Big Dreams (9 page)

Hamburg had a population of eighty. Drift boats were up on trailers in front yards, marking a season’s end for the local fishing guides. The air had lost its last trace of coastal moisture and had become dry and desertlike, and the landscape colors had changed from dominant greens to earthier tans and browns.

Highway 293 was a two-lane road to Yreka. There was a spare-ness to California now, a hardscrabble quality. I saw clumps of sagebrush and circling buzzards. Soon I was driving through some splendid, craggy rock formations like those in the American Southwest. The rocks had a reddish cast. The sun was low in the sky, really roaring, and it seemed to set them ablaze.

The scenery was so warm and rosy that it affected me like a glowing hearth, so I pulled over to bask in the beautiful twilight. In all that barrenness, I expected to be alone, but I wasn’t.

A man was pitching his tent in a nest of wood chips on the side of the highway, ignoring the big-rig trucks whistling by. He had on a red deerstalker’s cap, a railroad shirt, red suspenders, gray pants, and some black hiking shoes that were torn and frayed and looked like the spent rubber tread that comes flying off tires. He was so intent on the job that he jumped when I approached him, blinking at me and yanking at his pointy, gray beard.

“Bob Burnett,” he said, shaking hands. “From Medford, Oregon.”

“It’s a gorgeous sunset, isn’t it?” I threw an arm wide to gather in the emberlike rocks.

Burnett chewed on the notion for a second or two. “It
is
gorgeous!” he agreed. “Thank you for calling my attention to it. I was so busy with my tent I forgot to take a picture.”

He retrieved a camera from a backpack that was lashed to the frame of his ten-speed bike and began snapping photos of the rocks. The bike was his sole mode of transportation. A mini-trailer on wheels was hitched behind it. Burnett’s pots, pans, film, and sundries were stowed in it and protected by a plastic tarp. He had a tattered orange pennant on his handlebars as a safety precaution.

After returning his camera to the pack, Burnett confided that he was on a special mission. He was trying to visit every Lions Club in his Lions Club district, which stretched from Coos Bay in Oregon to Mount Shasta in California. He’d made the same journey a year ago, but he hadn’t planned it well enough and had failed. This time, he said, he had mapped his route with precision and had sent a letter to all the clubs along the way announcing his impending visit and his goal of attending a meeting.

He had also sent a letter to every sheriff’s department because fellows who rode their bikes alone were always getting their heads bashed in. If that happened to Burnett, he wanted his body to be identified and the bastard who did the bashing to be caught and sent to prison.

“How old are you, Bob?” I asked.

Grinning and blinking, he said, “I’m on the far side of twenty-eight.”

Burnett explained how he had come to be on the road. He was a pollinator by trade, who worked in the Medford orchards. One morning a while back, he had got out of bed too swiftly and had suffered a dizzy spell. He thought it might be a stroke or a heart attack, but his doctor told him that it was a natural result of aging.
Old age wasn’t something that Burnett looked forward to, so he had embarked on his trip before it was too late.

He had set out riding from Medford in November, in an autumn chill, and would be home in Oregon by late May. He showed me a map on which the route he’d taken was marked in yellow ink. He had survived rain, snow flurries, and a hailstorm, and felt none the worse for wear. The handlebars of his bike were patched with electrical tape, though, and his front-wheel rim had dents in it from his hammering at it to straighten it.

Bob Burnett, I said to myself, you have the right spirit. You would have made it as a pioneer.

For some reason, the question of money came up, and Burnett let it be known that he was a little short of it. He had just two bucks in his pocket, in fact. When I offered him a ten-spot as a sort of sponsorship, he accepted it reluctantly. He kept insisting that it was a loan, not a donation, propounding a mystical theory whereby it would be repaid to me down the line by another pilgrim in our straggly brotherhood, passed on in one form or another, whether as greenbacks, tools, equipment, or even some sage advice at the exact moment when I needed it most.

Yes, Burnett said, it would happen that way. Without another word, he shook my hand again and walked over to fiddle with his camp site, smoothing out the wood chips where his bedroll would rest as the big rigs went zooming by.

A
FTER THE GLOOMY DAMP OF THE NORTHWEST COAST
, its deep and yearning greens, its isolation and its vast distances, Yreka looked like a metropolis to me, alive with human energy. There were more than five thousand residents in the city, a mob scene compared to Happy Camp. The evening was mild and almost summery, and as I wandered the streets I felt elated to be around so many people, experiencing the same bloodrush of possibility that must have affected the miners who used to blow through town on a Saturday night.

At the county courthouse, I studied the gold that had bedeviled poor Fernando—mega-nuggets like asteroids—and in A. J. Bledsoe’s
Indian Wars of the Northwest
, I came upon an official telling of The Lost Cabin story that did not differ much from the version that Geneva Sanchez had performed for me.

In Bledsoe’s rendering, an adventurous miner strikes it rich “in the foothills near the sea-shore” and buries his fortune by his cabin “on the northern Coast of California.” Some Indians attack him and believe that he’s dead, but they can’t find the treasure and burn the cabin down. The lucky miner regains consciousness—but he’s gone crazy! Somehow he makes it back to his hometown in the East, where, on his deathbed, he suddenly turns rational again. Summoning his friends, he gives them a detailed description of the cabin’s site, but, to this very day,
the gold still has not been found!

Yreka was not a corruption of
Eu
reka, as I’d guessed. It was derived instead from an unidentified Indian tongue and probably meant “north mountain,” a reference to Mount Shasta, a volcanic cone that was the central landscape feature of Siskiyou County. At 14,612 feet, its peak was always snowcapped. It had a younger twin, Shastina, that had reached a height of 12,336 feet. All through the southern Cascades, there were such cones. The range had incurred more volcanic activity than any other part of the state, resulting in a dissected tableland of basaltic sheets, mudflows, and ash.

Foothills were strung between Yreka and Shasta Valley, an area of about five hundred square miles. The valley’s eastern half was raw, rocky, and short of water, a scabby territory of sagebrush and volcanic debris, but its western half tolerated farming and ranching. Native grasses had once covered it, but the settlers had plowed them under to plant wheat. In time, livestock was introduced—horses for the mining camps, sheep, and cattle, both dairy and beef.

Alfalfa was grown in Shasta Valley now, enough for three cuttings a year, and so was barley, all of it dry-farmed without any irrigation. Dairying didn’t matter much anymore, but there was still
some wheat. The cattle grazing in pastures were usually beef cattle, either Herefords or Aberdeen Angus, and I passed small herds of them as I made my way, slowly, toward Alturas.

T
HE CATTLEMAN’S CLUB IN GRENADA
, in Shasta Valley, was established in 1917. The building didn’t look that old, any more than it looked like a private club. What it looked like, really, was a roadhouse where a man could get a decent burger and a cold beer on a warm afternoon in early May. The jukebox was playing some Randy Travis, and when the bartender brought my Bud and asked if I wanted a glass, I knew instinctively that the correct answer was “No.”

The bartender, Jim, conducted himself convivially. He was new to the job and hoped that it wouldn’t last forever. By trade, he was a millworker, he said, but his union, the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), had been on strike against Roseburg Forest Products, which operated a mill in nearby Weed, for about four months. The strike was mainly over wages and benefits. Jim had run through his savings and needed some cash to pay his rent.

Roseburg was a huge corporation, he told me, one of the largest in the timber industry. Its home offices were in Oregon.

A couple of Shasta Valley cowboys were sitting to my right. They were working men in dirty jeans and scuffed boots, and they carried on a muted conversation, parceling out their sentences with deliberate care, as if an auction-yard foreman of the English language might hold them to account for anything they uttered. Chuck Pearce, who was sitting on my left, had no such fear. For him, talk was like breath, a gusher compounded of gossip, anecdotes, jokes, and opinions.

Although Pearce had no ties to Roseburg, he still had strong feelings about the strike. It had crippled the economy in Weed so badly that he couldn’t sell his mobile home there and move to Blythe for the bass fishing, as he wanted to do.

“When I can’t catch a fish, I just hook some old girl in the ass,” he remarked with a wink, reaching over to give his wife, Juanita, a sexy pinch.

Pearce was definitely a ladies’ man. At the age of seventy-two, he kept his stomach flat and his figure trim. If a song he liked came on the jukebox, he hopped up and danced to it alone, hooking his fingers through the loops of his jeans. Juanita watched him with bemused affection. She was a Cherokee about fifteen years younger than her husband, but he was her wayward boy.

He poked me with an elbow after one of his dances and whispered, “There’d be no damn divorce courts if all the women were like her.”

He knew whereof he spoke. Juanita was his third wife. They’d been together for twenty years, while his other marriages had lasted eleven and six years respectively. Pearce had a thing about numbers. He believed in their potency and proved it by taking off his straw cowboy hat and showing me how he’d written the date of purchase on the sweatband. He’d bought the hat in La Paz, Mexico, on a fishing trip.

Pearce was from Madisonville, Kentucky, but he’d earned his fortune in the Golden State like the Argonauts before him. The army sent him to California, and when he finished serving, he opened a dry-cleaning business in Chula Vista, south of San Diego, in 1946. The navy threw him a contract to clean its uniforms, and soon he was pushing sailor blues through his shop at a blizzard clip, running the machines around the clock.

He had retired to Weed in 1981 to be closer to his sons. One of them, a contractor, was even more successful than he had been, Pearce claimed.

“That boy’s got a house with nine bedrooms,” he informed me, counting away. “He owns thirteen cars.”

Jim had the Weed
Press-Herald
with him and pointed out two ads that Roseburg had placed. They were there to hurt the strikers, he thought.

In a full-page ad, the company had printed some tables indicating that the average Roseburg worker in Weed earned $32,096 a year, which was a heap of money in a poor town. Jim felt that the statistic was misleading because it included such extras as health and unemployment insurance, workers’ comp, social security, pension benefits, and vacation and holiday pay. The figure for regular wages was only $19,106.

“If we were really making $32,096,” he asked, “would we be out on strike for four months?”

One line in the ad went, “These yearly earnings are equal to or certainly better than our competitors and are certainly better than other jobs in this community.”

There was a time in the lumber trade, I was told, when small, independently held firms had treated their employees as family, seeing to everything from their housing to the schooling of their children, but that time had passed. Now corporate giants ruled the forests of California—Weyerhaeuser, Georgia-Pacific, Louisiana-Pacific, Roseburg—and they were strictly profit-driven. Often they depended on clear-cutting, a practice that the
California Forestry Handbook
, a government publication, describes as “a drastic treatment.” Clear-cuts reduce the forest cover so much that soil damage can result, unless appropriate erosion control procedures are undertaken.

A Waylon Jennings tune started playing, and Chuck Pearce hopped up to do his unique, personal-type dance. He wanted me to join him and Juanita on an excursion to The Dugout, a bar over in Black Butte, but I had an intuition that The Dugout was only a stop on a caravan that might roll on for hours, so instead I escaped into the fine spring day and pushed on toward Weed, hoping to get there before evening.

W
HEN ABNER WEED
, a former soldier from Maine who was at Appomattox with Robert E. Lee, came to California in 1869, about 17 percent of the landmass was given over to forests. The most prominent
tree species were fir, redwood, Douglas fir, and pine. The Spaniards and the Mexicans had mostly ignored the resource, and it was only when some ambitious Americans took matters in hand that an embryonic timber industry started to develop.

In 1834, J. B. R. Cooper built a water-powered sawmill on the Russian River, in Sonoma County. Within the next decade, there were mills at nearby Bodega Bay and in Santa Cruz, south of San Francisco. In 1848, James Marshall, a carpenter, built a sawmill for John Sutter on the South Fork of the American River, not far from Sacramento—a mill that became the most notorious in history when flecks of gold were seen flashing in its tailrace.

The Gold Rush sparked a big increase in the demand for lumber. Miners needed wood for sluices, flumes, dams, and cabins. By the time Weed headed for the Siskiyous, the finest, most accessible redwoods and pines had been cut, but the forests were so rich that the harvesting had scarcely affected them.

The pressure accelerated, though, as loggers on the eastern seaboard laid waste to the last virgin stands of white pine. Timber companies began exporting lumberjacks and materials to strip the western forests, sometimes breaking down an entire mill, loading it onto a ship, and sending it around Cape Horn. There were few restrictions in the timber business then, and blocks of trees could be bought reasonably from homesteaders, who’d been deeded them by the government.