Read Online The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan - Free Book Online
Book: The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan
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Authors: Timothy Egan
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twenty-one shots from the cannon of his ship. The next year Spain tried to build a settlement at Neah Bay, in the extreme northwest corner of the peninsula, heart of Makah Indian country. They purchased twenty slaves for a price of thirty-three sheets of copper, then built a fort and ten log cabins. New Spain in the Pacific Northwest lasted all of four months—the four driest months of the year, at that. Even during the summer, what chased the whites away was the drip, drip, drip.
The Pacific shore here looks about the same now as it did to the first, unfortunate European visitors; a sixty-one-mile stretch of beach, from south of the Hoh to just below the northwest tip of the state, is the longest wilderness coast in continental America. Winter storms are legendary. During one such convulsion, the surf threw a 135-pound rock more than a hundred feet through the air and into the wall of a lighthouse. Wind-shaped, spare-limbed Sitka spruce hold to sand at the vegetation line, the visual embodiment of Japanese haiku. Sea stacks, with curled evergreens sprouting from their rock sides like hair growing from the ears of a hermit, are planted offshore, the crumbs of a mountain range that used to be underwater. Marine fossils have been found atop the highest summits of the Olympics, which are young—formed just 30 million years ago—and still growing. Entirely roadless, without any hint of man, the edge of the continent is thick with life: one cubic foot of tidepool can support more than four thousand living things. The nine coastal tribes that lived on the peninsula were pudgy from clams and crab and salmon and whale blubber. The first Europeans to visit nearly starved to death.
After the Spanish settlement collapsed, no whites set foot near the rain forest for another sixteen years, till 1808, when a boatful of Russians went off course in a storm and was shipwrecked at the mouth of the Hoh, the same place where the British had ended up as a dining delicacy. Thestranded Russians, lucky enough to have made it onshore, were chased up and down the Hoh, finally caught, and held until they were ransomed two years later. The only European who seems to have had a pleasant experience was one who stayed offshore, Captain John Meares, the fur trader who had missed the mouth of the Columbia and left the name Cape Disappointment. Sitting in his ship off the rugged coast at sunset on a warm summer night in 1788, Meares took pen to hand and named the highest peak, a pink-hued glacial mass just under eight thousand feet. He wrote: “If that not be the home wherein dwell the Gods, it is beautiful enough to be, and I therefore call it Mount Olympus.”
So the area remained, ice-draped on top, rain-smothered in the valleys, unsettled and unmapped, the home of the gods and some contented salmon-eaters on the coast. A pandering attempt was made in 1849 to call the mountains the Presidents Range, and to rename Olympus as Mount Van Buren, a stillborn idea. When Winthrop canoed off the eastern shore of the peninsula in his summer of 1853, whites had yet to try transplanting New England near the rain forest. Winthrop looked at the mountains as a cushion for the soul, a respite. Cannibals? Darkness? No, of course not, he said—the Olympics are a masterpiece of nature’s art. His view was an oddball one. Nature, at least in the West, was treated like a disease awaiting the cure that had yet to cross the Rockies. Gliding down Puget Sound in a canoe, Winthrop turned his gaze to the west and found instant comfort.
“The noble group of the Olympian Mountains became visible—a grand family of vigorous growth, worthy of more perfect knowledge,” he wrote. “On the highest pinnacles of this sierra, glimmers of perpetual snow in sheltered dells and crevices gave me pleasant, chilly thought in that hot August day.” Then he added, “The calming influence of these azure, luminous peaks, their blue slashed with silver, was transcendent.”
The idea that
The Pacific shore here looks about the same now as it did to the first, unfortunate European visitors; a sixty-one-mile stretch of beach, from south of the Hoh to just below the northwest tip of the state, is the longest wilderness coast in continental America. Winter storms are legendary. During one such convulsion, the surf threw a 135-pound rock more than a hundred feet through the air and into the wall of a lighthouse. Wind-shaped, spare-limbed Sitka spruce hold to sand at the vegetation line, the visual embodiment of Japanese haiku. Sea stacks, with curled evergreens sprouting from their rock sides like hair growing from the ears of a hermit, are planted offshore, the crumbs of a mountain range that used to be underwater. Marine fossils have been found atop the highest summits of the Olympics, which are young—formed just 30 million years ago—and still growing. Entirely roadless, without any hint of man, the edge of the continent is thick with life: one cubic foot of tidepool can support more than four thousand living things. The nine coastal tribes that lived on the peninsula were pudgy from clams and crab and salmon and whale blubber. The first Europeans to visit nearly starved to death.
After the Spanish settlement collapsed, no whites set foot near the rain forest for another sixteen years, till 1808, when a boatful of Russians went off course in a storm and was shipwrecked at the mouth of the Hoh, the same place where the British had ended up as a dining delicacy. Thestranded Russians, lucky enough to have made it onshore, were chased up and down the Hoh, finally caught, and held until they were ransomed two years later. The only European who seems to have had a pleasant experience was one who stayed offshore, Captain John Meares, the fur trader who had missed the mouth of the Columbia and left the name Cape Disappointment. Sitting in his ship off the rugged coast at sunset on a warm summer night in 1788, Meares took pen to hand and named the highest peak, a pink-hued glacial mass just under eight thousand feet. He wrote: “If that not be the home wherein dwell the Gods, it is beautiful enough to be, and I therefore call it Mount Olympus.”
So the area remained, ice-draped on top, rain-smothered in the valleys, unsettled and unmapped, the home of the gods and some contented salmon-eaters on the coast. A pandering attempt was made in 1849 to call the mountains the Presidents Range, and to rename Olympus as Mount Van Buren, a stillborn idea. When Winthrop canoed off the eastern shore of the peninsula in his summer of 1853, whites had yet to try transplanting New England near the rain forest. Winthrop looked at the mountains as a cushion for the soul, a respite. Cannibals? Darkness? No, of course not, he said—the Olympics are a masterpiece of nature’s art. His view was an oddball one. Nature, at least in the West, was treated like a disease awaiting the cure that had yet to cross the Rockies. Gliding down Puget Sound in a canoe, Winthrop turned his gaze to the west and found instant comfort.
“The noble group of the Olympian Mountains became visible—a grand family of vigorous growth, worthy of more perfect knowledge,” he wrote. “On the highest pinnacles of this sierra, glimmers of perpetual snow in sheltered dells and crevices gave me pleasant, chilly thought in that hot August day.” Then he added, “The calming influence of these azure, luminous peaks, their blue slashed with silver, was transcendent.”
The idea that
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