Twain's Feast (16 page)

Big as the trout at the hatchery today are, they don’t approach the size of the old ones. A lot of what made Pyramid Lake Lahontan cutthroat special was completely local, below subspecies level; the bigger the predatory lake dwellers got, the better they were at hunting tui-chub. The prospectors and settlers who seemingly called the trout of every mountain by a different name actually had a point; you can’t preserve what’s beautiful and unique about a species by maintaining it in one place. The challenge, and the hard work, comes in seeing the differences
within
a species, to see that even what seems like a single kind of fish can mold itself to the world—and the world to it—in a hundred different ways. Today there are Lahontan cutthroat trout
in
Pyramid Lake, but the largest trout in recorded history were the Lahontan cutthroat trout
of
Pyramid Lake. Those are gone.

Or so everyone thought. At some point (no one knows when) somebody (no one knows who) carried Lahontan cutthroat trout to Pilot Peak in Utah, depositing them in Morrison Creek. Genetically identical to the original Pyramid Lahontan cutthroats, the trout are now raised at the Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Lahontan Fish Hatchery; in 2004 over thirteen thousand fish were returned to Pyramid Lake, each with a coded tag that allows them to be separated from the Summit Lake stock during spawning. Lisa Heki, the project leader, is optimistic about the fish’s prospects with the right combination of stocking and dam breaches; she’s said that “twenty years down the road, we could have twenty- to thirty-pound cutthroat trout running the river right through downtown Reno.” Others—Robert is one—are less hopeful, feeling that the river’s obstructions and degraded water quality won’t allow that kind of comeback. Whatever happens, it’s a tremendous irony that the kind of haphazard transfer of species that helped doom the original trout of Pyramid and Tahoe has made their return possible.

Small stainless-steel bowls are set in the holes along the table. Kia holds his trout firmly with one arm and centers her over a bowl. With the other hand, he takes a sturdy grip just behind and below the pectoral fins, drawing steadily toward the tail; at once a continuous stream of what looks like orange liquid shoots out and into the bowl. When it tapers off, the bowl is a third full of beautiful, brightly colored eggs the size of tapioca. Kia tosses the trout—out of the water for less than a minute, but now looking concave and insulted and squished—into a hole in the wall, where she slips down a slick pipe and back into the lake.

I’m bemused. They just
squeeze
the fish? Apparently they do. Apparently this isn’t an unusual talent on Kia’s part, like being able to flip flapjacks in midair or write with his toes—another man is already squeezing a second fish over the same bowl. This time the fish is a male, dripping sperm onto the orange eggs. Michelle Moore picks up the bowl, unceremoniously mixing the contents with her fingers as she disappears into the next room. Soon there’s a respectable assembly line going: fish wrestled from the water, fish squeezed over the bowls, bowls mixed and moved to the next room as soon as they’re ready.

The process, the only reason there are any trout in the lake at all, seems amazingly straightforward and low-tech—enough so that I ask Kia for permission to help. The idea is to mix the eggs with your bare fingers, then ladle in some numbingly cold water from the hatchery farther up the hill. You mix this cold biological soup for exactly one minute, which seems too short until you consider that under natural conditions this mixing would all be taking place in nearly open, flowing water, with only a small depression, called a redd, to keep the eggs from washing away. After the eggs are fertilized, they need to be cleaned of any worms or mud or lake weed, so you ladle in several changes of water, swirling the eggs as though rinsing starch from white rice; the water gets dumped out through the grated floor. “The dud eggs are the most important to get out,” Kia says. “Those white ones—they’ll rot and kind of cottonball, spread fungus all over the rest of the eggs and smother them.” But this part of the process is simple and also, when I think about it, amazing: I’m helping to
grow fish.

In 1864 market fisherman Seth Green, frustrated with trying to fill orders for wild fish hurt by logging and overfishing, opened his first hatchery in Caledonia, New York. Within two decades the U.S. Fish Commission was hatching salmon in California and shad in New England; it brought in European brown trout to replace the failing eastern brookies. Though hatcheries sometimes helped to supplement healthy fisheries, they were more often responding to a collapse, as the Paiute hatcheries did. Today the Pyramid Lake cutthroat trout are entirely dependent on the descendants of people who once largely depended on them.

More ironically, some of the rivers the trout once spawned in are now being slowly, laboriously twisted back into their proper knots by the same army corps that once carved them sterile and straight. Twain mocked the twisting desert rivers, but their cottonwood-shaded bends sheltered the redds of the trout he loved. Though their beauty wasn’t as obvious to him as Tahoe’s, or that of the Sierra mountains, all were bound together—all helped make the others what they were.

Tahoe’s peace touched Twain. But it wasn’t like him to stay calm and quiet for long; his Tahoe idyll ended when he set the mountain on fire. He’d set a blaze to burn down into coals for supper, heading down to the skiff for a frying pan. But a shout from Kinney interrupted him—when he looked back, the fire “was galloping all over the premises.”

The forests around Tahoe needed fire almost as much as the great prairies did. Fifteen years before Twain came to Tahoe, a member of the Mormon Battalion descending along the Carson River said that “the mountains seem to be all on fire and the valley full of smoke. . . . At night we could see as it were a hundred fires in the California mountains made no doubt by Indians.” Washoe Indians would often set fires intentionally, helping to clear out undergrowth and encourage the growth of mule’s ears, a sort of sunflower the Native Americans harvested for seeds. They burned most often during spring’s first thaws, when the remaining snows created natural firebreaks. “By this means,” the admiring traveler and poet Joaquin Miller wrote in 1887, “the Indians always kept their forest open, pure and fruitful, and conflagrations were unknown.” Other fires could have been set by lightning (Forest Service land in California can receive seventeen hundred strikes per year).

Whether people or lightning had caused the earlier blazes, Twain’s fire wasn’t nearly as intense as it would be today, when a policy of stopping all burns as quickly as possible has left behind a century’s worth of dry, tangled growth. Still, the burn was spectacular and terrifying. Now the fishing boat became a means of escape, as the young men pulled offshore and away from the blaze. In
Roughing It,
Twain recalled that

But the lake was there—always the lake. Even when watching a mountain inferno, Twain couldn’t draw his eyes from the water for more than a few moments:

They watched for four hours. By that time they looked like “
lava
men, covered as we were with ashes, and begrimed with smoke.” With the fire miles away, “hunger asserted itself,” Twain remembered, “but there was nothing to eat. The provisions were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see.”

There are a few theories about the location of Twain’s timber claim, but one convincing idea places it near Stateline Point, on Tahoe’s northern edge. That would mean a south-facing slope, vulnerable to burns as it dried and warmed during the sun’s long passage. What’s more, south faces in Tahoe are favored by ponderosa pines, which leave the ground “deeply carpeted with dry pine needles” just as Twain later remembered. Add in the fact that any slope will increase the speed and intensity of a blaze and you have a recipe for a genuinely impressive, if not particularly dangerous, burn.

In a letter to his mother a week after returning to Carson City, Twain described the “standard-bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air.” That probably means that the main forest never caught—the fire was restricted to clearing out dead and extremely dry growth, such as the “dense growth of manzanita chaparral.” Such clearing burns are, after all, exactly what forest species have evolved to expect—even to want. There was intense heat, surely, but evidently not so much as to make living trees explode with flame.

So Twain’s fire probably left the trees of the timber claim mostly untouched, even if the ground was charred and smoking. Still, cutting the wood down, then milling and transporting it, was harder than Twain had guessed, and he decided to return to Nevada and take up something he was sure would be easier: milling quartz to find trace amounts of silver. After a week he asked his employer for a raise: “He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round sum. How much did I want? I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.” That disappointment (and several prospecting failures) would lead to something momentous: his first regular writing job, at the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.

But for now that was in the future. Twain and Kinney packed up their surviving belongings, rowed across a wide cove, and began trudging back to Carson City. On the way to Washoe, Twain had dropped a leaf on either side of the Continental Divide, imagining the eastern-most going on a long, familiar journey, past the wharves of St. Louis and the canefields of Louisiana and finally into “the bosom of the tropic sea.” Now, as he walked toward the tumultuous silver towns, another divide lay behind him, behind Tahoe and its necklace of stream-cut mountains. A leaf dropped on the Sierras’ western face would drift through the ponderosa pines and sugar pines, the balsam and yellow firs, past the prospectors with their pans and rockers and sluices and wing dams, down and down and into a maze of wetland delta—until, at last, it reached a blue bay, and San Francisco, and the roar of the world-spanning Pacific.

 

 

 

 

 

N
ORMA’S RESTAURANT, in New York’s Le Parker Meridien Hotel, will, if you desire, sell you an omelet for a thousand dollars. Possibly to distract from the actual price, Norma’s calls the omelet the Zillion Dollar Lobster Frittata. Now, expensive though lobster is, a thousand dollars will get you a mighty pile, even in New York, even at Norma’s (the standard lobster omelet costs twenty-eight bucks); the real cost of the Zillion Dollar Frittata is in the ten ounces of sevruga caviar cupped within the folded eggs.

Hangtown fry was the Zillion Dollar Frittata of Gold Rush California. Though it consisted of a humble-sounding scramble of eggs, bacon, and fried oysters, the real point of the fry was the price; all the stories about its invention stress the rarity and expense of the ingredients. One version says that a newly wealthy prospector strutted into a restaurant in Hangtown (now, disappointingly, called Placerville) and demanded the most expensive meal they could cook. Another claims that a condemned man ordered the rarest ingredients possible in order to delay his execution.

Today oysters are by far the most expensive part of a Hangtown fry. But in the early Gold Rush days, though oysters could be expensive in the mining country, the real cost was in the eggs. Oysters could be packed into barrels and hauled in wagons to the mining towns, but there just weren’t many chickens in California yet—certainly not nearly enough to meet the demand for fresh, homey eggs. Soon a thriving business in seabird eggs developed; eggers would sail across thirty miles of dangerous currents to the rocky spires of the Farallon Islands, where hundreds of thousands of murres nested. Robbing murres’ nests for eggs to sell in San Francisco and the mining towns was so profitable that rival egging parties had bloody fights over the best grounds, culminating in a deadly shootout on the islands the year before Twain came to town. But murre eggs, while decent baked, were apparently appalling when fried. For Hangtown fry you needed chicken eggs, and people would pay dearly for a plate.

I made my first Hangtown fry soon after Erik was born. Eli wanted something rich, nourishing, and memorable—a comfort food we’d never tried before. I spent much more on eggs than I had to, thinking as I did so of a fantastic rant by one Mr. Flood, a New Yorker who, by the time he turned seventy, had given up eating anything but seafood. “When I was a boy on Staten Island,” Flood recalled in 1944, “hens ate grit and grasshoppers and scraps from the table and whatever they could scratch out of the ground, and a platter of scrambled eggs was a delight. Then the scientists developed a special egg-laying mash made of old corncobs and sterilized buttermilk, and nowadays you order scrambled eggs and you get a platter of yellow glue.” Eggs from Vacaville’s Soul Food Farm obviously have full access to grasshoppers and grit and whatever they can scratch from the ground; if he could have tried them, Flood might have danced. Their yolks are a deep gold, approaching amber; recently five Soul Food Farm yolks survived over a minute of whisking by Erik, which any parent of a four-year-old will recognize as evidence of almost metaphysical strength. By comparison a factory-farmed egg is tasteless and watery and insipid.