Big Dreams Read online

  The Klamath River was no less imposing. It carried more water than any other river in California, except for the Sacramento. It was big, wide, and deep, the color of coffee mixed with cream.

  From an overlook in Requa, the ancient Yurok village, I watched it dumping tons of mud and silt into the ocean. Sea lions were swimming in the murky wavelets at its mouth, swatting at salmon and steelhead. They held fish between their teeth and barked like mutts. Cormorants were perched on the rocks around them with their wings spread, as still as totems.

  No fishing boats were in sight, even though the ocean was as flat as the surface of a skillet.

  Trees and water, water and trees: that was the mantra to be chanted on the North Coast. There were ghosts in the mountains, too, just as in Crescent City, the spirit lives of old Klamath town hovering above the floodplain by the river, where the water had swelled in raging tides to sweep away houses, buildings, and automobiles, all the structures and interdependencies of three hundred and fifty people, repeating a historical cycle.

  A new Klamath town, the one that Knott the carpenter had helped to build, was on the other side of Highway 101, far from danger. At the town gate, a salmon carved from wood was suspended in a heart. Two stone bears prowled the ramparts of a bridge, and a little tombstone peeked out of the long grass by the main road, inscribed thusly, Bigfoot, R.I.P.

  Nothing seemed to be moving in Klamath, nothing but the river. William Brewer had observed a similar emptiness in 1863. The gold-mining fever was over, he said, but some forty-niners had switched to mining copper up Del Norte way. Brewer found them lodging fecklessly around potbellied stoves in filthy barrooms, where they played cards and railed at each other all night. Unable to sleep, he checked into a tidy Dutch tavern, but his stay was spoiled again, this time by a drunken miner who was determined to enlighten him on the subject of geology.

  Along the river, Brewer saw evidence of flooding. He saw devastation. Some miles inland from the coast, he came to the town of Hamburg, where only two years before, there had been three hotels, three stores, two billiard emporiums, and many miners’ cabins. Now all were gone.

  The placers were worked out, the cabins became deserted, and the floods of two years ago finished its [the town’s] history by carrying off all the houses, or nearly all.… A camp of Klamath Indians on the river bank is the only population at present! Their faces were daubed with paint, their huts were squalid.… In contrast with this was a sadder sight—a cluster of graves of the miners who had died.… Boards had once been set up at their graves, but most had rotted off and fallen—the rest will soon follow.

  At the Beehive Cafe in Klamath, I paused for a cup of coffee. It was almost noon, but again, as at Hollie’s Market, I was the only customer. The only waitress, a welcoming woman with gray hair, seemed glad for the company and was eager to exchange a bit of gossip.

  The Beehive used to hum and buzz with loggers from dawn until suppertime, she told me, but not anymore. The last mill had shut down a while ago, and its rusted, scrappy remains lay behind the local Mobil station. The logging around Klamath was done by gypos now, small companies with low overheads. The big timber firms had cut too much too quickly, the waitress believed, snatching what they could and never thinking about the future. Did I know that it took sixty years for a redwood to reach a harvestable height?

  “They were piggish,” she said.

  I laughed and said, “Like the rest of us,” sliding some coins under my saucer.

  Upstream from Klamath town, the river wound through a steep canyon. Deadfall, stumps, and the scars of clear-cuts interrupted the smooth, green flow of the mountains. Across the water, on the opposite bank, the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation began. Junker cars were distributed among the trees, hauled in from body shops and accident sites. The road ended in Klamath Glen, a hamlet of trailers, drift boats, and rental cabins for visiting anglers. Two young loggers were leaning against a truck and handing a pint of whiskey back and forth.

  “Too muddy even for the gypos to be out,” one of them shouted to me when I waved. He seemed far away from the world, out of touch with it, like a pebble cast at the moon.

  It started raining again. An Indian family stood fishing by the river, four kids and a mom and a pop, all oblivious of the weather, as if they’d been bred to the damp. They let the drops roll off them, casting and reeling in their lures. The rain drummed against my windshield and spattered on the ground. I heard a symphony of liquid sounds around me—the river, yes, but some creeks, too, and the water dripping from leaves and branches into rills, and the rills running into puddles, and the puddles seeping into the secret well-springs of the Klamath, replenishing its subterranean reserves.

  AT THE BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS (BIA) IN KLAMATH, I met an agent, Norman McLemore, who had come down from Fairbanks, Alaska, to take over the office just a month before. Fairbanks was in the grip of a big freeze when McLemore had left, with temperatures to seventy-below, so a new post in California had seemed like a godsend. He had expected lots of sunshine, some good beaches, and lots of pretty blondes. That was how the state had always looked to him on TV.

  When McLemore got to Klamath, it was raining, and it had been raining a little ever since. He had visited the coastal beaches a few times, but the sun was weak there and the water was too cold for swimming. As for the blondes, they were nowhere to be found.

  “You have to go south for that,” he advised me. About California, he had become a wiser man.

  McLemore was half Navajo. He wore a silver bracelet, a flashy ring, and a belt buckle in turquoise and silver. He had grown up in Arizona, on the Navajo reservation around Window Rock, and had worked on it as a peace officer with the Navajo Division of Public Safety as a young man, but the job wasn’t leading him anywhere, so he got an urge to travel and joined his parents in Bethel, Alaska, where his father had a job with the BIA.

  He passed his first few months in Bethel trying to join the Alaska State Troopers. He scored a 94 on his exam and did well on all the agility tests, but he was never hired. Later, in Juneau, he tried again under an affirmative action program, and once more, in spite of doing well on his tests, he failed to be hired. He attributed it to prejudice. So, instead, he worked as an assistant to an Alaskan tribe and became involved in some disputes over land allotments, and after that he joined the BIA.

  The Klamath office of the BIA was small and cramped and a little difficult to find, tucked into a plain building near the police station. California had a Native American population of more than two hundred thousand, the largest in the nation, with about 130 tribes that spoke some twenty-four separate languages, but the bureau spent less money in the state than in any other of its administrative regions. I thought it must be due, at least in part, to the invisibility of Indians in most cities. Only in the Far North did a white Californian feel their presence so strongly.

  The lack of resources weighed on McLemore because he had a tricky, laborious situation to resolve. The Yurok tribe was at the center of it. They had shared the 93,000-acre Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation with the Hupa—the tribe’s name was spelled differently from the place’s name—for over a century. The two had always managed to coexist and had always done business, with the Hupa traditionally trading such inland food as acorns and fruit for the Yuroks’ canoes and fish.

  In the past few years, however, there had been some feuding and litigation between the tribes, and they were about to be partitioned by an Act of Congress. The Yuroks would get their own reservation, but anybody who wanted to live on it and partake of the benefits had to be certified as a Yurok Native American by the BIA, submitting a complicated application form. Yuroks who had some Hupa blood could apply to stay on the Hoopa Reservation. A Yurok, once certified, could also forsake his or her claim and accept a buy-out of fifteen thousand dollars.

  McLemore had received about seven thousand applications so far. He figured that he could dismiss about a quarter of them out of hand, but the rest demanded his attentio
n. He would not enjoy the task, either, because he was against any partitioning and suspected that it merely amounted to a strategy of divide-and-conquer. Partitioning diluted the power of Native Americans, he felt—it had done that to the Navajo and the Hopi. He believed that Indians ought to consolidate, but that they would need a unifying vision to lead them. There was no such vision at present.

  Above all, McLemore hoped to be fair in dealing with the Yurok. Indians had already suffered enough in California. Theirs was a history of brutality, violence, and murder that had genocidal implications.

  When Junípero Serra had established his first mission in what was then known as Alta California, in 1769, the Native American population had totaled about 350,000, but disease and armed attacks soon reduced it by half. During the Gold Rush, miners stole Indian land and reduced the population to about 50,000 through random slayings. In 1851–52, the federal government agreed to give California tribes some provisions, some cattle, and some tracts of land—about 7 million acres, or 7½ percent of the state—but the U.S. Senate, in a secret session and under pressure from business interests and the legislature in California, refused to ratify the necessary treaties.

  Congress did pass a law in 1860, though, that allowed for Indians to be held as “apprentices,” or chattel, and many of them were still in slavery long after the Emancipation Proclamation.

  About one-third of California’s tribes currently had no legal standing, said McLemore, and hence no access to federal benefits. He told me that the commerical fishing season would begin on the Klamath River in late May or early June. The Yurok would need their official IDs from the BIA by then. If they didn’t have them, they’d go ahead and fish, anyway—more trouble, not less.

  McLemore sighed. He had too much to do. He had to find a house to buy in town, but here again California had pitched him a curveball. There was a crazy real estate boom in and around Klamath, and sellers were demanding premium prices for dumps. A crummy trailer home on a straggly, weed-burdened lot back in Klamath Glen could cost upwards of fifty thousand bucks.

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Pelican Bay State Prison,” he answered. “Everybody thinks it’s going to make them rich.”

  McLemore shook his head. California, it was not to be believed.

  ON MY WAY TO THE HOOPA VALLEY RESERVATION, I ran into a problem of my own, several monstrous motor homes and trucks pulling trailers that were creeping along the pavement of Highway 101. You could practically hear the vertebrae cracking as necks craned for a view of some treasured aspect of Redwood National Park.

  California had given birth to these suburbs on wheels, of course. In the 1920s, Wally Byam, an advertising man in Los Angeles, started publishing a magazine that catered to the do-it-yourself craze that was sweeping the country, and he printed some plans for building a trailer in one issue. When readers wrote to complain that the design was faulty, he felt obliged to improve it and kept tinkering until he came up with something better.

  By 1936, Byam had a new business venture. That year, he introduced a sleek, silvery, riveted-aluminum trailer, the Clipper, that became the flagship of his Airstream Trailer Company. Because of its contours, which were based on aircraft principles, it glided along, said the old copywriter, “like a stream of air.”

  The Clipper had a tubular-steel dinette, its own water supply, electric lights, a chemical toilet, a galley, and an air-conditioning system that used dry ice. It slept four and carried a steep price tag of $1,200, but consumers were undeterred. The fledgling company couldn’t fill all its orders.

  Here was a purely American moment. In one fell swoop, Byam had tamed the thrill, the terror, and the sheer adventure of the open road, vanquishing it with backyard technology while simultaneously turning the last wild places in the state into potential venues for domestic sitcoms. Soon caravans of Airstreams were roaming the globe, mutating and spawning replicants, showing up for confabs in Uganda, at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, at Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, and at the Jami-i-Masjid mosque in Afghanistan, but Byam never realized his grandest dream of putting a circle of trailers around the Great Pyramid in Egypt.

  The back road into Hoopa Valley, Bald Hills Road, broke off in an easterly fork a few miles from Big Tree, a landmark redwood some three hundred feet tall. As soon as I turned off the main highway, the trailer people were left behind, and I was alone in the landscape, the only car around.

  The Bald Hills were a spring-green color, ripe with juice, but the outlying mountains were still capped with snow. The road turned rough and potholed in places, but I made it over Schoolhouse Peak and French Camp Ridge and dropped down toward Weitchpec, a town at the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity rivers, at the southern border of Yurok territory, where tension was in the air. Graffiti were sprayed on walls, bridge stanchions, and boulders: Yurok Power and Hoopa Stoners and Fuck the Police.

  At the Weitchpec store, a large display of handguns was arranged in a glass case, next to shelves crammed with liquor. The clerk behind the counter had a look of suspicion on her face, and she was short with me when I bought a soda.

  Around Klamath, there was talk about the tribal split. Most everyone seemed to think that the Yurok were getting the short end of the stick. One rumor had it that the Hupa were anxious to have the Yurok gone, so that they could strike a bargain with a timber company to harvest more trees from the virgin forests on their land. The rumor couldn’t be pinned down and proved, but many people subscribed to it, anyway.

  A road ran from Weitchpec through the pinched-in granite walls of the Trinity River canyon. Scarlet larkspur was blooming in the foothills. The coastal damp was gone, and the sun was very hot. In the town of Hoopa, poppies were strewn along the playing fields at the high school, home of the Hoopa Warriors, and at the edges of pastures. White butterflies were floating in clouds.

  The river was deep green and almost clear, and in the shallows a woman was wading, her white dress hiked up to her thighs. A man was putting in a rowboat upstream from her. I thought he might be her lover or her husband, but he just drifted by.

  THE ONLY MOTEL IN HOOPA, a Best Western, brand new, still smelled of the freshly laid carpeting. My room had a sliding-glass door that gave me a view of the Trinity River. After a light supper in town, I went to the community center near the motel for a Bingo game that had drawn a big crowd.

  About a hundred people, more than half of them Indians, sat at folding tables in a smoky room where teen-age waitresses dashed around dispensing Pepsis and nachos. A noisy popcorn machine provided a soundtrack, echoing like an old popgun being shot. I had bought a ten-dollar Bingo packet at the door, but the cards made no sense to me. The Bingo I’d known as a child was easy to play, but now there were a dozen different games, Red Cross, Black-Out, and others, and no rules to explain them anywhere in the packet.

  As I stood there bewildered, a man, Wayne Kinney, approached and said in a kindly voice, “You need some help? I’ll help you. Go sit at my table.”

  Wayne Kinney was about forty. He had a round, almost moon face and dark brown eyes. His yellow polo shirt was as chipper as a crocus, and he wore a snappy little hat pushed back on his head. He spoke so softly that I had to listen closely to hear him. He was sharing his table with two cousins, both daughters of his mother’s sisters, and with a fleshy, broad-beamed woman everybody called “Auntie,” who did not say a word the entire night, preferring to chainsmoke Pall Malls, mark her Bingo cards, and knit her brow in frustration.

  Wayne sat across from Auntie. He looked excited. “I feel lucky tonight,” he declared, drumming his fingers and grinning. Bingo had been good to him lately. In the past few weeks, he had won three hundred dollars, but, alas, the money was gone.

  A Yurok, Wayne had been living in Hoopa Valley for three years, up by Weitchpec. Before that, he had worked as a hairdresser in San Francisco and had owned a shop. Without actually stating it, he let it slip that he’d fallen on hard times. His wife and his daughter were still in
the city, and Wayne was laboring to support himself by cutting hair and doing perms at Margaret’s House of Beauty, in Hoopa.

  The Best Western fascinated Wayne. He had stayed there once with a friend after a Bingo victory, and he seemed to fear that the experience might never be repeated. “How much does your room cost?” he asked.

  “Thirty-nine dollars.”

  He did some private calculating. “But it’s nice,” he said with authority, as if trying to convince himself that he hadn’t been foolish to blow his winnings on a motel. “The room has a radio. It has a good TV.”

  Wayne’s cousin, Marcia, who was visiting from Milpitas, near San Francisco, was busy with her Bingo cards. When I asked what had brought her to the valley, she told me that she had needed to see some people. She had ridden up on a Greyhound and would go home by bus in a few days.

  “I ran away,” she said, without a trace of humor.

  During the evening, I came gradually to understand that it wasn’t unusual for some Yuroks to go out into the white world and stay in it for a long time—years, even decades—and then to arrive at a moment in life where only some contact with friends and family, with ancestors, with all the specificities of being a Yurok, could quell an ache. Not every Yurok felt that way, surely, but Marcia and Wayne and their clan did.

  The Bingo games began, one after another. At our table, the women were playing two or three cards each. It was a simple matter to lose fifty dollars on a Wednesday or a Friday night. You could lose even more on the weekend, when the pots and the buy-in were more substantial. The little balls churned in their cage, an announcer called the numbers, and the numbers flashed on a board, like bolts of hope.