Big Dreams (8 page)

D
OWN THE ROAD FROM HOOPA VALLEY
, at the base of the Trinity Mountains, lay the town of Willow Creek, where everyone was involved in the annual rite of preparing for tourist season on the day that I arrived. As a fisherman mends his nets in anticipation of salmon, so, too, did the proprietors of motels, gift shops, and sporting goods stores in the Far North get ready for their customers, whitewashing walls, hosing bug corpses from screens, and practicing their smiles before a mirror.

Willow Creek drew its inspiration from the Old West, from buckboards, grizzled prospectors, and weathered barn siding. It had a rustic, no-nonsense atmosphere, a quality of being literal that came as a relief after the slippery sadness of Hoopa. The businesses in town pointed up a country person’s distaste for anything fancy.

The simple, forthright names suggested a smalltown responsibility, as well. If you were offended by the service somewhere, you could look up Bob or Chris or Old Man Hodgson in the phone book and cuss them out. They might cuss at you in return, but that was the way of discourse in the West, although insults had replaced sixguns as the weapon of choice.

At Big Red’s Cafe, a hungry crowd had gathered for lunch and gossip. The menu guaranteed that everything was fresh, except for the help. Like Red, many of the patrons were big, really big—big in the bones and big in the stomach. The daily special, a pork tenderloin sandwich, sounded good, so I took a stool and ordered it.

A gigantic man in a logger’s plaid shirt walked in and sat down next to me. He said to the waitress, who was wiry, feisty, and skilled at riding herd on the regulars, “Mary, is that pork tenderloin a pretty good-sized sandwich?”

“It’s better than nothing,” Mary answered.

“Aw, hell. I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries.”

“Same as you did yesterday.”

The giant grunted and snatched absently at a circling fly, a sure harbinger of summer. He began telling anyone who’d listen about his morning at the history museum over in China Flat. He’d swept the floors and had sorted through the new T-shirts, which featured a crosscut saw as part of the museum’s logo.

In the Far North, you found museums everywhere. History had become an exercise in nostalgia, maybe because the past with its vision of gainful employment for all was more intelligible and had more resonance than the tapped-out present or the imponderable future.

Willow Creek was once an important timber center, just as it had once been a Gold Rush settlement, but its loggers were confronting the same rigid restrictions and protests that currently prevailed elsewhere in California, and layoffs were common. Although the loggers were surrounded by trees in Trinity National Forest, they were often kept from cutting any down, so the folks in town were
counting on tourism as a quick fix for their economy, like the people in Crescent City.

It seemed to me that they had a chance of succeeding. They had some good campgrounds, and better hiking, fishing, and weather, but their window of opportunity was still brief. Snow could start falling by early October, and it would certainly fall in November, and Trinity County was not known for its skiing. The county was even emptier than Del Norte, four times as large but with fewer residents—about fourteen thousand of them on more than 2 million acres.

Mary brought my pork tenderloin sandwich. Big Red had breaded and deep-fried the meat to infuse it with even more calories and cholesterol and give it some greasy-spoon oomph. When I took a bite, hot oil poured down my chin, as in a medieval torture, and gave me a nasty burn. The oil left a raw, red blister below my lip that scabbed over and finally turned into a scar. It was still there when I crossed the border into Mexico.

That evening, I camped on the Trinity River. Beneath some pines and some Douglas firs, on ground tinted a burnished red by iron ores, I staked my tent, as diligently attentive as I had been as an eight-year-old, when camping meant a night in a Long Island backyard. I smelled the pine needles and watched the scrub jays and the sparrows and the crazy little chipmunks scooting around like wind-up toys.

It was tremendously satisfying to be alone by the Trinity River. There was something magisterial in the sensation, something opulent and restorative. I consulted my maps and atlases and plotted a route for the next day that would take me back over Highway 96 to Yreka, in the north-central part of the state. From there I would travel east through sheep and cattle country to Alturas, the last frontier, where the earth froze six feet deep in winter. Or so I’d been told.

H
IGHWAY
96 FROM WILLOW CREEK
to Happy Camp ran parallel to the Klamath River and its many tributaries, offering a dream of abundant water come true—muddy water dripping, spilling, and trickling down from the mountains, water in such quantity that it demanded a whole new set of gerunds to keep pace with its apparently infinite outpouring.

What a cosmic tease this gushing would have been to a farmer in the dusty, dry San Joaquin, or to a developer of the hard-baked, desert flats beyond Los Angeles, in all those places where the land was like an old washcloth that you had to wring for hours to squeeze out a few drops of juice.

In California, water was destiny, the lifeblood of empire. It had been the star player in a series of melodramatic thefts, kidnapings, and reroutings that had started around the turn of the century, when San Francisco’s water barons conspired to build a dam at the Hetch Hetchy Gorge of the Tuolumne River, in Yosemite National Park.

At about the same time, William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who’d worked his way up from the position of ditch-tender to run the Los Angeles Water Company, had embarked on a plan to tap into the Owens River, in the Sierra Nevada, building a conduit of some 250 miles. His project was second only to the Panama Canal in its scope.

So precious and competitively sought after did the mountain rivers become that in 1945 Governor Earl Warren established a State Water Resources Board to study and control the distribution of water. The board kept absorbing other agencies, inflating itself from within, until it turned into the Department of Water Resources, in 1957, and formulated a new master plan.

The plan incorporated the already existing Central Valley Project, an intricate, hopscotching network of dams and diversions that borrowed water from one stream, only to replace it with water from another. The CVP dated from 1935. It was a federally backed, public-works
project under the auspices of the Bureau of Reclamation, and its first phase of construction was finished in 1955. At its hub were four dams on three rivers—Shasta and Keswick on the Sacramento, Folsom on the American, and Friant on the San Joaquin.

The Trinity River was impounded at a shocking cost and joined to the system, its flow channeled under the Klamath Mountains, into the Sacramento, and finally into the CVP. All this siphoning, this immense restructuring of natural arterials, this surgery being performed on the body of California, was due to end in 2020 with virtually every drop of “surplus” northern water recycled to the south.

Water, ever more water. Ikes Creek, Slide Creek, Bluff Creek, and Slate Creek. Outside Somes Bar, the Salmon River flowed into the Klamath, glittering like an emerald. A few Whitewater rafters, the first of the season, could be heard hollering as they splashed through the spume, whacking madly at the river with their paddles.

Toward Happy Camp, the Klamath started to clear. My map was littered with the names of mines, Independence, Buzzard Hill, and Kanaka in the shadow of Frying Pan Ridge. There were still hopeful souls who worked the water with pans, sluice boxes, or hydraulic dredges, believing that it had not yet surrendered all its treasure. They could be seen wading in the shallows and searching for one last big-time strike in this region of last things, before epic California vanished forever.

T
HE NEW 49’ERS STORE
in Happy Camp had a coin-operated sifting jig out front that customers could use. You hauled up some dirt or sand from the Klamath, poured it in, deposited a quarter, and watched the machine rumble for a few minutes as it purportedly separated valuable gold from mere earth. Never in a million years would I have trusted it. What if the jig really stole your gold, hiding it in a secret compartment? The annals of mining history were filled with tales of human greed.

True New 49’ers would not share my suspicions. They had a
positive outlook and belonged to a club that held claims to mining property in California, Arizona, Idaho, and Oregon. Club members claimed to have recovered an estimated $300,000 in gold from the Klamath River alone. The club literature did not say who had done the estimating, but only someone like me, a paranoid, would ask such questions.

For a New 49’er, it was enough to know that the club offered training sessions, campgrounds, fraternity, success, and a 10 percent discount on such mining equipment as Diablo Gold Demon metal detectors, Gold King placers, and Weasel goldspinners. The club’s initiation fee was not cheap, but you could parcel it out at $35 a month until you’d submitted the complete payment of $3,500.

Inside The New 49’ers Store, there were handsome dredges fitted with pontoons and fired by Honda engines. A clerk told me that miners working around Happy Camp could clear ten or fifteen ounces of gold in a summer. She had done some prospecting herself and marveled that no two pieces of gold were ever alike. She’d found nuggets that had reminded her of a Rorschach blot, a monster with fangs, E.T.’s head, and a map of the United States, minus Florida.

In a back room, Geneva Sanchez and her friend Dee were sitting on a bench and viewing a New 49’ers video about famous gold discoveries. The women were gold gypsies camped on the Klamath with their husbands. They’d just paid a dollar each to take a shower at the store, and their hair was still a little wet. They smelled wonderfully soapy and scrubbed and were not at all discouraged that they’d missed the real Gold Rush. Optimism was their boon companion.

Geneva Sanchez was a Modoc from Oregon. She was a powerhouse, short, stocky, and bright-eyed. Existence for her was a constant series of electrifying thrills. Her grandfather was an herbalist in Portland, she said, and she had met her husband, Fernando, through him.

Ah, Fernando! He was the flame burning at her emotional core. She spoke of him with such passion that he seemed to materialize
in the video room, a handsome prince off the cover of a Harlequin romance.

At the age of ten, Fernando had run away from his home in Mexico to look for work over the border. He drifted north to Portland, where Geneva’s grandfather found him hanging around the bus station and hired him to do some farm labor. Geneva fell for him immediately. She and Fernando had grown up together and then had married, and now they were on the road to Eldorado together, gold gypsies, living on their savings and the jewelry and the Indian beads that Geneva sometimes sold.

Fernando couldn’t read very well, so Geneva had taken it upon herself to read to him aloud. At night, by the campfire, she read to him from books about gold and gold mining. Her own favorite was a book about The Lost Cabin, a renowned but mysterious spot somewhere in the West where a huge stash of gold was reported to be buried. She was stunned that I’d never heard about The Lost Cabin and set matters straight by reciting, with appropriate gestures and sound effects, the entire story.

“The Indians killed him!” she exclaimed. “They torched the cabin! But the man wasn’t really dead!”

She and Fernando were trying to locate the cabin, Geneva confessed, but if she thought about it too much, she got excited and couldn’t sleep. Fernando was also prone to losing sleep over gold. The whopping nuggets displayed at the courthouse in Yreka had almost turned him into an insomniac.

“Have you ever actually found any gold?” I asked Geneva.

“Oh, yes!” she cried, clapping her hands together.

The gold, in dust and in flakes, was still in her possession. She was a pack rat and a hoarder, she said. As an example, she brought up the time when she was about to go into the poultry business. She had enough land in Oregon for some hens and a rooster, but the more she mulled it over, the more she realized that she would get attached to the chickens and would wind up knitting them little hats and sweaters instead of butchering them.

Geneva laughed about the chickens. When the video was over, she toweled her hair again and invited me to drop by for a New 49’ers potluck dinner on Sunday. She hated to rush off, she said, but she had to get back to camp soon—Fernando would be missing her! She had to fix their dinner and make their bed, a four-poster that they had bought in Mexico. They hauled it with them wherever they went and slept on it under the stars.

F
ROM HAPPY CAMP AND THE KLAMATH MOUNTAINS
, I descended to the broad plateau of the southern Cascades. Lilacs were blooming in the fields near Hamburg, where William Brewer had observed those Gold Rush ruins.