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

by Timothy Egan

  The rains have arrived. The roses of late summer look like melted wax on long stems. The sky is in a rage; no weak little mist is this. I’m in the green closet of the Stillaguamish River valley, about sixty miles northeast of Seattle at the western edge of the Cascades. Zane Grey, one of the originators of the Western novel, once said the Stilly was the best steelhead-fishing river in the world. If I could see the river, I might be able to judge for myself. The sky is too thick with horizontal rain to allow much deciphering of the water.

  This is no place to get lost; it’s full of hungry people who’ve been on strike at the Simpson Timber Mill in Darrington for most of the year. Various scarecrows in white collars hang in effigy along the main road. Tar Heel country, the valley here is populated by third-generation refugees from cut-over forest lands of Southern Appalachia. Some of them still make moonshine behind their tree-shrouded homesteads. I see a few stooped-over figures draped in camouflaged rain gear out in the cow fields picking magic mushrooms, psilocybin, which sprout in great abundance in the rain country. They call this valley the Bluegrass Capital of the Northwest, but all I can think of are the toothless hillbillies in Deliverance.

  I find the little village of the Stillaguamish Tribe, about a hundred Indians living in new houses surrounded by a forest of dripping evergreens. Long ago, the federal government said they were no longer a legally recognized tribe. In trying to restore their treaty status, an old Stillaguamish woman named Esther Ross stood in front of a bicentennial wagon train in 1976, making headlines across the nation, and she once threw the bones of a dead ancestor on the desk of Governor Dan Evans. They are now a legally recognized tribe. This morning, about two dozen Stillaguamish gillnetters have been out on the raging river fishing for chum salmon. They display their catch, about three thousand fish, in front of the village this morning. Everybody comes out of the homes, smelling of wood smoke, and stands in the rain to look at the fish. Been a long time since this many salmon have been seen by these people.

  An old Chevrolet pulls up, full of kids. A man without front teeth, eyes heavy from little sleep, steps out of the car and opens his trunk. He has another two hundred pounds of fish to add to the haul. They weigh the fish and laugh in the rain. Japanese wholesale buyers will pay them the best price they’ve ever received for their chum catch.

  “What’re you going to do with your money?” I ask the man.

  “Buy some food.”

  “And?”

  “Maybe some tires for my car. Got my eye on a pair down in Arlington.”

  Zane Grey would not recognize the Stilly today; it runs brown like 7–11 coffee. I’ve come up here not to see the Indians but to look at the biggest threat to the silver flash of life in all the years the Stillaguamish River has carried salmon. State biologists estimate the fishery, including crab beds in the Puget Sound bay into which this river empties, is losing $3 million a year because so much logging debris is clogging the river and smothering spawning channels. With every passing hour of this storm, the river rises another foot, knocking out the resting pools for upstream-bound salmon, scooping up the freshly fertilized eggs. The reason for this carnage lies upstream.

  I climb into a van with Pat Stevenson, biologist for the Stillaguamish Tribe. The rain intensifies. It’s about 9:30 in the morning, but the sky seems as dark as an earthen ceiling. The ditches on either side of the road resemble small streams. We drive for about an hour, winding up a mountain road, until we reach the bridge over Deer Creek, one of the main tributaries of the Stilly and a world-class steelhead river—that’s wild steelhead, not hatchery-bred. Though technically not salmon, the winter-running steelhead trout look just like salmon and act just like salmon. They weigh up to forty pounds and can grow to fifty inches in length. Catching one with fly rod and reel is an angler’s dream. What happened to Deer Creek is the steelhead’s worst nightmare.

  “Sure you wanna cross this?” Stevenson asks me. “Bridge may not be here when we come back.”

  The river roars downstream in boiling, brown rapids, four and five feet high. “A few weeks ago, this was your basic babbling brook,” he says.

  We cross the bridge and continue another few miles to road’s end. We then hike a few hundred yards in cut-over forest land, large cedar stumps all around.

  “Hope you’re ready for this,” he says.

  I thought I would be, but I am not. We edge up to a vast canyon, where the earth cracks in layers. I feel as if I’m watching a slow-motion earthquake. Streams of mud and clay and gravel slide down from all sides of the canyon, funneled into Deer Creek. The debris backs up, fills with water during storms such as today’s downpour, then explodes, scooping out every steelhead and salmon spawning nest in its path.

  “Don’t get too close,” Stevenson warns me. I’ve never seen anything like this—a cancerous canyon five hundred feet across, two thousand feet long and eight hundred feet deep. More than a million cubic yards of debris have slid into the river. Five years ago, this was a gentle forest slope. Then, the Georgia Pacific Timber Company clearcut most of the trees in the watershed. Now, the land will not hold water. The logging company says it’s nature’s fault, not theirs.

  When you press timber-industry leaders about the effect of land-savaging logging practices, they sometimes deflect the main question and talk about the future of salmon: just like the Japanese, we’ll raise them on farms and breed them in hatcheries, they say. British Columbia is already headed in that direction. Once, the Fraser River used to support a sockeye run of up to 40 million salmon. This year, about 2 million fish will return. Log-clogged channels and debris-covered spawning grounds strangled the run. Within a few years, however, British Columbia is expected to pass the Japanese in number of salmon raised in the netted pens of fish farms. These small, odd hybrids never know the ocean depths or the cold gravel of a mountain stream. They are raised like cattle, frequently diseased by bacteria from their cluttered feces. The Weyerhaeuser Company tried to get into salmon ranching in Oregon in the 1980s. They spent $40 million to create a hardy breed of trained coho. It didn’t work, and this year the timber company threw in the towel on fish farming and went back to clearcutting.

  “Salmon are more than just Burger King sandwiches,” Norman Quinn, born and raised in New York City, told me one day at the University of Washington. “They are the canary in the mine shaft, an indicator of the health of everything we care about here.”

  In the pouring rain above the Stillaguamish, land crumbling all around me, I feel dizzy and disoriented, as if one misstep is going to send me stumbling into the Deer Creek slide. There is no silver flash of life here, only the color of destruction. If all the salmon of the Northwest were raised on farms and bred in hatcheries, slides like this would be common, children would have few reasons to care about drainage ditches behind their schools, and visitors from Chicago would have less to marvel at on a fall day. The land above the rivers would be more prone to lose the thin layer of green life that has been attached to it since the glaciers melted away. What’s more, it would lose the resonance of spirit.

  Chapter 11

  HARVEST

  I’m freezing; the forest floor has given up the day’s heat, and the pine needles are stiff with cold. I’m hungry, my stomach a hollow melon. I’m alone—just a few minutes ago, I started talking to myself. Dangerous stuff, this gibberish without the brake of contention. In the valley below, there is warmth and food and company. There are calories in all colors and grapes of joy growing from earth as rich as German chocolate cake. Not yet, not yet. I’m on a diet of cold air and barren ground to prepare for the harvest. Food tastes better after a fast. Wet fruit finds a welcome home in a dry mouth. The sober head is more receptive to the spin of champagne. So I walk along the cold shallows of the Little Naches River, muttering like a politician in an echo chamber, stomach on empty, head full of tomorrow and the valley. The Yakima Valley. Eden with irrigation.

  I started walking just east of the Cascade Crest, intending to follo
w gravity’s groove through the pine forests down to the valley. Up here, after years of spring runoff and wind-ripping, the surface holds nothing but a few generations of alpine mulch. The Naches is a cocky little stream, darting through rock cleavages and around downed timber, quicker and deeper than it should be. It drains the country where William O. Douglas recovered his strength after a childhood bout with polio, the fall elk-hunting ground of Yakima warriors. The Naches pulls the Bumping and American Rivers with it down a chasm to the valley, where the snowmelt of the Cascades arrives at the doorstep of the desert with a promise of life. Once there, the Naches joins the Yakima River. About seven inches of rain a year falls in the Valley, a home for rattlesnakes and ground squirrels that don’t need fresh drinking water to stay alive; they metabolize moisture from desert plants.

  In two days of wandering the Naches all I’ve had is water laced with powdered lemonade—sugar with food coloring. When I take a long pull from the lemonade, it gives me a quick boost, causing me to speed up, followed by the inevitable letdown. The sun has now passed beyond the crest and the massif of Rainier, which knocks down most of the storms from the west and leaves this area parched in its shadow. Daydreaming, I’m startled by a splash in the river, as if a big stick had been thrown nearby. I look downstream and see the surface break with trout, big guys, leaping for late season dragonflies, those oddly intertwined bugs who always seem to fly in tandem. Watching the trout jump has a Pavlovian effect on me; they are a suggestive tease to the stomach. I’ve never looked at a fly-covered cow and thought of cheeseburgers; but as I watch these rainbows, I think of white flesh, moist, cooked just right over a fire.

  I do some quick rationalizing and conclude that it wouldn’t be cheating to break my fast with a native fish. After all, they’re part of the natural bounty. I set my pack down and rig up my portable Zebco rod, two pieces with a spinner reel. Grandpa would never forgive me for this, using a lazy man’s tool for a sporting test. I tie on a goofy-looking fly, something that might pass for an earring in West Hollywood, and float the little sucker downstream. The current carries my fly to a pool created by downed logs. Then—splash! The line goes taut. The Zebco whines. Hot damn, I’ve got one of the little bastards! He goes for cover under the logs, but I cross over the stream and reel him in on the other side. I flop him onto the rocks—a beauty, about thirteen inches, a fine rainbow. I’m so hungry I’m ready to sample trout sushi. I cut him open to see what he’s been eating; the guts don’t tell me much. In ten minutes, as the last of the light slips away, I catch two more trout. Now, I’m ready to feast.

  On the riverbank, I start a fire in a clearing. I rustle through my pack and find a single beer—cold from the free-falling temperatures. Now, I’ve got two pieces of a paradise pie. I put the beer in the Naches for an extra chill. When the fire settles down into hot coals, I take out my little Boy Scout frying pan, squeeze a bit of olive oil on the bottom, and balance it over the edges of two rocks near the fire. In a few minutes, the oil starts to sizzle, and I put the three trout in the pan, which is too small to hold them. I suspect they’ll shrink up into a fine fit. There’s no wind in this alpine valley tonight, just the roar of the river. A moon-sliver pokes through the woods to the south. I retrieve my beer, take my fish out of the pan and flop ’em on a plate. I say to my stomach, Gentlemen, start your engines.

  Afterward, I light a cigar and lie back against my pack. I think of something Winthrop said when he was camped with two Indians and three horses on the banks of this river in 1853, a few months before it became a wagon trail so steep that oxen were lowered down by tether. “I fed my soul with sublimity,” he wrote. After a dinner by campfire in the Cascades, there is no better dessert than sublimity. Tomorrow, I plan to consume the bounty of the Yakima Valley. Despite my repast of trout and cold beer, I can’t quell a rising food lust. I think of apples so big they barely fit in the palm of your hand. Grapes the color of passion. Quail and duck fresh from the irrigation swamplands. A sip of Chardonnay to wash down the duck, or maybe one of the three-year-old Merlots from the upper valley. Or a thick, rust-colored beer brewed with Yakima hops. Pears, or a few cherries left in cold storage from the summer harvest. Late peaches. I’ve orchestrated a stampede of anticipation, but I’ve still got fifty miles of river to follow.

  Along the banks of this river, Winthrop treated his horses to a patch of wild pea vines and himself to a grouse which he shot and slow-cooked over the fire. His head sated with sublimity, his stomach full of grouse, he fell asleep next to the cold river. Later, he concluded, “There are things to be said in behalf of cobblestone beds by rivers of the Northwest. I was soft to the rocks, if not they to me.”

  I wake up shivering, the top of my sleeping bag covered with frost. It’s not quite morning. I try to return to a dream, just to see how it turns out, but I can’t get back in. I get up, dress, fold my bag and continue downstream. At a junction of the Naches and the Bumping, a road leads down to the Yakima Valley from Chinook Pass. By plan, I’m supposed to follow the river to the valley, just as Winthrop did. It’s the late twentieth century, no reason to stay on two feet; Winthrop didn’t have the benefit of the interstate highway system. I stick my thumb out. An hour goes by, three cars pass. Then a logging truck stops, and a man with a baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan “We Interrupt this Marriage to Bring You Deer-Hunting Season,” leans over and says, “Hop in.” He’s heavily into deforestation, carrying a load of old-growth ponderosa pine down to the mill in Yakima. His cargo looks a lot like the trees I slept next to, two-hundred-year-old beauties. With the casualties in back and me in front we wind down the road along the Naches.

  Coming into the Yakima Valley, we pass a few orchards in the high country, sloped rows of trees clinging to hillsides and bluffs. The earth is overcooked, seared of any late season vegetation, but huge patches of green are grafted to this quilt of brown. Sprinkler heads spit water above the treetops. The blades of giant windmills rotate slowly, trying to mix the cold air of the orchard floor with the warmer air ten feet above ground. The Naches widens and slows, changing from mountain stream to valley irrigation artery. Along the river, before we enter the sprawl of the town of Yakima, shacks of corrugated tin, plywood and cardboard appear, the homes of migrants. An army of forty-five thousand Mexicans picks the hops that are brewed into three-dollar-a-glass ales, the spearmint that becomes gum for sluggers in the World Series, the Rainier cherries that so delight, the grapes that ferment to fine white wine, the asparagus of spring, the peaches and pears and prunes for summer tables, the apples for the world.

  According to natural law, nothing should grow here but sage and scrub brush and those creatures of the desert that don’t need drinking water to stay alive. On the floor of the Yakima Valley I do a 360-degree head turn, and all I see are fruit trees and vineyards and hop fields at the height of life. The wind carries the scents of the season, fresh-pressed cider, grapes under crush. Beyond the hillsides of irrigated green are the desert tops of two ranges which rise above the valley, Rattlesnake Hills and Horse Heaven Hills. Floating above the horizon on the western skyline is the 12,225-foot volcano of Mount Adams, a suspended snow cone.

  The apples on Jim Doornink’s farm have reached climax. Ripe. Sweet. Full-colored. Firm. I pick a Golden Delicious, the color of winter sun. I polish it on the nap of my jeans and then bite into the fruit Eve used to tempt Adam, the ancient Greek symbol of love and fecundity. All that fiber and potassium and Vitamin C in a sweet orb of eighty calories.

  “This is the best day of the year to pick these apples,” says Doornink, a big man in his late thirties with massive forearms who looks somewhat like his brother Dan, a onetime fullback for the Seattle Seahawks. He takes out a small handheld pressurizer and tries to punch through an apple.

  “Look at that,” says Doornink. It takes eighteen pounds of pressure per square inch before the apple breaks, more than enough to meet the minimum Washington State apple firmness standard of eleven pounds per square inch. Nowhere els
e in the world are farmers required to poke eleven pounds of pressure against their apples before they’re allowed to sell them. He cuts open a few Red D’s and sprays them with iodine. The fruit goes black before it lightens in the center—the proof of maximum sweetness, another state requirement. But I don’t need the pressurizer or iodine to tell me that.

  Ever since Doornink unleashed the bees of April for a pollination orgy, he’s been waiting for this—peak week. Every apple farmer in the Yakima Valley is jacked. Nobody sleeps more than a few hours at a time. The trees are dripping red and gold and a dozen shades in between. Following the blossom, the apples absorbed a summer of desert sun, sixteen hours of light every day, and then a month of cool night temperatures. An apple that hasn’t experienced the hard times of cold is flat, tasteless, bland. But an apple that’s hung in the hundred-degree temperatures of day and held through the thirty-five-degree nips of night is a fruit with experience. Cold helps to brings out acid, which makes an apple tart. Color is painted by warmth. When they connected snowmelt to the sun a hundred years ago here, they created a valley of plenty: The farmers of Washington will harvest half the apples grown in America this year—about 12 billion pieces of fruit, and more cherries than anyplace on earth.

  Bouncing in the seat of Doornink’s truck, we listen as the radio picks up traffic reports from across the Cascades in Seattle. Here, we’re looking at a seventy-five-degree day, the sun reflecting back off the snows of Mount Adams, the air full of harvest and free of clouds. In Seattle, traffic is backed up practically to the Canadian border and drizzle is falling. They haven’t seen the sun for two weeks. I pick up a Yakima station, all Spanish, and another local one, all John Bircher, the broadcaster warning about the danger of a civilian population not sufficiently armed with AK-47S and other semiautomatic fruits of the Constitution. Doornink and I drop off a load of apples at the cold-storage facility, a warehouse of dark manipulation. Used to be, all apples were sold fresh until about Christmas, when they started to go mushy. Then came cold storage—or “controlled atmosphere,” as they call it here. All but about one percent of the oxygen is sucked from the air inside these blackened rooms, and the temperature is maintained at thirty-one degrees. The conditions keep the fruit suspended, as is, for about a year, allowing farmers to sell a crisp apple twelve months after it was picked from the tree. A marvel of technology, controlled atmosphere has one drawback: every year, says Doornink, they lose a worker or two who mistakenly steps into the vacuum without his bottled oxygen.