Big Dreams Read online

  An hour later, we dropped toward some spring-green fields that were strewn with yellow mustard flowers and sloped toward the sparkling scallop of Humboldt Bay. The earth was keenly alive after the rain, refreshed and replenished and vibrant with energy.

  At the airport in Eureka, I claimed a rental car and drove straight to Brookings, the first town on the Oregon side, where I checked into a motel and provoked a small commotion. The old man behind the motel desk eyed me with suspicion, as though he were making a mental inventory of my person to describe me to the police. I couldn’t figure out why, but then I caught him staring at my license plate—at the blue letters on a white background that spelled California.

  The old man was suffering from a peculiar anxiety that I’d witnessed before in Oregonians. Those afflicted with it were nervous about the empire to their south, worried about the nearness of sushi and acupuncture, and downright phobic about the prospect that Californians might someday take over their state and ban the use of chain saws and the wearing of flannel shirts.

  Brookings was a fishing town that was turning into a retirement colony. Perkiness was rampant in the streets as the elderly swapped bowling scores and funny anecdotes from sermons. At a central grocery store, they stocked up on generic goods in feedlot sacks, fifty pounds of dog kibble or oat bran, and I began to wonder if the millennium might be even closer than I imagined.

  ON THE CHETCO RIVER IN BROOKINGS, with a light fog burning off and a smell of sun-warmed bay leaves rising, I stood knee-deep in the stream casting flies to invisible steelhead, the big, sea-run rainbow trout that return to their natal waters to spawn. The stream had a flat, neutral color from the rocks and pebbles lining its bed, and I looked across it to a ridge where some silvery-green Douglas firs arched toward the sky.

  No fish, the meditative motion of casting, the sun roaring in my bones. Happiness, for a moment.

  Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’ll cross the border.

  Daydreaming, I imagined Edwin Bryant and his party getting ready to leave for California. I could see his ox team pawing the ground and sending clouds of breath into the air, could see Bryant tightening the cinches and wondering if he were about to make a foolish mistake or a glorious one.

  A contingent of his fellow Masons gave him a send-off. Grandmaster Reese, their potentate, delivered a joking speech that consigned him to the grave or to perpetual exile. Bryant found it “rather overstrained in pathos” and much preferred an original hymn that the Masons and their wives sang with great vigor to the tune of “Old Rosin the Beau.” Prayers were offered, and a benediction.

  Then Bryant mounted his horse in the full bloom of spring. He must have felt the adrenaline racing through him. He must have felt his heart beating for fair as he set out to address the continent in its ceaseless variety. On horseback he rode away from the Midwest toward the Rocky Mountains, scribbling notes on scraps of paper and reducing the broad beauty of the moment to electric syllables, a poetry of the actual:

  Remarkable Butte

  Terrific Storm

  A Good Supper

  Cold Nights

  Human Skull

  Desert Plain.

  PART TWO

  FAR NORTH

  Trees down

  Creeks choked, trout killed, roads

  —Gary Snyder, “Logging”

  My back has become like a mountain ridge, so thin, so hungry

  —Karok coyote saga

  CHAPTER 2

  COMING INTO CALIFORNIA, I passed a sign that welcomed visitors to the state while issuing no warning of its perils, and then an agricultural inspection station where uniformed agents were on the lookout for criminal bugs, the medflies and the gypsy moths trying to hitch a free ride to paradise on an Oregon apple or a Washington pear. Less than a mile away, I saw another sign that laid out some particulars.

  Smith River 6

  199 16

  Crescent City 19

  The landscape hadn’t changed much since Brookings. To the west, in fenced pastures along the ocean, herds of dairy cattle were grazing. Blackbirds and starlings fluttered about them in nervous arcs. There were yellow acacias in farmhouse yards, clapboard barns covered with a yellowish moss, and some wilted plumes of pampas grass that had once been ornamental but now seemed merely tired.

  To the east, some fields planted with Easter lily bulbs pressed up against hills that were studded with a diversity of trees—tan oaks and red alders, chinquapins, incense cedars, and a tall stand of Douglas firs that gave way at last, on the hilltop, to ponderosas and fleecy-needled digger pines. Almost the entire crop of Easter lilies in the United States came from the Brookings-Smith River area, about $4 million worth of flowers annually.

  Pelican Beach was a strip of sand on a quiet inlet a mile or two down the road. The Knottical Inn, a curious building on a bluff above it, caught my eye. It had the merry nonchalance of a folk-art piece. The entrance was festooned with multicolored fishing floats and almost blocked by old wooden barrels. A battered dinghy sat landlocked near the front door. Dogs barked with menace when I pulled into the parking lot, but once I got by them, I was in a beautifully situated restaurant that offered grand views of the limitless Pacific, a vivid aquamarine.

  At a small redwood bar, an elderly couple were having a quiet cocktail before dinner. The restaurant’s cook sat on a stool next to them, taking a break before the evening crunch. He had robust, gray sideburns that flowed in cottony columns from under his toque. He was watching Coal Miner’s Daughter on the bar’s TV and vetting it for any possible deviance from his notion of reality.

  “That’s the original Grand Ole Opry, all right,” he said approvingly when Sissy Spacek, as Loretta Lynn, began to sing. He finished up his coffee and retired to the kitchen, leaving the rest of us in charge of the facts.

  From the bartender, an open-faced, thirtyish woman, I ordered a beer. Her name, I discovered, was Penny Knott. Her family owned the restaurant—hence, The Knottical—and everybody pitched in to run it. Penny greeted the customers, her brothers worked as waiters, and her mother was the general overseer, responsible for the decor and making no apologies about it.

  The Knotts had come to California from Colorado in 1964, so that Penny’s father, a carpenter, could take a job helping to rebuild the town of Klamath after the Klamath River had destroyed it in a major flood. Her parents had never been especially comfortable in the freewheeling California atmosphere, Penny said. They thought the state was “debauched.” She wasn’t dissatisfied herself, she went on—just feeling restless and in need of something new, a change of some kind. She was considering a move to Phoenix or Tucson.

  I asked Penny what it was like to straddle a border between states, and she told me that she noticed a difference in her customers from either side.

  “The people from California are more graceful, and they tip better,” she explained. “Oregonians are much more careful. They’re legalistic—you know what I mean? They always want to be sure they’re getting full value for their dollar.”

  Apparently, we’d hit on a controversial topic around Pelican Bay because when Dusty, the cook, and his sous-chef overheard us through the open kitchen door, they played their own variations on the theme until Dusty felt compelled to emerge again to offer a good-natured defense of Oregon and Oregonians. He let it be known that he was a native Californian, Sacramento-born, but that he would never live there again, not even if hell froze over.

  “What do you pay for your car’s license fee?” he inquired.

  I could sense a trap being set. The gears in the cook’s finely tuned brain were spinning. “A lot,” I answered.

  Dusty nodded vigorously and almost sent his toque flying. “In Oregon,” he said, “we pay almost nothing.” He described a house he was renting, a lovely, tranquil, Oregonian house that he could never have afforded on the other side of the great divide.

  “Doesn’t Oregon bore you sometimes?” I asked, remembering all those chain saws and flannel shirts.

&
nbsp; The cook smirked and laid down his trump card. “You can always drive to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, putting an abrupt end to the debate.

  In the fading evening light, customers were filtering into The Knottical and engaging in the eternal struggle for the prize tables by the windows. Penny would seat them and then return to talk some more. Her current restlessness had to do with searching for a vision of her future, she said. She had recently attended a meeting at a grange hall nearby, where Billy Mills, the famous Olympian who was half Sioux, had given a speech about how Indians of all tribes lacked representation in Congress and needed to band together. The speech had inspired her to do some thinking.

  It dawned on me that the Far North was still Indian country in California, and that Penny might have some Indian blood herself.

  “Are you part Indian?” I asked, feeling foolish as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

  She looked at me as if I ought to know better, pinching an arm and glancing quizzically at a leg. I was getting an object lesson, the first of many.

  “It’s not so simple, eh?” Penny said, with a knowing smile.

  CIRRUS CLOUDS AND A SMOKE-HUNG SKY. A ship appeared on the horizon, an ocean liner plunked down by the highway. The Krupps had built it in Germany years ago as a yacht for a New York millionaire, who had christened it Caritas.

  When the navy requisitioned the ship in the 1940s, it became the U.S.S. Garnet, but the Garnet fell into private hands after the war, and tugboats towed it from Oakland to the mouth of Smith River. Twelve tractors dragged it from there to its present position, where its job was to lure tourists like me to Ship Ashore Resort.

  After a late supper in the dining room, I took a stroll along the river. The tide was low, revealing mud flats and shell debris. A great blue heron stood on its long, spindly legs by the timbers of a rotting pier, waiting patiently for its evening meal. Surfbirds, black-and-white, waddled over rocks that little breakers kept washing clean.

  In a region that had once boiled and spilled over with water, the Smith was thse last big, free-flowing stream—the last anywhere in California, really. On the North Coast, the Klamath, Eel, Trinity, Mad, Van Duzen, and Russian rivers had all been dammed for flood control, to supply irrigation to farmers, or to fuel suburban development.

  Like the U.S.S. Garnet, the Smith belonged in a museum. It showed how bountiful the coastal rivers used to be. It still supported large runs of spawning salmon and steelhead, and they were often of legendary size, with a few thick-bellied chinook weighing in at almost sixty pounds each year. Because the stream had no impoundments, it cleared quickly after a winter storm, but its uniqueness was also its curse. If the fish were thick, so were the fishermen, jammed in elbow to elbow.

  Jedediah Smith, fur trader and mountain man, had lent his name to the river. In prints and sketches, he was always dressed in fringed buckskins, but he was actually born in New York and didn’t see the other side of the Mississippi until, in his early twenties, he signed on as a hunter with General William H. Ashley of Saint Louis, who advertised in newspapers for “enterprising young men.”

  In 1828, while on a beaver trapping expedition, Smith passed along the North Coast on his way to Oregon, eager to be gone from California. The Mexican authorities had created difficulties for him since his arrival, pestering him for detailed papers and even for a passport bearing the seal of Mexico, so he was bound for the relatively unpoliced Willamette Valley, where he could set his traps without interference.

  Smith had great skill as a mapmaker. On the maps that he drew of the area, he labeled a stream that emptied into the ocean at Requa as the “Smith River,” but subsequent explorers corrected him. That stream had its headwaters in Oregon and was already known as the Klamath River, so “Smith River” got bounced from one place to another by cartographers until it stuck to the next river to the north, where it remained.

  Word of the change never reached Jed Smith. Some Umpqua Indians ambushed his party in Oregon and killed most of his men, and he died himself three years later in a battle with some Comanches on the Santa Fe Trail. His associates in Saint Louis mourned his loss and honored him with a hyperbolic eulogy in the Illinois Monthly Magazine.

  “And though he fell under the spears of savages,” it said, “and his body has glutted the prairie wolf, and none can tell where his bones are bleaching, he must not be forgotten.”

  An evening mist, cool and damp, settled onto my skin. The mist, the smoky sky, the spiraling trees, the spooky quiet—they were a signature of the Far North, its essential elements. While gulls whirled and piped, I watched a blood-red sun sink into the ocean and saw two dusky shapes at the river’s edge, a teenage girl with a ponytail and a young man who was being enterprising.

  “You’re going to be something when you grow up,” he told her in a syrupy voice.

  “I already am grown up,” she said.

  “No, you’re not. You’re already just pretty.”

  She could have been tiptoeing on a log. I imagined all the girls on all the beaches in California who were trying to keep their balance as the sun went down.

  SMITH RIVER TOWN WAS A SPECK in the enormous greenery of the Far North, a relic of the nineteenth century. Two roads converged at the town’s center before running by some shops and winding past dilapidated migrant shacks into open country. The buildings on Fred Haight Drive, the main street, were old and shabby and in need of paint. They looked much as they must have when settlers had hammered together Smith River in the 1850s, chopping down ferns that were sometimes knotted and tangled to a height of ten feet.

  Nothing much was happening on the morning I stopped to visit. I found a transients’ hotel, a video store, and, unbelievably, a tanning parlor that was defunct and shuttered, its radiant appliances collecting dust. Who would ever pay for a tan in Smith River? I wondered. Farmers got brown by working outdoors in the fields. The parlor was like a seed that had blown up from Beverly Hills and had failed to germinate, withering and dying in alien soil.

  Dust had collected elsewhere in town, as well. Smith River seemed to be in the process of dismantling itself. At Hollie’s Market, fixtures were ripped from the walls, and the shelves were toppled. Goods of every kind were tossed randomly into shopping carts, aspirin bottles mingling with candybars and bottles of Pepto-Bismol.

  Mrs. Hollie, a short, dark-haired woman, was counting greeting cards at a check-out stand, scratching numbers on a brown paper bag. I bought a bag of peanuts, her only customer.

  “Are you about to open or about to close?” I asked.

  “We’re closing,” she said. “It’s been twenty-five years!”

  “So you’ve had enough?”

  “Enough? Why, yes!”

  Mr. Hollie joined us from the rear of the market. He wore a John Deere tractor cap and had a friendly, ruddy, country face. In his manner, I saw another old-fashioned thing, a gentlemanly urge to be around while a stranger was talking with his wife. We chatted about blameless subjects, about how the lily bulb growers were pushing out the last dairy farms and how 120 inches of rain might fall in Smith River during a wet winter.

  “Will you be moving on?” I wanted to know.

  Mrs. Hollie was a native of the town. She wouldn’t consider leaving. “It’s too late to start over in a new place,” she said.

  Mr. Hollie laughed and said, “We’d be getting a pretty late start.”

  Some Indian men were lounging on the front steps of an old house not far from the market. They fell silent and turned to stare when I drove by. They did the same thing to other cars, but if an Indian driver passed, usually in a scruffy pickup or an antique V-8 sedan, they would raise their arms to wave. It was as if an Indian driver afforded them some relief from an ongoing monotony that only they could feel. They were acknowledging the presence of an Indian world that was ordinarily concealed within the white one.

  The men were probably from the Tolowa tribe, I thought. Once, the Tolowa had dominated the land around Smith River, cont
rolling a territory that stretched from Crescent City, just to the south, all the way to the Rogue River in Oregon. They were efficient hunter-gatherers and had feasted on the rich resources of the North Coast—the game, the berries, the fruit, and the waterfowl.

  In 1872, Stephen Powers, a reporter with a gift for ethnography, had set down his impressions of the tribe for the Overland Monthly, then the premiere journal in the state. The Tolowa, Powers wrote, were tall, haughty, aggressive, bold, and altogether forceful. They were in the habit of marching down to Requa, a Yurok village, rounding up a few captives, and holding them for ransom. They liked gambling and card games and had a superstitious reverence for the dead, never speaking their names, even by category, as in “father” or “mother,” so as not to insult them.

  For the Tolowa, Powers said, heaven was somewhere behind the sun. This belief was a natural outgrowth of their coastal climate, he maintained, since they had to suffer through “chilling, dank, leaden fogs” all summer and dreamed of bathing in “warm, soft rays” through eternity.

  That afternoon, I took a back road out of Smith River, and it led me by chance to a neatly kept Indian cemetery enclosed by a white picket fence. Little ovals of rust had bled into the wood from aging nails, and the gates were held fast with twine.

  For some minutes, I stood at a gate deciding whether or not to go in, but then I did and walked carefully among the headstones and the gravestones and read the chiseled inscriptions. I looked out at the ocean, so near, and at Prince Island, an uninhabited rock where seabirds were flocking.

  Most of the Indians buried in the cemetery had not lived very long, but I came across some exceptions, such as Joe Seymour, who’d lived to be a hundred. A vase of plastic flowers on Seymour’s grave had toppled over, so I set it right. The only sound I could hear was the crying of the seabirds.