The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (43 page)

Upstream, the Grand Coulee raised the river level more than three hundred feet, forcing the evacuation of three thousand people. Ten towns were buried by water. They were replaced by places with such names as Electric City and Elmore, futuristic villages that now look as dated as 1950s sci-fi films. The worst damage from the dam was to the upper Columbia River salmon. King salmon are among the most durable creatures of nature, strong-willed and singleminded when the spawning urge sends them upriver, but no fish can scale a five-hundred-foot-high dam. More than a thousand miles of spawning grounds were lost forever.

I’m looking for someone who can tell me what the upper Columbia used to be like before the Grand Coulee Dam changed the personality of this place where the desert gives way to gentle mountains and forests of tall
ponderosa pine. Everybody says talk to Martin Louie. So I follow a road northeast of the dam until it dead-ends among rusted cars clustered in the “new” community of Inchelium. The old one is under water. I’m directed to the small, tattered trailer of Martin Louie. When I enter at midday, I find a tiny man lying on a cot, covered with flies. He wakes, lights a cigarette, and looks around as if he’s lost. He has no teeth, and his lungs can barely hold a breath. He lives in squalor, an outhouse-size home in the dust along the banks of Roosevelt Lake, the 151-mile reservoir that is the upper end of the Columbia in Washington.

Louie can’t remember how old he is; and that may be because he nips from a bottle more often than he should and is never without a cigarette. His dark face contrasts with the snow-white hair atop his head, a crew cut. Back issues of
True Detective
are piled up near his cot. On the wall is a brown picture of Inchelium before the flood. I introduce myself. Louie stares at me for a few minutes, silent.

“You’re not another one of those Mormons?” he says at last. “ ’Cause if you are, you can leave right now.”

“No, no, I’m not a missionary.”

“What d’you want, then?”

“I want to know what it was like.”

“You can’t know.”

Louie is a member of the Lakes Band of Indians, a small tribe which lived near the present Canadian border. In the summer and fall they pulled salmon from Kettle Falls, a Columbia River fishery second only to The Dalles in bounty. Twice in the last century, the Lakes people were decimated by smallpox. When Louie was born, sometime around the dawn of the twentieth century, they were recovering somewhat. They still had Kettle Falls, and as long as the water tumbled down those cliffs, the salmon would be easy to catch. Louie attended two schools, he says: white school and Indian. At white school, he learned about “the only two books you haven’t got a chance against: the Bible and the law book.” At Indian school, a classroom without walls, he learned about the land.

“The white creator lives up there. The Indian creator lives all around. You see the Indian creator every day, every night. You see him in the day, in the sun, and at night, in his brother the moon. But most of all you see him in that water. That river. It’s never emptied out yet. It controls all life. It controls everything. The Indians call that Father.”

Until the dam went up, Louie lived the life his ancestors had lived, a
gentle routine on the upper Columbia. When the reservations were set up, the Indians were promised access to their salmon runs forever in a treaty backed by one of the two books which Louie is afraid of. At the dedication of the Grand Coulee Dam, much was made of the fact that the first electricity to go out was used to power the new washing machine of an Indian woman who lived not far from Louie. But she didn’t need a washing machine as much as she needed a free river. When the dam went up, the fish stopped returning, and Louie lost his livelihood and his independence. When the Columbia became Lake Roosevelt, he was a man who didn’t know his way around. He became a seasonal worker, a serf for somebody else. Now, in the last years of life, he is drowning in bitterness.

“When I want salmon now, you know what I have to do? I have to travel up to the Fraser River to buy it. And—here.…” He eases himself up, bites on the cigarette. “…  I’ll show you what I can buy for twenty dollars.” He opens the door of a small refrigerator, the outside paint chipped away, and pulls out a small, heavily wrapped packet. He strips away the layers until he comes to a few pieces of smoked salmon. “This.”

Kettle Falls, the salmon mother lode south of the Canadian border not far from Louie’s home, is just another section of smooth water now. It stirs no sense of awe or aesthetic impulse unless the imagination goes to work. The Columbia used to fall thirty-three feet in less than half a mile here. I find an odd-looking rock on a bluff above the graveyard of the falls. It’s a boulder full of slash marks, apparently a whetstone used by generations of Indians to sharpen their spear points. I close my eyes and imagine healthy men pulling salmon from the falls. I open my eyes and see the glass of a reservoir and the dying face of Martin Louie. For ten thousand years or more, people lived with the wind-tossed pines and turbulent river and never went without. When the river was dammed, it brought prosperity to one band of humans while forcing another to go hungry. I’ve seen the grapes and apples and wheat that grow in the new desert, but I will never experience Celilo or Kettle falls. I paid for a year’s worth of college tuition by working the caldrons of the Kaiser Aluminum plant one summer, a factory powered by cheap hydroelectric energy, but my education about the once-free Columbia must come secondhand, from the soured memories of people like Martin Louie.

Standing above the Columbia today, the river that carries water from
all parts of the Pacific Northwest to the ocean, uniting deserts and glaciers, forests and farmland, cities and sage country, I’m troubled by this paradox. Winthrop thought the land here would change a man, not the other way around; still, at the ebb of the twentieth century, we have yet to prove him entirely wrong.

Epilogue
P
ACIFIC
N
ATION

S
ometimes the wind along the Pacific shore blows so hard it steals your breath before you can inhale it. At La Push, a Quileute Indian village huddled amidst the sea stacks of the Washington coast, the wind owns almost every other breath. Few people live along the shore from San Francisco to Vancouver Island; in those places where humans have settled in next to the raging surf, often there are more Indians than whites. Such is the case here at La Push, where one must have skin of cedar bark, or the sea otter’s sense of humor, to live with the theft of many breaths. Compliance with nature is a virtue. And nobody in La Push thinks of this most northwestern edge of the lower forty-eight states as land’s end. Rather, it is land’s start.

As a soundtrack to the task of sorting cluttered thoughts, there is no better music than a winter storm on the Northwest Coast. On one side of me is the darkest and thickest of American forests, an evergreen cushion between the ocean and a nation in the early years of its third century. Great shanks of wood, thrown against the beach by the muscular sea, are piled in random disorder at the high edge of the tideline. The original forest cover of this continent, like the native inhabitants, has been pushed from Winthrop’s home in Massachusetts to this coastal strip in the far west. I wonder if these misted giants of five centuries or more in age will survive the commercial appetite of my generation.

Were I to follow Winthrop home, I’d have continued east through the pine forests and high desert of Idaho, crossed the Continental Divide in Montana, and traced the river drainages
to the Atlantic. But that was his world, the age of Europe, when all eyes looked east. I live at the dawn of the Century of the Pacific. At the end of
The Canoe and the Saddle
, Winthrop foresaw the start of this shift from east to west, a trickle of immigrants “moving away from the tame levels of Mid-America to regions of fresher and more dramatic life on the slopes toward the Western Sea.” Along this coast, life is certainly more dramatic, made so by the elements and a sky that should never be taken for granted. The freshness is evident in a change of attitudes. Although the non-Indian Northwest was founded on Pacific Rim trade—the wealth that Captain Cook’s men obtained from the Cantonese mandarins for the sea otter pelts they picked up during their 1778 trip to Vancouver Island—it is only now in the dying years of the twentieth century that people of this land have embraced Asia as their future.

When many Northwesterners hear talk about the decline of America, it means little to them; they see, in such talk, the diminished influence of Europe and those power centers in the American and Canadian East that look to Europe for identity. As the nations of Europe meld to a single continental unit, stagnant in population growth and new immigration—the “tribes of the setting sun,” as West Coast author Joel Kotkin calls them—the Pacific Rim is bursting with fresh life and ideas and commerce. Since 1980, more immigrants have arrived on the West Coast, most of them from Asia, than came to the United States at any time after the last great European wave in the early twentieth century. A similar immigration trend has hit British Columbia, where a third of all Vancouver citizens trace their ancestry to China. Seattle led the nation in new job growth in the late 1980s, and one in three of those positions was tied to Pacific trade. Just as the Irish and Scandinavians and Russians and Italians brought new tastes to the North American table, the Pacific Rim immigrants bring ties from the old continent, a link of opportunity.

Thirty years ago, American trade with Asia was only half that of its trade with Europe. Those figures have reversed themselves, with European trade amounting to only fifty percent of the volume the United States does with Asia. About $3 billion a year in Asian money pours into Vancouver, the Hong Kong of North America, where financiers are building a new sort of Wall Street, a place for traders who will operate on a world clock. The new mandarins, instead of receiving sea otter pelts taken from Vancouver Island by English seamen, are becoming Canadian citizens and helping the port of Vancouver emerge as one of the Pacific Rim’s new financial centers.

About 120 miles south of Vancouver, Seattle citizens who have had a
taste of Manhattan or worked jobs in Europe are trying to reposition their fast-growing city as the Geneva of the Pacific, a home between the Cascades and the Olympics for dialogue in many languages. Long before the national networks and the broadcasting syndicates tried similar exchanges, the Seattle television station founded by Dorothy Bullitt, daughter of a pioneer Northwest mill family, was linking up citizens of Russia and America by satellite to talk about the differences that would kill us all. At the same time, Bob Walsh—born in Winthrop, Massachusetts—was working to bring some of the best athletes, dancers and artists in Russia and America together in Seattle during the summer of 1990. Walsh has since married a Russian, Nina, who lives with him on a bluff above Elliott Bay, where the windows look out at the Olympic Mountains and the water that connects Siberia to Seattle.

The new products of the Northwest—airplanes and medicine and wine and computer software—are in their way dependent on the old resource: the magnificent scenery. No industry is more damaging to that scenery, and none brings less good to fewer people, than the current timber business, a hangover of the exploitive early years. The most economically distressed counties in the Northwest are those that depend on logging for their livelihood. The most prosperous are those that have unchained themselves from their mills. Someday the Northwest will stop acting like a resource colony, stripping the last of its big trees from the mountains and shipping that wood abroad with little concern for the resulting job loss or the land scars. When that day comes, Northwest forests will be able to produce a profitable by-product—furniture—and the scenery will be far less threatened. By some estimates, tourism will be the number-one industry in the world by the year 2000. The newly prosperous people of Korea and Taiwan and Singapore will come to the Northwest to visit their relatives; if they are lucky, they will see a land not far removed from the cradle.

North Americans used to fear Asia, and some still do. A backlash against the Asian influx in Vancouver has developed. Some Vancouverites want harsh immigration restrictions and have begun to spread the type of racial poison first seen in British Columbia when Chinese laborers were brought in to build the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Free trade can leave hard feelings: Japanese demand has pushed the price of salmon and timber beyond the reach of many Northwesterners, who feel they have a birthright to such products of their land.

“God forbid that the time should ever come when a state on the shore of the Pacific, with interest and tendencies of trade all looking toward
the Asiatic nations of the east, shall add its jarring claims to our distracted and overburdened confederacy,” said Daniel Webster, the American Senator of the midnineteenth century. Even as Webster thundered, the founders of Seattle and Portland and Victoria were plotting ways to get Asian ships to tie up in their ports, each calling itself the Gateway to the Pacific. Theodore Roosevelt, whose legacy has been astonishingly good for the Northwest, saw the Pacific Age as a coming tide of glory. “The Mediterranean era died with the discovery of America,” he said at the turn of the century. “The Atlantic era has reached the height of its development. The Pacific era, destined to be the greatest, is just at dawn.”

So, we have a Pacific Century, long predicted, that is finally coming of age, and one section of the North American continent primed to take full advantage of it. The prophecy of Winthrop may yet come to life in the polyglot future of the Pacific Rim. More than anything, what the Northwest meant to Winthrop was renewal—the promise of tomorrow that this continent has always held—a chance for his heart and mind to wander without the leash of the past. In the closing lines of his book, Winthrop said his tour through this land had cleansed him: