’s death is one of nature’s principal ways of bringing nutrients from the sea to the land of the Northwest.

This trickle of spawners in the Willamette is nothing, of course, compared to what used to be. “At the time of our visit to the falls of the Willamette the salmon fishery was at its height, and was to us a novel as well as amusing scene,” wrote Captain Charles Wilkes during his exploration of the area in 1841. “The salmon leap the falls; and it would be inconceivable, if not actually witnessed, how they can force themselves up, and after a leap of ten to twelve feet retain strength enough to stem the force of the water above.… I never saw so many fish collected together before.”

Most of the salmon that come up this way today are hatchery-bred, with a Northwest background no more extensive than that of the newcomers who fill the three-level homes in the orchard country east of Portland. But a few native kings, descendants of Ice Age pioneers who brought new life back to the glacier-ripped landscape, still make it through. With the reappearance this fall of these last few wild chinook, the chain remains unbroken.

A hundred and fifty years ago the expectations of a nation directed themselves into this hamlet at the confluence of the Clackamas and Willamette rivers, site of the first American city west of the Rockies to incorporate. Leaving debt and dubious backgrounds behind, the wagon travelers crossed the Plains, struggled over the notch in the Rockies, floated down the white water of the lower Columbia and ended up in the Willamette Valley. Usually, it was raining. The land was green and fertile, shadowed by the hulk of Mount Hood. The great cataract in the Willamette provided more than enough power to cut logs. The first paper mill
and the first hydroelectric power plant in the Northwest were built around Willamette Falls. Down went the trees that shaded the riverbank, and up went a forest of smokestacks. In no time, Oregon City looked more like Pittsburgh than a new metropolis built under the sublime influence of nature. By the middle of the twentieth century, after enduring a diet of sludge and pulp effluents and logging debris, the Willamette River was nearly dead. A muscled mannequin, it looked like a river and snaked like a river, but beneath the surface the pulse of life was faint.

In the Northwest, a river without salmon is a body without a soul. From the Sacramento to the Yukon, every waterway pulled by gravity to the Pacific has, at one time, been full of the silver flash of life. During certain times of the year, you could walk under any rain-country waterfall and get hit over the head by a leaping forty-pound fish. Lakes ran red with sockeye, streams were crowded with coho, and the Columbia was the main highway for the biggest chinook run the world had ever known. It was a bounty that tested the limits of greed. By midcentury, the handful of fish which made it through the wall of nets, hooks, seines and wheels at the Columbia’s mouth returned to the Willamette only to choke to death in water starved of oxygen. They died with eggs and sperm still inside them, belly-up in a rust-colored river.

Had he not died in the Civil War, Winthrop would have been forced to rewrite his Northwest descriptions if he’d seen what his New England brothers were doing to the Willamette. While Winthrop feasted on Pacific salmon throughout his journey in 1853—he talked of “feeling the exquisiteness of his coloring, grilling him delicately and eating him daintily”—the wild Atlantic salmon runs of his homeland were being wiped out by the excesses of the expanding industrial age. The new inhabitants of the Oregon Country would treat their natural bounty much better, Winthrop prophesied. How could they do otherwise? He had called the area from Portland down to the center of the state, “the sweet arcadian valley,” a place “charming with meadow, park and grove.” And it was upon reflection on what could be in the region of the Willamette that Winthrop repeated his central prophecy for this last frontier corner of mainland America:

In no older world where men have in all their happiest moods recreated themselves for generations in taming earth to orderly beauty have they achieved a fairer garden than Nature’s simple labor of love has made there, giving to rough pioneers the blessings and possible education of a refined and finished landscape, in the presence of landscape strong, savage and majestic.

The lesson from the land nearly came too late. In the midst of the Depression, when less than a hundred wild chinook were returning to the Willamette, a cry went up to save the river. At the time, another wave of Americans was spilling into the Northwest, Dust Bowl refugees from Arkansas and Texas and Oklahoma. Hollow-eyed, with strange accents, they knew little about the area except that it was supposed to have in great abundance something they had lost—water. Yes, they had water in Oregon, enough to wash all the tears from the drought out to sea. But they were poisoning it. So, as one generation was happy merely to have a raw element, another generation said it was not enough. To be a Northwesterner was to be a salmon-eater. In 1938, Oregonians, who were among the first people in the nation to give themselves the power of legislation by popular initiative at the ballot box, voted to clean up the Willamette River and save the salmon run. The buffalo had disappeared from the Plains, the caribou had long vanished from the Upper Mississippi Valley, the wild Atlantic salmon runs in New England were mostly memory. The Pacific king, also known as chinook or tyee, a fish which can grow to five feet in length and 125 pounds in weight, was one of the last of the true marvel creatures left in the New World.