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

by Timothy Egan

  As it turned out, a handful of poets came to the Olympics before pioneers. The great naturalist John Muir, tromping through the ancient forests here in 1889, found a scattering of Winthrop-type characters a full generation after the Yankee’s prophecy. Muir wrote: “In these Washington wilds, living alone, all sorts of men may perchance be found—poets, philosophers, even full-blown transcendentalists, though you may go far to find them.”

  What came of these poets is not recorded. But one year after Muir’s visit, the prose was considerably less flattering when the Seattle Press organized an expedition of well-armed explorers to penetrate the interior of the Olympics. This was the so-called Press Expedition, put together as a newspaper promotional stunt to satisfy the forty thousand citizens of Seattle who in 1890 still had no idea what lurked behind those blue and green walls forty miles across the Sound. The first group photo shows a mean-faced crew clutching rifles, with bullet belts slung over their shoulders. They look like mercenaries on leave from the barbershop quartet. Loaded down with tons of food, boxes of whiskey, carpenter’s tools and enough ammunition to wrest Vancouver Island from the British, the Press Expedition took four weeks just to leave the outskirts of civilization on the northern peninsula. By then, “our supply of whiskey was well-nigh exhausted,” one member told the paper in a dispatch.

  The ultimate boys camp-out quickly soured. Two months into the trip, they had completed construction of a flat-bottomed barge, which moved upstream at a slug’s pace and had to be portaged most of the way because the rapids of the Elwha River were too shallow. Bereft of whiskey, the group leader, James Christie, gave some insight into the ordeal in midwinter. “An extraordinary amount of rain—water falling in sheets,” he wrote. “There has scarcely been a single hour for the last week without a shower bath that went straight to the skin. Oil clothing seems to be of no use and we have discarded it as useless.” In a bid for wider readership, they named dozens of mountains after dozens of newspaper editors, most of whom had never been west of their city rooms. George Childs, owner of the Philadelphia Ledger, was given a mountain; Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World was offered Mount Pulitzer; a competitor, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, had his Mount Bennett, and another Manhattan rival, George F. Jones of the New York Times, could sleep easier knowing he had an Olympic peak to call his own; Mount Hearst was named for William Randolph Hearst of the San Francisco Examiner; and of course a city editor at the Seattle Press, a gentleman by the name of John G. Egan (no relation), was immortalized with Mount Egan. On my map today, I cannot find a single one of their names.

  In the late spring, with snow on the mountainsides twenty-five feet deep, the expedition neared its destination. Desperate for animal fat after months of living on salmon and pancakes, they killed a bear one spring day, devoured the animal’s liver and drank the meat grease as if it were fresh-squeezed orange juice. At last they reached the Quinault River and were hailed as conquering, but somewhat slow-moving, heroes. It took them six months to travel forty-nine miles. No mountains were climbed. Essentially, it was a valley walk, one which today can be done on national park trails in three days, maybe four if you’re burdened with extra whiskey.

  The white-tipped ridge ahead of me is hidden by cloud cover again; the peek-a-boo views through slits in the forest are replaced by puffs of gray and an increase in the tempo of drip, drip, drip. Everything is greener and darker. No light directly overhead. The canopy has hogged it all; the low-level vegetation must compete for the afterlight. Midday, and I can’t shoot a picture in here without boosting the film speed. I’m not sure exactly where I am—somewhere in the valley—but I can still hear the distant river, my tether. Now, I hear a clomping sound, branches breaking underfoot. I look up and see elk, black-chested beasts, about a thousand pounds each. I count six, eight, ten, and then to the other side, six more. A herd of Roosevelt elk. I feel tiny and two-legged. In the salad bar of the rain forest, they are pruning shrubs and chomping brush. Their coat of fur is reddish, except for the black-vested chest. Some have antlers. Their legs, muscled and taut, are long and graceful. I watch them eat, they watch me watch. After a few minutes, somebody gets a bad scent, they crash and clomp up the steep side of the valley and disappear.

  President Teddy Roosevelt, alarmed by the dwindling coastal elk herds and the fast-approaching loggers, made much of the Olympic Peninsula a protected National Monument in 1909, shortly before he left office. Hunters were slaughtering the elk to get at their teeth, which were sold as watch fobs to Elks Club members around the country. Nearly thirty years later, Teddy’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the cripple who could not walk, toured the perimeter of the peninsula by car. Though it drizzled off and on, the President was enchanted. One night at Lake Quinault, timber industrialists and their allies in the Forest Service argued against a park in the Olympics, saying the rain forest should not be protected. Roosevelt got up early the next morning, looked east across the lake to the sun rising over the iced peaks above the thousand-year-old evergreen trees, and made up his mind. The Olympics, he said, “must be a national park.” This at the depths of the Depression. Score one for Winthrop; the poet’s spirit had lingered in the mist of the rain forest.

  In ardent defense of the Olympics, Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, said, “If the exploiters are permitted to have their way with the Olympic Peninsula, all that will be left will be the outraged squeal of future generations over the loss of another national treasure.” The mountain range and narrow corridors along the lowland western valleys of the rain forest were set aside as a national park in 1938. Nature has since repaid the family: the largest Roosevelt elk herd in the world roams the Olympic Peninsula.

  Had Roosevelt gone the other way, and opened the Olympics to deforestation and pell-mell settlement, much of the peninsula might well look like the area around Forks, an abused timber town west of the national park. Surrounded by thick stumps, burned-over land and eroded hillsides, Forks is to the Olympic Peninsula what a butt rash is to Venus. The logging company officials who work out of this town still look at the park covetously; in their braver moods, they speak of getting at the protected timber.

  Once, most of the country was covered with trees; now the American jungle has shrunk to this strip at the edge of the continent. The natives who lived on the Olympic Peninsula for thousands of years left only a few fingerprints. In the brief run of Western Man’s attachment to this place, the Olympics have nearly been exhausted of fish and trees, the two sources of native prosperity. Instead of cutting on an even rotation, the timber industry turned to automation and export, tearing down as much of the ancient forest as the law would allow, and they now demand the last of the old trees. The town of Forks, painful to see, its social ills heartbreaking to hear of, is their monument.

  At dinnertime, I decide to cook sausage, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, and oregano and pour it all over spaghetti noodles. I take my time, adding a dash of wine from a plastic container, and letting everybody get to know each other over the low heat of my camp stove. Soon I’ve got company, a doe and her fawn, wobbling on new legs. When I stand up, the deer makes a defiant scrape of the ground with her hoof, something I’ve never seen before. The fawn is toy-store cute, a Bambi look-alike, and would not do well to get a taste of Italian cooking at her age. The doe steers her away. I eat while sitting on a log next to the roaring Quinault, watching the river flow. So hypnotic, this surge of deep, clear water, bouncing out of the mountains and sprinting toward the Pacific. Later, inside my tent, I find sleep comes easy, aided by the drip, drip, drip and the white noise of the Quinault. I dream of traveling geologists (like traveling salesmen) who come by the campsite with tips on how to comprehend the mystery that surrounds me: Have you considered the influence of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, the late movements of the Pleistocene Epoch, the relative youth of these mountains?

  In the morning there is sunlight—sunlight! The drip is gone. I stick my head out and see a woodpecker drilling i
nto a dying fir that looks completely different from what it did ten hours ago; the striations of advanced age are fully visible in this light. I get some idea of why a woodpecker pecks: he drills for sap, knowing it will draw bugs. Later, it’s easy pickings. For me, breakfast is much simpler, instant oatmeal and coffee. I break camp in a hurry. Sunlight, who knows how long it’ll stick around? On the trail, my blisters hurt, but the scenery is diverting. The Enchanted Valley is six miles upriver, and I’m told to expect a place that lives up to its name. Even with the sun, the forest is dark most of the way, and becomes greener still with each mile closer. Where the valley walls steepen, there are more casualties among the giant trees. After living the long life on shallow topsoil gouged by the glacier, they are felled by exhaustion. I pass several uprooted monsters, their trunks at root level fanning out in a starburst pattern. The valley is about a thousand feet above sea level here, and the river is so swollen and hurried it appears to have come from an outlet of some grand lake.

  After passing through the darkest, greenest, thickest, wettest and most sweet-scented part of the valley, I find the air lightens, the canopy opens up and the trees change somewhat. There is something big and white straight ahead, shining through the trees. The valley widens, until it is flat and open and grassy, a perfect park with a wall of glaciers at the head. Ice Age and temperate jungle commingle. The first thing I notice about the Enchanted Valley is the wildflowers, great bursts of color against a green backdrop. The waterfalls—to the north, the south and up ahead in the cirque of the valley—plunge down rock walls, falling hundreds of feet to shock life into the infant Quinault. Like movements of a symphony, they each contribute to the sound of the valley—a rumble, a splash, a rhythmic slapping of water on rock, water on snow, water on moss.

  On the floor of the Enchanted Valley is a three-story chalet, made of wood, cedar-shingled on top, with large windows, a nice porch, a stone fireplace. Very storybook, something like a retirement home for Hansel and Gretel. Once a hotel whose guests were hauled up the valley trail on horseback, the chalet is National Park Service property now, a fact the government makes instantly clear. In search of human companionship, I go to the chalet and find it locked. I peer through the window: inside is a well-cleaned, well-kept residence, home of some lucky park ranger. Outside, in bold letters, is this sign: WARNING: THIS STRUCTURE IS U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY AND MUST NOT BE MOLESTED. Molested?

  Fresh coffee is brewing somewhere. I follow the scent to a bright-orange-domed tent, occupied by a man and a woman from Maine. We swap exclamations, talking about the strange and wonderful things happening within this fortress of green. The man from Maine says he’s come to the valley to look at the biggest hemlock tree in the world. It’s somewhere in the Quinault, but unmarked. I tell him he can go into the Queets River rain forest, one valley over, and look for the biggest Douglas fir in the world, which is marked. Or he can look for the biggest Sitka spruce in the world, which is also in this neighborhood. He likes trees better than just about anything and had to come all across the country and wait out several weeks of rain and then some to find them. He started in Oregon, where the temperate rain forest begins, extending in a coastal strip all the way north to the Alaskan panhandle. But nowhere do the trees grow so big, so fast, in such a protected setting as in the Olympics, where the garden of conifers is watered by glacier melt and Pacific storms.

  I ask him and his girlfriend if they mind the drip, drip, drip, and they say not at all, because in Maine the drip falls as snow, and the land doesn’t come alive until late in the spring. I look up at the Anderson Glacier, which leans down from a pass at the head of the valley, and get to thinking about doing some climbing while the weather is just right. I ask the people from Maine if they want to come along, through snow up to Anderson Pass, and they say no, they want to read their books and lie in the grass.

  While I’m traveling over the snow, the wind is chill and fresh. The giant trees are gone, and the land becomes white except for the rock and the tops of dwarfed firs which poke through the snow. My heart is racing, but not from the exertion. Something the man from Maine said sets off an internal palaver. In New York City, there is a tree from the Olympic Rain Forest inside a glass cage in the basement of the Museum of Natural History, as frozen as a stuffed moose head. I remember seeing the trunk of that tree, and a little stuffed deer nearby, and some salal bushes and grass and ferns and other plants from the forest inside this window display. In the explanatory museum text, they got it just about right: the story of a single drop of rain that comes from a Pacific wind that feeds on the moisture of the warm sea, sweeps into the land, is forced up the mountains, then falls and becomes part of the ice or snow that will eventually return to the earth. It’s a fine story, as nature tales go. Lots of conflict and resolution. But I’d hate to learn about this place from a glass cage.

  A few years out of college, I traveled a lot, working just long enough to get a big wad of money to spend on some exotic trip, looking for places ever more remote and foreign and new. When I arrived at these places halfway around the globe, I had an attitude of, Okay, I’m here, now surprise me. Only now am I starting to learn that this place across Puget Sound, forty miles from my home in Seattle, contains enough secrets to last a lifetime.

  In the valley of the Hamma Hamma River, the woods are not as thick. This is the eastern drainage of the Olympics, over the ridge from the Quinault Valley, no longer rain forest but still overgrown and evergreen. I’m trying to climb The Brothers, a twin-peaked mountain of just under seven thousand feet which rises between the Duckabush and the Hamma Hamma valleys. I come up through the Hamma Hamma, which means “stinky stinky” in native parlance. The river does not smell, but it used to be so full of salmon that their rotting, spawned-out carcasses filled the shallow riverbed in early fall. Not now. Most of the drainage is outside the national park boundary, and logging has shaved many of the low-elevation hillsides dry. In a short trip from the salt water of Hood Canal, a natural arm of Puget Sound, to the head of the Hamma Hamma, the salmon pass through several war zones.

  After the Press Expedition of 1890, it didn’t take long for the new residents of Puget Sound to get over their fear of the Olympics and get on with the business of making something of the newly mapped place. The old-growth forests around the new cities were fast disappearing. The Olympics were virgin. However, it was still tough to get in and get out with the monster trees. World War I changed all that. When a Serbian nationalist assassinated Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand, he set in motion a series of events that remade the national boundaries of Europe—and the landscape of America’s only rain forest. By the time the United States entered the war, many of the crucial battles were being fought in the air by planes made of spruce, a wood that is both light and sturdy. The best spruce in the world is grown in the Olympics. Overnight, the forests that started rising when gunpowder was first invented a thousand years ago were leveled to help fight an incomprehensible war across the Atlantic.

  The most abundant spruce forests were in the northern part of the Olympics near Lake Crescent, the site of my Uncle Hank’s disappearance, thick with ocean mist. Boeing was then still a garage operation run out of a red barn on Seattle’s Lake Union. But the factories of Europe, and later America, couldn’t get their hands on enough Olympic Peninsula spruce to fight the war. An Army Signal Corps detachment, eight thousand men strong, began work on a spruce-hauling railroad on the north side of the peninsula. The United States Spruce Production Division worked at a frenzied pace for more than a year, clearing the forest and blasting two tunnels to lay out forty miles of track from Port Angeles on the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the woods. They finished on November 30, 1918—nineteen days after the war ended. A private timber company bought the railroad and, having hooked the world on Olympic spruce, proceeded to drain much of the area of its trees.

  From an elevation of about five thousand feet on The Brothers, I can see the patchwork of logging below in the Hamma Hamma region
. Planes are built of aluminum now, but the Olympics, on national forest land all around the park, continue to give up their forests; in the last fourteen years, almost half of the remaining old trees have been cut, leaving only 90,000 acres of virgin timber in the Olympic National Forest, which is now little more than a 600,000-acre tree farm for private industry subsidized by American taxpayers. For most visitors, this devastation is not always evident; by state law, the timber companies are supposed to leave a “visual corridor” of trees along the road. Behind this thin illusion are the big swaths of ripped-up ground, streaking mud and slash—one of many reasons why the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, has long been nicknamed the Department of Nothing Remaining. During the recession of the early 1980s, when many of the logging towns were turned into welfare camps, the state and federal government continued to sell off the trees, practically giving them away in some sales concluded despite low demand. The state forests are sold to pay for new school construction, an archaic setup designed to ensure that teachers and parents root for clearcutting of ancient trees.

  A take-no-prisoners style of logging is used on these six-hundred-year-old trees: all life, from ferns and huckleberry bushes on the ground, to eagles’ nests on the tree crowns, is cut down, bulldozed into garbage heaps, stripped of commercial wood, and then burned. The great, deliberately set fires on state and national forest land are the main cause of air pollution in Seattle and Tacoma during the late summer, as the smoke drifts eastward into the Puget Sound basin and obscures views of the mountains. The giant trees of the peninsula are among the world’s greatest storehouses of carbon. Once they are cut down, and the slash is burned, the fires release enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, contributing in a small way to the greenhouse effect and shortening the planet’s life span. A curious paradox is at work on the forests of the Olympic Peninsula: while the American government scolds Brazil for cutting and burning its tropical rain forest, the Forest Service is aiding and abetting the death of the American rain forest.