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

by Timothy Egan

  Soon after the Budd Inlet capture, the state banned all types of commercial whale-hunting in Puget Sound. This upset columnist George Will, who wrote a piece in Newsweek criticizing Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro. A fourth-generation Northwesterner, Munro wondered why children of Washington State should have to travel to San Diego and pay ten dollars to see a creature whose home waters used to be in their backyard. Munro said people in the Northwest “are tired of these Southern California amusement parks taking our wildlife down there to die.” His statements set George Will off. “If Sea World is denied a permit for ten orcas,” Will wrote, “I hope 230 million Americans go to Puget Sound, unfold lawn chairs on Munro’s lawn, ask for iced tea and watercress sandwiches and watch the whales. It will be good for their souls and it will serve him right.”

  The orcas were never captured. Ted Griffin retired from the business of riding killer whales around by the dorsal fin in small cement pools. He was forced out, he admitted, by a tidal shift in public opinion—the wolf of the sea had become a teddy bear. But just as the orca was given its freedom, a group of bottlenosed dolphins were drafted into indentured service at the Trident nuclear submarine base at Bangor, on Hood Canal. These swift-moving mammals, part of the same family as killer whales, are being taken from their home waters in the Gulf of Mexico and trained to guard nuclear submarines in Puget Sound. Having marshaled some of the best scientific brains to build an underwater nuclear arsenal that can destroy the planet, man now attempts to put the smartest creature of the sea at work as a co-conspirator.

  At high tide, the horizon at Bowerman Basin is covered with the pastel undersides of a million sandpipers. They come here from South America, heading north; or they fly down from the arctic, heading back to Colombia. In small part, the basin reminds me of the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, the great watering hole of nature where pink flamingos blot the sky and sleepy lions and moody water buffaloes roam the crater floor. In the ten-thousand-mile length of the Pacific flyway, there is no better truckstop than here, a mudflat just outside the broken Pacific logging town of Hoquiam on Grays Harbor. The town lost almost a third of its population during the last timber recession; now log prices and demand are high, but Grays Harbor County still has an unemployment rate three times the national average. The winds blow steadily in from the Pacific; logs and jobs sail steadily out to Asian countries that no longer have forests.

  For migrating birds, the old wetland haunts of the West Coast are mostly gone. Hungry and desperate, they finally land in the mudflats of Bowerman Basin. Unlike the Nisqually Delta to the north, the basin has tidal goo uniquely suited for sandpipers. Frantically digging into the mud with their pencil-thin beaks, the birds gorge themselves on marine life, carb-loading for the two-thousand-mile flight ahead, the final leg north. Their stomachs on autofeed, they slurp and peck, and chomp and slurp on a patch of tidal mud. Then, something happens, something changes, and they hit the sky—a sheet as big as a stadium flag.

  I arrive at Bowerman Basin on a day when many in New England have yet to see their summer songbirds. For some reason, they didn’t show up. Shutters in New England opened to spring mornings, bulbs came forth in the usual color, but there were no songbirds in the land of Winthrop. They must be late, delayed by a seasonal quirk. But then spring dragged on, and still no sound of the early morning worm-chasers. For most people, it’s a mystery. Others blame the loss of wetlands and estuary stopovers. We are losing plant and animal species in North America at a rate a hundred times greater than before the arrival of Europeans. Most of us don’t notice until the morning begins with no other sound but the dreary radio news of traffic tie-ups, or the backyard is overrun with a certain type of insect, or the sun burns hotter than ever.

  In the Bowerman Basin area, civic leaders think they should continue filling in the marsh; already, a third of the basin has been covered up by the Army Corps of Engineers, acting on some vague plan by local business leaders. They have no specific economic outline; just a gut sense that mudflats can’t mean much of anything to a broken community. The mayor of Hoquiam, a timber town so depressed its leading citizens are paying $100 a night to hear motivational speakers from Seattle tell them how to feel good about themselves, says he eats shorebirds for lunch, a line that gets a big laugh at Rotary. His remark is a response to a proposal to save the last bit of mud in the Bowerman Basin. With four thousand acres of Grays Harbor marshland already filled in, conservationists want to save the remaining thousand or so acres for the sandpipers. The basin hosts the largest concentration of these birds in the West. Hoquiam civic leaders are against the idea of a wildlife refuge; they think filling in the mudflats is a better idea: solid ground in Bowerman Basin will make it even easier to export the logs which are yanked out of the fast-disappearing rain forest to the north. But nobody knows for sure; the word in the Hoquiam business community, freshly rejuvenated by the Seattle motivators who tell them they can do anything as long they feel good about themselves, is that mud and birds don’t add up to a whole lot.

  When I ask for directions to the basin, the Chamber of Commerce folks shrug. Apparently, I’m not alone. Dozens of people have dropped by the visitors’ center this morning—up from Portland, down from Seattle—inquiring about these goddamn sandpipers and the stinking mud. A woman gives me a brochure which tells all about the world’s first tree farm up north, and I tell her I don’t want to see a bunch of uniform-sized, corporate Douglas firs, thank you. I want to see the sandpipers. Well, then go out past the mill and the loading dock facility until you get to the airstrip, you can park there. But you’re on your own.

  At Bowerman Basin, about twenty people with cameras are positioned at different spots, sitting in the grass onshore or wading through the mud. I feel like a visitor to Capistrano before the hordes descended on the little mission town to watch the returning swallows. The birds don’t seem to mind the human presence; beaks down, they slurp and chomp. I find a weather-beaten log and settle in. I start to read something I brought along; ten minutes later, when I look up, my log is surrounded by a swarm of birds. I watch them for perhaps twenty minutes, and then they swarm away to another location in the mud. Hitting the sky, thousands in one mass fly in unison at a high speed. As natural thrills go, this one gets the adrenalin pumping. In the distance, logs are stacked to the low end of the cloud cover, putrid smoke belches from a mill, and the people in the broken town wonder what to do to save their community, and I wonder: in all the West Coast, is there no room left for a bird that only wants a thousand acres of mud?

  In New York a month later, I meet a man who lives on the forty-second floor of a building in the Lincoln Center area, two blocks from Central Park. He strikes me as a sort of graying genius, in his mid-sixties with a wrinkle-free face and thick glasses, the kind of man who can talk for an hour without taking a breath because his head has been buried in a computer screen for so long. He works at his terminal in sweat pants, massaging questions through his IBM. When he talks about his home, he says he’s an environmentalist, angry at skyscrapers which block the sun from Central Park, incensed at New York’s garbage being dumped at sea. As we talk, he proudly points to the view across the Hudson River to New Jersey. It’s the kind of view I used to think I wanted, in the heart of the world’s greatest ambition refuge, the streets pulsing with the kind of activity one needs to lead a full life.

  I ask the New York environmentalist about estuaries: are there any fish or migrating birds across the way where the Hudson River empties into the Atlantic? I tell him about the Bowerman Basin; the very week I’m in New York, Congress votes to set aside part of the mudflats in Grays Harbor for the sandpipers. He takes off his glasses and gives me a quizzical look, blinking. What do you mean? I ask if the Hudson and Atlantic convergence fosters any marine life. He shakes his head and says you wouldn’t want to eat anything that came out of the water below, then points to the bank that rises up from the water, New Jersey, and the narrow band of mud at the foot of the cliff.
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br />   “The estuary, you mean? Is that where it is?”

  “I guess,” he says. “I’m not sure what you call it—I’m not familiar with the terms—but isn’t it pretty?” I tell him not to apologize; some words leave the language when they no longer have any use.

  Chapter 8

  UNDER THE VOLCANO

  The hot breath from the belly of Mount Rainier is stale and sulfurous, the distinct odor of a restless land. Fourteen thousand feet above the lowlands of Puget Sound, one hour into a new dawn, the August sun has yet to soften the ice over which we walk. The summit is near, so says the nose, picking up the scent of the volcano’s crater vents. Now the glacial surface turns to sun cups, knee-deep bowls melted during the heat of the day and then frozen in position as soon as the mountain goes back in shadow. They look like petrified waves. We are cold, three of us tied into one rope, and silent—a unit of chill inching upward through the sun cups. No more of the crude jokes and high-fives which helped jump-start us out of camp at midnight. My brother Danny has lips of blue and fingers that won’t wrap around his ice axe. My friend Grim, son of a Norwegian who escaped the Nazis on cross-country skis, is stoic as usual, but his eyes have taken on a glaze that doesn’t fit his usual summit face. We want only to stand atop the broken crater rim of Tacoma, as Winthrop called it, he being the first to commit to print the native name for the highest point in the Northwest. To get here, we drove to the parking lot at Paradise Inn, crossed the deep-wrinkled Nisqually Glacier, put in camp under a thirty-story icewall at the 9,800-foot level, and then woke this morning for the final push through Fuhrer’s Finger, a narrow stretch of deceptive glacier and a funnel for fast-charging boulders, named for two Swiss brothers who should have known better than to come up this way. When the temperature reaches a certain point, the ice that bonds broken rock to the mountain loses its grip, sending a constant shelling of stone down this steep couloir.

  None of us likes the route; it is too hazardous for fun, too long for weekend challenge. The exhilaration of last night, when we stared down at the pink-tinged sea of clouds from a seat carved in the glacier, wrapped in an evening as still as cathedral air, is gone; we are left scraping the barrel of our motivation for putting one strained leg ahead of the other. Grim and I are as different as the national characters of the two countries from which our ancestors came. But we share a love of the high country, a friendship developed over years of testing avalanche gullies and passing a flask in the alpenglow. In the Northwest, where one can flee the social divisions of sea level in a few hours’ time, friendships that flourish above timberline are not unusual.

  We have the standard tools, feet of spiked crampons and a rope that tethers us to each other’s pace. They bring some sense of security. In town, my pile of climbing equipment looks formidable. At this elevation, it seems laughable. What’s to keep a fortress of ice which has clung to this mountain for several millennia from suddenly crumbling, as it did in the summer of 1981 when a party of eleven was killed while crossing the Ingraham Glacier, the most common route up the mountain? Gravity tugged, the bond broke, and in ten seconds they were all gone, swept away by van-sized chunks into the Pleistocene depths of the glacier. It was the worst disaster in American mountaineering history, an act of God, the investigators concluded. Coming up through the bowling alley of Fuhrer’s Finger this morning, I’m reasonably certain no such divine mood swing is in store for us. Of course, the very thought of danger is part of the attraction.

  The only storms that truly matter in this part of the world are those that shower up and out of the volcanoes. As the cities grow, and comforts increase, we place more distance between us and the molten rock that smolders under blue ice. We understand what’s going on (or at least we think we do), and we’ve got terms that help to explain it all. But subterranean pressure—plate digging under plate and forcing hot crushed rock upward—hasn’t gone away just because we no longer attribute such violence to a temperamental deity.

  On the summit Danny finds a steam vent and plops on top of it. The land lives. Just below the summit, the glaciers are hundreds of feet deep, a choppy sea of frozen séracs and snow-covered cracks. But on top there are patches of bare land on a ridge kept warm by the mountain’s inner turbulence. A small lake hides under the middle of the crater ice cap, long mythologized as the haunt of summit demons. Here, where the air has a third less oxygen than at sea level, we are too tired to explore further. Grim and I fall on our backs, the ultraviolet stare hot on our faces, stars still visible in the bruise of an early sky. At this height the mechanics of the shift-change from night to day are more transparent, the atmosphere cluttered with backstage maneuverings. I fall asleep. When I awake, my brother’s pants are wet, soaked from the steam vent, but he is much warmer. We laugh, silly with exhaustion. The volcano is friendly now, a source of wonder and curious extremes—all this ice on the outside, all this fire inside, and no place higher for a thousand miles in any direction.

  Without snow on top or verdant trimming of fir below, without its ice-cream-cone shape in the sky, Rainier would still inspire. We are drawn to the quirks of the planet, those deformities of landscape which mock convention. Even more, we are drawn to power. In one day of discontent, this mountain could bury the city of Tacoma, level Seattle, smother the most productive fruit orchards in the world and fill much of Puget Sound to such a height it would become a lifeless prairie. The impulse to reassure says that geologic time moves too slowly for such disasters to affect us; that wasteland of St. Helens to the south of me this morning says otherwise. It is hard to hold a grudge against any of the sixteen major volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest, a string of elevated portholes to the inner earth stretching from Mount Garibaldi in British Columbia to Lassen Peak in northern California. No matter how much hill-leveling, tideland-filling or river-rechanneling takes place, the volcanoes will remain lord of the landscape.

  The old forests which cloak these cones and the wild streams which scramble from their glacial tops are mere façade, the mask of the outer earth; we look at them and see beauty, the perfect picture of the Northwest. Beers are sold and vacations are made from this scenery. What we don’t see is the hellfire below, yet we want some intimacy with it, sensing in the ticking of the earth’s heart something greater than the pulse of our own lives. Volcanoes brought life to much of the planet and hold the potential to cause massive death. To live within close range of such power prompts humility and fear even while it inspires. The naturalist John Muir, touring these volcanoes a hundred years ago, said Mount Hood was “a glorious manifestation of divine power.” Rainier, he said, “was so fine and so beautiful it might well fire the dullest observer to desperate enthusiasm.”

  There has been much firing to desperate enthusiasm in the last century. An Army pilot, flying through the cloud halos which blow off Rainier’s summit like smoke rings from a cigar, swore he ran into a swarm of flying saucers in 1948. His account, widely publicized but never completely put to rest in the tidy bed of government conclusion, produced the first use of the term Unidentified Flying Object—UFO. Since that time, friends of the extraterrestrial have gathered annually on a summer evening in a meadow at the base of Rainier and linked hands, calling forth the saucers from Out There. Inevitably, they are satisfied. Farther down the mountain, near the damp taverns where out-of-work loggers shoot pool and curse the spotted owl, the New Age movement has set up base. First, Ramtha, the thirty-thousand-year-old spirit who resides inside a young woman with a gift for mass marketing, moved into a million-dollar home in the Nisqually valley. Then Shirley MacLaine bought a house nearby. They both believe the volcano attracts an unusual amount of psychic energy.

  I feel today as Winthrop did when he walked the Cascade Crest east of here in August of 1853. Though he would live only another seven years, to his thirty-third birthday—my age on the day I stand atop this peak—the alpenglow of the volcano brought him a hint of eternal life. In that, he was surely ahead of his nature-savaging countrymen when he wrot
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  And, studying the light and the majesty of Tacoma, there passed from it and entered into my being, to dwell there evermore by the side of many such, a thought and an image of solemn beauty, which I could thenceforth evoke whenever in the world I must have peace or die. For such emotion years of pilgrimage were worthily spent. If mortal can gain the thoughts of immortality, is not his earthly destiny achieved?

  Another generation would pass from the time of Winthrop’s visit to the first successful climb of Rainier. In 1853, he considered the summit unclimbable, a view shared by many. “No foot of man had ever trampled those pure snows. It was a virginal mountain, distant from the possibility of human approach and human inquisitiveness as a marble goddess is from human loves.” But his prophecy on that day came in the form of a command: “Up to Tacoma, or into some such solitude of nature, imaginative men must go, as Moses went to Sinai, that the divine afflatus may stir within them.”

  Today, we are but three of six thousand climbers who attempt to walk this crater rim every year, of which about half succeed. I look to the west and see the Puget Sound basin, wherein reside those millions who stare back at us in first light. Beyond are the Olympic Mountains, and farther, the Pacific, shrouded by the blue wall. To the north, Mount Baker and Glacier Peak tower above the spine of the Cascades, two white cones among the jagged edges. To the south, I see Hood and Helens and Adams and Jefferson and even a wisp of Mount Shasta, which last blew ash from its northern California base in 1786. All the majors in the Ring of Fire are visible this morning. I move closer to the north edge of Rainier, where the mountain was cleaved and sliced, losing perhaps a thousand feet of the top some 5,800 years ago. The north wall drops down a straight vertical mile. Weakened by hot volcanic fumes, the upper part of this side of the mountain was shaken loose and then slid away, eventually carrying a half-cubic-mile of mud 45 miles down the valley toward the tidelands where Seattle originated, covering 125 square miles. If a similar event happened today, a half-million people would flee for higher ground. To the natives who lived near the shoreline, the mud storm of long ago fortified the mountain’s position as forbidden high ground, a place for angry gods.