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

by Timothy Egan

  The company was encouraged to drill near Crater Lake by James Watt, the early 1980s Secretary of the Interior and trustee of all the national parks. Watt once told a Senate committee that man was ordered by God to take over the earth and conquer all living things, a view that used to be shared by many of the new residents of the American West.

  The scientists guiding the submarine are trying to find hydrothermal vents on the floor of America’s deepest lake, in Oregon’s only national park, hoping to use the evidence to stop the power plant. Perhaps, they theorize, these vents influence the color and water level of the lake. In some places where geothermal vents were tapped into for power purposes, hot springs and geysers have been reduced to warm carbonated spit. The rangerette explains it this way: “Ever try taking a shower when all the other water faucets in your house are turned on? You can’t get much water, because you don’t have any pressure. We’re afraid if you start tapping into these vents just outside the park, you’ll reduce the pressure underneath the lake.”

  The rangerette also wonders what it would look like to have an industrial plant on the border of a national park that has consistently been judged to have the cleanest air in the country. People drive up here to the seven-thousand-foot rim of the broken volcano, far removed from any population center, just to breathe. Random comments from the Crater Lake Lodge guest book: From a Texan—“Fantastic! I’ve died and gone to heaven.” From a New Yorker—“What do you do to the air up here?” From a German—“Eighth wonder of the world.”

  In the evening, I walk along the rim away from the crowds. Like most of America’s national parks, Crater Lake is designed to funnel thousands of drivers into one main visitors center where they can buy a Crater Lake Twinkie and take a picture and then be on their way. A few hundred feet away from the traffic jams, the natural wonder comes into better focus. As Rachel Carson said, you don’t need to be able to identify a pine tree to love nature; at Crater Lake, you don’t need to be a geologist. Windprints track across the wide surface of the lake; stiff-limbed, anorexic trees grow in pumice slopes; the mystery of the rock island called the Phantom Ship enchants.

  Meditations in blue: because there is almost no marine life in Crater Lake—all the water comes from rainfall and snowmelt—the color is a product of the interplay of sun and water. As sunlight passes through the lake, it is absorbed color by color. The reds fade first, followed by orange, yellow and green. Blue, the strongest hue in the color spectrum, is the last to be absorbed. From a depth of three hundred feet, the limit of light’s ability to penetrate water on the planet, the blue gets reflected back.

  Crater Lake is a product of destruction, essentially Mount Rainier without the upper mile of its cone. In the year 4860 B.C.—carbon-14 dating of charcoaled wood has established the exact date—the volcano erupted with a force that hurled eighteen cubic miles of pumice and ash all over the West. St. Helens sent forth little more than half a cubic mile. Parts of this mountain have been found 1,500 miles away, scattered over eight states and three Canadian provinces. Mazama has not stirred for nearly a thousand years.

  At night, when the blue disappears and the stars press through the dark ceiling and all the motor homes have turned off their generators, campers walk through the forest to a small outdoor theater run by the National Park Service. Some of the visitors clearly miss television; they bring potato chips and beer to listen to the story of how Crater Lake was formed. Tonight’s narrator is a small, elderly ranger, Carrol Abbott, a native of Pittsburgh. He talks about the volcano the way you’d expect somebody from an old city in the East to explain the odd landscape of the West, and it makes sense. The eruption here was like indigestion, says Abbott: “When I was a little boy, a long time ago, we would always have a big picnic on the Fourth of July. I remember one time I played a little baseball and then ate half-a-dozen hotdogs, a whole bunch of sauerkraut and then went out and played some more baseball, came back and ate a few more hotdogs. Then I topped it off with a whole lot of ice cream. When I got home, I exploded.” Pause. Chuckle. “That’s sorta like what happened here.”

  He urges everyone to step outside the cocoon of their motor homes and spend at least an hour walking somewhere in the park, “trying to read the landscape.” They will find pumice deserts where the volcanic deposits are so thick that nothing has grown back; they will find wildflowers growing from the insides of ancient, gnarled trees called Krummholz, a German word meaning “twisted wood”; they will see in Wizard Island, a hood that rises eight hundred feet from the surface of the lake, the shell of the magma chamber. What’s more, he concludes, if they walk the mile-long trail down the steep, pumiced slopes from the rim to Crater Lake, they will find “the tenth wonder of the world—a place without a Coke machine.”

  Early morning, sun just over the eastern crater rim. Atop Garfield Peak, two thousand feet above the surface of the lake. Timberline follows the steep grade right up to the eight-thousand-foot summit. With a growing season of about seven weeks, clusters of weather-harassed, soil-deprived, crabby alpine fir are holding tight to volcanic afterthought like a dying man clutching his photo album. Life springs from the past. A few thousand years down the road, the summit of St. Helens may look much the same. Older, more broken down, but alive—inside and out. This morning, in a demonstration designed to back its case that an industrial plant would not harm the national park, the California energy company has set up a pair of hundred-watt speakers on the park border and floated a host of balloons above the treetops. They are trying to simulate a 120-megawatt geothermal power plant to show that the project won’t be much of an obstruction.

  I turn to the south, where the cone of Mount Shasta is undergoing the slow turn from rose to white, 106 miles away and clear as the neighbor’s apple tree. I think of the three prospectors who fell upon the rim in the year that Winthrop visited southern Oregon. They never found the lost goldmine in the country of ice-covered cones, but they discovered this treasure: air so clean the eye can wander for a hundred miles or more, and a volcano transformed from beast to beauty. For now.

  Chapter 9

  THE WOOD WARS

  Boundary Springs boils up from the ground just west of Crater Lake and quickly forms the headwaters of a legendary river. Such turbulence from birth is appropriate, for the Rogue River, on its way to the Pacific, drains a country that is at war over its resources. To save a forest with a botanical gene pool older than any other living thing in the Northwest, men who call themselves Doug Fir and Bald Mountain Bill are perched in trees, ready to fall with the front line of the wilderness. In strategic places throughout the million acres of the Siskiyou National Forest, ancient evergreens are spiked with steel to sabotage mill saws, and bulldozer gas tanks are filled with sugar to foul the engines. At night, in the valleys shared by pot-growers and tree-fellers, gunshots are fired, windows are smashed. “Somebody’s gonna get killed,” mutters the old man on the porch in the timber town of Cave Junction. In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl’s or the logger’s? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America. And so men with braided beards sit in tall hemlocks trying to block the advance of loggers, and timber companies cut at an ever-faster rate, hoping to get the centuries-old giants before court injunctions on behalf of a small bird that can live only in the ancient coastal evergreens get at them.

  Following the Rogue west from its source in the soft shoulders of the Oregon Cascades, I have trouble staying with this river as it hurls itself through deep basaltic trenches and forests congested with green life. The banks of the Rogue are a tribute to the imagination of nature—rain forest ferns mingle at the same party with blossoming azaleas, and dry-country pines tangle with the boughs of moisture-loving spruce. An oddity among the wet woods in the temperate zone that runs along the coast from Northern California to British Columbia, the Siski
yous bake under hundred-degree temperatures in summer, but take in enough rain during the dark season to boost the conifers to astonishing heights. The Ice Age glaciers which buried the rest of the Northwest, effectively killing all plant life and then carving the U-shaped valleys as they retreated, never made it this far south; the buckled clumps of red earth here are remnants of a forest that predates all life to the north by several million years. While most of the Pacific Northwest, covered by an ice sheet a mile thick, was unveiled a mere twelve thousand years ago, the Siskiyous have lived uninterrupted for perhaps 40 million years. Twenty different conifers and 1,400 plant species thrive in the Siskiyous, home forest for the greatest biological gene pool of the West, much as the Smokies are for the East. Three times as old as the Cascades and the Sierras, these mountains are resonant with life from the adaptations of those many centuries. They are not craggy or sharp or even particularly high. There are no glaciers, no granite spires, no volcanic cones, and only a few alpine lakes.

  Like a stranger who defies stereotype upon first acquaintance, the Siskiyous are hard to figure. A little incongruent, at times spooky. Bigfoot, in this part of the country, is known as the Hermit of the Siskiyous—just under seven feet in size, smelling of body sweat and sticky hair, with yellow-tinged fur. He’s been spotted by loggers and prospectors for years, but their cameras have always failed them when the beast came within focusing range.

  Before the Rogue cuts its gorge in the Siskiyous, the river courses through the western slope of the Oregon Cascades, changing its look with the frequency of a fickle teen on an extended trip to the mall. In the higher reaches, the river is clogged with boulders that were tossed in its path by the eruption of Mount Mazama nearly seven thousand years ago. Even in midday, late summer, sunlight does not penetrate the canopy here, which is overwhelmed by the green of chlorophyll. Gathering strength from the waterfalls squeezed out of the upper woods, the Rogue roars through a dark canyon farther west of Crater Lake. I find salmon jumping from the Rogue’s torrents—big chinooks, throwing themselves against the current. Farther down, light cuts through the thinning treetops, and the perfume of ponderosa pine predominates, carried by the wind. All is sweet and cleanly cluttered in the way of a pine forest. But then the lovely scent disappears, and the Rogue turns sluggish and flat and quiet. The only dam to block the river’s 212-mile path to the Pacific appears here, backing up a reservoir surrounded by brutally shaved hillsides. Now I’m on private land, out of the national forest. Nearby is Butte Falls, a timber town on the way down.

  Logging trucks, carrying pine and fir of a girth that says the trees have lived three centuries or more, crowd the roadway. Walking up the hills, I can’t find a trace of the original forest, the lungs of this land. All is gone—cut and bulldozed into slash heaps. In the hamlet of Butte Falls, population 428, there is confusion and anger. Residents of fifty years do not recognize the hills around their town. Lost in their own backyard, they talk as if collective Alzheimer’s disease had taken over Butte Falls—like the Pretenders’ song about a native daughter’s return to Ohio: “but my city was gone.” The favorite hunting spots have disappeared. The picnic meadow that used to be … here—gone. The woods where they first made love—a sunburned junkyard. The winds kick up dust instead of tossing evergreen branches against each other, and it seems much hotter than ever before. When it rains hard, water cuts new channels in the bare earth, clouding salmon streams. People shake their heads, sad as hell, and then trudge off to cut the remaining trees left near Butte Falls.

  Global economics is wiping the green and the shade away from this timber town. For three generations the Medford Corporation has been the lifeblood of this community, gradually cutting away the old-growth trees on its ninety thousand acres. Historically, the company always logged just enough to make a profit and keep the town alive, ensuring a steady supply of trees. Then, in 1984, a corporate raider named Harold Simmons from the treeless canyons of Dallas paid $110 million for Medco, as it’s called here, an acquisition added to a $2 billion empire of sugar, petroleum, chemicals and fast-food restaurants. Because the buyout ate up so much capital, the Texan ordered all the old-growth trees near Butte Falls to be cut as fast as possible while the market for timber was still hot. Old conifers from the Northwest, straight and fine-grained, make the best building wood, any lumberman will tell you. But they take a few centuries to reach the astonishing heights and level of strength so valued in world markets. Patience is not a virtue of late-twentieth-century corporate raiders. Before the sale, about 80 logging trucks a day rolled out of this town with Medco timber. Now, the pace is nearly 130 trucks a day. Off to Japan and Taiwan go the woods around Butte Falls, a third of an acre with every truck. Throughout the Northwest, 170 acres a day of ancient forest are being cut, 62,000 acres a year. In a few years, the residents of Butte Falls say, all the trees on Medco’s 90,000 acres will be gone.

  And what will become of Butte Falls? To survive, the loggers who live here on a wage of eight dollars an hour will have to look farther west and down the Rogue to the million acres of the Siskiyou National Forest—dry and wild and mostly uncut, home of the last big unprotected roadless area of forest left in continental America. A few groves of redwoods, the tallest trees on earth, some in excess of two thousand years old, live in the Siskiyous. Every timber company in the Northwest has its eyes on this public land, which is managed by the Forest Service, a branch of the Department of Agriculture. In a typical timber sale, the government builds roads into primeval forests, logging companies buy rights to use the roads and cut all the trees. In time, Smokey the Bear has become the nation’s foremost road-builder, as the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees—more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system.

  Of late, Forest Service land managers have been treating their public trust in the Northwest like a tree farm—annual harvests reflecting market demand, and then reforesting with only one or two varieties of softwood seedlings—a process which is leading to the gradual elimination of many kinds of plant species. Few things are uglier than a fresh clearcut, with its scabbed earth, raw stumps, slash piles of debris and roads to nowhere. But a national forest replanted in the style preferred by the timber industry—corn rows of commercial trees—resembles nothing in nature. Ashamed of what the former friend of the forest had become, Jeff DeBonis, a longtime employee of the Willamette National Forest north of here, recently wrote a letter to his boss, F. Dale Robertson, Chief of the Forest Service. “Our basic problem right now is that we are much too biased toward the resource-extraction industries, particularly the timber industry,” he wrote. “We support their narrowly focused, short-sighted agenda to the point that we are perceived by much of the public as being dupes of the resource extraction industries.”

  It takes up to a thousand years for a natural forest to become the rich rot of diversity known as the climax phase of the tree-growing cycle. Only a generation ago they said Oregon had so many overgrown trees that you could stretch a sixteen-mile-wide swath of this state’s old growth from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic. No more. Less than a tenth remains of the original 30 million acres of virgin forest in Oregon. The biggest chunk of that, roughly 440,000 acres, is in the north part of the Siskiyous, the oldest living area in the state. Although 1.2 million acres of wilderness have been set aside in Oregon, only 200,000 acres is lowland timberland. Wilderness in Oregon, as in Washington and British Columbia, is mostly rock-and-ice high-alpine country. Pressed by the demands of timber companies, which have exhausted all the old growth on private land, the Forest Service has announced plans to begin clearcutting much of the remaining unprotected public forest in the Siskiyous. In the hamlets around the Rogue River, clusters of people say they will die to prevent that from happening. Few people doubt them.

  In morning light, before the sun washes away the mysteries of landscape and makes the country go flat, the hills in the central Rogue Valley
look Tuscan: vineyards wear a coat of late summer mist, pears hang from orchards thriving on irrigation water, and the land rolls and folds in undulations of bright beige. Summer has been dry, leaving the madrona bark curled and the river much lower than usual. I’m on my way to the timber war zone, but curiosity slows me. In this corner of the Northwest, a place Oregon Territory promoter Hall Jackson Kelly called “the loveliest country on earth” in 1831, before he’d even seen it, people say things like “Allrighty” and wave to you as you drive by. They root for the football 49ers, because San Francisco, about 350 miles to the south, is closer than Seattle, 470 miles to the north, but urban influences are minimal, even with the advent of satellite dish television receivers. A handful of homesteaders keep dairy farms alive on small plots of land. Backcountry, away from the farms and vineyards, some of those who don’t cut trees for a living grow pot. For several years, marijuana has been the number-one cash crop in Rogue River country.