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

by Timothy Egan

  Gridlock and cocaine gang wars rule the valley in the city where I live. Once it was full of small farmers and family merchants, a long, tree-lined boulevard with views straight up to the north spine of Mount Rainier. Now the farmers are all gone, and many Seattle merchants operate from behind bullet-proof windows, and the walls are spray-painted with the slogans of young men who kill one another because somebody is wearing the wrong-colored hat. The towers of downtown prosperity are five minutes from the desperate gulch, with no connection between the two. I drive through the valley to get to my home; sometimes, stuck in traffic, I daydream off Rainier’s distant glaciers. Other times, I’m an urban warrior, adrenalin-primed for combat, even if the only battle is one to beat a yellow light.

  A few weeks before this rain forest trip, I was driving home one evening when I saw something that chilled me for a long time. Stopped at a crosslight, I witnessed a little girl get clipped by a speeding car. She was dirty-faced and shoeless, no more than sixty pounds, with soiled brown hair tied in pigtails. She was clutching a toddler when I first spotted her, eyeing the flood of traffic. Protecting the smaller child, she waited until three of the four lanes had stopped, and only then ventured across Rainier Avenue in the dim twilight. I was in the inside lane, stopped. As they walked in front of me, I glanced at the rear-view mirror: the lane to my outside was open, and a car was screaming toward the kids. I honked my horn, jumped out of the car. Too late. Without ever slowing down, a big car smashed into the little girl, sending her flying off the hood. The toddler was spared, somehow, but her sister lay crumpled and crushed on the sidewalk, spitting up blood and teeth, her leg badly mangled, her stomach heaving in and out.

  The driver of the car walked toward his victim—two faces pulled from the urban stream, both in shock.

  “I never even saw her,” he said when the ambulance arrived. “Never even saw her.”

  My first hour in the rain forest I can’t shake the caved-in face of the little girl, the spindly legs, the look of horror from her sister. I’m here, in part, to put some distance between the city and me, to seek shelter from the daily storm of civilization. Maybe such a thing is impossible in the late twentieth century. I wonder what happened to that valley in the city? The land has not changed too much: trees will still grow, the moisture will still be there, Rainier will still loom. The climate is the same. But the laws of nature are irrelevant in that valley. The urban beast is king of that jungle. In less than a hundred years, the roles have reversed: the valley in my city is dark, dangerous, a place where humans don’t belong. And this valley in the rain forest is life-giving, a sanctuary for old trees and wounded urban refugees. Now I walk under a cathedral of conifers, pleasantly daydreaming, pumping no adrenalin. I’m not on alert.

  The rain forest could have gone the same way as the valley in my city. Near the turn of the century, a white homesteader named John Huelsdonk entered the Hoh River valley, a few miles north of here, determined to conquer. The Hoh contained more fish, more elk, more deer, more berries, more cedar bark than any tribe of Coastal Salish Indians could ever hope to give away in the most elaborate of potlatches. But the rain forest had never experienced a person quite like Huelsdonk; his nickname was the Iron Man of the Hoh. He entered the valley carrying a woodstove on his back, proceeded to clear part of the forest, punch in a primitive road and set up a home. In the next few years, Huelsdonk boasted of killing three hundred cougars and an equal number of bears. By eliminating the chief predators of the tree-nibbling elk herds, he single-handedly disrupted an ecosystem that had existed for several millennia without change. However, few whites followed Huelsdonk into the Hoh to crowd the land and drain the air of green. Most of the valley is now part of Olympic National Park, saved by the drip, drip, drip.

  What kept the resource armies away, at first, was the basic freakiness of the place. A hundred years ago, after the completion of the transcontinental railroads caused Washington’s population to triple in ten years to 350,000 people, the Olympic Mountains still remained essentially unmapped. The new residents of Puget Sound knew the land buckled to cloud-snagging heights across the water. They knew a dozen or so loud rivers poured out from the glacial heart of the mountains. But no white man had ever walked all the way through the place, even though the valley floors are gentle, the rain always soft, and the mountains relatively low. In an age when nature existed only to be corraled—Cotton Mather preached that wilderness was an insult to the Lord—the land was useless, a wild, overgrown child of the West, the one that got away. By 1890, when the American frontier was officially pronounced closed, Washington’s governor wrote of the heart of darkness forty miles across the Sound, this land of mystery, and called it “terra incognita.”

  The rain has not been a total shield. Approaching the Olympic park border by car from the south, I pass the 190,000-acre reservation of the Quinault Indians. Decimated by smallpox and alcoholism, this once prosperous tribe dwindled to practically nothing just after Washington became a state in 1889. Under the management of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the reservation’s timber has been sold off, tract by tract, to the worst kind of cut-and-run loggers, who leveled the forest. In most cases, there was no reforestation. Just rip and roar, slash and grab, and get the hell outta this freaking mudhole, leaving behind as much as two hundred tons of debris per acre. A ravaged stumpland, it looks now like a junkyard finished off by vandals. Half-burned slash. Spindly alder. Muddy roads leading to nowhere. The green is all gone, replaced by black and brown, the colors of decay and erosion. Now, day after day, no matter what season, the mist of early morning peels away to reveal the same sight, the untended casualties of Western man’s war with the rain forest.

  As a consequence, the sockeye salmon run fell from nearly a million fish a year in the Quinault River to a few thousand. Without shade, the river warms; without trees, the soils shed nutrients and dilute the spawning beds. The Quinault natives, who worshipped cedar as a gift from God and salmon as an edible icon of even higher rank, knew as much. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs, based in a windowless office in Washington, D.C., did not. So a big part of mainland America’s only temperate rain forest is gone, impossible to duplicate by even the most advanced of tree farm schemes and a platoon of biologists. Something which has lived longer than most of Western civilization was wiped out in a few years.

  I stop for water at a place where the trail crosses a planked bridge over the gorge of the Quinault River. Swollen by runoff and the recent rains, the Quinault here is so deep and fast, so clear, it seems a continent away from the naked land downstream, outside the park boundary. My destination is the Enchanted Valley, thirteen miles into the heart of the Olympics, at the river’s source. There is supposed to be a wide, flat valley and an enormous glacier and an old chalet inside the Enchanted Valley, a place resonant with adjectives from previous visitors. The rain forest I walk through now is protected from further predations of chain saws and bureaucrats; never touched, a national park for half a century, it has since been recognized by the United Nations as a world-heritage site, joining the pyramids of Egypt and the Grand Canyon as places on this earth worthy of saving for the generations that will live in an overcrowded greenhouse warmed by the loss of forests and the negligence of governments. Even with the protection, timber companies are talking again about the need to “open up” the national park and get at these small valley corridors of ancient natural history, the last true remnants of a much bigger rain forest that once covered most of the Northwest Coast.

  The river roar here is just right, a pleasant numbing. Overhead, shafts of light pierce the canopy, illuminating the many shades of green, a color full of moods. I have little in common with the Quinault Indians and won’t try to act like I’m their nature buddy. I’m Irish Catholic, but feel closer to this wet land than that wet land across the Atlantic. I was born in this country because the land in Ireland went tired and thin, unable to keep the inhabitants alive. Quinault country was just the opposite, a frenzied bount
y. However, I do share something with the natives of the rain forest: a family ghost with a permanent address in the Olympics. I lost my Uncle Hank in the cold waters of Lake Crescent, a deep mountain lake on the north side of the Olympic park. He and his wife raised a truckload of kids on a small plot of land surrounded by thick woods. One day in the early spring Hank and Virginia went for a canoe ride on the lake; caught in a squall, the canoe tipped. Hank was not a good swimmer. He clung to the canoe while Virginia swam for help. She crawled up out of the bank, looked across the way at Hank, and told him to hold on. By the time she flagged a passing car, Hank was gone. Although they dragged the lake, his body was never found. A few years later, my mother put me on a bus, and I rode the ferry with strangers across Puget Sound and then over the winding roads on the north side of the Olympic Peninsula until Virginia, a friendly woman with sad eyes and lots of lipstick, picked me up for a summer on the farm. I was eight years old, and I learned how to ride a cow and jump-start a tractor and sneak up on a deer and make a whistling sound with a blade of grass between my thumbs and fish without a pole and say words like “piss” and “pecker-head.” We talked a lot about how Hank was always just lurking in the woods somewhere, their pop, my uncle, this ghost. Kept us out of serious trouble.

  Halfway to the Enchanted Valley, I come upon an open section bordered by oddly muscled maples past their prime. In this part of the valley, the forest opens up enough to let you look at the glacier peaks upriver and the green tunnel downriver, so I decide to put up camp here. My feet are blistered and my back’s whining, but I feel just fine inside the nest of the rain forest. I slump down against one of the maples and go for a sip of Jack Daniels to take the edge off the blisters. Slowly, the forest reveals itself; the truth of a place is never found on first glance, or even third glance. Here among the ancients, tree roots spread out in all directions searching for soil in a place where the earthen floor is not easily found. In one small patch of the forest, a big hemlock has taken over like a brother-in-law who’s moved into the guest room, glomming onto anything of value, its two-foot-thick tendril roots clambering over boulders to find sources of nourishment. A monument to adaptive creativity, the tree must be close to a thousand years old.

  I slip out of the boots and put on leather tennis shoes, bedroom slippers for this country. It’s time to take a closer look, get lost in the green air and the drip, drip, drip. All around me are evergreens in varying stages of the struggle with gravity. One tree lies on the ground, over the trail, with a swath cut through the middle to allow passage. I try to count the rings, but I get bored after three-hundred-and-something. Another tree is snagged in the branches of a giant, stuck at a forty-five-degree angle. In the rain forest, few opportunities are lost; a host of young alders, some as tall as ten feet, have taken root in the slow-dying flank of the snagged tree—a “nurse log,” in the terminology of biologists. The seedlings are nurtured on the moss of the nurse log, sucking, searching, probing until gradually the old tree is compost and the new tree is king. Only one of a thousand small trees ever lives to maturity. But when they finally settle in, they’re here for centuries. The Quinault, a classic U-shaped valley carved by a retreating glacier, offers protection from most natural disasters. The upper reaches of the mountain walls on either side of the river snare all the lightning bolts and take the brunt of forest-leveling avalanches. The valley is too wet for fires. The only threats to these trees are chain saws and an occasional superstorm.

  The Douglas firs here grow two hundred feet or more, straight as a carpenter’s plumb line, adding as much as three feet a year in the hunt for sunlight. On the bark of these trees, growing sideways, are ferns and fungi. The bigleaf maples are the spookiest, their hardwood branches draped with sleeves of moss and lichen, a Gothic gown.

  I can see why the first Spanish sailors who came ashore to the rain forest thought they had landed on another planet. Most of them were up from California and Mexico, brown land, cactus country, where three inches of annual rainfall produces the geek of New World plant life, the Joshua tree, a skeletal oddity that looks as if it has been electrocuted. A party of Spaniards landed in 1775—apparently the first whites to set foot in the Northwest—and were promptly killed by a group of natives near the mouth of the Hoh River. They were looking for water. Twelve years later a British sea otter ship landed near the same spot, and its crew was likewise slaughtered. Some of their body parts turned up in a feast offered British traders at Vancouver Island. These two clashes did not sit well with the travel writers of their time, the mariners whose journals were widely read throughout Europe. The Olympic Peninsula therefore remained unmapped and deeply disparaged, as if it had a poison label on the outside. By the time the Spaniards, led by Manuel Quimper, tried to take formal possession of the peninsula in 1790, they were quite wary of the place. Quimper, adding to the area’s reputation as a land of death and mystery, wrote that the natives “decorated the beach with the impaled heads of their enemies.” Taking no chances, Quimper approached landfall waving a large cross and firing twenty-one shots from the cannon of his ship. The next year Spain tried to build a settlement at Neah Bay, in the extreme northwest corner of the peninsula, heart of Makah Indian country. They purchased twenty slaves for a price of thirty-three sheets of copper, then built a fort and ten log cabins. New Spain in the Pacific Northwest lasted all of four months—the four driest months of the year, at that. Even during the summer, what chased the whites away was the drip, drip, drip.

  The Pacific shore here looks about the same now as it did to the first, unfortunate European visitors; a sixty-one-mile stretch of beach, from south of the Hoh to just below the northwest tip of the state, is the longest wilderness coast in continental America. Winter storms are legendary. During one such convulsion, the surf threw a 135-pound rock more than a hundred feet through the air and into the wall of a lighthouse. Wind-shaped, spare-limbed Sitka spruce hold to sand at the vegetation line, the visual embodiment of Japanese haiku. Sea stacks, with curled evergreens sprouting from their rock sides like hair growing from the ears of a hermit, are planted offshore, the crumbs of a mountain range that used to be underwater. Marine fossils have been found atop the highest summits of the Olympics, which are young—formed just 30 million years ago—and still growing. Entirely roadless, without any hint of man, the edge of the continent is thick with life: one cubic foot of tidepool can support more than four thousand living things. The nine coastal tribes that lived on the peninsula were pudgy from clams and crab and salmon and whale blubber. The first Europeans to visit nearly starved to death.

  After the Spanish settlement collapsed, no whites set foot near the rain forest for another sixteen years, till 1808, when a boatful of Russians went off course in a storm and was shipwrecked at the mouth of the Hoh, the same place where the British had ended up as a dining delicacy. The stranded Russians, lucky enough to have made it onshore, were chased up and down the Hoh, finally caught, and held until they were ransomed two years later. The only European who seems to have had a pleasant experience was one who stayed offshore, Captain John Meares, the fur trader who had missed the mouth of the Columbia and left the name Cape Disappointment. Sitting in his ship off the rugged coast at sunset on a warm summer night in 1788, Meares took pen to hand and named the highest peak, a pink-hued glacial mass just under eight thousand feet. He wrote: “If that not be the home wherein dwell the Gods, it is beautiful enough to be, and I therefore call it Mount Olympus.”

  So the area remained, ice-draped on top, rain-smothered in the valleys, unsettled and unmapped, the home of the gods and some contented salmon-eaters on the coast. A pandering attempt was made in 1849 to call the mountains the Presidents Range, and to rename Olympus as Mount Van Buren, a stillborn idea. When Winthrop canoed off the eastern shore of the peninsula in his summer of 1853, whites had yet to try transplanting New England near the rain forest. Winthrop looked at the mountains as a cushion for the soul, a respite. Cannibals? Darkness? No, of course not, he said—the
Olympics are a masterpiece of nature’s art. His view was an oddball one. Nature, at least in the West, was treated like a disease awaiting the cure that had yet to cross the Rockies. Gliding down Puget Sound in a canoe, Winthrop turned his gaze to the west and found instant comfort.

  “The noble group of the Olympian Mountains became visible—a grand family of vigorous growth, worthy of more perfect knowledge,” he wrote. “On the highest pinnacles of this sierra, glimmers of perpetual snow in sheltered dells and crevices gave me pleasant, chilly thought in that hot August day.” Then he added, “The calming influence of these azure, luminous peaks, their blue slashed with silver, was transcendent.”

  The idea that mountains, especially ones with such an evil reputation, could be … transcendent … was visionary. During the very summer that Winthrop felt calmed by the Olympics, a group of fellow New Englanders, having exhausted the timber of the state of Maine, were making plans to begin leveling the Olympic rain forest. Possibly Winthrop, the rebel who had to lug around five generations of Puritan baggage, was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and philosopher who thought reality was best experienced through a soul in tune with the rhythms of the earth. In the description of his Pacific Northwest journey, a few pages after crowing about the Olympics, Winthrop skewers the old view while accurately predicting his own place in history: “Poet comes long after pioneer. Mountains have been waiting, even in ancient worlds, for cycles, while mankind looked upon them as high, cold, dreary, crushing, as resorts for demons and homes of desolating storms.” Instead, he says, mountains should be “our noblest friends, our most exalting and inspiring comrades, our grandest emblems of divine power and divine peace.”