The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (Vintage Departures)
Timothy Egan
Language: English
Pages: 254
ISBN: 0679734856
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A fantastic book! Timothy Egan describes his journeys in the Pacific Northwest through visits to salmon fisheries, redwood forests and the manicured English gardens of Vancouver. Here is a blend of history, anthropology and politics.
Bay State locations—Salem, Medford, Springfield. Boston lost out to Portland in a coin toss. Up the 164 steps of the Astoria Column’s circular stairway I go. Atop the promontory, the wind is fierce, the sky scrubbed clean and salty. The big river snakes the last few miles and then empties into the horizon. I look in every direction, but I’m drawn to the kicking bar. Lieutenant Monteith’s face is grim. The killer breakers are about three hundred yards away, off a tongue of sand called Peacock
Mid-fall now, the leaves of the red maple out front are clinging to a thread of memory, and we know he has to go. A winter with Gramps in the basement will not do. On a Sunday in late October, one of those weekends when the jet stream is lacerating southeast Alaska but leaving this corner of continental America alone, we put Grandpa in the car and drive south, heading for Mount Rainier. I decide to take him to the apex of the Northwest, the blue hulk which has shadowed over both of us for so
Unlike Joseph of the Nez Perce, the Chief finally found a home in the land of the Hudson’s Bay Company. While the Chief was on the skids, the lawsuit pursued by his two former cohorts in the Fish War took a dramatic turn. After a three-year trial, Federal Judge George Boldt declared that all the Indians in Puget Sound who had signed the original 1854 treaties with Stevens were entitled to half the salmon caught in Washington waters. For the first time in their lives, Silas Cross and Bob Satiacum
of the past; I’m like Benjamin. The people who took over the Northwest did not treat the Indians any better or worse than other Americans had treated other tribes. Winthrop cast a cold eye on the “fishy siwashes,” as he called them. He was disgusted by their inability to contain themselves after drinking alcohol. But in writing that civilization in the Northwest would be different from any other, more attuned to the land and its influences, Winthrop might as well have been talking about the
in camp under a thirty-story icewall at the 9,800-foot level, and then woke this morning for the final push through Fuhrer’s Finger, a narrow stretch of deceptive glacier and a funnel for fast-charging boulders, named for two Swiss brothers who should have known better than to come up this way. When the temperature reaches a certain point, the ice that bonds broken rock to the mountain loses its grip, sending a constant shelling of stone down this steep couloir. None of us likes the route; it is