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

by Timothy Egan

  Back at the Doornink family farm, I sample the Rome Beauties—my favorite, midsized, almost perfectly round. Doornink owns sixty acres, mostly Red and Golden Delicious, but he grows pears and cherries for diversity. Last year, he lost about fifty dollars for every bin of apples he sold. Too much sun. Too many apples. The fruit looked bad. Throughout the valley, millions of pounds were left to rot on the trees or poured into canyons. Farmers paid juice processors to take them off their hands. This year, the the volume is down, the fruit looks good, and Doornink and his wife, Rena, are hoping to go to Europe on the proceeds from the harvest.

  Jim Doornink wanted to be a doctor like his father, Glenn, the patriarch. Side by side, they look Dutch Calvinist and mean, Gothic farmers, big-boned, slow to laugh, with massive hands. The vagaries of working the land shape a country face so differently from a city face. Usually, it’s an edge-of-bankruptcy look, neck and brow wrinkled by sun and worry. The doctor’s father was a dairy farmer who came to the valley in 1928 and then went bust. The doctor bought the orchard in 1957. Jim started working in the fields at the age of six. Today, with the fruit plump and full-colored, the Doorninks are lighthearted and generous of spirit. Those Dutch faces shine.

  The surgeon inside Jim Doornink has never left. He is a practical doctor of horticulture. In the yard next to the eighty-year-old house where Jim and Rena Doornink live are rows of experimental trees. Doornink is constantly grafting one species to another, toying with taste and look. The average American eats nineteen pounds of apples every year, mostly Red Delicious, a species almost unheard of fifty years ago. Tastes change. If the consumer ditches the Red Delicious for one of the new boutique apples growing on small farms throughout the Northwest, then what? Some growers think the Red Delicious has already reached its peak. Doornink does not want to be left high and dry with yesterday’s fruit fad. The great thing about apples is that they lend themselves so easily to genetic alteration. A well-read amateur can play fruit god, adding a touch of tart here, a douse of pink there, grafting to make smaller sizes for smaller appetites. The aerobic apple is all the rage now, a cute, eight-bite snack that fits into the purse or the suit pocket of a fat-phobic urbanite.

  “Apples are kind of like kids,” says Doornink. “They all come from the same human family, but they all look slightly different. If you were to take ten thousand seeds out of this orchard, you’d get ten thousand different apples.”

  “A valley bare and broad,” is the way Winthrop described this desert floor of the Yakima Valley. His prophetic powers were missing here; bothered by heat and conflicts with his Indian guides, he turned surly and short-sighted. Taking shelter at a Jesuit mission, he dined on local potatoes and salmon from the river, and argued philosophy with the blackrobes from the Society of Jesus. He poked fun at their attempts to wean the Indians away from polygamy and fishing. The Yakimas might take to potato farming, said Winthrop, but giving up spousal variety was another thing. He noted that the native women of the valley were gorgeous, much different from the round-faced, squat coastal tribes. “A strange and unlovely spot for religion to have chosen for its home of influence,” Winthrop wrote of his overnight stay in the mission. “It needed all the transfiguring power of sunset to make this desolate scene endurable.”

  The sign in the upper Yakima Valley says: WELCOME TO YAKIMA—THE PALM SPRINGS OF WASHINGTON. The desolate scene is more than endurable, thanks to the transfiguring power of water, but Palm Springs it’s not. Five mountain dams provide water for a half-million acres of farmland in the valley. The Yakima River, birthed in snowmelt just east of Snoqualmie Pass, is held back by the turn-of-the-century dams of Keechelus, Kachess and Cle Elum. Two other forks, Tieton and Bumping, are also pinched by reservoirs. Every winter the farmers of the Yakima Valley watch the snow pile up in the Cascades; if the white tops disappear too early, as they did this year, water battles break out. The irrigation system here is an Old West anachronism: first grab, first served. If you were given irrigation access eighty years ago, you still get first shot at the water in a drought year, even if your farm is of marginal importance. Not only farmers are bound by the old rule; the tribes of the 1.3-million-acre Yakima Indian Reservation were promised by treaty adequate stream flow for their salmon runs. This spring saw the largest downstream migration of young salmon in thirty-five years. The Yakimas wanted enough water released from the irrigation dams to help those fish get down to the Columbia, and then out the gorge to the Pacific.

  The adult salmon, four- and five-year chinooks, are going upstream today. At an irrigation canal juncture, I watch them flop and leap up through a fish ladder. The same water that will fatten Jim Doornink’s apples is helping the big kings return to spawning grounds in the upper valley. Nature brought every taste of the human palate together here. Once, it was all covered by water, an Ice Age lake which shrank to a river that left behind twenty stories of rich sediment. Now it brings food to the tables of the world.

  At the county fair, the 4-H Clubbers say if all of this year’s harvest were placed in boxcars of a single train, that train would stretch from here to Chicago. The fair is a celebration of fertility, a Yellow Brick Road of produce. The pumpkins dance. The squash gator. The gourds crawl. Japanese pear-apples—small and round, light beige in color. Firm like an apple, but sweet like a pear. An after-dinner fruit. And here’s grapes—four shades of purple.

  Over a dinner of peppercorn duck, slices of scarlet tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, bread and a bottle of Sémillon—all Yakima Valley bounty, of course—I’m told the story of the Red Delicious apple, which is relayed like the narrative of the Nativity. In the midnineteenth century, a farmer in Peru, Iowa, noticed a renegade seedling growing among the apple trees he’d been raising in neat rows. He mowed the fledgling tree down twice, and twice it reappeared, more vigorous than ever. Finally, impressed with the tree’s fight, the farmer let it grow. In ten years’ time, it blossomed and bore a single apple—the first Red Delicious. Grafts from that tree were eventually brought to the Yakima Valley.

  “And every damn Red Delicious apple grown in this valley is a descendant of that one tree,” says Lowell Lancaster, an oversized orchardist who is sitting across from me at the dinner table. He looks like Hoss from Bonanza. Everything in this valley—produce and people—seems big. The fruit at the county fair was of extraordinary size. Surely, the apples of the Yakima Valley get some boost from the lab.

  “Just one,” says Lancaster. “Ethylene gas.”

  These huge apple farmers wait for me to react, expecting some lecture on chemicals in fruit. They hold grins and food in their mouths, and then laugh all around. One of them gets a piece of green bean stuck on his front teeth.

  “Yeah, ethylene gas, that’s what the apples themselves produce as they start to get ripe,” says Lancaster. “It’s like a dog in heat. Tells the fruit it’s time to get ripe. If it’s late in the season, with a frost on the way, we spray ethylene to help get everybody going. Puts ’em in the mood to get ripe.”

  The dirty word here is Alar, trade name for a growth-regulator that brings a brighter touch of red to apples and gives them a longer shelf life. A decade ago, no one had heard of Alar in the Yakima Valley. Apples, like tomatoes of thirty years ago, were raised fresh and fat without uniform size or look. Then the packagers and mass marketers started to influence the growers. They wanted all the fruit to look the same, factory-painted, firm enough to hide the scars from transportation. The supermarket chains, with their demands for color conformity, became one of the worst enemies of the small grower. Around the same time, an innovative Wenatchee Valley farmer named Grady Auvil started raising the biggest and best-tasting sweet cherry every produced—the Rainier, nearly as big as a plum, light yellow in appearance, with a blush of pink—but he couldn’t sell it to the big fruit wholesalers because it shows its bruises rather than hiding them as Bing cherries do. As a result, only a few thousand acres of Washington grow what has to be the best cherry in the world.

  With apples,
the buyers from Safeway and A & P wanted a deep red that would hold its color for months past the harvest. Such a thing is impossible, unless helped along by chemicals. In time, like a coach secretly giving his best runner steroids, and feeling guilty whenever the athlete broke a record, the apple farmers of Washington started using Alar, and they experienced years of tremendous growth and prosperity. Salesmen from the chemical companies and big food chains convinced the farmers they couldn’t live without it, saying the consumer wanted a red that was nearly artificial in appearance instead of the duller, natural tone. Alar turned farmer against farmer; those who used it had a competitive edge over those who did not.

  When researchers found that massive doses of Alar could cause cancer in lab rats, the market for Washington apples crashed, no matter the color or background of the fruit. Many of the small growers, some of the last of the nation’s family farmers, most of whom had never used Alar, were forced into bankruptcy. Others dumped their fruit or gave it to the homeless. They blamed a concerted media attack—“television terrorism,” they called it—for their bad times. Never before had the apple, the very embodiment of good health, taken such a hit. Nobody claims to use Alar now. Mention of the word is like bringing up an old girlfriend in the presence of a new wife.

  I pick through the rest of my duck, which has a pear glazing atop it. More fruit stories pour forth from the farmers. The first apple tree was brought to the Northwest by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The tree, planted at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia in 1825, still bears fruit.

  “Betcha didn’t know that apples and roses come from the same family? You can even graft a rose onto an apple tree.”

  The table goes silent. We pick at our teeth and food for a few minutes. A farmer sitting at the far end of the table speaks up for the first time tonight. “The Golden Delicious came from cow shit,” he says.

  “No shit.”

  “Cow shit,” says the fellow. “What happened was, a cow ate an apple and shit the seeds out. One of those seeds, carrying the strains of other apples, grew into the the first Golden Delicious.”

  Granny Smith apples are the product of the garbage of a New Zealand woman who dumped rotting fruit in a creekbed. They grew up into trees which produced a tart, freckled green apple. She gave them away to her friends, who referred to the treat as “Granny Smith’s apples.”

  It’s getting near bedtime for big Lowell. He’s expecting to make good money this year, after the disaster of last year, and is just scratching to get at the dawn. The only thing worse than the loss from overabundance was a long-ago freeze. Early November, twenty years ago, an arctic breeze scampered down through Canada along the Okanogan Valley into Washington, freezing up all the fruit trees while they still had sap in their veins. The sugar flow went hard, and expanded, causing the trees to literally explode.

  “You could hear them pop, one after another—pop, pop, pop,” says Lowell. “Never seen anything like it. Lost most of the orchard.”

  Following the Yakima River downstream toward the Columbia, I enter the wine country and a culture far removed from that of the apple growers. A person who harvests vinifera grapes for premium wine is not a farmer but an alchemist. Among the trellised vineyards, I hear music today, the sound of crush. At the Hogue family farms, across the railroad tracks along the river, the hops are recently in, the asparagus has been pickled, and now it’s time to make some wine. Great bunches of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes are dumped into a vat, where they are crushed and the juice drained. From there, the juice goes to stainless steel storage and then to oak barrels and, in two years’ time, to the market—about three hundred cases of the most eagerly sought-after red wine in the Northwest. What sets the Hogue family vino off from the other wines of the world—aside from the taste, a high-acid Cabernet so crisp some people drink it with seafood—has to do with the volcanoes to the east, the snow atop them, and the far northern latitudes of this valley that was dismissed by Winthrop and other nineteenth-century prophets as useless.

  Here, a few fruit farmers looking for crop diversification, aided by a handful of young hotshots from California, have gilded the Yakima Valley.

  There are no stone cottages or elegant chateaus or pseudorustic tasting cellars in this part of the valley. For that matter, there is no history. This is a place of concrete apple juice warehouses and dry hills carved up by dirt-bike trails. On the same day that winemaker Rob Griffin is overseeing the crush of red grapes out in back, he has bottled a small rattlesnake which he found slithering around the front. Griffin slaps a Hogue Cellars label on the jar of the rattler’s new home. “It’ll be a good year for snakes,” he says.

  In less than twenty years, the Pacific Northwest has become the greatest premium-wine-producing area in North America outside California. The wine growers here are not the peasants of Tuscany or the Ph.D. farmers of the Napa Valley. They are people like Wayne Hogue, a onetime sharecropper, then a hop farmer, now a genius. After working years for other people, he went out on his own with forty acres of hops in 1949. Over the decades he added spearmint, selling the mint oil to Wrigley’s, and Concord grapes, which he sold to Welch’s, and potatoes, which he sold to burger chains. Around the family dinner table at Christmas, the Hogues used to drink jug wine made by Mateus and toasted the new year with Andre’s Cold Duck champagne.

  By the mid-1960s, a few small growers in the valley were starting to experiment with Vitis vinifera, the grapes that produce the world’s great wines. As a hedge against the highs and lows of crop prices, the Hogues planted ten acres of premium wine grapes in 1972, thinking maybe they could sell a few to the Californians during a down year for hops. The climate was right, with more than seventeen hours of daylight in June, a critical grape development period. The Yakima Valley has two more hours a day of sunlight than the Napa Valley during peak growing season. Looking at the globe, the growers noted that the Yakima Valley was located between the 46th and 48th Parallels, the same northerly latitude as Burgundy and Bordeaux. With irrigation water, and the sun predictable, growing conditions can be tightly controlled, the grapes receiving the same amount of water as the French areas would receive naturally. Grapes ripened to full color in the long hot days, and gained enough acid for flavor in the cold nights.

  The shot heard around the wine-producing world was fired in 1966 by André Tchelistcheff, considered the dean of California winemaking. He tasted a Washington Gewurztraminer and pronounced it the best in America. From then on, young graduates of the oenology school at the University of California at Davis began to look north.

  “I came here with a genuine sense of mission,” says Griffin. “Everybody said, ‘Don’t go up there, Rob. It’s too cold in the winter for grapes to stay alive.’ I showed up in 1977, and there wasn’t much to look at. But all the ingredients for world-class winemaking were here—the soil, the climate, the water.” He started work at Preston Wine Cellars, down the valley near Pasco, seeking to develop a crisp, dry white. He came up with a Chardonnay and a Sauvignon Blanc that won so many admirers that when young Griffin showed up at the Dom Perignon cellars in Reims for a visit, he was welcomed at the champagne shrine as a celebrity from the wine-growing frontier.

  “They’d actually heard of me, Rob Griffin from the Yakima Valley,” he says.

  The Hogues hired Griffin in 1984, when the family decided to get serious about winemaking. The brothers, Gary and Mike, and their father, Wayne, sold their first vintages in the early 1980s from a roadside card table. Then a Chenin Blanc from that period won a gold medal at an international contest, and the Hogues were on their way. At first, they were uncertain about what to call their wine and how to market it. They were farmers, after all, not lawyers on a lark or urban exiles looking for a hobby and a tax haven. As Gary Hogue says, “I grew up with shit on my shoes.” The role model at the time was Chateau Ste. Michelle, a pioneer Washington winery known mainly for its Riesling, sold in all fifty states and throughout Europe and Japan. Recently, it was named the best vintner in America
. But the Hogues were uncomfortable with French-sounding pretense for a Washington wine.

  “There aren’t any chateaus here,” says Gary Hogue. “I doubt if there’s a building older than a hundred years in this valley. We didn’t want to be something we weren’t, some Euro-winery or whatnot. We figured what we had here was crisp and clean and fresh, like the country here. Finally, we just put our names on it—Hogue Cellars, Yakima Valley wine. Wine is such an ego thing; it’s the only crop where you can follow it all the way through the chain and stand in front of people and say, ‘How do you feel about this?’ ”

  At the same time, up the river from Hogue, a former New York attorney named David Staton was starting to turn out Chardonnays and Rieslings that were beating all California whites in national wine-tasting contests. The Riesling of Washington has enough acidity to balance the grape’s natural sweetness, an original taste. In Oregon, the Pinot Noirs from the Willamette Valley were causing Frenchmen to scramble to their maps of North America. Staton, with winemaker Rob Stuart, another Cal Davis graduate, pioneered a vineyard trellising method that allowed more air to circulate around the grapes and gave them maximum sun exposure. As a hedge against winter freezing, he came up with a drip irrigation system that forced the roots to go deep for water rather than spread out along the surface. In the alluvial Yakima Valley, he found that roots could go thirty feet down and still be in rich soil. At one time, he thought the best hope for American winemaking was in California. No more. The temperature variations of the Yakima Valley—a fifty-degree drop from noon to midnight is not uncommon in the spring and fall—were perfect for full-flavored grapes. By comparison, he says, California wines are flat and overripe.