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

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 saidthat 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 intothe 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