The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest Read Free Page A

Idea … will elaborate new systems of thought and life.
    New systems of thought and life—is that what’s clogging the freeways of the Puget Sound megalopolis, the Willamette Valley and the urban forest above the Fraser River? After setting Winthrop aside for several years, I resolve to follow his footsteps and look at what’s developed in the presence of a countryside “strong, savage and majestic.” Forget the boundary of Canada and America at the 49th Parallel; the Northwest is united by landscape, not divided by latitude lines. The regional icons—salmon and trees and mountains and water—spring from the elements. If people here become too far removed from those basic sources of life, then they lose the bond to a better world.
    Winthrop completed his trip in fourteen days, a virtual sprint by horse and canoe. I will take a year, attempting to follow the Yankee from Oregon desert to green-smothered rain forest, from storm-battered ocean edge to the inland waters, from the new cities of the Northwest to the homesteads of the Columbia Plateau, to see what a century can produce from scratch, and maybe … come to some understanding of why Grandpa belonged in the wellspring of the White River, as do I.

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 theearth 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