The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (6 page)

Thorn tried a second time. He sent a dinghy off, at ebb tide, and the boat capsized. Two Hawaiians and one Boston man drowned. The bar had now claimed seven men from a crew that was supposed to furnish the first American settlers in the West. It was as if the land itself were resisting these newcomers. Eventually, several crewmen got through, and the fort of Astoria was built in the spring of 1811. Shortly thereafter, Captain Thorn was butchered and the
Tonquin
torched off Vancouver Island by the much-offended natives of Nootka Sound, who were angered when he rubbed a pelt in their chief’s face.

Fort Astoria lasted all of one year in American hands. During the War of 1812, with the British sloop
Raccoon
fast approaching, Astor’s representative sold the whole settlement to the Montreal-based Northwest Company, which later merged with the Gentlemen Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay—the boys of the HBCo, an amalgam of French-Canadian, English and Indians who knew better than to rub a pelt into the face of a trading partner. After the war, Astoria went back under American jurisdiction, though there were few Boston men to be found at the post. When the Florentine silk hat was introduced at a Paris fashion show in 1825, the beaver hat was doomed. The Hudson’s Bay Company moved upriver, to Fort Vancouver, headquarters of a trading and agricultural network that stretched from Fort Umpqua in the south, to Fort Thompson in northern British Columbia, from Fort Colville on the upper Columbia to Fort Boise on the lower Snake. Ostensibly, the area was under the joint occupancy of America and England; in truth, it was governed by the HBCo.

The Columbia River Bar continued to swallow big ships at the rate of one a year. The
William and Ann
sank in 1829, killing forty-six people who were on board. The
Isabella
, a Hudson’s Bay Company trading vessel, went down in 1830 and wasn’t discovered until 1987. When the American exploring party led by Charles Wilkes lost the
Peacock
here, and all the scientific material which had been gathered in three years of exploring the distant points of the planet went under, the sinking so incensed
Wilkes that he concluded Americans should not settle for the northern border of the Columbia River. He raged against the river bar, declaring it too hazardous to serve as the northwestern entrance of America. The American property should include Puget Sound, with its calm water and safe harbors, Wilkes argued.

Off Peacock Spit, we climb a twenty-foot wave, chugging like a truck straining to make the crest of a hill, and then slide down the other side. Gumby-legged, I’m standing on the deck, soaked to the bone, trembling with cold, my stomach puréed, my sense of balance shot. Then, without warning—
Swooooosh
. I’m blinded, buried, and swept off the boat, my feet and hands knocked loose, water down the front of the suit. For a few seconds, I have no sense of up or down. Everywhere, water. The cables hold me to the top of the boat, but my feet flutter somewhere at the edge of a breaker. I spit icy salt water out, coughing to regain a full breath. When at last I can breathe again, Lewis tries to tell me something else about Deadman’s Cove, but I’ve had enough. I pull myself back up, trying to stand. I catch a glimpse of the southern end of the Willapa Hills to the northeast, clouds crawling all over the deforested summits. A storm is brewing. It’s time to chase the rain, to follow the moisture to the heart of the Wet Zone. Forward then, north by northeast, to the rain, the darkness, the mud—the real country. After tossing around on either side of this bar, I’m convinced: at this gateway to the continent, the river is still in charge.

We pass two jetties, five miles in total length, designed to channel the force of two tons per square foot into some sort of orderly outflow. The channel is continuously dredged by the Corps of Engineers. They scrape and dig, the river pushes and refills, a struggle repeated in varying degrees of ferocity throughout the length of the Columbia; only here does the river win. Now, a light rain is falling. Has the jet stream come home? Will there be no withered cedars after all, no frustrated salmon flopping around arid spawning beds? Approaching landfall, I look toward shore: the spruce forest blurs against the rock of Cape Disappointment. I see nothing through the drizzle but green and gray, deep colors here, and true. As long as they remain the tint of this land, the Columbia River will never be quaint.

Chapter 2
E
NCHANTED
V
ALLEY

F
or the next nine weeks the sky drops low to the ground and empties rain onto the Pacific shore every day until the forest canopy is weepy and the ground is mush and the little woman inside the ranger station at the end of the road next to the Quinault River is happy. Spring has come to the western valleys of the Olympic Mountains: nearly six feet of rain in two months.

“It’s a start,” she says, looking up at the swollen heads of her rhododendrons. Towering plants, vaguely domesticated, giving off a light of their own when in blossom, they look as if they escaped from the nursery long ago and settled into lawless residence here where the sun is not supposed to shine. She lives on the edge of a freak land, a place unlike any other on this earth, where ferns grow taller than Magic Johnson and
cedars live for centuries on nothing more than the rotting carcasses of other logs. Reality checks are needed hourly: that hemlock with the trunk as wide as a garage door, it’s pure science fiction; that moss draping the bigleaf maples, a cotton-candy spin of filament-thin fiber, it seems to be growing on air; those elk coming down the draw, they’re so big and barrel-chested they look steroid-pumped. The air is heavy with the basic lubricant of life. Rain doesn’t fall inside this forest; it blends with the moss and then floats downward in webs of tinted moisture. Six feet of rain in two months. On the Olympic Peninsula, a porkchop of land as big as Massachusetts bordered by the sea on three sides, it’s almost invisible. No cloudbursts. No storms. It seldom freezes, seldom sizzles in continental America’s only temperate rain forest. Just … the reliable drip, drip, drip.

European and American explorers feared the rain forest as they did no other part of the New World. It was too dark, too green, too impenetrable, a place of death and danger, home for cannibals, hell with a cloud cover. Left alone, the land went crazy: trees grew to sizes unheard of anywhere else; eleven plants and seven species of wildlife flourished here and no-place else; and the prodigious salmon runs filled gravel beds with such numbers as to create a white noise of their own. Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth. And yet, this is not some distant land in a far-off corner. A straight line from Seattle to the Olympics, across Puget Sound and Hood Canal, marks a distance of about 40 miles. Three million people crowd the Puget Sound basin, but 40 miles and 120 additional inches of rain away, there is almost nobody—a million acres of ice and elk and evergreens and sea-washed rock and devil’s club and sword ferns and salmonberry and water and wildflower and ocean, all bunched up at the western edge of the continent.

I shoulder my pack and enter the outer edge of the Quinault River valley on a day when the sky is supposed to clear up. I don’t know. In some places, it looks like the rain flows up, leaping off the chin-high vegetation of the forest floor. Forget the gentleman’s club of normal plant growth; here, the curled ferns lengthen by the hour. Twenty miles inland from the Pacific, the rain forest welcomes. I don’t want to worry about anything except how I’m going to slow-cook dinner and how that Jack Daniels is going to taste when I sip it while listening to the drip, drip, drip, soothed
by the massage of moisture. The poison of excessive sun will kill thousands, victims of malignant melanoma. No one has ever died of too much drizzle.

Gridlock and cocaine gang wars rule the valley in the city where I live. Once it was full of small farmers and family merchants, a long, tree-lined boulevard with views straight up to the north spine of Mount Rainier. Now the farmers are all gone, and many Seattle merchants operate from behind bullet-proof windows, and the walls are spray-painted with the slogans of young men who kill one another because somebody is wearing the wrong-colored hat. The towers of downtown prosperity are five minutes from the desperate gulch, with no connection between the two. I drive through the valley to get to my home; sometimes, stuck in traffic, I daydream off Rainier’s distant glaciers. Other times, I’m an urban warrior, adrenalin-primed for combat, even if the only battle is one to beat a yellow light.

A few weeks before this rain forest trip, I was driving home one evening when I saw something that chilled me for a long time. Stopped at a crosslight, I witnessed a little girl get clipped by a speeding car. She was dirty-faced and shoeless, no more than sixty pounds, with soiled brown hair tied in pigtails. She was clutching a toddler when I first spotted her, eyeing the flood of traffic. Protecting the smaller child, she waited until three of the four lanes had stopped, and only then ventured across Rainier Avenue in the dim twilight. I was in the inside lane, stopped. As they walked in front of me, I glanced at the rear-view mirror: the lane to my outside was open, and a car was screaming toward the kids. I honked my horn, jumped out of the car. Too late. Without ever slowing down, a big car smashed into the little girl, sending her flying off the hood. The toddler was spared, somehow, but her sister lay crumpled and crushed on the sidewalk, spitting up blood and teeth, her leg badly mangled, her stomach heaving in and out.

The driver of the car walked toward his victim—two faces pulled from the urban stream, both in shock.

“I never even saw her,” he said when the ambulance arrived. “Never even saw her.”

My first hour in the rain forest I can’t shake the caved-in face of the little girl, the spindly legs, the look of horror from her sister. I’m here, in part, to put some distance between the city and me, to seek shelter from the daily storm of civilization. Maybe such a thing is impossible in the late twentieth century. I wonder what happened to that valley in the city? The land has not changed too much: trees will still grow, the moisture
will still be there, Rainier will still loom. The climate is the same. But the laws of nature are irrelevant in that valley. The urban beast is king of that jungle. In less than a hundred years, the roles have reversed: the valley in my city is dark, dangerous, a place where humans don’t belong. And this valley in the rain forest is life-giving, a sanctuary for old trees and wounded urban refugees. Now I walk under a cathedral of conifers, pleasantly daydreaming, pumping no adrenalin. I’m not on alert.

The rain forest could have gone the same way as the valley in my city. Near the turn of the century, a white homesteader named John Huelsdonk entered the Hoh River valley, a few miles north of here, determined to conquer. The Hoh contained more fish, more elk, more deer, more berries, more cedar bark than any tribe of Coastal Salish Indians could ever hope to give away in the most elaborate of potlatches. But the rain forest had never experienced a person quite like Huelsdonk; his nickname was the Iron Man of the Hoh. He entered the valley carrying a woodstove on his back, proceeded to clear part of the forest, punch in a primitive road and set up a home. In the next few years, Huelsdonk boasted of killing three hundred cougars and an equal number of bears. By eliminating the chief predators of the tree-nibbling elk herds, he single-handedly disrupted an ecosystem that had existed for several millennia without change. However, few whites followed Huelsdonk into the Hoh to crowd the land and drain the air of green. Most of the valley is now part of Olympic National Park, saved by the drip, drip, drip.

What kept the resource armies away, at first, was the basic freakiness of the place. A hundred years ago, after the completion of the transcontinental railroads caused Washington’s population to triple in ten years to 350,000 people, the Olympic Mountains still remained essentially unmapped. The new residents of Puget Sound knew the land buckled to cloud-snagging heights across the water. They knew a dozen or so loud rivers poured out from the glacial heart of the mountains. But no white man had ever walked all the way through the place, even though the valley floors are gentle, the rain always soft, and the mountains relatively low. In an age when nature existed only to be corraled—Cotton Mather preached that wilderness was an insult to the Lord—the land was useless, a wild, overgrown child of the West, the one that got away. By 1890, when the American frontier was officially pronounced closed, Washington’s governor wrote of the heart of darkness forty miles across the Sound, this land of mystery, and called it “terra incognita.”

The rain has not been a total shield. Approaching the Olympic park border by car from the south, I pass the 190,000-acre reservation of the
Quinault Indians. Decimated by smallpox and alcoholism, this once prosperous tribe dwindled to practically nothing just after Washington became a state in 1889. Under the management of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the reservation’s timber has been sold off, tract by tract, to the worst kind of cut-and-run loggers, who leveled the forest. In most cases, there was no reforestation. Just rip and roar, slash and grab, and get the hell outta this freaking mudhole, leaving behind as much as two hundred tons of debris per acre. A ravaged stumpland, it looks now like a junkyard finished off by vandals. Half-burned slash. Spindly alder. Muddy roads leading to nowhere. The green is all gone, replaced by black and brown, the colors of decay and erosion. Now, day after day, no matter what season, the mist of early morning peels away to reveal the same sight, the untended casualties of Western man’s war with the rain forest.