The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

by Timothy Egan

  My legs move slowly in the deep, wet snow above the Hamma Hamma. The sky is starting to muddy. I’m not a technical climber; I know nothing of the fancy French rock-jock terms or moves, nor can I scale a granite wall. I can use an ice axe to keep from falling in a glacial crevasse, and I have a reasonable idea how to stay out of avalanche gullies. I can read a map. I understand when the sky is trying to tell me something, but like most climbers, amateur and hotdog, I don’t always listen. Most of my life, I’ve stared out at The Brothers from Seattle—a two-breasted beauty that seems to sweep up from the very surface of Puget Sound. From the city, the tips turn pastel in sunset and then dark in silhouette, a very theatrical mountain, almost a custom fit of Winthrop’s description of a peak that, viewed from a seat in civilization, stirs the soul. If ever there was a place where city and wild country could live side by side, this would be it, each needing the other, separated by the moat of Puget Sound. An irony of modern times is that the city dweller is often more appreciative, more protective, of the wild treasure than its rural neighbor. Thus, residents of the Columbia River Gorge fought the legislative protection of a National Scenic Area, and landowners around the Olympic National Park oppose further wilderness designation, just as many of their grandparents were against formation of the park. The larger question for the Northwest, where the cities are barely a hundred years old but contain three-fourths of the population, is whether the wild land can provide work for those who need it as their source of income without being ruined for those who need it as their source of sanity.

  The sky continues to darken. I shift all thoughts to the summit. More than anything, at this instant, I want to stand atop this earthen cloud-grabber. Climbing is not something easily explained. The body gets to working, steaming, ploughing ahead with a single, all-consuming goal in mind. To the east, I can see the Puget Sound basin, wherein lies the Navy base of Bangor, home port for ten Trident submarines, each of which is longer than the Washington Monument is high and carries enough nuclear weapons to vaporize 240 cities. Farther across the water, Seattle can barely be made out. For the ice and rock ahead of me, I could be in the Himalayas, but instead I’m looking straight at a city with thousand-foot-high skyscrapers and ribbons of freeway clogged with traffic. Two hundred inches of precipitation can fall on this mountain, but just across the water Seattle gets less rain than New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami.

  Now I come to a rock section too steep to hold the late snow of spring. I put my ice axe behind me, strapped to the pack, and start to clamber up the rock. This must be the last stretch of the mountain, and then I will touch the top and hurry down. But I’m having trouble. I’m slipping, and the way is not clear. Sweat stings my eyes. My fingertips are numb. My knee is shaking against the vertical rock. Only a few feet more, I think, just over the rise. Hold on, hold on … there—but what’s this? I slip back, frightened. A massive white creature with a pair of big, wet eyes, two sharp horns and a full facial beard is staring back at me, not more than five feet away. A ghost. No. He’s clinging … vertically. How? I don’t know. He won’t move. He’s planted there, a two-hundred-pound, snow-white mountain goat. I fall back, startled. My mind was so intent on making this rise—which is not the summit at all—that I blanked everything else out. Now this—an arrogant goat. A warning, perhaps.

  The clouds chase me down, spears of rain all around. I slip and slop, making a hasty exit from this high-country home of goats. I think nothing but dark thoughts, of being lost in a storm, buried somewhere, never to be found. Prodded by fear, my heart pounds harder on the way down than it did on the way up. The imagination runs wild. I stop and sit under the overhang of a boulder, shielded from the storm, and try to talk my way down. I have a compass. I know if I continue to descend, I will be in the forest, and then I can follow the runoff to the streams and down to the lake. The mountain goat—poor bastard—his days here are numbered. Once there were no goats on the Olympic Peninsula. Then, sixty years ago, a dozen of them were introduced as an experiment. Like every other form of life in the Olympics, they flourished, breeding madly, growing to absurd heights, some with pot bellies. Plenty of high-country meadows in the summer and rich valleys in the winter. No hunters. With the gray wolf extinct in these parts, and mountain cougars reduced to a handful, there are no natural predators. Now there are more mountain goats in the Olympics than anywhere else in the country. They tear up the fragile meadows, defoliate the shrubs, and drop large turds in the trickling fresh water of the alpine zone. The goats are cute. Very athletic. Their eyes are big, moist, brown, irresistible. But they are not indigenous, and are making life hard for plants that are, and so the Park Service has decided they must go. At a cost of $1,000 per goat, the rangers are airlifting them out and sending them to goat-deprived areas throughout the West.

  The storm has picked up. Visibility about ten feet. Nothing to do but come out from under this rock overhang, wipe the cold rain from my face and slog down. Visiting a tree in a glass cage does have its advantages, but leaves nothing for the storyteller.

  Chapter 3

  TOE OF THE EMPIRE

  On the ferry to Vancouver Island, not more than a hundred yards from the international boundary, I look up, and there she is: Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of England, ceremonially smiling under the weight of the Crown. She has a nice smile for a symbol, somewhat more human than a visage on a postage stamp. The Queen is framed in silver, a full-color photograph hanging prominently inside the bow of the ship, overseeing all the sensibly dressed white people. I’m crossing the Tweed Curtain, going from a land of E-Z terms and BBQ to a country full of fellows named Fisswidget, Craigenforth and Hangshaft. On the north coast of Washington, most of the settlements are small and ragged—some with get-to-the-point names like Whiskey Creek or Forks, others remnants from a Salish Indian past all but wiped out, places called Pysht, Sekiu, Sappho, Hoh, Yahoo, Klahowya, Sequim. Nothing regal. But away from the rain forest, across the swift-moving Strait of Juan de Fuca and up the Gulf Channel, are the mannerly burgs of Sidney and Ladysmith and Victoria, which was the last city in North America to give up the custom of driving on the left-hand side of the road.

  At the moment, passengers are queued up for tea on the ferry, Her Majesty now smiling from another picture, this from the boat’s dedication, complete with a tag line not seen on the American side of the Tweed Curtain: GOD SAVE THE QUEEN. Out the window, three bald eagles are circling for prey near the rock cliffs of an uninhabited island. A covey of harbor seals are crawling over one another on a basaltic perch next to the shore. Shiny red madrona trees stripped of their bark and polished by the wind lean out over the edge. Here and there, groves of Sitka spruce hold to shallow topsoil. The islands are dollops of evergreen that look as if they were plopped in the inland sea like raw dough on a cookie sheet. The rock shore is glacier-carved—lined, furrowed and cracked—a legacy of the last Ice Age, which retreated through here about twelve thousand years ago and carved out Puget Sound and most of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Except for this strange hole of blue sky overhead, it looks like the rest of the Pacific Northwest.

  In Victoria, which is neatly sewn into the southern tip of Vancouver Island, they grow cactus; palm trees are conspicuous in front of the several large estates. On the high bluff of the city’s Beacon Hill Park, the old native cedars hold firm, but they are properly manicured, as evenly trimmed as a pensioner’s mustache. On the vast grounds nearby, not a weed is in sight, not a single hawthorn hedge out of place, not a primrose or pansy in less than perfect health. The blossoms are everywhere, crowding ponds inhabited by royal swans (imported from the Queen’s Preserve in Windsor Castle), bordering paths and playfields, all in flawless formation. The minute they start to droop or fade—gone, snipped away lest their sagging remains mar the effect. I wonder: don’t flowers die around here? Archways drip wisterias. Small shrubs are cleanly topped. And near one of these ever-groomed gardens, two teams of eleven gentlemen in matching outfits and funny hats a
re playing … cricket. Yes, British baseball, with wickets and such. This is tournament play, the scores and details of which will be reported the next day in the Victoria Times-Colonist.

  As manicured as a fresh-primped poodle, Victoria is the capital of the province of British Columbia, which spreads north in a mostly roadless expanse to the Yukon Territory and east to the plains beyond the Rocky Mountains in Alberta—an area about one-third larger than Texas. Much of the province briefly entered the American attention span during the presidential campaign of 1844, when “54–40 or Fight” was a slogan of James K. Polk, referring to the latitudinal point where Russian America, now the tip of southeast Alaska, snuggled into British Columbia, or New Caledonia, as it was known before Queen Victoria approved of the present name. Glaciers and wheat farms and forests—the barren, the bounty and the meat of the Canadian West—all are managed from under a pocket of blue sky next to a statue of an overweight Queen.

  If the entire Northwest were ever to cleave from the continent and become a nation-state (a suggestion that has already prompted a name for the new country, Ecotopia), it would have not only geography but political sentiment in common. For just as Washington and Oregon were the only states in the West to vote Democratic in the 1988 presidential election, British Columbia went against the tide two weeks later and sent eleven additional members of the liberal New Democratic Party to Parliament. But those new Parliament members are among the harshest critics of the excesses of the American Northwest, which is considered a threat to their way of life. Many British Columbians who look south of the border ask: Why can’t the Americans practice some self-restraint? In perhaps no other place in North America are the character quirks of two nations, one young and wild, the other old and reserved, so evident as here, on either side of the Tweed Curtain. Settling a land of benign extremes, the British reacted cautiously; the Americans never took a breath. The British chose to carve a small patch of perfection from the last unsettled edge of the New World; the Americans went to war against the land.

  A visitor from New York City, who came to Victoria more than a century ago, made several observations which are as true now as they were then. He said, “The skies are ever clear, the air is always refreshingly cool, the people look quiet and respectable, and everything is intensely English.” The New Yorker’s only complaint was about Victoria’s women, who “tend toward the ponderous.” So, given the blessings of God and Queen, what have they done with it? Is Victoria a realization of the prophecy of Winthrop—the true city on a hill—the embodiment of a place he thought would emerge from a “climate where being is bliss”? Is this the civilization that would be ennobled by the elements? A land where the totem pole stands next to the statue of the Queen, and the twining of both cultures has produced an offspring of civility?

  When Winthrop crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca, there was no town of Vancouver (which is now the largest city in the Canadian West), just a Hudson’s Bay Company fort at Langley on the Fraser River, which drains one-fourth of British Columbia. Victoria, by comparison, was a settled character who’d been sitting around the hearth long enough to be bronzed. The only major city on an island the size of Taiwan, Victoria has a metropolitan population of 250,000. Up until 1950, when emigration policies changed, opening the province to more Asian newcomers, more than eighty percent of Victoria’s residents traced their ancestry to Great Britain. Now, only a third are English. Despite repeated admonitions from Canadian government officials, many Victorians still fly the Union Jack every day, fourteen thousand sea miles from the Mother Country.

  While the rest of British Columbia—particularly the city of Vancouver, which is one-third Chinese, with healthy Greek, Indian, Jewish and German neighborhoods—has become a polyglot mix, Victoria clings to its English past, having transplanted many habits of the old island in the Atlantic to the new island in the Pacific. In Victoria, Empire Day is a showy holiday for members of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the British Empire, which some less charitable Canadians call the Imperial Order of Dotty Englishwomen. The Royal Commonwealth Society and the Monarchists League also stage a variety of functions which inevitably conclude with tea-drinking and God-save-the-Queen-hailing. When Queen Elizabeth II last visited Victoria a few years back, the town spent thirty thousand dollars to dredge the harbor for Her Majesty’s personal yacht, the Britannia. Few complained. On Empire Day this year, the Queen’s representative to British Columbia, the Honourable Robert Gordon Rogers, visited the small town of Cumberland, and ten thousand people lined the streets in a rain storm to see him. He was astonished. Before the stroke of a pen changed him from Mister to Honourable, the former chairman of the board of Crown Zellerbach Company had been called timber baron, forest-stripper, strike-buster, and worse. But as soon as he became the twenty-fourth Lieutenant-Governor for the Province of British Columbia, overnight he was royalty. The Queen’s Rep—he’s played host to Di and Charles, chatted with Philip, and of course exchanged words with QE-2 herself.

  The Tweed Curtain: a fuzzy black-and-white picture in the Royal Museum of British Columbia shows the Royal Engineers surveying the boundary of the United States and British Columbia. The line was drawn in 1846 at the 49th Parallel (Polk was now waging war with Mexico, and couldn’t afford to fight the British over wilderness in the Northwest). Lower Vancouver Island, and a little tongue of land called Point Roberts fall below the line. The 282-mile-long island went to Great Britain. Point Roberts, which is not much bigger than a stadium parking lot, went to the United States; it has essentially become a shopping mall with a border crossing. A dozen years after the border papers were signed, the Royal Engineers were sent out into the forest along the 49th Parallel to find and define this bloody line between Our Way of Life and the filthy Yanks in Washington Territory. In the picture, they are literally cutting and marking the border, a broad swath through the trees. And, while doing so, are dressed in pressed red serge uniforms and funny hats.

  For introductory answers as to why this island in the North Pacific still clings to royal fussiness, I look up Molly Ingram, chairwoman of the Monarchists League. Four decades of life in Victoria have not softened the syllables as they march out of Mrs. Ingram’s mouth in the accent of the Empire. A London native, she moved to India just before the war, and served the Empire in a variety of capacities, including espionage work. After the war, like many a British civil servant taking the slow route home to England, she stepped off the boat in Vancouver Island and never got back on. Now, she is the unofficial link between the monarchy and island residents who wish to stay in contact with royalty. A charming woman with a wonderful garden full of roses that blossom year-round, Mrs. Ingram has met the Queen a number of times. “She’s so amusing, the Queen, and we get along quite well.” And just what is the Monarchists League?

  “Why, it’s hundreds and hundreds of people here who think the monarchy is frightfully important,” she says.

  Every year, on April 21, the members of the Monarchists League hold a dinner in honor of the Queen’s birthday. It’s all very solemn and proper, and there’s nothing funny about it. Aside from the dinner, they meet for cookies and tea and royalty-talk, and try to encourage more education in the Canadian school system about the role of the British monarchy.

  “I think it’s frightfully important to keep a sense of Empire, don’t you?” says Mrs. Ingram. Her ancestors, she explains, did foreign duty in India beginning in 1816, and she continues the family tradition in the Province of British Columbia. “To me, the monarchy is all about continuity, which you don’t have much of in the States.”

  When I ask her why the personality of Victoria is so different from that of the land just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Mrs. Ingram tries to maintain her politeness. “I’m very affectionate for the Americans, and I happen to like a great many of them,” she says. “But our life up here is not like that of you people down there because … well, if you’ll excuse my saying so, what you’re all about is money, money, money. Yes? A
nd that’s not us. We live for something more.”

  Eighteen miles south of this toe of the Empire, on the American side of the strait, 150 men have just been given their pink slips from a timber mill at Port Angeles, a Resource Town that’s been through one too many boom-and-bust cycles. Although the town’s setting is breathtaking, in the foothills of the Olympics overlooking the water, nature and man struggle to get along, like a bad marriage sputtering through the hurt phase. Beat-up trucks with gun racks stop-and-go through the Lotto sales outlets. Ministers hold revivals in mobile homes. Billboards block views of the mountains and the strait with promotions for motor-home parks. Logs are stacked high around the port, the transit point for local timber ripped from the rain forest and shipped raw overseas. There is a sense that life is two steps out of reach and moving away fast.

  Here in Victoria, the resource rat race is not as obvious. Although one in every two dollars generated on Vancouver Island comes from the forest-products industry, there are no sulfur-belching pulp mills, no clearcuts on the immediate horizon, no trailer-home parks on fresh-cleared stumpland, no drive-through booths for Jesus. Part of this picture is illusory: the interior of the island has been shaved to bare stubs; even sections of Strathcona Provincial Park have been clearcut. But in Victoria the land-scraping is out of view, not unlike the more abusive acts of British imperial rule at the height of the Empire.

  This is not the England of Dickens, but the England of Hyde Park and Lord Byron. Double-decker buses cram streets named Royal Oak and Cadboro Bay. There’s a pub and teahouse on every other corner. Clipped accents—real and contrived—thick ankles and sensible shoes are the rule, along with that peculiar British distaste for sweat. It takes me three days before I understand a joke. When a man’s hat falls off, and he looks both ways and says “Excuse me” before picking it up—is that funny? In Victoria, it is.