Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  A LIGHT RAIN WAS FALLING when I got to Crescent City the next day, and everything in sight was gray. The sky, the streets, the dogs, the cats—all gray, as gray as flophouse linens. The grayness had an inordinate strength and seemed to suck the brilliance out of other colors, leaching them of their substance. Here was a primal gray that could not be appeased with coffee, tea, brandy, or flames, a gray so clammy and relentless that prolonged exposure to it threatened to sever your ties to the universal oversoul.

  The doldrums, then. April twentieth, noon, and the thermometer was bottlenecked at forty-six degrees. I took a room at American Best Motel, a confident establishment if ever there was one, and discussed the weather with the manager, Bob Young, who advised me that there would be no change until early evening, when the mercury would drop a few more notches to add another dollop of misery to the prevailing chill.

  For with the grayness, the abiding gray, came a weird sort of cold that couldn’t be measured reliably on any gauge. No matter how you tried to resist it, it got to you sooner or later, seeping through your clothing to reside in the marrow of your bones. It felt as if a steady clatter of miniature ice cubes were being released into your bloodstream. You shivered, stiffened, and stamped your feet, but your metabolism refused all entreaties.

  Crescent City was a famous fishing town. Touring the harbor, I could see some boats out on the ocean and pitied the poor crewmen aboard them. Say, for example, that they were into the twelfth day of a two-week voyage, at a point in nautical time when the cramped quarters of an old trawler became almost unbearable—the decks slick with slime, the heater broken, the head a holy nightmare, and the stink of bait, entrails, and dead fish permeating every inch of enclosed space.

  At sea, in frigid weather, every metal surface seemed to stick to the crewmen’s skin. They had to keep clenching and unclenching their hands to prevent their brittle fingers from breaking. Their noses dribbled and their sinuses impacted. The only escape from the debilitating elements was down below, where a fellow could lie on a hard bunk beneath a thin, gray blanket and flip the bilge-swollen pages of an ancient copy of Playboy from which his brethren had surely torn the centerfold.

  Even when the boats returned to shore, the poor men would find precious little to distract them. Crescent City might be the largest town in Del Norte County, but it had less than four thousand residents. Only twenty thousand people were scattered over the entire county, an expanse of some 641,290 acres. That worked out to about one person per 30 acres. The state and federal governments owned three-quarters of the land and preserved it in parks and forests. There were no metropolitan areas nearby.

  An economic depression stalked Del Norte County. Fishing and logging, the traditional industries of the Far North, were both battling to survive. The locals complained about too much government regulation, but the ocean and the forests had been attacked with a vengeance over the years, and their dwindling resources were in need of protection. An era of Wild West-style plundering that had always supported the area was drawing to a close.

  In Crescent City, the powers-that-be were looking to tourism to patch the holes in their economy. Every tackle shop in the harbor was piled with fliers and pamphlets advertising such stellar attractions as the annual Dungeness Crab Festival, but there was still the problem of the weather to be surmounted—a bleak, damp grayness in the spring, and in the summer a dizzying, gray fogbank that lifted for just two hours each afternoon.

  Throughout the long day I felt the forlornness of Crescent City. Young men cruised absently around the harbor in their trucks, smoking dope and popping the tops on half-quart beers. They were tough kids raised to work in mills or on boats, and they wouldn’t stoop to being waiters or clerks—they weren’t servants. They’d been cheated of a future, really, so they behaved recklessly and acted out their anger, getting into fights and copping DUIs.

  Outside the canneries in the harbor, workers stood around in bloodstained aprons. Trucks pulled up to chutes that fed into the cannery buildings and disgorged butchered fish in pieces—heads, tails, and guts in a roaring gush. On one pier, some fish buyers were huddled in shanties to cut their deals.

  By the Seafarer’s Hall and the Commercial Fishermen’s Wives Association, I paused at a drinking fountain inlaid with a plaque that said, In Memory of Steve Williams, Lost at Sea, March 6, 1970, and then these words:

  They that go down to sea in a ship

  That do business in great waters

  These see the works of the Lord,

  He maketh the storm a calm,

  Then they are glad

  Because they are quiet

  So he bringeth them into

  Their desired haven.

  Psalm 107, Verses 23–30.

  MORE RAIN FELL ON MY SECOND DAY in Crescent City, buckets of it, so I took shelter at the Visitor Center of Redwood National Park. The park covers about 106,000 acres in California’s redwood country, a strip of land that extends from the Monterey Peninsula into Oregon.

  Children were stretched out on the floor of the center reading books, while their parents bought postcards and quizzed the rangers on duty, who wore uniforms and Smokey-the-Bear hats and sometimes showed a humorous grace-under-pressure when they responded to questions.

  “What did Lady Bird Johnson plant in the grove that’s named for her?” somebody asked.

  “Her feet,” came a ranger’s response.

  I studied the exhibits and learned that Spanish explorers had called our Sequoia sempervirens “palos colorados” on account of their reddish color. An average redwood lived for about two thousand years. The same watery, gray climate that chilled the blood of human beings helped the trees to stay alive so long and grow to such an impressive size. The damp soil kept their roots moist, and their trunks and branches didn’t lose much water through evaporation or transpiration.

  Passing through Crescent City in 1863, William Brewer had spent some time in a redwood grove and had recorded his wonderment.

  “The bark is very thick and lies in great ridges,” he wrote, “so that the trunks seem like gigantic fluted columns supporting the dense and deep mass of foliage above.… A man may ride on horseback under some of these great arches.” There was a special tree down the coast in Trinidad, he said, that a speculator proposed to cut down and turn into a schooner.

  It was December, and Brewer mentioned that the grove had an “almost oppressive effect upon the mind.” In summer, a redwood forest with its slanting light can be likened (and, too often, was) to a cathedral, but the same forest in winter is a cold, dark, hostile environment. Already the redwoods were under siege, Brewer implied. “A man will build a house and barn from one of them, fence a field, probably, in addition, and leave an immense mass of brush and logs as useless.”

  The ravaging of virgin redwood groves had continued unabated for more than a century, and now the few remaining old-growth forests were increasingly off-limits to the timber companies that had harvested them for ages. Around Crescent City, the bitterness toward organizations like the Sierra Club ran deep and played itself out in such bumper stickers as Stamp Out Spotted Owls. Loggers took it hard when they perceived that a bird’s life mattered more to society than a man’s did.

  The rain kept falling. One of the rangers removed her hat for a minute to take a breather, and we got to talking. Linda lived with her husband and her daughter near Lake Earl, on the outskirts of town. She was completely at home on the coast and could hike, camp, fly-fish, and even make a meal off the land if it came to that.

  Although Linda held redwoods in high esteem, she wasn’t sentimental about them. Her appreciation for the trees was strictly botanical. She marveled at how unique they were and what they meant to the ecology of the planet. Logging had always been part of life in Del Norte County, she said, and she only objected to the cutting of irreplaceable, old-growth stock.

  Linda told me a parable about the redwoods. A friend of hers who was broke and without hope had once accepted a job as a lo
gger to feed his family. Everything went well until he was ordered to top an old-growth stand behind his grandmother’s house. She ragged him about it, and so did the neighbors. The logger felt guilty and couldn’t sleep. He’d try to scale a tree, and down he’d slide, wedging splinters into his face and his hands. He thought to himself, Those redwoods are fighting back!

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “He quit and got a job driving a bulldozer where the prison’s going in,” Linda said. “Out on Lake Earl Drive.”

  I had heard about this prison, Pelican Bay, a maximum-security institution, in town. It was supposed to have beds for 2,200 inmates, but it would doubtlessly hold many more than that. Prisons in California were in short supply and always exceeded their carrying capacity. Since 1984, the state had been constructing them as fast as it could after a hiatus of twenty years.

  It surprised me that a little place like Crescent City would welcome a prison, especially one for murderers, kidnapers, rapists, and gang members, all the rottenest apples in the barrel. I was even more surprised when I saw that it was being built in a residential neighborhood close to a school.

  That evening, I remarked on Pelican Bay to Bob Young at American Best, and he set me straight by telling me that the prison had a projected annual payroll of about $42 million.

  ON MY THIRD DAY IN CRESCENT CITY, the sun miraculously began shining, and the town became its ideal Chamber-of-Commerce self, all salt air and sparkling sea. My thoughts turned to fishing again, so I phoned Bob Dearth, the president of Del Norte Fishermen’s Marketing Association, to indulge in some talk of hooks and down-riggers and the ocean brine.

  I had it in mind to ask Dearth to show me his boat, but his wife intervened. He had promised to paint their house that morning, and she meant to hold him to it. After some hushed bargaining, though, he was granted a grace period of one hour, and I went to meet him at his berth in the harbor. In a while, a little Japanese pickup came steaming toward me. It stopped abruptly, and Mrs. Dearth released her husband to my custody.

  Bob Dearth was a solid man in his fifties. He had the chafed skin of a seafarer and spoke gently and with respect for words. He had twinkly eyes behind glasses and enjoyed a joke. Pens and pencils were jammed into the front pocket of his Big Mac overalls as a tribute to his presidential rank.

  “Time to switch on the bilge pump,” he said cheerfully, stepping onto his boat, the Vilnius, a twenty-five-foot-long salmon trawler equipped with a 160-horsepower outboard engine, more juice than such boats usually had. The skipper was a speed jockey.

  Dearth had built the Vilnius from scratch in his backyard, starting with a fiber-glass hull that had cost him seven hundred dollars. He’d intended it to be the first rung on a ladder leading him to a bigger craft, but times were rough, and he had decided to hang onto it instead of going into debt. Age had taught him caution and forebearance.

  “See that over there?” He pointed across the harbor to a nice, big, all-weather shrimp trawler, the Catherine Marie, that was about forty-five feet long. “That’s my boat. I bought that boat down in Texas, but I lost it here in a bad year.”

  Dearth hailed from a fishing family. His father and his two brothers had all fished commercially. His home port was in the Department of Fish and Game’s Klamath Management Zone, and he shared the zone with two other groups of users, sports anglers and Indians.

  In the KMZ, the salmon runs were so depleted that a “season” might only last for a day or two, he said. The season changed from year to year, but regardless of how it changed, there were never enough salmon for Dearth to earn a living on them. He ran the Vilnius as a transit boat, traveling around to more fertile waters. He went down to Fort Bragg in early April, a trip of about two hundred miles, and up to Coos Bay, Oregon, in July, where he remained until autumn. He was always back in Crescent City by Halloween, mending his gear for Dungeness crab season, which could still be rewarding in the KMZ.

  The traveling caused him difficulties. Dearth missed his wife while he was away in Oregon, and he missed his two sons all the time. The boys had crewed for him on the Vilnius since they were just out of diapers, but they were adults now and had left home to see what they could of the world. That was often the case around town, Dearth said. The children felt a tug when they were in their teens. There were no jobs to hold them, so they took off.

  As president of the Marketing Association, a co-op, Dearth was adept at reciting the troubles confronting fishermen in the Far North. The decimated salmon fishery was the most serious problem. In the past, the fleet had contributed to it by taking too many salmon, but Dearth felt that the Department of Fish and Game was overcompensating by unspooling too much red tape and creating regulations that were too harsh.

  Logging companies had also caused some of the wreckage through negligent practices that had ruined many spawning streams, poisoning them with silt and pollutants. Then there were the boats that pursued hake, a cod, in the mid-water fishery and caught incidental salmon in their nets—27,000 incidentals in a recent year. The hake had no real value in the United States. Mother ships from Russia, China, Korea, Poland, and Japan processed it offshore and readied it for export. Abroad, it was used in synthetic crab and shrimp products.

  Fishermen also paid exorbitantly for their disaster insurance, Dearth said, and they had to compete with fish dealers who sold pen-raised salmon from Norway and giant sea bass from Chile. There was a bottom line to all this. It used to be that any lout with a boat could survive, but now you had to be smart. You had to sweat and be willing to work the debilitating hours.

  “You get out of it exactly what you put into it, and nothing more,” Dearth asserted. The slack was gone.

  Above us, the sun was arching toward noon. Dearth shut off the bilge pump, smiled, and stretched his arms over his head. Troubles aside, he still loved being a fisherman. He loved the freedom, the independence, and the ocean in its many moods. He was glad to come home tired from doing some physical labor and didn’t think he would last very long in an office building where the air was stale and nobody knew the meaning of happiness.

  The Vilnius might not be a stellar craft, but she pulled her weight at sea. Her name had emerged during a brainstorming session during which the skipper and some friends aspired to bless the boat with a touch of magic, believing that something cosmic would do, maybe Pluto or Saturn or, better yet, Venus! But somewhere between the filling out of forms and their bureaucratic shuffling, a spelling error had occurred, and when Dearth got his papers back he had a Vilnius, not a Venus. Being someone accustomed to the operations of fate, he had let the error stand.

  Mrs. Dearth was barreling toward us across the harbor, a sure sign that our hour together was up. As Dearth opened a truck door, I asked him if he had decided what color to paint the house. He had.

  “I’m going to paint it gray,” he said.

  THE ROLLING GREEN HILLS OF POINT SAINT GEORGE, northwest of Crescent City, marked the break between the open ocean and the sheltered cove of Pelican Bay. Here the Tolowa had chipped flint and had worked with antler bone to fashion arrowheads and simple tools. They had done their heavy butchering and had cleaned their fish, counting on the sea breezes to carry away the blood odor and the gulls to police up the offal.

  When the first ranchers and prospectors began carving into the coastal scrub and chopping at the great tangle of ferns, there were about 1,500 men, women, and children in the Tolowa tribe. By 1856, only 316 of them were still alive. By 1910, only 150 Tolowa remained.

  Sometimes the breeze at Point Saint George turned into a gusty wind that pushed the fishing boats from Saint George Reef back to land. A Tolowa myth had it that an Indian boy had caused offense long ago by climbing a forbidden hill to pick some sweet, ripe salal berries. To punish him, North Wind swept down and grabbed his grandma, tearing her apart with an awesome force and scattering her limbs on the water, where they were transformed into a string of rocks that is now found on marine charts—Seal Rock, Whale Rock, St
ar Rock.

  I walked around Point Saint George for a long time and then returned to Crescent City, where lights were glowing all along the crescent-shaped bay. In the harbor, I saw an old Portuguese fisherman, his hair still inky black, grip his wife graciously by an elbow as he escorted her up some stairs to a restaurant, whispering to her in their native tongue.

  Chalkboards in restaurant windows listed the daily specials, crab and cod and shrimp in batter, clams steamed and chopped and served over linguine, salmon from Norway poached or broiled. The odor of cooking oil masked the cannery stink. I could feel a cloaklike dampness around me, a fetid moistness from which the redwoods, the skunk cabbage, and the mushrooms were all drawing breaths.

  There was a ghostly quality to the night, something sad and otherworldly. It had to do with the climate and the isolation of the Far North, but also with the slow passing of the old means of survival—the trades, the crafts, and the industries that were losing their ability to support and sustain a way of life tailored to the specifics of a certain place. I thought how removed I was from anything remotely associated with the popular image of California. Even our symbolic sun had to struggle for a purchase.

  CHAPTER 3

  UP OVER THE KLAMATH MOUNTAINS I went in the last week of April, through some redwoods and past Trees of Mystery, where “authentic Indian artifacts” were for sale. The Klamaths were draped with clouds and had a soulful presence. They were home to the usual array of firs, pines, and oaks rising in tiers but also to such rarities as Alaska and Port Orford cedars and the Engleman spruce, indigenous to the Rockies. The weeping spruce grew here, as well, and nowhere else in California, rooting itself to the ridges of north-facing slopes at altitudes above 7,500 feet.

  The Klamaths were intimidating. They dwarfed human beings and made us seem like an afterthought in the master plan of creation. Starting in southern Oregon, they ran for about 130 miles between the Coast and the Cascade ranges to the east, falling into several subgroups—the Siskiyou, Salmon, Marble, Scott Bar, and Trinity mountains. All through the Klamaths, there were alpine streams and lakes, and the forests were thick with black bears, cougars, mountain lions, feral pigs, and blacktail deer by the thousands.