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

by Timothy Egan

  I scramble along more rocks, looking for the owners of these platforms, but find nothing more than the hum of transmission lines sending electricity out from the half-mile-long powerhouse of the Dalles Dam. No Celilo Falls, of course; they were buried when the dam opened in 1957. No spillway, even; the dams have become so efficient at channeling all water through deep turbines that a flow over the top is considered purely cosmetic. I climb around a turn and drop down, closer to shore, still on precariously vertical rock. There, on an enormous, wobbly platform is an Indian fisherman. He is wearing a wool cap and overalls, and his long hair is braided in matching pigtails. His body leashed to a climbing rope and harness, he leans way out over the river. Looking around, I see three twenty-foot-long dipnets near three different platforms. He jumps from pole to pole, pulling them through the water and coming up empty. He looks like a museum piece—the deep color of his face and hair, the traditional pine dipnet—set against the enormity of the dam. After ten thousand years, perhaps he is the end of the line. I ask him about the fishing. A late fall chinook run is still underway, and he had hoped to bring back a big catch for a tribal salmon feed. After three days of work at a spot where a single person used to take up to five hundred fish a day, he has a half-dozen salmon to show.

  Thousands of Indians used to gather at Celilo Falls to spear chinook and coho or catch them in dipnets. Because of this salmon bounty, The Dalles was the great trade mart for all Northwest tribes, the center of a native network that spread out across the Rockies to the Plains, and far north into British Columbia. Here, the Klamaths of Northern California traded slaves for salmon, the Nez Perce brought horses and bighorn sheep horns, the nomadic Shoshoni swapped buffalo hides, the Makah came down from the rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula with sea otter pelts, the Vancouver Island tribes brought their trademark canoes to exchange, the Chinook bartered with dried clams and bright shells. On a fall morning, The Dalles was like an open-air shopping center, crowded with perhaps as many as fifty thousand people.

  By the time of Winthrop’s arrival, there were few hints of what used to be; a majority of the Columbia Plateau natives had died of disease. Fresh from the jungled forests of the Cascades, Winthrop considered these basalt walls and bristled fields to be the northwestern corner of hell.

  “Before me was a region like the Valley of Death, rugged, bleak and severe,” he wrote. “A tragical valley, where the fiery forces of Nature, impotent to attain majestic combination and build monuments of peace, had fallen into despair and ugly warfare.” What bothered the Yankee traveler, aside from the fact that he contracted smallpox and was forced to spend his three-week convalescence quarantined inside Fort Dalles, was the lack of any vegetation, bare hills all around in the Sahara of the Northwest. How could this be in the land of the Big Green? Fifty miles from impenetrable forest, and not a stick of timber anywhere, not a fern or blade of grass.

  “Racked and battered crags stood disorderly over all that rough waste,” he wrote. “There were no trees, nor any masses of vegetation to soften the severities of landscape. All was harsh and desolate.” He left a passage for us prophet-checkers. “The Dalles of the Columbia, upon which I was now looking, must be studied by the Yankee Dante, whenever he comes, for imagery to construct his Purgatory, if not his Inferno.”

  I find the place closer to limbo than hell. By harnessing the Columbia here to send power to Southern California, the Corps of Engineers ruined a place that has been called the greatest salmon fishery on earth. At Celilo Falls, the water used to crash down in a series of gradual drops, the stairs of a giant. Hurling themselves upstream, the fish would leap one section at a time, resting in little pools.

  Long after the Indians were sent to reservations, tribal fishermen continued to catch salmon at Celilo Falls, holding out at what became a sort of aboriginal Alamo. When dam building began in earnest in the 1930s, Celilo Falls was spared, at first. Pictures from the early 1950s showed half-naked natives in cowboy hats tethered to ropes as they leaned out over the crashing water with their long nets. When somebody wanted to see what the West was like, they were shown these Real Life Indians who risked their lives at a place where the river narrowed and dropped, named Le Dalle (“The Trough”) by the French. Right up to the end, in 1957, the desert daredevils pulled fish from Celilo Falls. They protested construction of the dam, of course, but were told to step aside; this was before Northwest Indian fishing rights had been upheld by the Supreme Court.

  In the evening, I head for an Indian village, planning to sit in on a salmon ritual which the dipnet fisherman had told me about. I turn off the interstate that follows the Columbia and drive on a dusty road a few miles upstream from the graveyard of Celilo Falls. The desert, about twenty miles east of the green Gorge, is still and cold. About a hundred Indians have gathered for a salmon feed. Flames leap from a large firepit. Despite a sign warning against drinking alcohol, two women stagger over each other—and then fall to the ground. About thirty fish are pulled out of ice and cut into strips by several heavyset women. The fish meat is bright orange-red, full of oil and taste. One woman pinches off about two fingers’ worth and holds it up in disgust: “You go to a restaurant and order salmon. This is what they give you.”

  Following the ancient recipe, they stretch fillets flat around cedar sticks and then cook them upright on thin poles placed in the ground near the fire. This keeps the juices in, while slow-cooking the fish. Some venison is cut by the men and placed on a grill. While waiting for the meal, we all eat potato chips and drink Cokes. I talk to an elder about the dam and what it did to Celilo Falls, but after a few minutes he gets angry and clouded up and can’t go on. I leave before the food is cooked.

  Early morning, threading through orchards in the hills above The Dalles, I’m dazzled by the late-season d’Anjou pears. Hitchcock-shaped, with a blush of pink, they are firm and sweet and full of juice which drips down your mouth when you take a bite. The cherries are long gone, most of them off to Japan, where they sell for ten times the price they retail for here, and the apples are all picked. Water from the Columbia, piped up from the reservoir of the dam that killed Celilo Falls, keeps these trees full of vigor. Without irrigation, nothing would grow. The desert here receives about six inches of rain a year—less than Phoenix—just an hour’s drive from the hundred-inch annual rainfall in the west Cascade forests. Irrigation brings life to 7.2 million acres in the four states of the Columbia Basin. In the spring the orchards are convulsive with color, rolling rows of blossoms perfuming the desert air. In the fall, the trees are Impressionistic, bordered by the volcanoes of Mount Adams and Mount Hood. The perfect picture is broken only by the hangover of sorrow from the night before. I’m troubled by a puzzle of economics: chinook salmon were native to this area, and they are selling for ten to twelve dollars a pound this year, when you can find them. The fruit trees were brought in, and at harvest the growers practically give the crop away. If billion-dollar dams can help fruit grow in the desert and light boulevards in Los Angeles, surely salmon, which require nothing more than a river channel free of obstacles, can get some help from the geo-technicians.

  By midafternoon on the third day, I’m ready to leave The Dalles. Before I go, I spend considerable time looking for the place where Winthrop recovered from smallpox, the old Fort Dalles site. I find it high on a bluff above town that still looks almost exactly as he described it. I go to the spot where he stared north to Mount Adams, his outlook soured by the desolate land below. “My heart sank within me as the landscape compelled me to be gloomy like itself,” he wrote. “Nature harmonized discordantly with my feelings, and even forced her nobler aspects to grow sternly ominous.”

  The land could chill the soul just as easily as it could enlighten. Eighteen fifty-three was one of the worst years of the smallpox epidemic, which killed as much as ninety percent of the native population along the Columbia. Winthrop, suffering through three weeks of chill and fever, had a recurring dream that he’d caused the smallpox epidemic am
ong the Indians. He must have wondered why his Yankee constitution could take the illness and the Indians could not. He hinted at the passing of orders, from the indigenous population to the New England transplants. It was not the hand of God that was at work, he concluded, but the random swing of nature.

  Farther upriver: the air is drier, drained of all humidity, the land more barren. Few orchards cling to the hills of the Columbia in the hottest part of the Northwest, the northern end of the Great Basin. Less than twenty-five miles east of The Dalles, the river is pinched by the John Day Dam, a mile-long blockade across the water, the third Corps dam in less than a hundred miles. Man stands out here like asphalt in an alfalfa field. Up on the Washington bluff, a distant castle pokes in and out of view. Closer, it appears to be a mirage, a four-story stone mansion with a perfectly manicured green lawn set against the bony hills. There is no population center for miles. And yet, here’s this castle, Sam Hill’s mansion, the lawns of which are crowded with peacocks. Hill was an inspired lunatic, somewhat of a premature answer to Winthrop’s prophecy. The son-in-law of railroad baron James J. Hill, Sam bought seven thousand acres of windswept scrubland above the Columbia in 1907, intending to erect a glorious home for his wife, Mary. After twenty years, it was still unfinished, but Hill, desperate to tie his life project to royalty, convinced Queen Marie of Rumania, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, to come to America and take a train out west to his mansion, which she dedicated in a formal, black-comedic ceremony. Over the years, the mansion on the hill remained unoccupied and unfinished. People wandering through the Columbia desert would see the enormous castle and wonder, What the Sam Hill? After Hill’s death, the mansion became Maryhill Museum, home for one of the most extensive collections of sculptures by Auguste Rodin. It’s the oddest place for such a museum, but oddly fitting—through a sputtering evolution, it brought the better works of man near one of the better works of nature.

  Another hundred miles upstream is the Big Bend, where the Columbia does a ninety-degree turn, flowing south through the barren home of some of the nation’s darkest nuclear secrets before heading west. Here, the Columbia picks up the Snake River, which drains most of Idaho and parts of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and Oregon. Though stapled by thirteen dams from its headwaters near Yellowstone Park to the confluence here, the Snake still has some power of menace. By the time it enters the Columbia, the Snake has carved out Hells Canyon, a slit in the earth more than eight thousand feet deep at its lowest point. The outsized landscape has inspired man to take extreme alteration measures. Egged on by merchants in the wheat towns of the Palouse, the Corps of Engineers dredged and dammed the Snake to allow passage of barge traffic all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, a Pacific port in the arid plateau.

  In the vast desert here, the federal government built an instant city of fifty-five thousand during the World War II campaign to manufacture the atomic bomb. The sage and jackrabbit country around Hanford was declared a nuclear weapons reservation, an island of intrigue sealed from public view for nearly half a century. During the war, only a handful of the factory hands knew what they’d been working on. Then American planes dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and a local paper screamed out the answer: IT’S ATOMIC BOMBS! PRESIDENT TRUMAN RELEASES SECRET OF HANFORD PRODUCT. After the war the area around the Snake and Columbia confluence, once a cluster of a few hundred subsistence farmers, caught atom fever. Nine primitive nuclear reactors were built, constructed virtually overnight. In just a few years’ time, the main product of the Big Bend country went from peaches and asparagus to weapons-grade plutonium.

  The Cold War was particularly prosperous. But during one 1949 experiment, the largest radioactive emissions ever documented drifted over the land here. It was kept secret for nearly forty years, while cancer deaths among young farmers and their children chilled the families of the high plateau. When documents about the emissions were finally released, they showed that people who lived downwind from the Hanford nuclear plants received doses of radiation—about 5,500 curies—ten times higher than Soviet citizens living near the scene of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, and hundreds of times greater than the 15 to 24 curies released during the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island. Perhaps twenty thousand children—because of their age, they were particularly vulnerable—were exposed to deadly levels of radiation which cause healthy cells to mutate. One fourth of the people living near the hardest-hit area have died of cancer since the 1960s.

  All nine reactors are closed now—skeletons in the desert, they are frozen memorials to the infant nuclear age. Hanford, weaned on the bomb and all its by-products, is in steep decline, uncertain how to proceed in an ambiguous world. Cancer victims on the farms downwind petition the government for help, while most of their neighbors in the cities of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick ask for more nuclear-bomb-building contracts to keep their “Miracle in the Desert” from crumbling. They wonder why the market for plutonium has gone flat. News of better relations with the Soviets is greeted with glum appraisals at Rotary lunches. Neighborhoods built along Leave-It-to-Beaver dreamlines are full of For Sale signs, many pasted over by foreclosure banners. The wagons have been circled; after some controversy, students at Richland High School have voted overwhelmingly to keep as their school logo a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb blast.

  “You’ve heard of a family crest,” says Marcia Cillan, the student body vice president at Richland High. “Our crest is a nuclear bomb.” Once, years earlier, at commencement day ceremonies, the Army rigged a bomb of napalm and TNT and set off a mock atomic blast, a mushroomlike explosion which shattered the windows of nearby buildings.

  Hanford boosters have placed one last hope in trying to get the government to convert a half-finished commercial nuclear reactor into a tritium producer. Warren Magnuson, the retired United States Senator who directed more government contracts to the state than any other man, said such a desperation move made no sense.

  “The times have changed, and we must change with them,” said Magnuson, whose influence brought highways and health centers and dams and bridges and military stations to the young Northwest during his forty-four years in Congress. He died in 1989, but he spoke for history. There are three great treasures in the Pacific Northwest, he said: Puget Sound, the Cascade Mountains and the Columbia. Each deserves respect, bordering on reverence. The desert can produce many things when watered, but nuclear bombs should not be a permanent product of the land, Magnuson said. What would Winthrop make of this nuclear-crazed community on the Columbia? A detour on the way to the Promised Land? An aberration of nature, perhaps? If so, its cycle was remarkably short: up from the dust to the City of Tomorrow, then back to the dust as the world realized the City of Tomorrow could not be trusted.

  I want to see the last wild stretch of the Columbia River—the Hanford Reach, fifty-seven miles of freedom. It’s a rumor I’ve never confirmed. Because this part of the river lies within the 560-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation, it has been shielded from most of society, including the dam builders, since World War II. But with Hanford closing down, the river is coming out. I turn off a couple of lonely roads, pass Keep Out signs and fences of diminished authority, angle toward the river, and there it is: the only free-flowing stretch of the Columbia. Full of renewal, the river races through the desert here, pulling water past rust-colored cliffs and mesas untouched by irrigation or cattle grazing or roads. From the steep, eastern bank of exposed geology, I see mule deer and jack-rabbits and the ever-circling hawks. A coyote dashes from the brush, startling me. I walk along a cliff, three hundred feet above the river, and stare into a canyon with a fresh pulse, the wind in my face.

  Now, down on the shoreline, I look out at the only slice of the Columbia which in any way resembles the river seen by Winthrop, and Lewis and Clark. I toss a piece of wood into the water, and it quickly disappears. Unlike the rest of the backed-up Columbia, the river here has a current of mystery and strength. Several generations of history haunt this pla
ce. On level ground next to the river is a trio of aging willows, planted for shade by homesteaders who were chased off the land when the bomb builders took over, a rough collision of two eras. Across the river, in the foreground, is a tree with nine blue herons perched on its limbs; in the background is an abandoned nuclear reactor.

  Arrowheads and chipped tools from the Wanapums, who have lived in the upper Columbia for centuries, are littered on the beach of a small island separated from the shore by a shallow stretch. Undisturbed, never buried by water from the dams, the island looks as if the natives left just yesterday. They built pit houses here during the salmon season and crafted bowls and weapons while drying fish for the winter. I can still see the shelters carved into the bank of the island, and rock flakes near their encampments. Later, when I talk to a few members of the Wanapum tribe—there are only a handful left, clustered in a village upstream—they say the Hanford Reach is sacred country, full of burial sites. “I wish they would just leave it alone,” says Patrick Wyena, as he sips beer with five other Wanapums.

  The graveled river bottom here, unstirred by the earth-movers, is home to the biggest natural chinook spawning ground in continental America. About half a million fish a year return to the reach to spawn and die. There is no need for multi-million-dollar hatcheries; all that these big kings need to propagate is for the Hanford Reach to stay the way it’s been. Also lurking in these depths are sturgeon. An Ice Age survivor, prehistoric in appearance and size, Columbia River sturgeon can grow to two thousand pounds or more and live for a century. When they break the surface of the water, it is as if the Loch Ness monster had arrived from Scotland.