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

by Timothy Egan

  The future is in red grapes. The biggest problem the Hogues had with their Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon last year was keeping it in stock. Recently, the hop farmer’s 1985 Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve was chosen the Best of the Show from among two thousand entries at the largest international wine competition in the country. A few years earlier, when the brothers tried to peddle their wine at the finer restaurants in Seattle, they were told to go away and take their stinking fruit and berry wine with ’em.

  Griffin talks like a true evangelist. “Everybody thought the Mount St. Helens eruption was going to kill the Yakima Valley wine industry. We got three inches of ash on the ground here. The sky went completely dark. But the best grapes are planted in the worst soil. They’ll tell you that in France. Volcanic soil drains better than anything. It’s not fertile. It’s sterile. It’s silica, what they use to make glass. But all you need is a good medium.”

  As the color of an October day gives way to the soft tones of night, Gary Hogue cracks a year-old Chardonnay. We sit outside and watch the light shrink on the Rattlesnake Hills, and listen to the last sounds of harvest. We are surrounded by the best products of the earth at this latitude, under the benign influence of these volcanoes and the life-giving water from the Naches and the Yakima. Theodore Winthrop looked around and saw a fallow basin; I think of the Yakima Valley as a young bride at the altar, about to begin a full life. Hogue, dressed in plaid shirt and workboots, keeps asking me what I think of his Chardonnay. The bottle is nearly empty now, and I’m not sure how to describe it. I review all those wine terms: should I say it has a delicate aroma, with a complex but subtle bouquet, outstanding clarity, well-shaped body with just the right touch of vinosity, or should I talk up the acidity and residual sugar? We drain the bottle, and I turn to Hogue.

  “It tastes like the Northwest.”

  Chapter 12

  GOD’S COUNTRY CANCER

  A hard wind from the north delivers the first blast of winter to the Okanogan Valley this morning, a few days into November. Along the road that follows the river, migrants hitchhike for rides south. The apples have all been picked; those that remain belong to the deer and the frost. I follow the Okanogan River north from its confluence with the Columbia, searching for people who were here in the fall of 1963, when much of the world looked to the apple farmers and ranchers of this remote country to render judgment on a time of hysteria. Many of the people I want to see are dead. Others have moved away. To live in this valley, bordered by the dry edge of the North Cascades on one side and the forested expanse of the Colville Indian Reservation on the other, where the summers burn hot all day and the winters bring isolation, requires an emotional commitment that few people can remain faithful to for life.

  When I start to knock on doors and introduce myself, people smile and tell their dogs to stop barking. But when I say I’d like to talk about what happened to the Goldmark family—John and Sally and the kids—the response is the same: We’d rather not discuss that. At one home in Malott, a riverside village of perhaps two dozen people, the old woman I wish to speak with slams the door in my face.

  I continue upstream toward the Canadian border. The river, banked by aspens holding a last shock of gold, still looks much as it did when Hudson’s Bay Company voyageurs canoed its waters, loaded with trading goods for the inland tribes. However, there is one big difference: the land on either side of the river is full of fruit trees now. The first white homesteaders, who came to the Okanogan barely a hundred years ago, quickly realized they had found ideal orchard country. Farther north, where the river drains central British Columbia, the valley serves as the breadbasket of Western Canada. The problem was, you couldn’t get water uphill to the trees without the help of windmill-powered pump, or mule, or human shoulders. So, most of the early farmers went under; their crumbling shacks can be seen throughout the valley, abandoned to gravity and the weather. With completion of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1941 came the promise of public power—dirt-cheap electricity for every apple grower and rancher in Okanogan, a county twice the size of Connecticut with a population of about thirty thousand. On the face of an old clock in the center of the town of Okanogan is a slogan that tells the story of this valley: LIVE BETTER ELECTRICALLY. For a long time, the clock didn’t work. It does now.

  For the first third of the twentieth century, electric power was a privilege, controlled by private monopolies; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, using the Columbia River just south of the Okanogan Country, made it a right. Water, the most basic and plentiful resource of the Pacific Northwest, belonged to every citizen of the region, Roosevelt said. Among intellectuals and poor folk alike, the idea of public power—the baton of progress—was enormously popular. In this sentiment, Roosevelt echoed Winthrop, an Eastern blueblood from another era. Winthrop said the land would set future inhabitants of this area free. Roosevelt showed them how to do it. The snowmelt of the high Cascades and the western flank of the Rockies would power turbines to provide electricity so cheap and plentiful it would make prosperous landowners out of sharecroppers. In most of the small valleys and farm hamlets of the inland Northwest, this transition went fairly smoothly.

  A few hundred yards from the Canadian border, I look for the home of Gerald Thompson, who grows apples on ninety acres of hillside above the valley floor. Even with the wind tossing dust and leaves and tumble weeds throughout the bowl of the Okanogan, this country is astonishingly beautiful. Open sky. Clean water. Ice-covered mountains rising to the west, rusted mesas to the east, each level covered with bigger pines. And down the center of the valley, grafted to either side of the river, are nothing but miles and miles of fruit orchards. Thompson’s house has no address; he had said I could find it by looking for green shake siding and a white roof. He greets me at the porch, frowning.

  “I don’t think you’re gonna like me,” he says.

  “Why not?”

  “I changed my mind. Not sure I want to talk to you.”

  Outsiders find either suspicion or open arms in this community, same as elsewhere. In the tradition of the American West, new arrivals have no past; tolerance is a high virtue, just as nosiness is a low crime. Usually, that holds for the Okanogan Country. For a hundred years, highbrows and hicks have lived side by side. The town of Winthrop, one valley to the east, was founded by a Boston-bred Harvard graduate, Guy Waring, and named for Theodore Winthrop’s ancestor, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Another Harvard graduate, Waring’s college classmate Owen Wister, spent his honeymoon here in 1898, a visit which he drew upon to write the first popular western novel, The Virginian.

  Thompson is missing a few teeth up front, his gut hangs over his waistband and his face is blasted red from the wind and sun. I say I’m interested in getting a few things straight about the Goldmark trial of 1963. Thompson was one of twelve jurors who sat in a courtroom of linoleum floors and rough plywood doors while the idea of the international Communist conspiracy was put on trial. In passing judgment on themselves, they delivered a verdict on the rest of the country. For two months, they pondered the thesis that Communists could take over a farm community just as sure as a virus could invade a healthy cow. It was the only time that the postwar Red Scare was put up against the legal test of truth. Historians view the case as the turning point against the loose libels and conspiracy theories which coursed through much of American thought from 1945 to the early 1960s.

  Beyond the historical implications, a man’s reputation was at stake, a man who had embraced the Okanogan Country only to have it turn on him. John Goldmark, a war hero who’d given up the promise of his Harvard Law School credentials to become a cattle rancher and citizen politician here, had been driven out of state office by a campaign that labeled him a tool of the Communist conspiracy. If anything, Goldmark was a product of the New West—that which would blossom under irrigation and prosper with cheap public power. Tall, athletic, a voracious reader and superb outdoorsman, he became a sort of Northwest archetype of the Ame
rican Dream: a man who thought the land could enrich the spirit and harden the body. Delivering on Roosevelt’s promise, he helped to put water to work producing electricity that freed farmers from burdens dating back to the Stone Age. Like timber and fish, public power was soon looked upon as a regional right. But those who had controlled electricity in the Okanogan Country did everything they could to hold on to it. In the dying days of a losing fight, they targeted John Goldmark, calling him a Communist and a traitor. His life in ruins following the 1962 smear campaign, he sued for libel. Witnesses flew in from all over the country to help the twelve Okanogan Valley jurors decide.

  “Well, by God, I was a witness, all right,” says Thompson, slowly warming to the topic. “As a juror, I spent the winter in that courtroom when I coulda been pruning my trees.”

  He has no trouble remembering the trial. The question is whether he wants to remember. The Big Lie of 1962 has yet to die; he is scared of what could still happen.

  “You saw what they did in Seattle,” he says, shaking his head.

  On Christmas Eve 1985, Annie Goldmark was baking a ham for a holiday dinner of close friends and family. The dining table inside her Seattle home, a two-story Tudor overlooking Lake Washington, was set for ten. A thick fog which had covered the city for most of the week obscured any view of the lake or the Christmas ships which cruised near the shore. It was a few minutes before 7 P.M., and the guests were due to arrive in half an hour. Her dinner on schedule, Annie went upstairs to take a shower. A minute later there came a knock on the door. Her son Colin, a ten-year-old who spoke fluent French just like his Paris-born mother and fluent English like his Okanogan County father, answered the door and was greeted by a man with a dark beard and stocking cap over his greasy hair. He held a white box in one hand and a tiny black gun in the other. It was a toy gun, but looked authentic enough. When David Lewis Rice knocked on the door covered by a Christmas wreath, he had not expected a child to greet him. Inside, stockings hung over the fireplace and presents were piled high around a tree. Rice had planned this visit for six months; it was to be the act of a soldier against the imagined villain behind all that had gone wrong during his twenty-seven years. Rice blamed Communists for trying to subvert the country from within; he was part of the flotsam of urban castoffs who bounced from city to city, light-years removed from a fantasy such as Morning in America.

  “Charles Goldmark, please,” said Rice as the boy answered the door.

  Born a month before his father went to fight the Japanese in the South Pacific, Charles Goldmark grew up on the Okanogan ranch. At first, the family had no electricity, and only a rough, deep-rutted twenty-five-mile road connected the Goldmark home to the handful of stores in the valley below. Chuck Goldmark eventually went to Yale Law School, served as an Army intelligence officer and started a legal practice in Seattle. He used to say that the days of growing up on the remote ranch east of the Cascades provided the best education a boy could ever get: the eerie stillness before a thunderstorm, bunch grass poking up through old snow in early spring, helping an infant calf get through the first days of life. No book could teach such things. It was an exalted life in new land.

  When Chuck Goldmark greeted the stranger at the door of his Seattle house, both sons now at his side, David Rice was momentarily confused. Chuck was handsome, with sandy hair and a build befitting his hobby of mountaineering. He seemed no older than thirty-five or thirty-six. Rice was looking for another man, somebody much older, the Okanogan Valley Communist he’d read about. Rice flashed the small black pistol and ordered them inside. One boy ran into another room. Rice told Goldmark to call for him. He directed them all upstairs. Hearing the shower, Rice told Goldmark to ask for his wife.

  “Honey, can you come out here?” Annie put on a robe and walked into the bedroom. Rice ordered them to get down on the floor, face down. The two children, scared as they dropped to their knees at the foot of the bed, rattled him. Kids—this wasn’t part of the plan. He pulled the sweaters of the two boys up over their heads so their arms would be bound. Then he handcuffed Chuck and Annie.

  “Do you need money?” Chuck asked.

  “Yes, I can use all you got.”

  Rice had pawned the cheap television set belonging to a woman he was in love with and used the proceeds to pay for the tools of his Christmas Eve plan—the toy gun, chloroform and handcuffs. Searching Goldmark’s wallet, he found an automated bank card and asked for the identification number. Chuck gave the number of his law firm’s bank card. Rice had intended to interrogate Goldmark about Communists in Seattle, but he didn’t have time. Dinner guests were on the way over, he was told. He opened the white box and proceeded to apply chloroform to each of the family members. One by one, they lost consciousness. Annie struggled at the smell, but quickly went out like the others. Hurrying now, Rice went downstairs looking for a weapon. He found a small filleting knife and a heavy steam iron, then went back to the upstairs bedroom. Starting with Chuck, he bashed in the heads of each of the four people on the floor, using the sharp end of the iron. After hitting Annie several times, he saw her start to move, so he hit her again. The two children were bludgeoned in the same way. Checking the pulse of Chuck and Annie, he found they were still alive, “So I decided to complete the job with the knife,” he said later, in describing how he plunged the weapon into their brains. Wiping his feet of blood, he walked downstairs and left the house.

  The first dinner guests arrived a few minutes later. The lights were on, the table was set, but nobody was there.

  They called out. “Chuck? Annie?” No answer. One neighbor went next door to call the house. No answer. Then they called police, who arrived within a few minutes. Upstairs, officer Bane Bean found blood all over the walls, and the moaning, labored breathing of four people: Charles Goldmark, age forty-one; his wife, Annie, forty-three; and their two sons, Derek, twelve, and Colin, ten. Annie died that night; over the next thirty-seven days, the three remaining Goldmarks died one after the other.

  On Christmas Day, David Rice showed up at the front porch of one of his political mentors, a Boeing Company electrician named Homer Brand who had founded the Seattle chapter of an odd little right-wing group called the Duck Club. At their meetings at a smorgasbord diner in Seattle’s Scandinavian community of Ballard, they talked about Jewish banking conspiracies and how paper money wasn’t worth anything because it was no longer backed by gold. Somebody had to do something about the goddamn lawyers, one of the members would say, and everybody would roar in approval. And what about the federal income tax—it’s unconstitutional. Goddamn right. Rice, a drifter, newly unemployed, took it all in. “Shut your mouth and open your eyes—that’s what I always say,” was a favorite phrase of his. At one of these meetings, Rice heard about the Goldmarks—not the family that he later slaughtered, but the first generation, the post-World War II pioneers of the Okanogan high country. What did he hear? An old story, a lie. Brand said something about Goldmark—living right here in Seattle—being the “regional director” of the Communist Party. As the target took shape in Rice’s mind, he read some yellowed news clips about John and Sally Goldmark, who had been labeled tools of the kind of conspiracy in which Rice had come to believe. The voices inside his head told him to take direct action.

  “Hey, Homer,” Rice said excitedly to Brand on Christmas morning. “I’ve just dumped the top Communist!”

  “Oh, yeah,” Brand replied, skeptical. “So what else is new?”

  Rice was caught the next day, after police were tipped off by another acquaintance. In the spring of 1986 he was found guilty of four counts of aggravated first-degree murder, the only crime in Washington State punishable by death. He had confessed to the killings. In a failed effort to save his life, defense attorney Tony Savage said Rice was mentally ill and easily influenced by talk that most people would consider irrational. “The extreme right wing did not cause his illness,” said Savage. “But his illness provided fertile ground for their philosophy.” After a short
deliberation, the jury sentenced Rice to be executed. The jury foreman, Joel Babcock, said whoever planted the original thought that Goldmark was a Communist was as much to blame for the death of the family as was Rice. A grocery store clerk, age twenty-five, Babcock said the trial made him think hard about things he’d never thought about before. “This whole thing started with something that wasn’t true,” he said after the trial. “Whoever started such slander should feel a little embarrassed right now—a little guilt.”

  The seed that landed in the head of David Lewis Rice blew over the Cascade Mountains twenty-three years after it was shaken from the weeds of Okanogan County. When Gerald Thompson heard about the Christmas Eve carnage at the Goldmark house, he knew right away what was behind it.

  Now, his face angry, his eyes watching the wind rip dead leaves from his apple trees, Thompson snaps his fingers.

  “Just like that I made the connection,” he says. “It came from these guys who first made up all these lies about John Goldmark. That was what killed Chuck’s family.”

  John Goldmark first came to the Okanogan Country in 1946, looking for a fresh life in a land unencumbered by the rust of his native East Coast. As one of the most remote areas in America, the Okanogan fit the bill. While still at war in the Philippines, the young Navy ensign wrote his wife, Sally, about his urge to move west, “where people are less twisted up in traditions, class and inhibitions.” After scouting the apple valleys of central Washington, he bought the ranch on the high plateau of the Colville Indian Reservation. From the house, a homestead structure in a grove of aspens, you could look across the plateau to wheat fields and pine in one direction and away to the blue curtain of the Cascades in the other. John, Sally and their infant son Chuck moved onto the ranch in early spring, when the ground was still covered with snow. He put his Navy officer’s sword over the fireplace and set out to become a man of the land. Harvard Law School and a stint as a New Deal administrator in Washington had not prepared him for the life of frontier cattle rancher. But he listened. He applied pure logic and science to the sometimes illogical trade of farming. In time, he established a healthy herd, grew wheat and grain, and built an airstrip on his property so he could land a small plane. The boys, Chuck and Peter, learned about ranch life at home and the rest of the world at a one-room schoolhouse on the Indian reservation, a million-acre trust for nine tribes from the central Columbia River region. They both learned to fly the family plane, herd cattle, build fences and climb mountains.