Traveling Light Read online

  Suddenly, I had five hundred dollars in my pocket. The bills came in several denominations. They were as crisp as counterfeits, virtually untouched by human hands. They produced such heady oblivion in me that I seemed to be floating through the grandstand on angel wings. My old pal Arnold Walker, who’s permanently estranged from Lady Luck, had to bellow my name three times before I descended from the ozone to greet him.

  “Did somebody give you nitrous oxide?” Arnold asked, flashing the syrupy, self-effacing grin that causes palpitations of the heart in avid matrons. “Do you want a Valium from the nurse’s office?”

  I showed Arnold my money.

  “Very new,” he said.

  Bills like those I’d showed him had slipped through Arnold’s fingers many times over. He and currency were in a state of perpetual divorce. It was a wonder that he could still afford the expensive suits he liked. The one he had on was beige, with fine pinstripes. He’d bought it during his annual winter trip to Florida, where he visits thoroughbred shrines like Gulfstream Park.

  “How’d you do this year?” I asked.

  “Terrific,” Arnold said dryly. “I broke even.”

  We had a quick drink at the clubhouse bar, and I tipped the bartender a dollar. Arnold was so startled (he’d never seen me surrender more than fifty cents before) that he launched into a story about a TV ingenue he’d met at a bar somewhere near Boca Raton. He took out his wallet and handed me the matchbook—Rick’s Tropical Hideaway—on which she’d scribbled her phone number. “I have it memorized,” he said. I cut him short when he began to describe the inside of her condo (pink conch shells, pink satin sheets), and forced him to listen as I used my newfound expertise to tout him on a fourth-race selection.

  “Here’s an opportunity you won’t want to miss,” I said. “Check out this Lulugal, Arnold. She’s in town from Los Angeles expressly to break her maiden. Look who’s been handling her at Santa Anita—ace jocks like Shoemaker, McCarron, and Fernando Toro. This is not your ordinary trashy filly. Look at her works.” I tapped the small type with my pencil. “Is she in shape? Or is she in shape? Her owner even shipped her up here early, so she could get a feel for the track surface.” I paused for effect. “Arnold, I’m giving you this filly like a gift.”

  Arnold stirred his vodka-and-7-Up. Then he shook his head sadly. “I’m through with shippers,” he said. “I dropped a bundle on some crazy Santa Anita horse in the first.”

  “The one who was climbing the ladder?”

  “You got it.”

  “But Lulugal’s different.”

  “They’re all different when you’re in love,” Arnold said, hitching up his trousers. “Me, I’m sticking with Plus Ultra. She’s steady as a brick.”

  Why I should have credited the opinion of somebody whose talent as a handicapper is even more suspect than mine, I don’t know, but I did credit it, and went for a gloomy stroll around the grounds. Pretty soon, I was riding the escalators, up and down, up and down. I tend to do this when I’m confused, on the assumption that I’ll achieve clarity more quickly if I don’t have to worry about moving my legs. The escalators failed me, though—I kept getting glimpses of the tote-board. Plus Ultra was an almost even-money favorite, while Lulugal hovered in the risky vicinity of four to one. It did no good to remember that the public was right only a third of the time —vide Al Who. The sheer weight of contradictory testimony inhibited me. I was certain Lulugal would win, but I wanted to talk myself out of it.

  I wouldn’t have played her at all, in fact, if I hadn’t had a brief conversation with a man who was also riding the escalators. Actually, he may not have been a man. He had an ethereal quality that linked him to the spirit realm. His hair flew upward in electrified fashion, and his eyes were as scenic as sunsets. He was eating popcorn. He peered over my shoulder and saw “Lulugal” written on the margin of my program, where I’d lovingly inscribed it. “It’s Lulugal for sure,” the man said pleasantly. “It’s got to be Lulugal. I’m telling you, friend, it can only be Lulugal.” He came closer. “Here’s a secret,” he said, looking around for G-men in disguise. “Lulugal will win.” He thought this was a fabulous joke, and laughed out loud. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “It’s simple—Lulugal is the best horse. The track’s busted me before, and the track will bust me again, but it will not bust me this afternoon!” A sort of sigh escaped from his lips. “Lulugal. My Lulugal!”

  Of course, it was Lulugal, although she managed to create more suspense than I felt was necessary. Her pace was so lackluster that I had to give her some vocal encouragement. This was a sacrifice for me, because I hate to cheer for the horses I’ve bet. It’s one thing to suffer your disappointment in silence and another to announce it to everybody around you. “Lulugal,” I muttered. Immediately, a female railbird down the way responded with “Come on, Lulugal!” Her voice had such unthrottled resonance that it summoned forth a more boisterous “Lulugal” from me. My rib cage expanded to free those full, rich syllables—a decidedly therapeutic moment. Before long, a chorus had formed in my section. “Come on, Lulugal!” was the chorus’s most popular refrain, followed by “Three horse, Lulugal!” with my bare-bones “Lulugal” in for the show. As the volume of the cheering increased, it seemed finally to filter down to Lulugal’s pricked ears, and she picked up the pace. Her breeding and class became apparent when she shifted into overdrive. She won by a length and a half—margin enough to compound the interest on my bankroll and make me wonder if I should hire a Brink’s guard to escort me to the car.

  I had a bout of recidivism in the next race, when I went against the objective evidence, which pointed to Vin Du Cru, and bet instead Princess Corinne, yet another shipper from L.A. The Princess ran well, but Vin Du Cru beat her to a pulp. I skipped the sixth race. In the seventh, I was interested in an old-timer, Postmark, who’d taken on some heavyweight horses in the past, but I got a scare when I saw him in the paddock. He was really old—the kind of still, solemn animal who attracts more than the average number of flies once he’s put out to pasture. His groom didn’t even walk him around. Postmark just stood in his stall, wearing a faded blanket and letting his eyelids creep toward his nose. I refused to be fooled by Postmark’s behavior—older horses are often lazy in the paddock—and approached the windows feeling pure. Postmark delivered the goods, holding on like a veteran to withstand the charge of King Wako, a young upstart. The win pushed my earnings toward the thousand-dollar level. That was all the excitement I could take in a single day, so I slipped through the clubhouse gate, and was confronted again by the familiar glittering blue expanse of San Francisco Bay. For once, I had no desire to jump in.

  An hour later, I was sitting in a neighborhood bar, happily involved with the flickering beer signs. Arnold Walker ambled in and propped himself on the nearest stool. All the robustness of Florida had been drained from his face. He looked ashen, as if he’d wintered in a bear cave. He didn’t speak but instead turned his jacket pockets inside out. The pockets held lint, ticket stubs, a tube of lipstick, and a broken crayon. So I paid for his vodka-and-7-Up—a double.

  “Arnold,” I said, adopting the patronizing tone of an older brother, “you’ll get over it.”

  “Tell me about it,” Arnold said.

  Somebody played “Whiskey River” on the jukebox. Arnold lifted his glass in salute. He hadn’t smiled since coming in.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Enough to send an underprivileged kid to camp.”

  In an effort to buoy him up, I told him how well I’d done. I told him how I’d avoided the usual mistakes, and how I’d trusted what was there before my eyes. I told him it was silly to overcomplicate the transparently simple. “You can’t let yourself get tangled in the veils, Arnold,” I said. “The world is what it is.”

  Now he smiled. It was a big smile, too, devoid of malice. “Phone me tomorrow,” Arnold said. “I want to see if you still believe it in the morning.”

  J. D. Ross’s Vision

 
; The country along the upper Skagit River, in Washington, is hard country. It occupies unfriendly ground. The Cascade Mountains bound it on the east, so that when a wind blows down from Canada, as it often does, it picks up a flinty meanness from all that granite and arrives with such stinging intensity that it echoes between the disks of your spine. A west wind is not much better, since it brings with it mist and chill off the Pacific. The climate throughout the Skagit is wet and cold for most of the year, with heavy snow at the higher elevations. The river valley is fertile, enriched with volcanic ash from Mt. Baker and several feet of topsoil, but corporate farmers prefer to do business on the other side of the Cascades, where they can earn a guaranteed government subsidy just by pumping irrigation water into the desert dust. The upper Skagit is for cranks, romantics, outlaws, and hard cases. It takes a kind of displaced cowboy sensibility to survive, a belief in the terrifying American myth of independence.

  The Skagit River is at the heart of things. It originates at a lake in a remote part of British Columbia, then rolls out of the mountains and through the flatlands until it empties into Puget Sound. The towns on the Skagit are desolate, cut loose from their links to productivity. There was once a thriving concrete industry in Concrete, but the factories are shut down now, hemmed in by neat little company bungalows. In Sedro Woolley, the bars are full of unemployed loggers who drink bottles of Oly and wonder aloud when the hell the machine’s going to kick back into gear. Evidence that the machine has faltered is all around them. It shows up in missed house payments, in stacks of unsold goods on market shelves, in the slow, defeated strides of midday strollers on main streets. Even the fishery is in decline. There was a time when the most lackluster poacher could stock his freezer in an afternoon’s fishing, but that was a while ago, before any dams had taken a toll.

  The dam is a central fact of life in the Pacific Northwest, where a constantly replenished knot of inland waterways once seemed to promise an inexhaustible supply of hydroelectric power. The Columbia River forms the model for what eventually happened to most free-flowing streams in the region—they would be dammed, over and over again, until almost every last ounce of juice had been squeezed out of them. The Columbia is a much larger river than the Skagit, with a flow of 1.9 million gallons of water per second—fourteen times greater than that of the Colorado, which feeds the entire Southwest. In its 1,207-mile rush to the sea, it drops 2,650 feet in elevation and that gives it tremendous force—enough to create one-third of the total hydro capacity of the United States. There are more than twenty multipurpose dams on the Columbia and its tributaries. The most famous are Grand Coulee—as high as a forty-six-story building and as wide as twelve city blocks—and Bonneville, in Oregon, about fifty miles east of Portland. In the early 1940s, these dams were producing so much energy between them that they could have satisfied the needs of Manhattan, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Cleveland, but that’s not true anymore.

  On the Skagit, there are four dams. They were all built between 1920 and 1940, and they all belong to Seattle City Light—at present, it is the nation’s fifth largest publicly owned electrical utility. Taken together, the dams constitute a monument to the man who conceived them, James Del-mage Ross. In a sense, it was Ross’s vision of the upper Skagit as Hydro Paradise that—along with timber, salmon, and gold—helped to transform Seattle from a nineteenth-century port into a complex twentieth-century city.

  Born in Chatham, Ontario, in 1872, the son of a Scottish nurseryman, Ross showed an early predilection for electrical things. At the age of eleven, he made his first battery by cutting a zinc strip from the apron under his mother’s kitchen stove and combining it with the bottom of an old copper kettle and some vinegar from a pickle jar. He used similar batteries to build an electromagnet, and, later, a dynamo to light a shop in which he performed scientific experiments. These experiments could be cruel. Ross thought cats were worthless creatures, because they killed birds, and he liked to attach wires to a saucer of milk and shock any poor kitty who stopped for a drink. He had nothing against dogs, though, and even saved the life of a doomed mongrel, Sancho, who was about to be destroyed for sucking eggs—apparently, a grave offense in Chatham. Ross stuck a wired pin in an egg and set it out as bait. When Sancho pounced on it, Ross hit him with a heady jolt, curing the dog of his bad habit. Presumably, he could have hypnotized Sancho just as easily, for he was a student of Mesmer’s theories and often put his classmates into trances, then ordered them to do things like declaim “Old Mother Hubbard” while standing on the teacher’s desk.

  As a young man, Ross contracted tuberculosis. In spite of the disease, he went on a gold-prospecting expedition into the Northwest wilderness, in 1898. He found some gold, and, miraculously, his lungs healed. After returning briefly to Ontario, he left for the Pacific Coast, and in Anacortes, Washington, he got a job as a steam engineer at a salmon-packing plant. He joined Seattle City Light shortly after the company was formed, in 1902, and he was involved in the construction of its first project, a small hydro dam on the Cedar River. In 1911, Mayor George Dilling appointed Ross the new superintendent of City Light. Immediately, Ross started planning to tap the latent energy of the Skagit River.

  At the time, the Skagit flowed unhampered all along its length. Every winter, it flooded its banks and damaged crops in a downstream valley known as Skagit Flats. Because of the annual floods, there was tremendous popular support for controlling the river. Around 1905, the Skagit Power Company, based in Denver, posted notices that stated an intent to build several dams at sites in and around Diablo Canyon, a steep-sided cleft in the Cascades, about thirty miles from the Flats. But Skagit Power was short on cash and never made good on its claims. A few years later, Stone & Webster, a Boston firm, acquired Skagit Power and took a more formal approach to development by obtaining legal permits from the Department of Agriculture, locking up the canyon sites through January 1917.

  It seemed that Ross would never get a shot at the river, but Stone & Webster, like Skagit Power, failed to deliver. When the firm’s permits expired, Ross filed an application on behalf of City Light. In it, he said that he wanted to build two hydro plants—one in Diablo Canyon, and one at Ruby Creek, to the northeast. Actually, he had it in mind to put three dams on the Skagit, the third of them (it was the first to be built) at Gorge Creek, southeast of Diablo. According to Ross, each dam would have a powerhouse. Transmission lines mounted to wooden poles would carry the juice to the city—1.25 million horsepower when the project was done. He might as well have been speaking in terms of cubits. There is something grand and biblical—something virginal—in his calculations.

  Secretary of Agriculture David Houston awarded Ross his permit on December 22, 1917. By 1921, a thousand City Light employees were living on the Skagit in rustic cottages and bunkhouses that constituted the construction camp of Newhalem. They had a school, and a volunteer preacher from the Bellingham, Washington, presbytery, and a mini-dam on Newhalem Creek to supply the bosses with electricity. Progress on the Gorge plant was slow, because of the harsh winter weather. The powerhouse—it looks like the Lincoln Memorial—was finished in 1923, but it didn’t go into service until the dam was completed more than a year later. Ross, ever conscious of ceremony, had a gold telegraph key installed at the White House. When President Calvin Coolidge pressed it, a spark went through the cables of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company, and Seattle experienced a shock as heady as the one Ross had given to Sancho.

  In 1928, Ross escorted twenty-seven members of the Seattle City Women’s Club on a tour of the project. This outing was the prototype of a more elaborate tour, which by the mid-1930s was bringing nearly two thousand people a week to the Skagit during the warm summer months. “We lure ‘em in with a display of beautiful growing things . . .” Ross said. “When they get here, they see the dam and the powerhouses—and that’s what we want them to see.” But it was the beautiful growing things that made a lasting impression. Ross turned the project area into an Arabi
an Nights fantasy. Exotic flowers and trees were planted by riverside paths; in winter, the more perishable species, like orchids, were moved into the Gorge powerhouse to protect them against frost. At Diablo, Ross collected a menagerie that included pheasants, peacocks, mountain sheep, cockatiels, African lovebirds, and an albino deer. His masterpiece was the waterfall at Ladder Creek. There, after dark, visitors gathered to watch colored floodlights illuminate the cataract while one of Ross’s favorite songs—either “By the Waters of Minnetonka,” or “Hark! Hark! My Soul!”—soared into the alpine atmosphere.

  The plant in Diablo Canyon went into service in 1936, but Ross did not live to see his cherished Ruby Dam erected. He died in March 1939, and was buried in a crypt at the base of Goodell Mountain—renamed Ross Mountain, even as Ruby Dam became Ross Dam and the impoundment behind it Ross Lake—surrounded by flowering Japanese cherry trees that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had dispatched from Washington, D.C., in sympathy.

  The system that Ross pioneered gave Seattle the lowest electrical rates in the country for many years. Even today, the Skagit project remains at the core of the City Light operation, but it no longer meets the needs of its customers. The utility began to suffer shortfalls in its generating capacity in the early 1960s, and, to compensate, started buying power from outside sources—primarily from the Bonneville Power Administration, on the Columbia. By the late 1970s, the B.P.A. was having its own problems of “insufficiency” and informed City Light that it would not be able to make up for Seattle’s electrical deficits after 1983. Moreover, the price that City Light had to pay for purchased power kept going up, putting the utility in the disadvantageous (if familiar) position of trying to pass on higher costs to its customers. The customers were not happy.