The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (3 page)

Chapter 1
T
HE
C
ONTINENTAL
H
EAVE

D
uring the last month of the driest winter in a hundred years, I go to the wettest spot in continental America, looking for truth from the sky and the sea. The moisture is predatory in this part of the world, and no element, be it stone or wood or tin or steel, lasts very long without losing some part of its composition to the nag of precipitation. Lewis and Clark, the moonwalkers of the early nineteenth century, spent four miserable months here, the winter of 1805–06, in a spongy spruce forest about two miles from the beach on the Oregon side of the Columbia River. Of all the real estate which Jefferson wanted to have a look at, none was wetter or more wild than the country here at land’s end. Sick of eating fish and crazed by toe-rot, they recorded only a dozen days without rain.

Now, in late winter, everybody is talking drought, as if the
earth were in the midst of a prolonged snit. In the churches they call it ungodly and whisper in apocalyptic overtones, for this is not Jimmy Swaggart shake-and-shout country, but heavily Scandinavian and emotion-tamed. In the bars they call it unmanly. Sunshine? That’s for people who think salmon sprout from bagel factories in Iowa and come with little umbrellas. Here in the seaport of Astoria, the oldest permanent American settlement west of the Rockies, cars wear coats of third-generation rust and wrinkled bumper stickers with the warning “We Ain’t Quaint.”

The sun is villainous: it warms the river, spooks the salmon, browns the evergreens, wilts the winter wheat, dries up the mushrooms, cracks the skin, befuddles the fish, the sea lions and the birds—they don’t know when it’s time to go home. About eighty miles north of here, beyond the hamlet of Humptulips at the headwaters of Washington’s Wynoochee River, it rains nearly two hundred inches annually, wettest spot in the Lower 48. Most of it comes in the winter, which can be like a season of living in a leaky basement. This year, January brought less rain than usually falls in July, and February passed without a gully-washer. Suicides are down, the camellias are blossoming, the tulips are at the gate. Must be a tear in the ozone, people say, or the jet stream has jumped track. Maybe the preacher’s finally going to get it right.

Except for the coastal strip from northern California on up, most of the American West is a desert, flat-bottomed and mountainous, kept alive by two arteries: the Colorado and the Columbia, both of them overworked. “A land of little rainfall and big consequences,” as Wallace Stegner said. The culture and population centers of the Southwest are built around the sun; in the Northwest, life flourishes under a cloud cover. Water shocks color and movement into even the most sedentary of life forms. The intrusion of brown in this land of green sets off alarms. A drought causes fear, then wild speculation, and finally panic as once-familiar land becomes a stranger.

In Astoria, as elsewhere in the Northwest, they are tired of this planetary prank, and waste no time taking drastic measures. In Seattle a few months earlier, the city had created the water police, a hydro-sniffing platoon on the prowl for car-washers and violators of the three-minute limit for showers. The mayor, pointing to pictures of water reservoirs at one-tenth of the normal level, encouraged neighbor to snitch on neighbor. The governor created the position of water czar and then told the 4.6 million residents of Washington to put bricks in their toilets. A flush spared is a fish saved. For several months, there was a run on bricks. Along the waterfront of Astoria, a middle-aged woman at the market said
that thirty-seven straight days had passed without rain last summer. She said it as if her son had cancer:
thirty-seven days, and I’ve tried to live a good life
.

Astoria’s sense of self is wrapped up in the elements; rain and raging sea must be constant companions. Life is flat, sterile, and entirely too comfortable without storm or tidal tantrum. For two centuries, the consensus here has been that what happens indoors is of little consequence compared to what happens Out There. Mysteries of current and tide, of gravitational pull and spring runoff, of moonlit gillnetting and dark-season tree-felling, are vital secrets, not easily learned or shared. The history of the Northwest begins, and to some extent is still influenced by, the daily struggle just west of here, where the Columbia River, mightiest of Western waterways, meets the Pacific, the bully of oceans.

The wandering Theodore Winthrop, twenty-five years old as he entered the Northwest following a three-week sail up the Pacific Coast from San Francisco, was much impressed by the Columbia Bar. He was no geographical ingénue, having spent his years after Yale traveling through Europe, South America, Central America and up the California coast. In 1853, the year of his Northwest visit, Congress funded the first West Coast lighthouse, to be planted at Cape Disappointment, a mound of sea-pounded rock above the bar. The bark
Oriole
, loaded down with supplies and engineers to build the beacon, sank on the shoals offshore of the cape, a cruel joke appreciated by no one except a few Chinook Indians whose ancestors have plied the vertical waters of the bar for centuries in cedar dugouts. On a spring day young Winthrop took a look at this sumo match of gravity and tide, and wrote, in the opening lines of
The Canoe and the Saddle:

A wall of terrible breakers marks the mouth of the Columbia, Achilles of rivers. Other mighty streams may swim feebly away seaward, may sink into foul marshes, may trickle through ditches of an oozy delta, may scatter among sandbars the currents that once moved majestic and united. But to this heroic flood was destined a short life and a glorious one—a life all one strong, victorious struggle, from the mountains to the sea.

The struggle from mountains to sea is considerably more indirect now, with hurdles of concrete at every big bend and more than 130 dams of all sizes on the tributaries of the river. But the incorrigible breakers of the Columbia Bar hold clues to the character of this country, and into
the mouth of the ancient guardian of the Pacific Northwest I must go to find a taste of the ages.

“If you fall in the water, the first thing you want to do is pull the flare out from your life vest and point it at a forty-five-degree angle. Whatever you do, don’t point it back at you—it’ll take your face off.”

And if a wave knocks the flare out of my hand?

“Then you want to reach into the other vest pocket and pull out this beeper, so we have a chance of finding you through the signal.”

Should I tread water?

“No. You lose body heat faster that way. It only takes twenty minutes in these waters for hypothermia to set in. What you want to do is curl up your legs in a sort of ball, to preserve whatever heat you can.”

When’s the last time you lost somebody?

“We lose about ten people a year off this bar, sometimes twelve or more. Most of ’em drown before we can get to them.”

Lt. Michael Monteith is taking me to the Columbia Bar on a boat that’s supposed to be sink-proof, designed to roll 360 degrees if necessary. It is a forty-foot barrel cut in half and sealed tight, essentially, and bobs like one heading for the cliff of Niagara. Not very fast. The basic rescue boat. Naval types come from all over the world to see how the Americans master this bar with this boat. I’m on a training run, midmorning, dressed in orange body suit, waterproof except for a slight opening around the neck. A former schoolteacher from South Carolina, Monteith runs the station at Cape Disappointment, considered the most hazardous Coast Guard operation in the Lower 48, with one rescue mission a day, on average. He’s thirty-seven, looks twenty-two—his face preserved by the unrelenting moisture. Most of his underlings are teenagers, kids with faint mustaches, easy jokes. The base doesn’t seem like the military; more like the fire department at sea, where the gang waits in summer for the inevitable call to pull some cokehead out of the surf off Peacock Spit, and in winter to collect fishermen from the froth.

When the waves crash over the bow and into my face, which they do with increased frequency as we move closer to the bar, the water spills down my neck and stomach. Cold. But I’m not worried about the chill. I want to look inside the throat of this beast, the river bar Lewis and Clark labeled “the bare ribs of the continent, that seven-shouldered horror.” Though muscle-bound and flood-trained for most of its length, the Columbia comes to a crashing finale here, the end of a 1,243-mile ride
that drains 250,000 square miles and then collides head-on with Pacific breakers. Were it not for this stretch of profound turbulence, the American Northwest would probably belong to England, or Spain, or Russia, or it might even be its own nation-state united with British Columbia. For two centuries, the best mariners in the world, flying the flag and carrying the cross, couldn’t find this river with its four-mile-wide mouth. Fools, schemers, liars, incompetents, connivers—every name in the book was thrown at them when they returned, unable to locate the Northwest Passage.

Every bit of water falling on all of France, channeled into one drainpipe—that’s similar to what goes into the Columbia, or at least a shallow part of it. The river’s source is a glacial drip 2,619 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Canadian Purcells; by its midway point in a high desert, the Columbia has a depth several hundred feet below the ocean plane. The only river to smash through the Cascades, the Columbia carved an eighty-five-mile gorge through the basalt spine of a mountain range with little fat. Snowmelt from the Cascades, the Rockies, the Selkirks, the Monashees, the Bitterroots, and every ounce of pine sweat and heather dew west of the Continental Divide from lower British Columbia to parts of Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington muscle their way into the Columbia. In the Western Hemisphere, no river empties more water into the Pacific.

And yet, most of the modern Columbia is flaccid, pinched by fourteen big dams, which back up fourteen big lakes. Upriver, where once there was violence and froth, now there is order and glass. In the scablands where the Snake River meets the Columbia, engineers operating out of a government nuclear reservation half the size of Rhode Island water-ski atop the surface of a river that used to dump settlers into hellish whirlpools. This river may have been shaped by God, or glaciers, or the remnants of the inland sea, or gravity or a combination of all, but the Army Corps of Engineers controls it now. The Columbia rises and falls, not by the dictates of tide or rainfall, but by a computer-activated, legally-arbitrated, federally-allocated schedule that changes only when significant litigation is concluded, or a United States Senator nears election time. In that sense, it is reliable.

This dog on a leash occasionally bites back. Just after World War II, though freshly harnessed by the completion of the Grand Coulee Dam, the Columbia rose up with spring rain and snowmelt and wiped out a city of forty thousand on the Oregon shore north of Portland. Without warning, the war-born town of Vanport was gone, insta-shacks crushed
and neat little streets swooshed away. Most of the residents were working at the time, smelting bauxite into aluminum at Henry Kaiser’s factory. Buried under the surge, Vanport was never rebuilt.

I’m in Astoria this month, at a time when winter storms usually chew at the coastline like a rabid hound tearing at a couch, to get a sense of what is left of this power, to ride the same river stretch that Winthrop rode during his introduction to the Northwest in the nineteenth century—if it can be found. The thrust of Winthrop’s prophecy, that the land in this last unspoiled corner of continental America would have a wonderful influence on its future inhabitants, requires the prophet-checker to first inspect the foundation. Is the natural world intact? Winthrop began his journey here in 1853, crossing the Columbia Bar in order to see the land hidden behind the surf, a passage of will that has frightened even the most sea-scarred. Captain John Wilkes, the naval officer sent by the White House in 1841 to circumnavigate the globe and, on the way back, to see whether any of the Oregon Country was worth fighting the British over, took a look at the Columbia River Bar after three years at sea and reached for his thesaurus. “Mere description can give little idea of the terrors of the Bar,” he wrote. “It is one of the most fearful sights that can possibly meet the eye.”

The oldtimers here, the men with ocean-polished faces who still speak with thick accents and congregate at the Sons of Norway Hall for secret rituals and snorts of chilled vodka with their vile-tasting
lutefisk
, refer to this area by its historical tag: the Graveyard of the Pacific. Justifiably, such talk makes them feel more alive. The Columbia River Bar has swallowed more ships, about 2,100 at last count, than any other location on the Pacific north of Mexico. “Graveyard of the Pacific” is not some desperate booster slogan seized upon after all the canneries closed down and the money left town. The Chamber of Commerce hates it when locals bring up shipwrecks. They don’t want to scare people. It’s all under control now, they say.