Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  At Los Murales Restaurant—“cuisine of northern Mexico”—I had a Tecate beer and tried to cool off. The place was jumping, but not a hint of trouble. At the rodeo grounds, I saw some teens, Latino gang-banger wannabes with pants that showed their butt cracks, trying to imitate the white teens, with pants that showed their butt cracks. They were part of the American birthday show, in their way, though possibly clueless as to what it was all about.

  I fell in with the cowboys for a time, smoking a cigar while they chewed tobacco. The rodeo queen, Jamie Mahaffey, strutted the grounds, her blonde curls cascading halfway down her back, cowboy boots polished, smiling to kids eating curly fries. One of the youths made a remark, and she kept smiling, even though it was not the kind of thing people in small towns are expected to say to rodeo queens. I watched the horses before the competition. I liked the Appaloosas. The animals jumped around in early evening, looking sublimely incorrigible. Rodeo, of course, is a term coined by vaqueros long ago, and many of the riders setting up for the evening were Hispanic. And the horses also descended from the herds brought to New Mexico by the Spanish. I found a seat in the half-empty stands. A mariachi band, ten pieces and men in sequined uniforms and sombreros, set up on stage and started playing. They drew a quick crowd. The music made me feel good, songs for the weather and the desert, and I could imagine myself in old El Paso a hundred years ago. I looked out beyond Lost Horse Plateau, toward the sunset, to the big volcano of Mount Adams, the second-highest peak in the Northwest, 12, 270 feet. The glacier dome, a rose-colored blush, seemed to settle in for a seat by the rodeo. It was in the mountains around Adams that William O. Douglas, the only Supreme Court justice ever produced by the Yakima Valley, had one of his great epiphanies. “I felt at peace,” Douglas wrote. “That night, I think, there first came to me the germ of a philosophy of life: that mans best measure of the universe is in his hopes and in his dreams, not his fears; that man is a part of a plan, not a fraction of which he can ever understand.”

  Not more than fifty yards from where I sat, Yakama Indians had set up their tipis. Because they lived east of the Cascades and roamed the broad Columbia Plateau, the Yakamas were buffalo hunters, some of them making the long trip to Montana. In the old days, it took about fifteen tanned buffalo hides to make a traditional tipi. Today, on the powwow grounds, the Yakamas used lodgepole pine for support, as was typically done, but have long gone over to canvas for the wrap. The Indians sold jewelry and cedar carvings, frybread and smoked salmon. Many of them wore T-shirts with a single word on the front: Dignity. And now, even as the mariachi band played, as Queen Jamie with her bouncing blonde curls flirted with the tobacco-spitting cowboys dressed in shirts of American flags, the Indians began to chant and play drums, low and rhythmic, in a circle in front of the tipis. In the rodeo grandstand were campesinos with blistered hands and freshly washed scarves around their necks, and big-bellied Anglos with cowboy hats, and girls in cutoffs, giggly and summery. All the sounds came together in the evening with the smells and sights, the cheatgrass giving way to Mount Adams, and the Appaloosas young and unfettered. The West of Wonder was in place again.

  BEFORE I left the valley, I went back to the road sign to try one last time to catch a miracle. The rodeo and powwow had played to record crowds, and it had gone off without a hitch, the sheriffs deputies said, unless you count the people arrested for drunkenness or the half-dozen folks treated for sunstroke. I would be disappointed if you could not fill a sheriff’s ledger in the valley with such notations. In my last visit to the road sign, I was alone. It was early, and the light was sharp, right on the back of where everyone else said Our Lady of Guadalupe had made her visits. I saw, more than I had seen before, the rainbow outline of color, and if I had really tried hard—maybe if I had had a triple-shot espresso at the Homestake Drive-Thru—I could have seen a face. But I was not disappointed. In ten years’ time, maybe less, I knew I might look at a road sign in one of these valleys, on a day when other things seemed flat, and see the Mother of God. It was inevitable.

  CHAPTER 14

  Frontier

  American River, California

  This is how the New World looks, this is what is happening

  in the vital madhouse of Eden, the vanishing Lotus Land.

  —Wallace Stegner,

  All the Little Live Things

  At one point the leading minds in Europe believed that California was an island with an unapproachable coast populated by single-breasted Amazons. For much of the 1990s, the leading minds in America thought California was dead, a still life of flakes and brutes with only the ground truly alive, and then in a terrifying way. So perhaps the way to find California’s place in the West is to go somewhere that is vaguely consistent. On a day when it is 104 degrees in the Sacramento Valley and the urban ozone looks the way a bee sting feels, the snowmelt of the Sierra makes sense. Water and wonder, the two elements the West needs in order to stay healthy, are the magnets of the Range of Light. Through all the dreams, disasters, and schemes of empire-builders under five different flags, California has had It’s source of liquid renewal in the Sierra Nevada Range.

  So to the Sierra we go, my friend Jim Wilson and I, and a handful of Californians new and old, logical and looney. We wade into the middle fork of the American River, pushing a raft into the stream, and then we are held captive by the current—a tether to the ages of California. We are two thousand feet, perhaps a little higher, above the stifling valley, the interchangeable Taco Bells and Shopkos, the California of walled compounds and toxic auto culture, and only fifty miles or so away by direct line, and yet we have escaped it entirely. I’m stunned. Nobody would call the American River a wild stream by the standards of, say, Idaho’s Salmon or Oregon’s Deschutes. Most of modern California history has coursed through it or been touched by it. Carrying mustard-colored flecks from the granite tables of the Sierra, this river lured the first crush of Americans, and now feeds the $25-billion machine of California agriculture. The people who lived in the river valley six thousand years ago left milling stones behind, their only record. In a flash, nineteenth-century argonauts rerouted and turned over the river, yanking it from It’s gravitational home, scraping the bottom bare. They burned and cut down all the trees, killed or drove out all the wildlife, and knocked down the banks with hydraulic cannons. By 1882, it was “treeless, mud-laden, filthy and fishless,” as Myron Angel wrote.

  But after it was fleeced and stripped bare, the American River was left alone, given over to the jet stream in late winter, and springtimes when thirty-five feet of snow would melt and rush downhill. It is clean, swift, and alive today at a time when whole forests have been felled for writers of California’s obituary. Into the current we go, a bit less hesitant to face what the Golden State has become.

  When we stop, I climb a rock and jump into a pool; it could be the west slope of Colorado. When we hit rapids, the spray covers us and makes everyone laugh; it could be the Green River in Wyoming. When we slow to a dead drift, nobody talks, because we all feel the same thing, the soft embrace of a valley. Not two days ago, the water around me was in a north-facing cranny of the High Sierra, snowbound. And several days from now, the water will be spit out of a sprinkler in a desert cul-de-sac in Moreno Valley, in homes protected by lasers and armed-response, a covenant-bound conclave where neighbors sue each other over oddly-placed basketball hoops. It is a quick ride from the Geography of Hope to the cliff of fear. But then, no place on earth has risen and then gone to the brink of ruination so quickly as California, a state that much of the West has disowned, speaking of it in the past tense. It is not us, they say in Utah, New Mexico, and Oregon, feigning sympathy, or more often openly expressing horror. The unlivable cities. The unbreathable air. The undrinkable water. The unaffordable houses. The tribal politics. The drive-by plastic surgery. The facile weather. The crimes against nature. The crimes against each other. The traffic. The natural disasters. The man-made disasters. The sickos with guns. The sickos with Ph.D.’
s. The half-baked ideas. The fight song of the U.S.C. Trojans—a dial tone is more appealing. It is not us, not the West, they say in Arizona, Montana, and Idaho, speaking as if California had long ago been cleaved at the border west of Nevada and south of Oregon, set adrift with a history all It’s own, on a course no other Western state would ever follow. Downriver, then, to see.

  THE STATE MOTTO is Eureka, and the state symbol is the grizzly bear. The last bruin was seen in 1922. The motto, curiously, remains, spoken in myriad languages and dialects. The greatest single movement of people in American history was the heave-ho, east to west, from 1849 to 1851. It was concentrated, then, during the Gold Rush, but it has never stopped. In 1900, barely a million people lived in California. The state grew to five million by 1930, about the population of present-day Colorado; ten million by 1950; twenty million in 1970, surpassing New York as the most populous state, and thirty million in 1990, surpassing all of Canada. It will have fifty million by 2025, if current projections hold, roughly equal to the population of Italy or France. Nearly one out of every eight Americans lives in California, the world’s seventh-largest economy. Within a few years, there will be no ethnic majority in the state, only a stew of all races and nationalities, each one a minority. In a year, three thousand immigrants move to California from England, twelve thousand from China, twenty thousand from Vietnam, ten thousand from Iran, forty thousand from Mexico, and nearly 800,000 come from other states of America. At what point do they become Westerners? Arrival, perhaps. Eureka, remember, means “I have found it.”

  The highest mountain in the contiguous United States is in the southern Sierra, 14,494-foot Mount Whitney, a mere eighty miles from the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, Death Valley at 282 feet below sea level. One-fourth of the state is desert. One-fifth is taken up by the largest mountain range in the West. The coastline is eleven hundred miles long; the northern shore looks like Maine and the south resembles the Mediterranean. The biggest trees in the world and some of the oldest living things grow in California’s misty redwood-and-sequoia zone to the north; the hottest spot on the planet is in the Mojave Desert to the south. It is all so sublime and diverse—breathless in the sheer force of It’s beauty—because it is still in the active process of being shaped. The Pacific Plate is moving north two inches a year relative to the more stubborn and anchored North American Plate, and the pressure from a mobile earthen crust floating atop a molten core has produced thousands of smaller faults and cracks. In one earthquake alone, the Lone Pine temblor of 1872, the Sierra rose twenty-three feet; in the San Fernando quake of 1971, the San Gabriel Mountains grew by six feet. An address, in California, is never permanent.

  “THIS STATE would be paradise,” says one of our rafting companions, a native Californian, trailing a foot in the current. “If only a few people lived here. Human beings have fucked it up so bad it may be beyond hope.” I imagine Ishi, the last surviving member of the vanquished Yahi tribe, felt the same thing when he came out of hiding near Lassen Peak in 1911, only to live the next five years as a curiosity with a heartbeat at the University of California’s Museum of Anthropology.

  I have had similar feelings, flying north in an Alaska Airlines jet after covering a race riot, an earthquake, a mass suicide, a mass murder, a calamitous mudslide, flood, or firestorm, a media farce around a celebrity trial, a political campaign where the candidates are never seen except on television. On the ground, California can seem like America at It’s worst, a poisoned civilization in the grip of a slow choke. From the air it is the best of the West, cracked and sunbaked, uplifted and wind-buffed, groomed and cultivated in the valleys, the rocky shores stroked by the Pacific, San Francisco a perfect match for It’s perfect setting, Half-Dome gleaming in Yosemite, Shasta holding the late light at fourteen thousand feet. But that is like loving someone only for their looks, the bond broken as soon as he or she speaks. Besides, California was never an Eden lanced by a sudden surge of humanity, as Ishi’s blinkered emergence from the pine forest would indicate. The coast, from the Baja tip to the Pacific Northwest—the original California, as named by the Spanish—had the densest population of natives anywhere on the continent, perhaps 300,000. They spoke at least eighty different languages, lived with cycles of drought and fire, fought with each other, slaved and raided. They were Miwoks and Modocs, Chumash and Yokut, Ohlones and Mojave, and they seem to have had as much trouble with heaving ground, flaming volcanoes, and sliding mountainsides as later residents did.

  Today people lament the exurbs built in fire zones and flood plains, the cities straddling fault lines. But from the very beginning, Californians set the standard for defiance of their native ground.

  AS IF guided by jinxed divining rods, the Spanish had a remarkable ability to find the worst and most unstable places to establish their outposts of harsh religion and slave-labor agriculture. As in the New Mexico entrada in 1540, the Spaniards crossed into California with the usual clanking parade of padres, cannons, gilt-skirted horses, bawling cattle, and sweaty soldiers looking for plunder. In 1769, the Portolá expedition entered the basin that is now weighed down by Los Angeles. They were greeted by the California equivalent of a Bronx cheer: a heart-stopping earthquake. It shook the ground for nearly a minute. Traumatized by the movable terra, the Spanish said Mass the next day, begging for help. In response came three more earthquakes—aftershocks, but big ones, the kind that can bring down Target stores. The following day, same thing. “This afternoon we felt new earthquakes, the continuation of which astonishes us,” wrote the expeditions diarist, Fray Juan Crespi.

  The basin was watered by a good little river, forested on It’s banks by willows and cottonwood, the brush full of ripe blackberries and blossoming roses. Antelope sprang from the shadows, and grizzly bears gobbled berries. Condors with a ten-foot wingspan, vulture-like and prehistoric in appearance, cruised for carrion. But though it was full of life, southern California also showed considerable signs of nature at It’s less pastoral. The grass was blackened from fire; logs were strewn along the river, evidence of floods. The Spanish did not take the cue. They proceeded to establish a mission, one of twenty-one such outposts along a five-hundred-mile length of the California coast. Most of them were placed directly atop what they did not know was one of the most fragile areas on earth—the San Andreas Fault zone. In the sand-speck of time since the Spanish arrived, it has produced 118 major earthquakes.

  At Mission San Gabriel a settlement arose that soon acquired a reputation for moral sloth and easy violence: Los Angeles in It’s first years, a shack town of single-story tar-roof adobe buildings and heat-slowed cattle. They named one of the nearby rivers the Rio de los Temblores. At Mission San Juan Bautista, the fifteenth in the chain to be built, the Spanish may have started to get the message. They constructed particularly strong adobe walls, three feet thick, and a red-tiled roof was designed to withstand a good shake. Nonetheless, it was sitting squat over the 750-mile-long break in the earth’s crust that is the Fault. In one month alone, October 1800, there were six earthquakes a day. Twice, the mission had to be rebuilt. The European introduction to California was baptized in earthly tumult. And nothing has changed. From Mission San Francisco de Asis rose a city of rowdy Americans and anxious Chinese that tumbled during the biggest displacement of the two big plates ever recorded: the 1906 quake, in which the ground slipped twenty feet horizontally, and 490 city blocks in San Francisco were destroyed.

  “We burn down a city in a night,” one Californian noted after the 1906 quake, displaying the trademark resilience. “And build it in a day.” Just before Game Three of the 1989 World Series came more plate slippage, more chaos and tragedy, and T-shirts, all over California, proclaiming what everyone knew by now: “Nature bats last!”

  No matter how much the earth opened up and broke apart, the Spanish friars were undeterred. It had been nearly two hundred years since Don Juan de Oñate had sacked Acoma in New Mexico, after the Pueblo natives refused to bow to Spanish demands of chur
ch and state. This time, the Plus Ultra banners were left in Mexico, and the friars spoke as if going out to teach children the wonders of the world. Still, the larger lessons of Acoma were lost. And so here was Western history, supposedly in It’s early stages, but actually quite far along, already repeating itself. The mission leader, Father Junipero Serra, rang a little bell as he moved about, hoping to attract heathens to his side. “I saw something I could not believe,” said Father Serra upon his first encounter with California Indians in 1769. “They were entirely naked, as Adam in the garden before sin.”

  Nude Californians in their native habitat matched, in one respect, Spain’s image of the area. For nearly 150 years, the best maps of the Americas continued to show the Island of California, not too far from the Island of Japan. It was not pure ignorance. A book written in 1510, a novel by Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, told a story of a land inhabited by very large, black, single-breasted women. They had only one breast because it made them better warriors, adept at archery; a pair would get in the way. They hunted men and fed them to goblins. Cold was ubiquitous. And over this island kingdom ruled a woman, Queen Califia. The very name California is a product of fantasy.