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

by Timothy Egan

  Epilogue

  PACIFIC NATION

  Sometimes the wind along the Pacific shore blows so hard it steals your breath before you can inhale it. At La Push, a Quileute Indian village huddled amidst the sea stacks of the Washington coast, the wind owns almost every other breath. Few people live along the shore from San Francisco to Vancouver Island; in those places where humans have settled in next to the raging surf, often there are more Indians than whites. Such is the case here at La Push, where one must have skin of cedar bark, or the sea otter’s sense of humor, to live with the theft of many breaths. Compliance with nature is a virtue. And nobody in La Push thinks of this most northwestern edge of the lower forty-eight states as land’s end. Rather, it is land’s start.

  As a soundtrack to the task of sorting cluttered thoughts, there is no better music than a winter storm on the Northwest Coast. On one side of me is the darkest and thickest of American forests, an evergreen cushion between the ocean and a nation in the early years of its third century. Great shanks of wood, thrown against the beach by the muscular sea, are piled in random disorder at the high edge of the tideline. The original forest cover of this continent, like the native inhabitants, has been pushed from Winthrop’s home in Massachusetts to this coastal strip in the far west. I wonder if these misted giants of five centuries or more in age will survive the commercial appetite of my generation.

  Were I to follow Winthrop home, I’d have continued east through the pine forests and high desert of Idaho, crossed the Continental Divide in Montana, and traced the river drainages to the Atlantic. But that was his world, the age of Europe, when all eyes looked east. I live at the dawn of the Century of the Pacific. At the end of The Canoe and the Saddle, Winthrop foresaw the start of this shift from east to west, a trickle of immigrants “moving away from the tame levels of Mid-America to regions of fresher and more dramatic life on the slopes toward the Western Sea.” Along this coast, life is certainly more dramatic, made so by the elements and a sky that should never be taken for granted. The freshness is evident in a change of attitudes. Although the non-Indian Northwest was founded on Pacific Rim trade—the wealth that Captain Cook’s men obtained from the Cantonese mandarins for the sea otter pelts they picked up during their 1778 trip to Vancouver Island—it is only now in the dying years of the twentieth century that people of this land have embraced Asia as their future.

  When many Northwesterners hear talk about the decline of America, it means little to them; they see, in such talk, the diminished influence of Europe and those power centers in the American and Canadian East that look to Europe for identity. As the nations of Europe meld to a single continental unit, stagnant in population growth and new immigration—the “tribes of the setting sun,” as West Coast author Joel Kotkin calls them—the Pacific Rim is bursting with fresh life and ideas and commerce. Since 1980, more immigrants have arrived on the West Coast, most of them from Asia, than came to the United States at any time after the last great European wave in the early twentieth century. A similar immigration trend has hit British Columbia, where a third of all Vancouver citizens trace their ancestry to China. Seattle led the nation in new job growth in the late 1980s, and one in three of those positions was tied to Pacific trade. Just as the Irish and Scandinavians and Russians and Italians brought new tastes to the North American table, the Pacific Rim immigrants bring ties from the old continent, a link of opportunity.

  Thirty years ago, American trade with Asia was only half that of its trade with Europe. Those figures have reversed themselves, with European trade amounting to only fifty percent of the volume the United States does with Asia. About $3 billion a year in Asian money pours into Vancouver, the Hong Kong of North America, where financiers are building a new sort of Wall Street, a place for traders who will operate on a world clock. The new mandarins, instead of receiving sea otter pelts taken from Vancouver Island by English seamen, are becoming Canadian citizens and helping the port of Vancouver emerge as one of the Pacific Rim’s new financial centers.

  About 120 miles south of Vancouver, Seattle citizens who have had a taste of Manhattan or worked jobs in Europe are trying to reposition their fast-growing city as the Geneva of the Pacific, a home between the Cascades and the Olympics for dialogue in many languages. Long before the national networks and the broadcasting syndicates tried similar exchanges, the Seattle television station founded by Dorothy Bullitt, daughter of a pioneer Northwest mill family, was linking up citizens of Russia and America by satellite to talk about the differences that would kill us all. At the same time, Bob Walsh—born in Winthrop, Massachusetts—was working to bring some of the best athletes, dancers and artists in Russia and America together in Seattle during the summer of 1990. Walsh has since married a Russian, Nina, who lives with him on a bluff above Elliott Bay, where the windows look out at the Olympic Mountains and the water that connects Siberia to Seattle.

  The new products of the Northwest—airplanes and medicine and wine and computer software—are in their way dependent on the old resource: the magnificent scenery. No industry is more damaging to that scenery, and none brings less good to fewer people, than the current timber business, a hangover of the exploitive early years. The most economically distressed counties in the Northwest are those that depend on logging for their livelihood. The most prosperous are those that have unchained themselves from their mills. Someday the Northwest will stop acting like a resource colony, stripping the last of its big trees from the mountains and shipping that wood abroad with little concern for the resulting job loss or the land scars. When that day comes, Northwest forests will be able to produce a profitable by-product—furniture—and the scenery will be far less threatened. By some estimates, tourism will be the number-one industry in the world by the year 2000. The newly prosperous people of Korea and Taiwan and Singapore will come to the Northwest to visit their relatives; if they are lucky, they will see a land not far removed from the cradle.

  North Americans used to fear Asia, and some still do. A backlash against the Asian influx in Vancouver has developed. Some Vancouverites want harsh immigration restrictions and have begun to spread the type of racial poison first seen in British Columbia when Chinese laborers were brought in to build the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Free trade can leave hard feelings: Japanese demand has pushed the price of salmon and timber beyond the reach of many Northwesterners, who feel they have a birthright to such products of their land.

  “God forbid that the time should ever come when a state on the shore of the Pacific, with interest and tendencies of trade all looking toward the Asiatic nations of the east, shall add its jarring claims to our distracted and overburdened confederacy,” said Daniel Webster, the American Senator of the midnineteenth century. Even as Webster thundered, the founders of Seattle and Portland and Victoria were plotting ways to get Asian ships to tie up in their ports, each calling itself the Gateway to the Pacific. Theodore Roosevelt, whose legacy has been astonishingly good for the Northwest, saw the Pacific Age as a coming tide of glory. “The Mediterranean era died with the discovery of America,” he said at the turn of the century. “The Atlantic era has reached the height of its development. The Pacific era, destined to be the greatest, is just at dawn.”

  So, we have a Pacific Century, long predicted, that is finally coming of age, and one section of the North American continent primed to take full advantage of it. The prophecy of Winthrop may yet come to life in the polyglot future of the Pacific Rim. More than anything, what the Northwest meant to Winthrop was renewal—the promise of tomorrow that this continent has always held—a chance for his heart and mind to wander without the leash of the past. In the closing lines of his book, Winthrop said his tour through this land had cleansed him:

  And in all that period while I was so near Nature, the great lessons of the wilderness deepened into my heart day by day, the hedges of conventionalism withered away from my horizon, and all the pedantries of scholastic thought perished out of my mind forever.

&nbs
p; In the near century and a half since Winthrop passed through the Pacific Northwest, the East has retained much of its dominance. The media centers are still there, as are government, and publishing, and finance, and most of the people. But everything Winthrop reveled in, the glaciers, the virgin forests, the green islands, the plump rivers, the fir-mantled volcanoes, the empty range of the high desert, Grandpa’s trout streams, and the alpenglow, are here—a land that has yet to give up all its secrets.

  About the Author

  Timothy Egan is the Pacific Northwest correspondent for The New York Times. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Joni Balter, and two children. He is at work on a second book.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction Finishing Up With Grandpa

  Chapter One The Continental Heave

  Chapter Two Enchanted Valley

  Chapter Three Toe of the Empire

  Chapter Four The Last Hideout

  Chapter Five With People

  Chapter Six Natives

  Chapter Seven Friends of the Hide

  Chapter Eight Under the Volcano

  Chapter Nine The Wood Wars

  Chapter Ten Salmon

  Chapter Eleven Harvest

  Chapter Twelve God’s Country Cancer

  Chapter Thirteen Columbia

  Epilogue Pacific Nation