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

by Timothy Egan

  The Corps of Engineers is moving fast to kill the salmon run and lasso the last stretch of freedom. For years they have been trying to get permission to dam the Hanford Reach, but nobody wanted the project. With that plan on hold, they are now proceeding with a scheme to gouge the river shallows of the reach for several miles, at a cost of $200 million, to benefit a few commercial interests in the upriver town of Wenatchee. The Port of Chelan dreamed up this idea and presented it to the Corps, whose members have never met a river that couldn’t be dredged, dammed or rechanneled. Never mind that most of the apples grown around Wenatchee reach their markets in no time by trucks traveling the highways; the Corps thinks it would be nice for Wenatchee to have deep-water barge traffic. Typically, that’s the way the Corps works: find a few Chamber of Commerce locals to put forth a pipe dream, then send the bill to the rest of the nation. The Army engineers estimate a half-million cubic yards of river bottom would have to be dredged, producing enough sediment to fill a football field to three hundred feet deep. Of course, they recognize that chiseling the reach into an industrial waterway would kill the last great natural salmon spawning ground on the Columbia and forever alter the final wild stretch. But the Corps says the natural salmon run could be replaced by an artificial one, created by manmade spawning channels.

  With the rest of the Columbia already shackled, the Corps is running out of projects; hundreds of engineers are sitting around offices in the Northwest with no rivers to dam. “We are in the business of building dams and dredging channels,” says Noel Gilbrough, the Corps project manager. “This is the last place on the Columbia where you could put a dam. But, we are having some trouble selling this project.”

  Now, the sky turns on me; thunderheads collide and dump ice marbles of hail. I look for shelter, but there is no place to duck out of the squall. If I were across the river, I could huddle under the roof of the abandoned nuclear reactor, a frightening thought. I trudge back uphill, drenched, and then continue upriver again. As I head toward Grand Coulee Dam—passing Priest Rapids Dam, Wanapum Dam, Rock Island Dam, Rocky Reach Dam, Wells Dam, Chief Joseph Dam—the Corps is dealt a stunning blow by Congress. The news out of Washington, D.C., is that the Hanford Reach has been placed off limits to the earth-movers for a three-year period of study to determine if it should receive permanent protection under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. When I hear the news I stop my car near a place called Dry Falls, site of the biggest waterfall the world has ever known, a prehistoric cataract forty times mightier than Niagara. Today, no water drops from this red-tinged basalt wall, four hundred feet high and nearly four miles across. A former channel of the Columbia, it has been dry for nearly a thousand years. When an ice dam broke at Lake Missoula eighteen thousand years ago, a mountain of water was unleashed over the Columbia Plateau, cutting channels into the desert floor and flooding the lower Columbia valley from the Snake confluence to the ocean. The surging water of that flood comprised ten times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world today. When the water receded, the Columbia was a new river with at least three new arms: its main channel, the Moses Coulee, and the Grand Coulee, which included Dry Falls. In time, the water retreated to the original path of the river, leaving behind coulees up to 1,600 feet deep in parts.

  Now the sky is heavy with darkness and fresh thunderheads. A wicked wind ricochets through the Dry Falls coulee. Alone as I stand with this trough of the ages, the narrative lines come through: without help, the earth can still tell a good story.

  Like a tooth drilled clean and packed with silver, the Grand Coulee is full of water again, a twenty-seven-mile-long irrigation reservoir. But the Moses Coulee is empty. At the upper end of the old Indian hiding grounds, where Chief Moses sheltered his band from winter winds and marauding whites, I yell into the expanse; the sound bounces against the wrinkled walls and then falls away. Down below is a ranch of hay and alfalfa and cattle, where Bob Billingsley has been trying to scratch a living from the floor of the old Columbia River channel since 1928. He is the padrone of the Moses Coulee, a rancher of high humor and wind-buffed cheeks, eighty-five years old on the afternoon that I drop into his coulee. Bob’s father homesteaded in scrubland above the Columbia in 1908, went bust, took a series of odd jobs, and then settled on a patch of bottom land in this coulee with his family. Bob knew that a geological tug-of-war had been waged in this prehistoric ditch. He found bones from the joint of an elephant, including a ball joint as big as a watermelon. He found petrified wood and Indian arrowheads. He drilled for a well in the middle of the coulee, four feet, ten, thirty, eighty, a hundred feet, and never reached clay. As far down as he could go, the soil was thick, nutrient-rich river sediment, a gift from the Pleistocene flood that carried bits and pieces of British Columbia, Montana, Idaho and Washington topsoil to this hidden coulee. His spring would only provide enough water for a hundred acres, so he figured out a way to back up the late winter floods and save the water for release over the summer. He hired Indians to work the fields with him, including a stepson of Chief Moses. They became fast friends, the Indian telling Billingsley about the horse races they used to have in the coulee and Billingsley giving him tips on how to deal with the government.

  The coulee is lifeless in the low end where it meets the Columbia—a deep, wide gorge that looks like a Martian roadside park. At the high end is the Billingsley ranch, alive with galloping horses and orchards and cattle and grandkids.

  Every day, Billingsley rises with the sun, puts a pinch of tobacco in his cheek, and works outside till the lunch hour. Then he kicks back, plays with his grandkids, helps his wife, Helen. Reads. Life is good in the Moses Coulee. He has a satellite dish out back which brings him 127 channels of television; when that bores him, he goes to his library of memories. He remembers the Woody Guthrie anthems to the Columbia—the socialist folksinger wrote twenty-six songs in twenty-six days of work for the Bonneville Power Administration—and all the Dust Bowl farmers and teachers and laborers who came to the desert of Central Washington because land was nearly free and water was just as cheap. “Most of these guys, they lasted until their sock ran dry,” says Billingsley. For twenty-five years he went without power, and then came the Grand Coulee Dam.

  “The farmer deserved electricity just the same as everybody else,” he says. “What the Grand Coulee did was to make us no longer second-class citizens.”

  Deep inside the bowels of the dam, the walls shake and glass rattles. The noise is not from generators; they hum along in relatively quiet fashion, their turbines capable of producing 6.4 million kilowatts of power—enough juice to run most of New York City. The sound comes from the pumping action, water racing through pipes twelve feet in diameter, going three hundred feet uphill through bedrock to the formerly dry channel of the Grand Coulee. You stand inside this fortress and realize that nothing since that Ice Age flood has so reshaped the land; the Grand Coulee is the height of man’s attempt to play God. I’m nearly six hundred river miles from the Pacific, inside one of the manmade wonders of the world. Yet, I feel a vague uneasiness. The most extensive hydroelectric power system ever built is on the upper part of this river. Water from the dams painted the desert green, lit up the inside of Indian shacks on the Columbia Plateau and dirt-farmer cabins in the Okanogan. With runoff under control, the dams gave a degree of assurance that the floods of spring would no longer wipe whole towns off the map. But this triumph of technology marked a surrender for the laws of the earth.

  Conceived in a populist flurry as the largest of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the Grand Coulee took eight years to build and provided a retort to a long-ago speech of Daniel Webster, who had said, “What do we want of this vast, worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or these great mountain ranges?” The idea for the dam was born in the coffee-table chit-chat of a country lawyer, Billy Clapp, and a young prospector, Paul Donaldson, who had just returned from a luckl
ess reconnaissance in the dry coulee. Looking for news in the summer of 1918, a reporter from the Wenatchee World promoted their bull-session with an eight-column headline across the top of the front page, a description of the unharnessed power of the Columbia: TWO MILLION WILD HORSES. Following Roosevelt’s election in 1932, the project gained favor as The People’s Dam, an engine for agriculture and cheap power. In Murray Morgan’s book, The Dam, he remembers what a fellow student at the University of Washington had told him when Grand Coulee was under construction. “If our generation has anything good to offer history, it’s that dam. It’s going to be our working pyramid.”

  Here on the Columbia Plateau, with the advent of the biggest public-works project ever undertaken, Roosevelt thought he had found the Dust Bowl solution. A half-million farmers would live near the lonely coulees within a generation’s time, he predicted. With the Columbia set to provide half as much electricity as was generated by the rest of the country, industrial leaders made plans to bring manufacturing plants to its banks. But Roosevelt said he wanted farmers, not factories; he worried that smokestacks would sprout from the nutrients of cheap electricity, making the West too much like the East.

  “There are many sections of the country where land has run out or been put to the wrong kind of use,” he said during a trip to Grand Coulee in 1934. “Out here you have not just space, you have space that can be used by human beings—a wonderful land—a land of opportunity.”

  In scale and audacity, the dam was astonishing; engineers were going to anchor a mile-long wall of concrete in bedrock at the bottom of a steep canyon in the Columbia. They would excavate 45 million cubic yards of dirt and rock, and pour 24 million tons of concrete. Among the few dams in the Northwest not built by the Corps of Engineers, the Grand Coulee was the work of the Bureau of Reclamation. When completed, it was a mile across at the top, forty-six stories high, and heralded as the biggest thing ever built by man. The dam backed up the river for 151 miles, creating a lake with 600 miles of shoreline.

  At the dam’s dedication in 1941, Roosevelt said Grand Coulee would open the world to people who had been beat up by the elements, abused by the rich and plagued by poor luck. But a few months after it opened, Grand Coulee became the instrument of war. Suddenly, the country needed to build sixty thousand planes a year, made of aluminum, smelted by power from Columbia River water, and it needed to build ships—big ones—from the same power source. Near the end of the war, America needed to build an atomic bomb, whose plutonium was manufactured on the banks of the Columbia. Power from the Grand Coulee was used to break uranium into radioactive subelements to produce that plutonium. By war’s end, only a handful of farms were drawing water from the Columbia’s greatest dam. True, toasters in desert homes were warming bread with Grand Coulee juice, and Washington had the cheapest electrical rates of any state in the country, but most of that power for the people was being used by Reynolds Aluminum in Longview and Alcoa in Vancouver and Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane and Tacoma.

  The Dust Bowl solution, the last gasp of agrarian idealism, had brought Industrial Age factories to the Northwest. Roosevelt didn’t fully anticipate the vast shift from country to city that was underway. A hundred years ago, forty-three percent of all Americans lived on farms; today, less than four percent do. In 1939, there was not a single aluminum plant in the Northwest; ten years later nearly half of all the nation’s aluminum was produced in an area served by two Columbia River dams. In 1935 there were eighty-five thousand individual farms in the state of Washington; thirty years later, there were only forty thousand. Many of the refugees from the fallow land of the interior ended up as factory hands.

  Upstream, the Grand Coulee raised the river level more than three hundred feet, forcing the evacuation of three thousand people. Ten towns were buried by water. They were replaced by places with such names as Electric City and Elmore, futuristic villages that now look as dated as 1950s sci-fi films. The worst damage from the dam was to the upper Columbia River salmon. King salmon are among the most durable creatures of nature, strong-willed and singleminded when the spawning urge sends them upriver, but no fish can scale a five-hundred-foot-high dam. More than a thousand miles of spawning grounds were lost forever.

  I’m looking for someone who can tell me what the upper Columbia used to be like before the Grand Coulee Dam changed the personality of this place where the desert gives way to gentle mountains and forests of tall ponderosa pine. Everybody says talk to Martin Louie. So I follow a road northeast of the dam until it dead-ends among rusted cars clustered in the “new” community of Inchelium. The old one is under water. I’m directed to the small, tattered trailer of Martin Louie. When I enter at midday, I find a tiny man lying on a cot, covered with flies. He wakes, lights a cigarette, and looks around as if he’s lost. He has no teeth, and his lungs can barely hold a breath. He lives in squalor, an outhouse-size home in the dust along the banks of Roosevelt Lake, the 151-mile reservoir that is the upper end of the Columbia in Washington.

  Louie can’t remember how old he is; and that may be because he nips from a bottle more often than he should and is never without a cigarette. His dark face contrasts with the snow-white hair atop his head, a crew cut. Back issues of True Detective are piled up near his cot. On the wall is a brown picture of Inchelium before the flood. I introduce myself. Louie stares at me for a few minutes, silent.

  “You’re not another one of those Mormons?” he says at last. “ ’Cause if you are, you can leave right now.”

  “No, no, I’m not a missionary.”

  “What d’you want, then?”

  “I want to know what it was like.”

  “You can’t know.”

  Louie is a member of the Lakes Band of Indians, a small tribe which lived near the present Canadian border. In the summer and fall they pulled salmon from Kettle Falls, a Columbia River fishery second only to The Dalles in bounty. Twice in the last century, the Lakes people were decimated by smallpox. When Louie was born, sometime around the dawn of the twentieth century, they were recovering somewhat. They still had Kettle Falls, and as long as the water tumbled down those cliffs, the salmon would be easy to catch. Louie attended two schools, he says: white school and Indian. At white school, he learned about “the only two books you haven’t got a chance against: the Bible and the law book.” At Indian school, a classroom without walls, he learned about the land.

  “The white creator lives up there. The Indian creator lives all around. You see the Indian creator every day, every night. You see him in the day, in the sun, and at night, in his brother the moon. But most of all you see him in that water. That river. It’s never emptied out yet. It controls all life. It controls everything. The Indians call that Father.”

  Until the dam went up, Louie lived the life his ancestors had lived, a gentle routine on the upper Columbia. When the reservations were set up, the Indians were promised access to their salmon runs forever in a treaty backed by one of the two books which Louie is afraid of. At the dedication of the Grand Coulee Dam, much was made of the fact that the first electricity to go out was used to power the new washing machine of an Indian woman who lived not far from Louie. But she didn’t need a washing machine as much as she needed a free river. When the dam went up, the fish stopped returning, and Louie lost his livelihood and his independence. When the Columbia became Lake Roosevelt, he was a man who didn’t know his way around. He became a seasonal worker, a serf for somebody else. Now, in the last years of life, he is drowning in bitterness.

  “When I want salmon now, you know what I have to do? I have to travel up to the Fraser River to buy it. And—here.…” He eases himself up, bites on the cigarette. “… I’ll show you what I can buy for twenty dollars.” He opens the door of a small refrigerator, the outside paint chipped away, and pulls out a small, heavily wrapped packet. He strips away the layers until he comes to a few pieces of smoked salmon. “This.”

  Kettle Falls, the salmon mother lode south of the Canadian border not far f
rom Louie’s home, is just another section of smooth water now. It stirs no sense of awe or aesthetic impulse unless the imagination goes to work. The Columbia used to fall thirty-three feet in less than half a mile here. I find an odd-looking rock on a bluff above the graveyard of the falls. It’s a boulder full of slash marks, apparently a whetstone used by generations of Indians to sharpen their spear points. I close my eyes and imagine healthy men pulling salmon from the falls. I open my eyes and see the glass of a reservoir and the dying face of Martin Louie. For ten thousand years or more, people lived with the wind-tossed pines and turbulent river and never went without. When the river was dammed, it brought prosperity to one band of humans while forcing another to go hungry. I’ve seen the grapes and apples and wheat that grow in the new desert, but I will never experience Celilo or Kettle falls. I paid for a year’s worth of college tuition by working the caldrons of the Kaiser Aluminum plant one summer, a factory powered by cheap hydroelectric energy, but my education about the once-free Columbia must come secondhand, from the soured memories of people like Martin Louie.

  Standing above the Columbia today, the river that carries water from all parts of the Pacific Northwest to the ocean, uniting deserts and glaciers, forests and farmland, cities and sage country, I’m troubled by this paradox. Winthrop thought the land here would change a man, not the other way around; still, at the ebb of the twentieth century, we have yet to prove him entirely wrong.