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

by Timothy Egan

  “I don’t think the home folks will rise up in ignorance quite like that ever again,” he says.

  But John Goldmark was smeared not so much because he was different, says Mansfield; his crime was that he helped to pry the Okanogan away from the grip of private power. The tragedy that befell him did not fulfill any prophecy of Winthrop’s, though Goldmark was certainly drawn to this country for the very reason cited by the Yankee prophet as a magnet for future generations; rather, the case brought out a truth penned by Richard Neuberger in his 1939 book about the Northwest, Our Promised Land.

  “Class warfare of a sort has rocked the northwest corner over the principal ways proposed for using America’s greatest block of hydroelectric power,” Neuberger wrote. There were sure to be casualties from the fight over who controls the most elemental resource of the Promised Land, he said, but even with that struggle, the Northwest represented the best hope of America during one of its darkest periods.

  Mansfield has seen the promise fulfilled, but he will always be troubled by the price.

  “They hated John Goldmark, these guys from the Washington Water Power Company and all their shills,” says Mansfield. “He fought them every step of the way. Then public power came in, the rates came down, and the farmers could afford to pump plenty of water to their orchards. They’d never go back to the way it was. The monopoly days were gone for good. Just too bad a good family had to die for it.”

  Chapter 13

  COLUMBIA

  When the federal government decided to wrestle the Columbia River away from nature and place it in the permanent custody of the Army Corps of Engineers, it did so with some trepidation. Man as a geological force—this was a line that had never been crossed. The land could be altered, customized to human scale, but surely not controlled. And what a way to start: no river in North America except the Mississippi is more powerful than the Columbia; it carries a quarter-million cubic feet of water per second to the ocean, ten times the flow of the Colorado, twice the discharge of the Nile into the Mediterranean. The Corps planned nothing less than radical surgery, a fifty-year operation that would involve ripping open the chest of the Northwest and redirecting the main artery.

  Elsewhere, the earth-movers had won a string of significant victories, cutting a canal fifty miles across the Isthmus of Panama, blasting railroad tunnels through the Rockies and Cascades, stealing water from the High Sierra and the Colorado for delivery to the desert of Southern California. There was no reason scrubland could not be green, or forests leveled to plain, or long-dry coulees filled with fresh water, or dead seas resurrected from salty graves. By the time the West was old and the twentieth century was young, the men from the platoon of progress had little trouble playing God. And so a deity with sliderule and bulldozer took over the Columbia, expecting all mortal elements to fall in place.

  Building is the great art of our time, it was said then. And technology, of the heavy-metal, grind-and-grunt school, was king. Salmon were caught in fishwheels and canned by an octo-armed machine called the Iron Chink. Seattle was lopping off its hills, filling in its tidelands and constructing the biggest skyscraper west of the Mississippi. Portland was drawing hydroelectric power from the Willamette and sending forth enough lumberjacks to fell a thousand acres of virgin forest a day. British Columbia was starting work on an ill-fated canal across its interior. The leading citizens of Vancouver, just a few years removed from the mines which made them rich, were planning to tailor their tidelands and gouge open the bordering mountains. Idaho had demonstrated that the unruly Snake River, which brings water from half of the intermountain West to the Columbia, could be dammed to satisfy the interests of a few powerful desert cattlemen and potato farmers. The geo-technicians of the early twentieth century approached the Columbia with the zeal of the first plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. There was just so much potential.

  Problem was, things could be a bit outsized in the field, as they called the world outside the drawing room. Take Beacon Rock, the largest monolith of stone on earth except for Gibraltar. Rising from the north shore of the lower Columbia, the rock is the basaltic core of a broken-down Cascade volcano, a piece of vertebra from the spine of the mountain range. Seeking the Pacific, the Columbia long ago smashed through this range, carving out the magnificent gorge and leaving chunks like this along the way. Lewis and Clark named Beacon Rock and admired its stark, vertical beauty. In a New World of magnificent proportions, it seemed to fit. The Corps of Engineers saw it as a nuisance. Although the rock never impeded river traffic, it was just sitting there, not doing anything for anybody, and therefore it was the Enemy. So, the Corps drew up a plan to pulverize the second-largest monolith in the world and use the shattered pieces to build a breakwater at the Columbia’s mouth, thereby accomplishing two enormous tasks at once.

  A man named Henry Biddle, a naturalist, new to the Northwest, tried to stop the Corps. He was a descendant of Nicholas Biddle, of Philadelphia, who had edited Lewis and Clark’s journals and later became president of the United States Bank. Unable to dissuade the Corps, Henry Biddle bought Beacon Rock in 1915. The whole thing. For the next three years, he built a path of stone and wood from the base to the summit, a mile-long trail up the nine-hundred-foot vertical length of the rock. He then sold the rock to the state of Washington for one dollar on the provision that it remain a park—and a finger in the eye of the Corps—for eternity. Until recently, it was the only significant battle the Corps of Engineers had lost.

  Atop Beacon Rock, the wind out of the west is warm this morning. The vine maple growing from the rock is drained of green and tinged in red, and a few Doug firs, dwarfed by the constant wind, cling to the edge of the monolith, their roots spread out in a pattern that reveals a strained scramble for soil. In a few weeks’ time, the wind will shift the other way, as the colder desert air is sucked into the mild west side of the Cascades. Either way, there is always a breeze in the Columbia Gorge, stiff and new, blowing twenty or thirty miles an hour. The River of the West may have given up its current and most of its independence to the Corps, but the wind has never been touched; carrying the spirit of the old Columbia, it rushes through the Gorge, more dominant than ever.

  From this view on Beacon Rock, the Columbia appears as a river of paradox, overwhelmed with responsibility but holding to a few wild quirks of character. To the west, the river is banked by steep, green walls from which pour the torrents of the Cascades. One of these waterfalls, Multnomah, drops 620 feet, pummeling rock and creating a misted mini-rain-forest all around. The Columbia flows these last 140 miles west unimpeded by man, picking up the Willamette, the Sandy, the Lewis, the Kalama, the Cowlitz, the Clatskanie and hundreds of smaller waterways on its final ride to the Pacific. The river below me is far different in appearance from the river an idealistic Franklin D. Roosevelt stared at while he chugged through the Columbia Gorge on a train ride in 1920. Scribbling a speech on the back of his breakfast menu—this was well before handlers scripted every breath for politicians—the young vice-presidential candidate thought about the future of this wild country, picking up where earlier dreamers had left off. In 1813, Jefferson had envisioned “a great, free and independent empire on the Columbia,” the western edge of an America he called “Nature’s nation.” FDR saw a chance for the common man to live regally within the 250,000 square miles drained by the big river. He wasn’t sure how that would come about, but he wrote that it might have something to do with “all that water running down unchecked to the sea.”

  Looking the other way, upriver to the east, I see Bonneville Dam, the first of the big harnesses on the Columbia, completed seventeen years after Roosevelt committed a rough draft of his thoughts to paper. The Gorge itself is about eighty-five miles long, a cleave in the Cascades that begins in the mist of the Sandy River near Portland and ends in the desert of The Dalles. After years of abuse, the Gorge is on the mend. I climb down Henry Biddle’s rock for a closer look.

  From here on out, I’m heading upstream,
following the late salmon, the early winter windsurfers, and Winthrop. I have already paid my respects to Fort Vancouver, birthplace of the modern Pacific Northwest, which Winthrop visited three times in 1853. The fort was the center of a universe that stretched from Mexico to Russian America, and from the Rockies to Hawaii. For twenty years, Dr. John McLoughlin ruled this empire from the Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters on a level bank across from the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia. A Scot, he was six feet, four inches tall, with shoulder-length hair. The Indians called him the White Eagle. Under his direction, the Gentlemen Adventurers salted barrels of salmon, milled timber at a water-powered sawmill, grew vegetables and shipped these elemental products of the Northwest up to two thousand miles away. He never removed Indians from their land, but saw the value of keeping the tribes strong and their fishery alive. Capitalism needed healthy trading partners, not conquered serfs—a lesson lost on most of the American settlers and government agents who followed McLoughlin. Visitors to Fort Vancouver drank French wines from Waterford crystal glasses and picked at their sturgeon caviar with sterling silver. As the Americans began to pour in, McLoughlin directed them south of the Columbia, hoping he could keep Washington as part of what became British Columbia. The fort’s setting, in the words of a young company man who first visited in 1833, was “The finest combination of beauty and grandeur I ever beheld.” Across the river, Mount Hood rises from rumpled hills, enough water locked in its glaciers to feed the valleys that surround it. Behind the fort, Mount St. Helens floats on the northern horizon. But paradise lasted only a bit more than two decades; McLoughlin retired soon after the English gave up claims below the 49th Parallel in 1846. He moved to Oregon City, became an American citizen, and died shortly thereafter.

  Nothing could be further from the Hudson’s Bay Company idyll than the cluster of timber towns on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge in Skamania County. Sasquatch, the photo-defying Bigfoot, is legally protected from hunters by order of the county council, but no similar resolution for the Gorge has come from local politicians. When I ask Arlene Johnson at the Chamber of Commerce what is unique about the area, she thinks for a long time and then brightens: “In the winter, we have the highest unemployment rate of any county in America—thirty-five percent.”

  The people of Skamania County fought to keep the Gorge from becoming a National Scenic Area. They grew up in the tail end of an era when the scenery belonged to whoever could get to it first and hold onto it. What they didn’t like was the idea that you wouldn’t be able to just mow down a swath of timber or put up a mini-mart without going through some kind of land-use committee made up of blue-hairs and birdwatchers. The American frontier may have been officially pronounced closed in 1890, but land-use laws and zoning remain foreign terms to many Western counties possessing some of the finest scenery in the country. It took an act of Congress in 1986 to force on the area a sentiment that Winthrop said would rise naturally. Following the legislation, citizens of Skamania County scorned the federal government and prepared for hard times. Pretty scenery won’t pay the bills, they said. Like their union brothers downriver in Astoria at the Columbia’s mouth, the loggers of the Columbia Gorge asked, What are we supposed to do now?

  The river today is wall-to-wall windsurfers. It’s midweek, cold in the morning, mild by noon, but nobody’s talking about the temperature. All that matters is the wind. They come from Germany and Australia and Texas and Nova Scotia, the skin-cancer-be-damned set, lawyers and trust-funders and drifters and dropouts; on the Columbia, hopping five-foot swells with a forty-mile tail wind, they go by just one name: Boardheads.

  Nearby, the last log flume in America hangs from the high walls of the Washington Cascades. A seven-mile-long wooden slide, it’s built over thick-timbered trestles and runs from the forest to the Columbia. The cliffs of the Gorge are too steep for roads, so the timber companies devised these flumes over which logs scooted downhill. Lumberjacks used to bundle up their best clothes and slide down the flume into town for a Saturday night drunk, which was followed by the Sunday morning walk back up, with hangover. The flume here shut down in the mid-1980s’ timber recession, for good. In a way, the last flume is a fitting symbol of the transition under way in the Gorge, and throughout much of the Northwest. The future has something to do with the squeal of delight on those Saturday night rides.

  Farther upstream, at Hood River, the Columbia is sluggish from the brace of Bonneville Dam, but with the wind, it looks like a choppy cross section of the Pacific. Everybody’s talking about “catching a blow” and “rigging up” and how great it is when rain falls in Portland because the cooler air gives the desert air a real yank. The radio news in the morning begins, not with bulletins from the Mideast, but with a wind report. The town of Hood River, named for the glacial stream that runs nearby, is surrounded by pear and cherry orchards that thrive on the east-Cascade sun and meltwater from the pyramid of Mount Hood. Walking the streets, I see few signs of the depression which was supposed to kill the Gorge economy once the scenery was protected. Carpenters are hammering away at new homes. Restaurants are full of people. Old houses with big gardens have converted to bed and breakfasts.

  When word first got out among the international community of transient thrill-seekers that the best wind in the world blew through the Columbia River Gorge, most locals were suspicious. Bums on water, who needs ’em? There are Pacific beaches in Hawaii with stronger winds, but in no place is the wind more consistent than in the Gorge. A University of Oregon study found that the average windsurfer earns thirty thousand dollars a year and is twenty-eight to thirty years old. They contribute up to $20 million a year to the economy of the Gorge. I stroll into an old wooden building in Hood River, two stories and a loft that used to be a fruit warehouse, across the street from a long-deserted salmon cannery. The ground floor is cluttered with sailboards fresh off the assembly line. I talk wind with a salesgirl who moved from Salt Lake City because she can ski any day of the year on the eternal snows of Mount Hood, and windsurf the same day. In the back shop a dozen workers blend fiberglass and plastic into lean boards which sell for $1,500 and up. Three small manufacturing facilities like this one have opened in Hood River. They make the boards from scratch; at some of the shops, the craftsmen get a share of the overall sales. Wages are good, usually better than union timber jobs. At one of the shops, work stops on days when the wind is really howling, a consensual rule.

  One man in his forties, still making the rough transition from timber beast to sailboarding hipster, says, “If you’d a told me ten years ago I could make a good living off windsurfing, I’d a said you were fucking-ay crazy. But hey, look at me. I just bought a new car. Windsurfing has done wonders for this town. They’re even talking about putting in a second street light.”

  Unemployment is at six percent in Hood River, lower than in any timber town on the Columbia. Windsurfing has given the town back its pride. But now with new prosperity has also come the first signs of discontent: Californians. You expect to see their pictures in the post office. They take home-equity loans on overpriced bungalows in Santa Monica and buy sixty-thousand-dollar farmhouses here for summer playpens. The equity exiles talk about Hood River’s becoming the Aspen of the windsurfing set. It already is. So why the anxiety? Flash and cash are not easily transplanted to Oregon, a state closer in spirit to its New England ancestors than to its neighbors in California.

  Across the river, in Skamania County, timber is selling at an all-time high price, and still twenty-five percent of the county’s work force is jobless. The logging companies, pouring profits into automated sawmills that cut wood with a minimum amount of human help, have been shedding workers by the thousands. But in the town of Stevenson, the riverside burg where the opposition to a Scenic Columbia Gorge bill was centered, a new business has opened up, the first new enterprise in more than a decade—a windsurfing shop. For 150 years the people of Skamania County never did anything but tear and gnaw at their natural resou
rces, and nobody ever got rich but a few timber barons. Now, they’re starting to feel the wind; it never stops blowing.

  At dawn the next day, with the tufts of brown grass hardened by frost, I slip under barbed wire and scramble down basalt cliffs near The Dalles. In the desert 190 miles upstream from the river’s mouth, there is no life without the Columbia. Everything looks baked and burnt, the river walls tiered by bath-rings from the prehistoric course of the Columbia. Winthrop called this area “the Devil’s race course,” the overland end of the Oregon Trail, a place where the river tumbled down Celilo Falls. From here, wagons were portaged around the falls, stripped of their wheels, then lashed to a barge for the final trip to the Willamette Valley. If I had been here with Winthrop, instead of following his ghost, we would not have been able to hear each other speak; the Columbia crashed down the stepped cliffs with such force as to drown all other sound. It was a place that moved the tongue-tied to fluid fits of poetry, the agnostic to divine reconsideration. Now it’s gone forever, another casualty of the Corps. Today, somewhere around the bend, I hear a dog bark guarding a federal bureaucrat; I hear the bee-swarm sound of electricity sprinting along transmission lines that are strung from The Dalles Dam to Los Angeles, 846 miles to the south; I hear the morning—an oddly modern sound—and nothing else.

  I come upon six abandoned shacks, sun-blasted to a deep brown and perched on level rock. Each dwelling is no bigger than an average bedroom; the roofs are perforated, and the floorboards are crumbling. One of these structures has a cross at its apex. When I walk inside, the smell of rats is overwhelming. Outside, I pick through old bottles and a rusted stove. More ghosts. Farther upstream, I find a couple of wooden planks, sun-peeled plywood nailed to poles of pine on the edge of the river. But unlike the long-deserted hamlet, these platforms show signs of recent life. One, covered by blue tarp, includes a bed mattress, rat-chewed and stained by mildew. It is indented from a human form. I look around and see beer cans, an old rocking chair, and everywhere, strings and wire. The smell of salmon is unmistakable. This Indian dipnet platform, little changed in style over centuries, surprises me; it’s like a gramophone in a video store. I had thought that the Indians of the desert Columbia, like most of the whites, took their salmon from Safeway. A frightful contraption, the platform is bound to the rocks by two guy-wires. Another surprise: The river at this point is actually moving. Little swirls and eddies.