The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (5 page)

What’s it like inside his ship, which was built to take the biggest hit the bar could deliver?

“You seen a steel pipe before. Imagine one that can hold three guys, then roll it downhill. That’s my ship on the bar.”

He bought his boat from the German Coast Guard years ago; it looks like a submarine, painted orange, fully sealed, ugly as hell. He calls it the
Peacock
, after the ship Captain Charles Wilkes lost in 1841 when he tried to enter the bar. McAvoy’s
Peacock
is designed to take the pressure of a hundred tons of water banging up against the skin of the hull. Twenty years after he started escorting ships into the Columbia, McAvoy still is scared to death of the bar. Any ship, any size, can get tossed. Earlier this year, while he was leading a container ship twice the length of a football field through the mouth, the current turned the Korean vessel around when it lost power temporarily. For more than an hour, the big boat was helpless, caught in the vise of river current and angry Pacific breakers. If it broke up, well, some of the beach-dwellers still count on a good wreck every now and then to get by. Oldtimers who live on Long Beach, the twenty-eight-mile-long Washington peninsula formed over the years by Columbia River sediment, say they used to pray for this manna from the sea, the charity of shipwrecks. It was God’s way of redistributing wealth. A hundred years ago, the
Queen of the Pacific
was caught in the usual bind; three hundred tons of merchandise had to be thrown overboard, including pianos, fancy new clothes, hats, barrels of liquor. The whiskey ended up in the hands of some Sand Island fishermen, who threw a party that lasted a week. Stetson hats, plucked from the beach, were worn around the mouth of the Columbia for years.

These days, the big ships from Pacific Rim countries have autopilot
and sonar and fathometers which warn of approaching shallow water; they come with fax machines printing out the latest from weather satellites above, and video channel charts. A lot of their captains don’t want to use some old-fart bar pilot in an orange coat, approaching them in an orange ship that looks like a pipe. But the high-tech stuff—it doesn’t mean shit here, says McAvoy.

“This river is like a snake,” he says. “You gotta know when to turn and when to jump. All the gadgetry behind the wheel won’t help you decipher local currents. We’re talking a quarter-million-odd cubic feet a second out there, a ten-knot current, sometimes. I’ve seen floating lighthouses go down.”

Does McAvoy feel like he’s part of a dying profession, the last of a breed. “Dying?” he says, lighting a new cigarette with his old one. “What d’ya mean by that?”

“The trends don’t look good. Ever thought of opening a tanning salon?”

“Hell—everybody’s dying.”

Early the next morning, still no sign of the low clouds that permanently park themselves over these parts in winter. I go up to the top of Coxcomb Hill, the highest point in Astoria, where a faded column frieze commemorates the two centuries of white history here. Firmly anchored to the north slope of the hill, Astoria could’ve been San Francisco but for the abusive storms of the dark season. Astoria is crafted to the peculiarities of this hill, washed by the rain and sculpted by the Pacific wind. The town seems a place of brooding resignation, where hope and commerce peaked long ago. The population, stalled at ten thousand for half a century, still makes Astoria one of the most populous towns on the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco.

In many parts of the American West, anything older than a mobile home is sometimes considered historic. Not so for Astoria, which seems built up beyond its purpose, like an accountant with bulging forearms and a tattoo on his ass. The British took it during the War of 1812, the Confederacy roamed offshore in the Civil War, and the Japanese fired a few rounds from a submarine during World War II. This was to be the “New York of the West,” capital of a fur empire founded by John Jacob Astor of Manhattan. He never saw the city named for him; the owners of most Resource Towns seldom got out among the muck that brought them all their money. The New York monicker, and similar names transplanted from the East, have been dropped on locations all over the Northwest,
as if they could bestow some instant sophistication on the stumpland settlements. Seattle’s first name was New York-Alki, the last word a bit of Chinook jargon meaning “eventually.” When the city expanded north across Lake Union, David Denny named the new part of town Brooklyn. Farther up Puget Sound the city of Everett, in a moment of profound sycophancy, was named for the toddler son of a New York Resource Baron who was supposed to build an empire on the mudflats of Port Gardner; its first name was Lowell, after the Massachusetts town. Trying to flatter the New York capitalist at a dinner in Manhattan, the Northwesterners offered the name of his boy, who was crawling around at their feet. Oregon has Albany, but most of the state’s cities are named for Bay State locations—Salem, Medford, Springfield. Boston lost out to Portland in a coin toss.

Up the 164 steps of the Astoria Column’s circular stairway I go. Atop the promontory, the wind is fierce, the sky scrubbed clean and salty. The big river snakes the last few miles and then empties into the horizon. I look in every direction, but I’m drawn to the kicking bar.

Lieutenant Monteith’s face is grim. The killer breakers are about three hundred yards away, off a tongue of sand called Peacock Spit. He tells me to hold on tight to the rail of our boat while a smaller ship, a thirty-foot wave-slicer, pulls up. This other boat is faster, a bullet used to get in and out of Peacock in a hurry. If you really want to butt heads with the bar, the bullet is the way to go, he says. The smaller vessel, called a surf rescue boat, coasts to within three feet of our craft, which is riding six-foot swells.

“When I give you the word, jump over to the other boat,” Monteith says.

“What?”

“Jump! Now!”

On board the thirty-foot bullet are two men in helmets, face visors and orange-sealed body suits; they look like hornets. They pull me up on deck and strap me into the boat with two cables, so that I’m completely tethered to the deck. Coxswain Randy Lewis tells me to hold on to the bars up front, and forget about the laws of gravity and the notion of balance. The bullet is fast, with a top speed of twenty-seven knots, and can handle just about anything except stopping. Inert, it dies, a passive cork on an angry sea. If it slows to a certain speed, the breakers will toss it. We head
for Peacock Spit, where no ships of any size or purpose are supposed to go, a mile or so northwest of the bar. Yet, three days out of five, this is where Lewis gets called in for rescues, steering the bullet up close enough to the shipwreck so his partner can lean over and grab the poor bastard.

Low clouds start to shove the high pressure ridge off the coast. Just the smell of rain has everybody excited. Piloting the bullet scares Lewis—it always has—but he’s hooked on the thrill. There is nothing else like it on land or sea. As he says, “You’ve got to be good in order to be lucky out here. And you can’t be lucky unless you’re good.” Now, the waves are on either side of us, building—fifteen feet, twenty—cutting off everything else on the horizon. I’m afraid. It’s like being stuck in a grave and watching dirt shoveled down from above. There is no order to the breakers, no rows of successive curls. They come from port and starboard, bow and stern. At all times, Lewis moves his head back and forth, dodging and ducking—radar the old-fashioned way.

“Back there!” He points. “Where’d that one come from?” Another curled wall crashes over the bow and into our faces. When my eyes clear, Lewis looks down at me and smiles.

“Look back at the Cape,” he yells. “See the inlet, just below the rock. That’s Deadman’s Cove, where all the bodies wash up. When somebody’s missing, that’s the first place we look.”

Seeking the Northwest Passage, Francis Drake, the reformed pirate of the late sixteenth century, sailed as far north as the coast of Oregon and then turned back because of the weather. “The most vile, thicke and stinking fogges,” he wrote, in the first description of the Northwest by a Western writer. A land of “congealed rain.” A Greek, Apostolos Valerianos, sailing under his Spanish alias of Juan de Fuca, thought he’d hit paydirt in 1592. Instead, what he apparently found was the passage to Puget Sound, a strait that would bear his assumed name forevermore. He never went inside to investigate. He was said to be a gifted liar, an invaluable asset for any mariner in the company of benefactors and historians. The English captain James Cook, his reputation on the line, tried three times to find the bloody river, the last attempt coming in 1778 when he poked around the mouth of the Umpqua River on the southern coast of Oregon, then missed both the Columbia and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. While eating human arms at Nootka Sound, a culinary gift of the Vancouver Island tribe, he agonized about his place in history, which as matters
turned out would have more to do with his death in Hawaii than with his failures off the Northwest Coast. With him was a young midshipman, George Vancouver, who would return.

Captain John Meares, a British trader, came next, following Cook’s maps and the recent chartings of a Spaniard, Bruno Heceta. Meares saw the discolored water, the pounding surf, and tried to find an entry point. There had to be a river here. It was July, the best weather month of the year, and still he could not get beyond the wall of breakers to see if anything was on the other side. He concluded that the River of the West was a fiction: “Disappointment continues to accompany us,” Meares wrote in his journal on July 6, 1788. “We can now safely assert that no such River exists.”

Meares left a name: Cape Disappointment.

George Vancouver returned in the spring of 1792, himself the captain now, with three Royal Navy ships under his command. A dour man of Dutch descent, still young at thirty-four, Vancouver was determined to find the River of the West or die in disgrace. His mission was to fill out the rest of the map of the north coast of the continent. There was still no such thing as Puget Sound on this map, no 250-mile-long island severed from the mainland of British Columbia, no Fraser River, no Mount Rainier, no Mount Baker, no Mount St. Helens, no Mount Hood, no Cascade Range. But there was a River of the West, labeled as such, a drawing based on optimism and little else, showing a waterway that began in the Midwest, drained out of Lake Superior and emptied into the Pacific. Of course, there were no Rocky Mountains.

At the same time, some Boston merchants had sent off an American, Robert Gray, and loaded his 212-ton sloop with cheap trading goods. Eighteen months out of New England, in the spring, Gray met Vancouver off the Pacific shore. Cautiously they exchanged information, deleting a channel here and a landmark there, embellishing certain discoveries; but neither claimed to have seen the River of the West. Vancouver had unknowingly sailed past the Columbia’s mouth on April 27. “The sea,” he wrote, “had now changed from its natural to river-coloured water, the probable consequence of some streams falling into the bay. Not considering this opening worthy of more attention, I continued our pursuit to the northwest.”

A few weeks later, on May 11, 1792, three hundred years after Columbus laid eyes on the New World, Gray’s ship, the
Columbia Rediva
, passed through the barricade of the sea and found, at north latitude 46 degrees and west longitude 122 degrees, The River. He noted it in his journal, a
dry, technical description, considering what he’d discovered. Gray seemed more fascinated by the Chinook natives just inside the mouth, stark naked, their noses perforated, their foreheads oddly flat. They seemed to have not a care in the world, but their secret—and the secret of this land hidden behind the bar—was now out. Upon meeting the Chinooks, the “Boston men,” as the natives called them, traded one nail for two salmon. This set a trading pattern, and soon Gray had picked up three hundred beaver skins for two nails per skin. The beaver-skin hat was all the rage among fashionable men of Europe and the fledgling states of America. Problem was, beaver was becoming scarce. Here in sponge-land, beavers were everywhere.

Gray, on a mission of commerce before nationalism, only ventured fifteen miles upriver, far enough to gather more than three thousand sea otter pelts. These silky mammals, up to five feet in length and with the disposition of a toddler just after a long nap, were easily clubbed, smiling right up until the moment their skulls were smashed. In China, on the way back to Boston, Gray made a fortune on the otter furs, selling them to mandarin lords for about $100 apiece. From here on out, the Columbia would be on every nautical route that went anywhere near the North Pacific.

Back at sea, Gray met Vancouver a second time and told him of his discovery. Vancouver acted as though he hadn’t heard him; he later claimed the Columbia as the property of Great Britain after his ship, the
Chatham
, commanded by Lieutenant William Broughton, sailed over the bar in the fall of 1792. Vancouver had spent the late spring in Puget Sound, which he discovered for Europeans, charted, and named. In the Columbia, the
Chatham
went a hundred miles upstream, within naming distance of Mount Hood, tagged for Lord Samuel Hood, a British naval officer who had been second in command of the English fleet during the Revolutionary War. Two of the biggest volcanoes in the Northwest, Hood and Rainier, are named for wartime enemies of America.

All the otter and beaver profiteering caused a considerable amount of excitement among eastern capitalists. John Jacob Astor thought the way to monopolize the beaver and otter trade in the far Northwest was to build a fort at the mouth of the Columbia. Nobody would get in or out without passing by the watchful eye of his American Fur Company outpost. Astor, a millionaire who was once called the richest man in America, sent out one of maritime history’s great megalomaniacs, Captain Jonathan Thorn, to found the settlement. Thorn arrived in his 290-ton ship, the
Tonquin
, with ten mounted guns on board. He came around the tip of
South America, then stopped in Hawaii, where he picked up some natives to use as cheap labor. He arrived at the Columbia entrance in March of 1811, loaded down with livestock, potatoes, a near-mutinous crew, and the Hawaiians. Facing the guardian breakers at the mouth of the river, Thorn backed off. Unable to get the
Tonquin
near Peacock Spit, he ordered his first mate, Ebenezer Fox, and three companions into a small boat and told them to find a channel through the bar. They were never seen again.