Big Dreams (5 page)

“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.

T
HE 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, Star 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.

U
P 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.

The Klamath River was no less imposing. It carried more water than any other river in California, except for the Sacramento. It was big, wide, and deep, the color of coffee mixed with cream.

From an overlook in Requa, the ancient Yurok village, I watched it dumping tons of mud and silt into the ocean. Sea lions were swimming in the murky wavelets at its mouth, swatting at salmon and steelhead. They held fish between their teeth and barked like mutts. Cormorants were perched on the rocks around them with their wings spread, as still as totems.

No fishing boats were in sight, even though the ocean was as flat as the surface of a skillet.

Trees and water, water and trees:
that was the mantra to be chanted on the North Coast. There were ghosts in the mountains, too, just as in Crescent City, the spirit lives of old Klamath town hovering above the floodplain by the river, where the water had swelled in raging tides to sweep away houses, buildings, and automobiles, all the structures and interdependencies of three hundred and fifty people, repeating a historical cycle.

A new Klamath town, the one that Knott the carpenter had helped to build, was on the other side of Highway 101, far from danger. At the town gate, a salmon carved from wood was suspended in a heart. Two stone bears prowled the ramparts of a bridge, and a little tombstone peeked out of the long grass by the main road, inscribed thusly, Bigfoot, R.I.P.

Nothing seemed to be moving in Klamath, nothing but the river. William Brewer had observed a similar emptiness in 1863. The gold-mining fever was over, he said, but some forty-niners had switched to mining copper up Del Norte way. Brewer found them lodging fecklessly around potbellied stoves in filthy barrooms, where they played cards and railed at each other all night. Unable to sleep, he checked into a tidy Dutch tavern, but his stay was spoiled again, this time by a drunken miner who was determined to enlighten him on the subject of geology.

Along the river, Brewer saw evidence of flooding. He saw devastation. Some miles inland from the coast, he came to the town of Hamburg, where only two years before, there had been three hotels,
three stores, two billiard emporiums, and many miners’ cabins. Now all were gone.

At the Beehive Cafe in Klamath, I paused for a cup of coffee. It was almost noon, but again, as at Hollie’s Market, I was the only customer. The only waitress, a welcoming woman with gray hair, seemed glad for the company and was eager to exchange a bit of gossip.

The Beehive used to hum and buzz with loggers from dawn until suppertime, she told me, but not anymore. The last mill had shut down a while ago, and its rusted, scrappy remains lay behind the local Mobil station. The logging around Klamath was done by gypos now, small companies with low overheads. The big timber firms had cut too much too quickly, the waitress believed, snatching what they could and never thinking about the future. Did I know that it took sixty years for a redwood to reach a harvestable height?

“They were piggish,” she said.

I laughed and said, “Like the rest of us,” sliding some coins under my saucer.

Upstream from Klamath town, the river wound through a steep canyon. Deadfall, stumps, and the scars of clear-cuts interrupted the smooth, green flow of the mountains. Across the water, on the opposite bank, the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation began. Junker cars were distributed among the trees, hauled in from body shops and
accident sites. The road ended in Klamath Glen, a hamlet of trailers, drift boats, and rental cabins for visiting anglers. Two young loggers were leaning against a truck and handing a pint of whiskey back and forth.

“Too muddy even for the gypos to be out,” one of them shouted to me when I waved. He seemed far away from the world, out of touch with it, like a pebble cast at the moon.

It started raining again. An Indian family stood fishing by the river, four kids and a mom and a pop, all oblivious of the weather, as if they’d been bred to the damp. They let the drops roll off them, casting and reeling in their lures. The rain drummed against my windshield and spattered on the ground. I heard a symphony of liquid sounds around me—the river, yes, but some creeks, too, and the water dripping from leaves and branches into rills, and the rills running into puddles, and the puddles seeping into the secret well-springs of the Klamath, replenishing its subterranean reserves.

A
T THE BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS (BIA) IN KLAMATH
, I met an agent, Norman McLemore, who had come down from Fairbanks, Alaska, to take over the office just a month before. Fairbanks was in the grip of a big freeze when McLemore had left, with temperatures to seventy-below, so a new post in California had seemed like a godsend. He had expected lots of sunshine, some good beaches, and lots of pretty blondes. That was how the state had always looked to him on TV.

When McLemore got to Klamath, it was raining, and it had been raining a little ever since. He had visited the coastal beaches a few times, but the sun was weak there and the water was too cold for swimming. As for the blondes, they were nowhere to be found.

“You have to go south for that,” he advised me. About California, he had become a wiser man.

McLemore was half Navajo. He wore a silver bracelet, a flashy ring, and a belt buckle in turquoise and silver. He had grown up in
Arizona, on the Navajo reservation around Window Rock, and had worked on it as a peace officer with the Navajo Division of Public Safety as a young man, but the job wasn’t leading him anywhere, so he got an urge to travel and joined his parents in Bethel, Alaska, where his father had a job with the BIA.

He passed his first few months in Bethel trying to join the Alaska State Troopers. He scored a 94 on his exam and did well on all the agility tests, but he was never hired. Later, in Juneau, he tried again under an affirmative action program, and once more, in spite of doing well on his tests, he failed to be hired. He attributed it to prejudice. So, instead, he worked as an assistant to an Alaskan tribe and became involved in some disputes over land allotments, and after that he joined the BIA.

The Klamath office of the BIA was small and cramped and a little difficult to find, tucked into a plain building near the police station. California had a Native American population of more than two hundred thousand, the largest in the nation, with about 130 tribes that spoke some twenty-four separate languages, but the bureau spent less money in the state than in any other of its administrative regions. I thought it must be due, at least in part, to the invisibility of Indians in most cities. Only in the Far North did a white Californian feel their presence so strongly.

The lack of resources weighed on McLemore because he had a tricky, laborious situation to resolve. The Yurok tribe was at the center of it. They had shared the 93,000-acre Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation with the Hupa—the tribe’s name was spelled differently from the place’s name—for over a century. The two had always managed to coexist and had always done business, with the Hupa traditionally trading such inland food as acorns and fruit for the Yuroks’ canoes and fish.

In the past few years, however, there had been some feuding and litigation between the tribes, and they were about to be partitioned by an Act of Congress. The Yuroks would get their own reservation, but anybody who wanted to live on it and partake of
the benefits had to be certified as a Yurok Native American by the BIA, submitting a complicated application form. Yuroks who had some Hupa blood could apply to stay on the Hoopa Reservation. A Yurok, once certified, could also forsake his or her claim and accept a buy-out of fifteen thousand dollars.

McLemore had received about seven thousand applications so far. He figured that he could dismiss about a quarter of them out of hand, but the rest demanded his attention. He would not enjoy the task, either, because he was against any partitioning and suspected that it merely amounted to a strategy of divide-and-conquer. Partitioning diluted the power of Native Americans, he felt—it had done that to the Navajo and the Hopi. He believed that Indians ought to consolidate, but that they would need a unifying vision to lead them. There was no such vision at present.

Above all, McLemore hoped to be fair in dealing with the Yurok. Indians had already suffered enough in California. Theirs was a history of brutality, violence, and murder that had genocidal implications.

When Junípero Serra had established his first mission in what was then known as Alta California, in 1769, the Native American population had totaled about 350,000, but disease and armed attacks soon reduced it by half. During the Gold Rush, miners stole Indian land and reduced the population to about 50,000 through random slayings. In 1851–52, the federal government agreed to give California tribes some provisions, some cattle, and some tracts of land—about 7 million acres, or 7½ percent of the state—but the U.S. Senate, in a secret session and under pressure from business interests and the legislature in California, refused to ratify the necessary treaties.