The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

by Timothy Egan

  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.

  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

  ENCHANTED VALLEY

  For 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.