Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  “Let me see that thing of yours,” he says, grabbing my line, then biting off the caddis. “There’s nothing like that out here today. You think these fish are stupid? Try a royal coachman.”

  After lunch, my luck changes. The west-slope cutthroats love the coachman. I’m slaphappy with fish, stripping in line all afternoon. After a while, I keep count, a bad habit from a lifetime of fact-gathering. In two hours, I catch twenty-seven fish. The last one is the biggest of the day, over twenty inches, and fat. That’s it for me. I don’t need Dollywood. I’m sated. So is Danny. Reluctantly, Kelly folds. Besides, he has to cook. At camp, he gives us tequila and an appetizer of smoked fish on crackers. Danny adds chips and orange cheese. Kelly cooks like he fishes: eyes on the prize, always aware of his next move, the picture of self-confidence. It takes him a while to complete his masterpiece, but it’s worth it. We eat under a sky dense with stars, windless, leaning against a stump. Salmon fettucine, in a cream sauce of garlic and butter, fresh salad of Spokane garden greens, with a white wine from a plastic bottle, chilled by the evening temperature drop.

  “Needs basil,” I say.

  “I’ve got it,” he says, reaching next to his cook kit, to a little mound of fresh leaves.

  Lewis killed a coyote, which he mixed with leftover horsemeat and crayfish. “I find myself growing weak for the want of food and most of the men complain of a similiar deficiency and have fallen off very much,” he wrote. They were deep in the Bitterroots, having traveled about 150 miles through thickets of old growth.

  Day three for us is still hot, but the water temperature has not risen in our valley. We have not seen another person. Kelly is pushing Dollywood again, but Danny and I want to go downstream, cut a cross-country path through the woods, and then work our way back. Our campsite is full of deer this morning; obviously the word has gotten out about the chow. We decide to hang the food to keep critters away. We pack our rods in cases, load up with lunches, and hike. It’s a slog through bramble, alder, and willow in low marshy areas, pine up high. We contour gradually downward, following the valley. I feel utterly disconnected from anything outside of this river drainage and drawn to a simple world of gravity, river flow and sky. The canyon walls are too steep, in parts, for a trail. In other sections, though, we follow a faint path, used by deer and chasers of fish. At an oxbow in the river, we’re confronted by a big pile of fallen timber, blown and washed down the river during the storms of late spring. A clean, sandy beach is off to one side. Crossing over a log, I see something in the sand, very clear and incised.

  “Take a look at these tracks.”

  “Not deer,” says Danny.

  “Not bear,” says my other brother.

  The tracks form a pattern that shows a big loping stride, that of a four-footed animal. There are two lobes on the leading edge of the heel pad and toes of elongated ovals.

  “Mountain lion.”

  “What?”

  Danny looks at me and smiles. “Boy, you are in cougar country.”

  “A big torn, judging by the prints,” Kelly says.

  Cougars are six to eight feet long, from nose to tip of the tail, and weigh up to 180 pounds. They are extremely secretive, stalking their prey without so much as a crunch of leaves betraying them. When they attack, they usually go for the central vein in the neck, bleeding their victims dry. Unlike grizzly bears, who seem to lose their taste for meat as the summer wears on, cougars are lusty carnivores year-round. They are long gone from Europe. They used to live everywhere in the United States, but now their range is limited to the West, and Florida, where there is a remnant group of panthers, a subspecies. Westerners have long had mixed feelings about these predators. The Indians in the north, particularly along the coast, seldom put cougars on their totems. One of the first orders of business of the provisional government of the Oregon Territory of 1843 was an assembly called to organize a way to get rid of all wolves, grizzlies, and cougars. Teddy Roosevelt was afraid of cougars, saying they were “as ferocious and bloodthirsty as they are cowardly.” Once they were nearly gone, people missed them— sort of. Voters in Oregon and California passed citizen initatives outlawing most kinds of mountain-lion-hunting.

  “Tells you something,” says Danny, looking closely at the tracks in the sandbar.

  “What?”

  “That we’re not alone.”

  Unlike wolves, cougars are not group hunters; they are solitary predators. A single lion can control a territory as large as four hundred square miles, marking it with piles of leaves or needles scented with It’s own scat or urine. Usually, they eat deer, elk, and squirrels. In a few cases, more recently, they have gone after joggers. In California, a cat attacked a forty-year-old marathoner who was running in the foothills of the Sierra and nearly cut her in half. It was the first death by mountain lion in that state in eighty-five years. In Colorado, an eighteen-year-old runner was killed by a lion. About two thousand cougars a year are killed legally by hunters. I still want to hunt fish, but now I feel one notch lower on the food chain.

  After eleven days of wandering through the Bitterroots, Lewis and Clark were saved by the Nez Perce in the Clearwater River drainage. The Indians welcomed them with salmon, roots, and bread mixed with camas bulbs. Though still five hundred miles from the ocean, they could taste the Pacific. What a feast they had. “I cautioned them of the consequences of eateing too much,” Clark wrote. But the hunger was too great. For days, the Americans gorged themselves on the local bounty. They ate until they were sick, and then they ate some more. “It Riled us so full of wind that we were scercely able to Breathe all night.”

  My legs are scratched from the cross-country slog, but we finally get back into our rhythm. The fish are a little smaller downriver, the big ones having gone to the colder, deeper water upstream in this week of hot weather. My coachman is still doing the job. But the fish are not hitting every cast. Maybe that is because my concentration is diffused. I glance at the brush and at the shore quite a bit, taking in the light and the color, and looking for tawny brown fur and almond-shaped eyes, following me.

  At night, back at camp, Danny is cooking. I le has a beer popped and his little Coleman burner is going at full speed.

  “Ramen?”

  “Three different kinds. All in one pot. It ends up that way anyway.”

  His chow is fine, washed down with beer. He’s got some peppermint schnapps for desert, which he pours into hot chocolate. He thinks I don’t like it, I can tell. He’s wrong.

  “Nothings keeping me from Dollywood tomorrow,” says Kelly.

  “What about that cat?”

  “He’s got to eat too,” says Kelly.

  Cougars mainly hunt at night, from dusk till dawn.

  “You’re supposed to fight back if one attacks you,” says Danny. With bears, the conventional wisdom is to play dead, rolled up in a ball. These ten-foot bruins will paw you over, experts say. Despite the fact that your heart is beating two hundred gongs a minute, and you’re sweating buckets, they’ll conclude that you’re dead. All I can think of is the “Far Side” cartoon where two bears come upon campers, face down. “I just love it when they play dead,” says one bear to the other.

  With mountain lions, you’re supposed to stand up tall, hold sticks in the air, and look big. Just don’t run. I have been thinking about this since we spotted the cougar tracks. If confronted, I’m going to wave at the cougar my ten-foot fishing rod with a royal coachman at the end of it.

  “Satellite passing over,” says Kelly, head slightly propped up as he looks at the night sky. “You could check your e-mail if you’d brought the battery-powered laptop with cell phone.”

  “That’s as lame as it gets,” says Danny. “A cell phone in the wilderness.”

  “Yeah,” I say, taking a swig of schnapps and cocoa, looking away. “Lame.” I have a confession to make to my brothers. Last year, my editors at the New York Times had asked me to keep in touch one weekend, just before I headed off on a three-day backpack
ing trip in the Cascades, into the William O. Douglas Wilderness east of Mount Rainier. Even after decades on the Supreme Court, Douglas used to head for the alpine lakes of the Cascades, near his boyhood home, and disappear—the business of the nation’s High Court be damned. We walked a long ways into the wilderness to a basin sheltered by boulders, and I lost myself in the details of a hike, observing the rock, watching the sky, listening for wildlife, thinking about all the worthless stuff at sea level, shrinking in significance with every step. On the second morning, I got up early and set out to find a place that would be high enough to give me a direct phone signal out. I climbed for two and a half hours to a summit ridge, my mind in the world of paragraphs, editors, and the tight ecosystem within the building on West 43rd Street. At the top, I dialed out with my cell phone and was connected to New York. A national desk editor came on, pleasant and gossipy. “Your story’s been held for lack of space,” she said. “Check when you get back.”

  “You need help,” Danny says.

  “I’ll take you to Dollywood tomorrow,” says Kelly. “That’s about as wild a country as you can find in America.”

  Maybe. But there is no place in the Lower 48 that is more than twenty-five miles from a road. When I tell this to my brothers, they don’t believe me. I had read this in Sports Afield, a magazine that is full of advertisements for gear to keep you comfortable while preying on fish and game. The rage in the outdoor world, judging by the ads, is the global positioning system, a handheld device that bounces a signal off a satellite and gives a map reading of the senders location. They were refined during the Gulf War. “When it comes to blazing trails, nobody does it like Magellan,” it says in a typical ad. “Combining a 12 parallel-channel reception with superior tracking in dense cover and 24-hour battery life. You always know where you are with a Magellan GPS.”

  I unfold the Forest Service map, and we scan the squares of central Idaho with our flashlights. We chart distances from deep in our valley, from nearby summits, from side channels in the heart of the Frank Church River of No Return, as the biggest wilderness in Idaho is named. A long days hike would get us to where Lewis and Clark ended their ordeal in the Bitterroots. But much of that area, around the town of Orofino, is a ruined landscape, the site of a monstrous dam that was built for no other reason than political pork, killing the once great steelhead runs of the north fork of the Clearwater River. It is the town that produced Helen Chenoweth. Little fish-and-bait shops, with yellowed pictures of steelhead ghosts, are rotting along the river near Orofino. They try to hold on, waiting for some miracle return of big steelies. At one such shop, Guns n’ Gear, the owner keeps a chart showing the decline of steelhead throughout Idaho, a death watch. On a hill above Orofino is a state mental institution, just a few feet away from the local high school—home of the Maniacs. The regional icon of Orofino, adorning the football stadium and the side of the school, is a drooling psychotic in a straitjacket.

  In other directions, the map is less cluttered with the products of modern Idaho. But there are enough logging roads cut into the woods that the twenty-five-mile statement seems to hold up. This is an awful thought about a place that is supposedly the largest roadless area in the contiguous United States, a place people visit because human beings need to keep some sense of the wild. But we know there is another marker out in the Bitter-roots tonight, a border established with leaves and cougar scat, staking territory. Despite the schnapps, I have a fitful sleep, which is how it should be in some places.

  CHAPTER 12

  Homecoming

  Joseph, Oregon

  Gathering in the buttery sunlight of a late-September afternoon, a band of men in cowboy hats and John Deere caps went looking for a hanging post in Joseph, Oregon, not long ago. It was the kind of day to get out of their way, and most people did, leaving the streets to the eighty or so men determined to take care of things in a way that certain people in this valley have always settled their more intractable problems. Defiant with hanging rope and vigilante bluster, they came to declare that the Old West would not die without a fight.

  The little town of Joseph is tired-looking, somewhat chapped by the weather, but fragrant with the smell of freshly cut hay or big cottonwoods after a rain, it still puts up a pretty face most days. It sits in a high alpine valley near Hells Canyon, the deepest cleft on the continent. The shoulder-to-shoulder flank of the Wallowa Mountains, snowy and blue and much too tall to be rising out of the prairie of eastern Oregon, tends to overwhelm anything that people have tried to do with two-stories of stone or wood down in the valley. The peaks are of such heart-stopping beauty that you feel like tipping them after taking their picture; they are ecoporn, in virtually any pose.

  But for all It’s natural radiance, the Wallowa Valley is also a place where the crosswinds of history can blow hard and sharp, bringing a hint of some distant bloodletting over power and land. Running people out of town is an old habit. Chief Joseph, the mountain of nearly ten thousand feet, shadows over the valley. Chief Joseph—the man, the myth, the industry—casts other shadows. The Nez Perce leader is everywhere, his face on the logo of the weekly newspaper, the Chieftain, on banners advertising Chief Joseph Days, on windows and coffee mugs and bank murals. But that Joseph—the one everyone knows about, the one whose piercing nobility seems to burn through the pose of the Edward Curtis photograph, the one who outfoxed some of the best Civil War-hardened generals of the United States Army— he is not here in the land of his birth. His father is. Old Joseph, his body mutilated by the great-grandparents of some of the people who marched down Main Street with a hanging rope, is buried at the foot of Wallowa Lake, in a small cemetery. Young Chief Joseph is buried in the chalky volcanic soil of the Colville Indian Reservation, in Washington State, where he was exiled after the war of 1877. Young Chief Joseph met with two presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland, kept two wives, and was called by Buffalo Bill the greatest Indian that America had ever produced— a compliment he considered meaningless, as it turned out. The dusty grave was the end of the line for a man who spent his life trying to hold on to this valley, as his father had asked him to do on his deathbed. Banned in life from ever returning to the Wallowas, Young Joseph was also banned in death.

  Ten years after the Nez Perce were driven from the Wallowas, thirty-one Chinese gold miners were attacked in an ambush. It started as a robbery. But after stealing $50,000 in gold, the thieves decided to kill every one of the Chinese miners in order to protect themselves from incrimination. In that sense, they were right. Though six Wallowa County men were charged with the murders, three of them were acquitted by a jury of friends and neighbors; three others fled and were never found. Wars have been fought in the West over less loss of life, but nobody was ever brought to justice for this mass killing. Nor are there any plaques or historical markers in the valley to commemorate one of the worst massacres of the nineteenth-century American West. And Oregon schoolchildren, rightly steeped in the struggle of the Americans who walked across a continent to settle on the Pacific slope, know nothing of the slaughter that took place within sight of wagon-trail ruts. The killings, the evidence of Chinese life, the story in all It’s elements, was never set down in the ritualized way that Westerners establish lore about themselves, and so it did not exist.

  The targets on this September day were a pair of local men, both in their mid-forties, white, and both rooted in the Pacific Northwest. The marchers walked past the sign at the entrance of Joseph—This Little Town Is Heaven to Us, Don’t Drive Like Hell Through It—and beyond all the new storefronts, more than a dozen galleries, places where bronze statues of Chief Joseph sell for $5,000 and coffee comes with Italian soda flavors. On Main Street, in the center of town, Dale Potter strung two ropes over a makeshift gallows, beneath an American flag. Then he hung two stuffed dummies, the heads tarred and feathered. A little cheer went up among the hanging crew as the figurative life went out of the victims.

  One of the dangling dummies was labeled And
y Kerr. He is a small, bearded man, a prominent person in Oregon, who had only recently moved from Portland, where a million people live in the metro area, to Wallowa County, where the population is seven thousand. Kerr looks like a spotted owl, the celebrated nocturnal bird that has been the source of so much contention in the Pacific Northwest. He has a talent for speaking in such loaded sound bites that it was said by reporters that if Andy Kerr did not exist, someone would have had to invent him. He knows how to use an active verb, most often as a weapon. The other dummy was given the nametag of Ric Bailey, a former logger, friendly and self-deprecating. He came to the valley in 1977 and fell in love with what he saw. Since then, he has been trying to make Hells Canyon into a National Park.

  The hanging-in-effigy did nothing to affect the timber mill that was closed recently by Boise Cascade, the county’s largest private landowner, taking a third of the entire payroll of the town of Joseph with it. Nor did it have the slightest influence on cattle prices, which were nearly half what they’d been just a few years before. But how do you hang an invisible, ephemeral thing like free market forces or a corporation like Boise Cascade? It’s much easier, said Dale Potter—later, when he was away from the mob— to go after an easy target, in this case, a pair of guys who are seen as a threat to the traditional rural lifestyle. The hanging allowed people in the valley to blame someone else for all their troubles.

  “These rural people are pretty simple and unsophisticated,” said Potter, a semiretired salesman who traces his family lineage in the valley to the 1880s, about ten years after the Nez Perce were kicked out. “They aren’t part of the laptop-computer crowd. They know bad things are happening, but they don’t know how to defend themselves. I had to do something spectacular to get peoples attention. And boy, did I ever.”