Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  Finally, I burst through the door at the top of the stairs, glad to have made it. Bob Royer followed me. He was bent double, sucking in air. “I don’t really think I enjoyed that,” he said.

  Together, we strolled along the crest road. The wind gusted up from the river; a fine powder of snow blew into our faces. To the north, the Cascades swept toward the sky. They resembled the Swiss Alps—pristine, unvanquished. “Hey, check this out,” Royer said. He showed me a plaque—larger than the ones on the generators—set into the wall of the dam. It informed us that an urn containing the ashes of Glen Harry Smith, an assistant superintendent who died in 1939, had been interred in Section 12, midway between Contraction Joints 11 and 12, fifty feet from the face of the dam. A quotation from First Corinthians was inscribed on the plaque:

  According to the grace of God which is

  given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder,

  I have laid the foundation, and another

  buildeth thereon. But let every man take

  heed how he buildeth thereupon.

  Suddenly, a bald eagle took flight from a mountain crag some five hundred yards away, soaring upward, its wings spread wide. Some ethologists think that bald eagles fly only out of necessity, to hunt or scavenge, but others say that the birds sometimes choose to soar for no apparent reason. This seemed to be true of the bird we were watching. The eagle was just riding the wind, two thousand feet above the river and wheeling higher and higher. Bald eagles have an acute ability to locate thermals—rising bodies of warm air—even on still days. When the wind is blowing, it’s a gift to them. They can cover vast territories in an effortless way, searching for food. If necessary, they’ll stoop to kill live prey or pirate a fish from a hawk, but they’d as soon feed on carrion. Such ignoble behavior prompted Benjamin Franklin to object to the bald eagle’s presence on the national seal. “He is a bird of bad moral character,” Franklin wrote in a letter to his daughter. “He does not get his living honestly.” The wild turkey would have been a better selection, Franklin thought—more likely to “attack a grenadier of the British Guards should the soldier invade his farmyard with a red coat on.”

  Returning to Diablo on the Cascadian, my collar turned up against the cold, I talked with R. J. Stretch, a crew-cut man in his fifties who has a vehement exactitude about him. The pens and pencils in his shirt pocket were arranged in precise order; you got the feeling that he knew even before he went to bed what he’d wear in the morning. Stretch is responsible for overseeing the entire Skagit project, making certain that everything is fine-tuned. He grew up in Montana, and he told me what it’s like to hike into the mountains in autumn hoping to pack out enough deer or elk meat to supply a family through the winter. Stretch was typical of Newhalemites in that he wanted to build Copper Creek. He wanted to build nuclear plants, too; he played down the hazards. “You’ll have accidents,” he said. “You can’t avoid them.” Stretch knew of a town where there were traces of uranium in the drinking water. “It doesn’t hurt anybody,” he said.

  The float trip down the Skagit was anticlimactic. It started after lunch. Our party had increased in size, thanks to the appearance of Congressman Al Swift, of Bellingham—a Copper Creek opponent—who had an entourage of aides and reporters. The reporters cornered Charlie Royer and pressed him on the issues. He answered the questions snappishly, giving no indication of his true feelings. The Mayor did not seem to be enjoying the great outdoors or the publicity aspects of the trip. He’d stayed close to his bodyguard for most of the morning, looking tight-lipped and reserved. Now, between answers, he was blowing on his hands. The cold had him bouncing up and down on his feet. “I’m a city boy,” he said, smiling.

  We left from Goodell Creek, just south of Newhalem. There were nine rubber rafts, each with a scruffy river rat at the helm. They divided us among the rafts, distributing the weight as evenly as possible. The Skagit was still low. The current lacked thrust. Our boatman, a bearded, barrel-chested kid in red suspenders, had to push hard on the oars to keep us from idling. The sky was dull and gray.

  It was a nine-mile float to Copper Creek. It took four hours. The thrills were few and far between. Halfway through, we did tear into a canyon S curve riddled with boulders and small rapids, but they were run without any trouble and gave us less of a charge than climbing the stairs at Ross Dam had done. The rafts bent in half and took on water. Voyagers in slickers and rain suits managed fine, but those of us in sneakers and old peacoats felt an awful clamminess descend.

  We saw about twenty bald eagles along the route. They were perched high in the limbs of firs and alders. None of them were actively feeding. It was the wrong time of day (they feed early and late), and besides, food was in short supply. The last flood, in early December, had washed most chum carcasses downstream. I’d read that bald eagles are spooked by human beings, but these birds didn’t move when we drifted past. They had marvelous balance. Their austere white heads looked fierce through the binoculars. There was a sleekness in them that’s missing in other scavengers. Vultures don’t touch the heart. When eagles take off, they seem noble somehow, in tune with the innocent ideals of the republic.

  No sign marked the Copper Creek site. Our boatman had to point it out as we floated by. I tried to imagine what the finished project would look like: an earth-and-rock-fill dam, to be built on river deposits instead of bedrock, so that the structure could shift with the shifting subsoil; a powerhouse, spillway, and switchyard; a reservoir, ten miles long, reaching all the way back to Gorge powerhouse and flattening out the rapids we’d just run. The project would devour two thousand three hundred acres of land. Deer, bears, beavers, small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and birds would die. Ten miles of state highway would have to be relocated, along with up to ten miles of transmission lines. All this for a marginal dose of power.

  We beached the rafts at Bacon Creek. The sky broke, and a light rain fell. Bob Royer and I were drenched to the skin. We got a ride back to Newhalem with R. J. Stretch. Stretch had not rafted the river, but he’d followed our progress from the highway, picking up empty beer cans along the road. The cans covered the floor of his car. Each of them had been stomped upon, crushed as flat as a quarter. Stretch dropped us at the Superintendent’s House. We changed into dry clothes and packed our bags for Seattle. There was a frenzy about our departure, almost an aspect of escape. The past seemed about to swallow us, foreclosing on the future.

  IV

  Once we were back in Seattle, and somewhat recuperated, the Skagit tour began to seem stranger than ever to me, but I didn’t find out what Charlie Royer had thought about it until the next afternoon, when we joined him to watch the Super Bowl at the house of Don McGaffin, a crony from KING-TV days. The Mayor was in a good mood, freed from Newhalem’s constraints. Some of the Skagit’s physical beauty had been lost on him, not because he was impervious to landscape glories but because he was charged with the task of mediating among wildly divergent parties. He was supposed to keep eagles flying, salmon spawning, rapids crashing, and light bulbs burning, all without spending much money. The dilemma at Copper Creek was a hoary one, recapitulating in part the classic late-century encounter between the snail darter and the Tennessee Valley Authority at Tellico Dam, but that didn’t make it any easier to write a satisfactory conclusion.

  The Mayor said that he, too, had been surprised by the anachronistic character of Newhalem—it had the quality of a time warp. He was most concerned about the welfare of City Light’s employees there. He said that it was sad that nobody took them into account in discussions of environmental impact. The Skagit employees had served the utility well for years, and now, because of shifting energy priorities, their view of the world—and of public service—was becoming obsolete. For Charlie Royer, the underlying problem was how to instill the values of Ross’s time into a new group of workers. He didn’t say what he was going to do about the dam.

  That question was answered on Monday. A front-page story appeared in the morning Post-Inte
lligencer, under the headline ROYER AND SWIFT SHOOT RAPIDS AT DAM SITE. AS everyone had expected, it made Congressman Swift sound heroic, a champion of the Skagit biota, while the Mayor was portrayed as a conniver. “A young bald eagle perched atop a tree at almost the exact spot where the dam would cross the river,” wrote the P-I’s reporter, preparing to unleash some anthropomorphic Guignol. “Unlike other eagles, it did not fly away but glared down as Royer’s boat floated by.”

  In the afternoon, the Mayor released to the press City Light’s recommendation to him on Copper Creek. The recommendation was signed by Acting Superintendent Joe Miller. It suggested that the utility not file an application for a federal license to build the dam; that all current studies and investigations be terminated at once; and that the project be placed in abeyance for not more than four years.

  The Mayor would take this recommendation into account and submit it to the City Council with his own recommendation. I asked Bob Royer what the Mayor’s recommendation would be.

  “Against construction,” he said.

  What the Mayor wanted instead was for City Light to invest in a coal-powered plant to be built in Creston by the Washington Water Power Company. Coal was quantifiable, absolute. No drought would ever shut down the Creston plant.

  Royer told me that other plans were on the boards at City Light. None of them sounded encouraging.

  There was a plan to raise Ross Dam by a hundred feet or so, increasing its generating capacity. There was a plan to put a powerhouse and penstock near an existing dam on the south fork of the Tolt River. There was a plan to build a new dam on the north fork of the Tolt. There was a plan to use sewage. There was a plan to tap into geothermal wells. There was a plan to disperse wind-turbine generators at selected sites around the state. There were several plans for saving energy through conservation.

  I ended my stay in Seattle by joining Bob Royer for a dip in his hot tub, which rests on a deck overlooking Lake Washington. We felt like energy criminals, to be using up precious kilowatts for such a frivolous purpose. Across the lake, millions of bulbs were blinking away, fueled, perhaps, by power from the Skagit—the miraculous transformation of water into light. How many other miracles of transformation went unnoticed in cities everywhere? I watched Royer sink chin-deep in the tub. He was still anxious about his wedding, and a little depressed about Copper Creek. He talked about leaving politics to take a job in the private sector. Then he talked about writing a suspense novel—some thickly plotted trifle geared to earning him a million bucks.

  As I bobbed around, I wondered what Ross would have thought of hot tubs. Probably, he would have liked them. He had a taste for gadgets. He might have figured a way to sell a tub to every customer in Seattle, much as he’d sold ranges to their grandparents. And I was willing to bet that after he got the tubs installed, he’d have figured out how to keep the water hot without pulling too hard on the system. That was the puzzling thing about City Light’s dilemma—the utility seemed terribly short on new ideas. No doubt the planners were up against a more difficult situation than Ross had faced; and yet what they had to offer the public was nowhere as bold. Maybe the future really was unimaginable. The American brain seemed compacted—as used up as the frontier that once had given it wings.

  Royer and I agreed that Copper Creek was a stale project, left over from the 1930s. What City Light needed was a new vision to carry it forward, for the great lesson of the Skagit, and of Ross’s career, was that a sustaining vision can itself be a kind of energy.

  O’Neill Among the Weakfish

  Eastern Long Island is famous for its saltwater fishing, but when I moved into the summer house I’d rented there, in the woods between Sag Harbor and East Hampton, I discovered that I hadn’t brought along the proper tackle. So I went directly to a place I’ll call O’Neill’s Tackle Shop to stock up. O’Neill himself waited on me. He referred to the rod he sold me as a “stick.” The reel, he said, was guaranteed. “It’s got gears,” he told me, cracking it open, like a walnut. “You want crap, I’ll sell you Japanese.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  O’Neill closed one eye, held out the stick, and examined it for bruises. He was pleased with what he saw.

  “This is about as good a stick as you’re going to get,” he said, “for what you’re willing to pay.”

  “What if I paid more?”

  “Then you’re talking custom sticks.” He spat into an ashtray. “You’re approaching elegance.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  O’Neill wound the reel with fifteen-pound test line. He sold me some two-ounce weights, some purple plastic worms, and some lead-headed jigs—heavy lures that sink quickly and ride upside-down in the water, making them resistant to snags.

  “You’ll need squid for bait,” he said, reaching into a small refrigerator and grabbing packages. “Skimmer clams. Mussels.” He paused for a moment and surveyed the dead and semidead items on the counter. “You ought to have some real worms. You want some real worms?”

  “Whatever you say, O’Neill.”

  “Yeah, you better have some real worms.”

  The counter was stacked high with smelly stuff. Clam juice leaked out of a Styrofoam tub. O’Neill tipped back his baseball cap and sold me a map that showed all the creeks, ponds, lakes, bays, and ocean beaches in Suffolk County. He sold me a spike-like rod holder to drive into the sand, so I’d always have a hand free for drinking beer. He sold me a fishing license and a bumper sticker that read, Surf Casters Do It in the Dark. When I finally said no to a fillet knife, he looked around the shop in a panic. “How about a clam rake? A crab net?”

  “No dice.”

  “This is a terrific folding chair.”

  “Just the bill,” I said.

  O’Neill sighed and did some quick addition on a paper napkin. I gave him a credit card, and he spent about ten minutes in search of his machine. He found it in a bottom drawer, in a nest of monofilament.

  “Ninety-seven fifty,” he said, after he’d filled in the form, painstakingly, writing each number with devout attention to its peculiarities. “Ah, what the hell. Let’s call it an even ninety-five. I’ll toss in the squid for free.”

  I asked him where the action was.

  “Hang on a second,” he said, as he filled in a new form. “Can’t you see I’m working here?”

  I walked around the shop while he worked. It wasn’t a very big place, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, with a pair of glass display cases that took up most of the space. On the walls, there were photos of locals who’d brought in trophy catches for O’Neill to record with his Instamatic—striped bass, bluefish, blackfish, even a shark that somebody had nailed on a party boat that had gone out from Montauk, at the very tip of the Island. I started thinking how tackle shops everywhere are the same, with the same odors of bait and stale tobacco worn into the wood, and the same smiling anglers taped up in all their glory between placards of lures. There’s always an overzealous O’Neill behind the counter—some guy who wants to divest himself of as much tackle as possible without falling into outright criminality.

  The first tackle shop I remember visiting was in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. I must have been six or seven. I stood at the counter next to my father, who seemed huge, the way every father does to his kid—at least when the kid is young. He was dropping a bundle of money on an assortment of tackle that the clerk—dog-faced, with a pack of Chesterfields rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt—assured him was absolutely essential. “Oh, yeah, you got to have a Buzz-Bomb,” the clerk was saying. “Nobody around here goes out without a Buzz-Bomb. And the fish have really been socking these Sonics. A Sonic drives the big fish wild.” The lures were pretty useless, of course, and ended their lives hooked on branches or lily pads, but I remember how excited my father was to own them. That’s how I felt when I grabbed my new stick and began whipping it through the air, startling poor O’Neill.

  “So you want to know where the action is?” he asked.

 
“Sure,” I said.

  He told me I should get myself all rigged up and go over to Long Beach, on Gardiners Bay. The annual weakfish run was on, and the boys over there were murdering them every night. “And you got everything you need to score,” he said.

  “I’ll bet.”

  O’Neill squeezed my shoulder. “I’ll tell you the truth, kiddo,” he said. “I wish’d I could go with you.”

  The trip to Long Island was in the nature of a homecoming for me. I’d been living in California for years, but I grew up in Westbury, in the Island’s central section, back in the days when many of the present suburbs were still potato fields, and you could look down the main drag and see all the way to Manhattan. My father bought our house, a Levitt tract model, for about eight thousand dollars, in 1950. He didn’t have to put any money down, since he was a veteran. The house was only a twenty-minute drive from the Atlantic, but he seldom did any saltwater fishing, mainly because he was from the upper Peninsula, in Michigan, and the ocean was always a bit too overwhelming for him to handle. Every summer, he’d get the itch for freshwater, for bass and northern pike, and he’d pack the family into the Country Squire station wagon and off we’d go to Minnesota, where my mother’s relatives lived. The idea was to rent a cottage by a lake—White Bear, Paradise, Big Kandiyohi, there were ten thousand of them to choose from. Probably I caught my first fish in Minnesota, but I don’t recall anymore what kind it was. It could have been a crappie or a sunfish or even a perch. The rest of the vacation set is fixed in my mind, though, because its details varied so little from year to year.

  The cottage, no matter where it was, had a screened porch where the kids got to sleep. In the mesh of the screens, you could find enough bug corpses to construct an archaeology of insect life, dating from the turn of the century. The beds on the porch had lumpy mattresses spotted with mildew. The kitchen in the cottage was always too small. It had a linoleum floor, a fridge that hummed and snorted, and a sticky yellow fly strip dangling from the ceiling. The bathroom door never closed properly—you had to secure it with a piece of wire. When the door was open, it brushed against the edge of the Formica-topped table where the aunts were playing canasta. The table had decals on it—leaping fish, beavers chewing on logs. The aunts tried to move it away from the bathroom door, toward the middle of the kitchen, but the uncles complained that it blocked their path to the beer. They drank beer all day long, cases of it. They had big sunburned Slovenian noses that looked ready to burst. They talked about the Army, about Eisenhower and Jayne Mansfield, and ignored the strange tribe of children known as “the cousins.” These cousins (they were nameless entities) had hobbies. They collected rocks and butterflies, and stamps from foreign countries. At night, when the aunts put them to bed in the cottage next door, we could hear them singing camp songs in spooky, high-pitched voices.