The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

  Looking around, I see a few hints of traditional life in the temperate zone: a rock crab scrambling over exposed pilings, some loose kelp, a cormorant riding a northern breeze. At the entrance, Elliott Bay is nearly as deep as the Space Needle is high, a depth of six hundred feet that hides a half-blind octopus of three hundred pounds which paralyzes its prey with a toxic squirt. In these waters live squid twenty-four feet long, century-old clams with necks of pornographic dimensions, starfish bigger than an extra-large pizza—in all, more than two thousand kinds of invertebrates. All of that is below me, out of sight. What I see when I paddle into Elliott Bay is the dominance of one species.

  I try to imagine George Vancouver, who was the first to pencil Puget Sound onto a map that showed no such thing. For one month in the spring of 1792, at the age of thirty-four, he had the feeling of God during Creation Week. Traveling up the Pacific Coast, the Discovery and the Chatham took a right turn at the Strait of Juan de Fuca and proceeded east toward an immense volcano anchored in the North Cascades, which Vancouver promptly relieved of its native name, Koma Kulshan, and replaced with that of his cartographer, Joseph Baker, the “undistinguished biped” cursed by Winthrop. Then south, to an inland sea and an even bigger volcano at its southern end, which he named Rainier. He passed through Admiralty Inlet, the weather clear, the water calm, the mountains polished on either side of him. All around, the land rose up in storm-sculpted detail, the islands carpeted by forests, streams leaping out of steep canyons. The air opened his sinuses and expanded his imagination. Vancouver, already ill with a mystery disease that would kill him before his fortieth birthday, was in the Northwest to map and chart a course for future commerce. A detail man, humorless, he would flog his men in front of other sailors to make his disciplinary point. But when he entered Puget Sound something happened, as if he’d tossed his old spirit overboard in a rush of spring euphoria. The first thing he did was give his men a holiday, their only day off since they’d passed Cape Horn at the toe of South America. From then on, his journals started to sing.

  To Vancouver and other British explorers, wild land was evil land, bad until proven civilized. That attitude changed when he came upon the garden of Puget Sound. It was perfect as it was. Vancouver wrote: “As we had no reason to imagine this country had ever been indebted for any of its decorations to the hand of man, I could not possibly believe that any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture.” Farther down the sound, he anchored off Bainbridge Island, just across the water from the future city of Seattle. Vancouver then penned what is perhaps his most famous passage:

  To describe the beauties of this region, will, on some future occasion, be a very grateful task to the pen of a skillful panegyrist. The serenity of the climate, the innumerable pleasing landscapes, and the abundant fertility that unassisted nature puts forth, require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages, and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined.

  In short order, the place would be full of villages and mansions and cottages, but their inhabitants felt compelled to assist nature. In Seattle, they nearly overwhelmed it.

  On that spring evening in 1792, a six-year-old native boy by the name of Sealth is said to have looked out across the water at the Discovery, surely a vessel that could not have been assembled with any product of nature. The Olympics were topped by the gold trim of sunset, the Cascades dark blue in repose. Never again would such a view belong to one band of people. Sealth was the son of a native slave woman taken in one of the periodic raids which the Coast Indians engaged in to replenish the tribal stock of females. The city that was built around Elliott Bay was named for Sealth, changed to Seattle because the original pronunciation (See-alth) made the speaker sound as if he had a lisp. But that came much later, more than a half-century after Vancouver passed by.

  When Winthrop visited Puget Sound, Washington Territory had just been carved from the Oregon Country and contained fewer than four thousand whites. It was a wilderness twice as large as New England, stretching from the Columbia River to the Canadian border and east to Montana. Like Vancouver before him, he felt this land would need no customizing from humans to improve it; instead, things should work the other way, with the land reshaping its inhabitants—Winthrop’s central prophecy. Already the cities of the East, some of them two hundred years old and falling into industrial mayhem, were not working. The nation was torn by slavery; seventy-seven years after the start of the American Revolution, a class system was still in place in many parts of a country where the theory of democracy and the practice of same were an ocean apart. Strange religious cults, centered around leaders who traded in ecstasy and redemption, sprang up in New England, New York and the new states of Ohio and Illinois and Indiana. Here in the Far West, in a maritime valley between two mountain ranges, was a fresh chance for a new nation to live up to its promise. Starting over is the oldest American impulse.

  From my kayak today, I look one way at the forest of new skyscrapers and the other way at Bainbridge Island to a grassy opening in the trees where Sealth is buried. There is a white cross atop his stone grave; in his later years, he converted to Christianity, and the first historians of Seattle treated him well as a result. Had he remained true to his native religious beliefs, he would have burned every day he heard his name mentioned in relation to the ever-expanding city in his midst. Once a person died, his name was supposed to go with him, evoked by mortals only on the most solemn of occasions. Sealth had always been one to compromise; some would say he sold out, early and often. He was tall and tough, a warrior in his younger days who owned eight slaves at one point and eventually freed them after Abraham Lincoln did the same thing for blacks in the South. He lived to be a very old man, going from aboriginal king of Elliott Bay and the river that drained into it, to a withered curiosity on the muddy streets of what would become the largest city in the country named for a Native American.

  Sealth was there when two dozen members of the Denny party landed off Alki Point in a November rain storm in 1851. The plan was to build a city on this narrow beach strip west of Elliott Bay. In the spring of that year, four wagons had left Cherry Grove, Illinois—a town which has long since left the map—and crossed the continent to Portland. They traveled the Oregon Trail at the same time that David Swinson Maynard, a clever, hard-drinking physician on the run from a bad marriage and a mountain of debt, was making his exodus from Cleveland. To this day, Seattle’s divided character can be traced to the dual nature of its two founders. Maynard was a boozer and a visionary; Arthur Denny was a teetotaler and small-minded. Maynard quickly learned to speak the native language and set up alliances with several tribes; Denny despised the Indians and considered them useless except as snitches against their own people. It was Maynard who named Seattle, scribbling it into the territorial register after first scouting the location and conniving with Chief Sealth, who had been in exile while feuding with a rival native leader. Sealth planned to use the white party’s arrival at his longtime fishing grounds as a means to his triumphant return.

  When the twelve adults and twelve children of the Denny party landed at the wind-lacerated shore of what they called New York–Alki, the appearance of Sealth and his tribe shocked them. It was a collision of Midwestern, church-going, cow-eating, monogamous people with a Northwestern, polytheistic, salmon-eating, promiscuous band. The white women, their starched bonnets collapsing in the rain storm, broke into fits of tears. There was supposed to be a cabin waiting for them, built by one of the younger members of the party. There was; but it had no roof. From the very beginning, this place of brooding green was no Illinois, although the city founders would spend much of their time trying to make it so. The new reality set in quickly: Mary Denny, unable to nurse her screaming infant, came up with a formula of clam nectar.

  Doc Maynard arrived in late winter and quickly concluded that the log cabin at the base of the windswept bluff would not do for his
city. They could keep New York–Alki. He paddled his dugout around Alki Point and into Elliott Bay, protected from the winds and extraordinarily deep, and found the spot he had earlier scouted, where the Duwamish River drained into the bay. Several steep, forested hills rose above the tideflats. In accordance with the Oregon Donation Land Act, he claimed 320 acres for himself and 320 acres for the wife in Cleveland whom he had yet to divorce. Denny had also been exploring the Duwamish drainage; four months after settling into New York–Alki, he moved his party to the superior site on the bay. He platted one section of town in a neat grid patterned after Cherry Grove; on the same day, Maynard platted an adjacent section in a not-so-neat grid patterned after his native Cleveland. Thus was born the last great American city to rise during the frontier experience, 211 years after John Winthrop founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony and used the words “City on a Hill” to describe the New World promise.

  Within a few years, Maynard’s section of Seattle was wide open, a lumberjack’s version of an eternal lost weekend. Denny’s section was proper, picket-fenced. On Maynard’s plat was the house of Madame Damnable, a two-story, Southern-style mansion and bordello that became one of the most popular destinations north of San Francisco, and the seat of local justice. On Denny’s plat was built an Episcopal church. While the whorehouse thrived, the church folded for lack of attendance. Seattle still ranks at the bottom of all American cities in number and percentage of church-goers.

  Most towns that were carved from the weeping forests of the Pacific Coast in the days before the Civil War were built in a spirit of speculation. Great chunks of land were free for the taking. Large sums of money were then made when that land was sold off, lot by lot, to immigrants who were convinced that their muddy plot would double in value within a few years. It was a kind of pyramid scheme, dependent on every new settler attracting three or four additional friends. As Winthrop wrote, “Whenever one has hit on a good site for a town, his next neighbor starts a rival one, so that there are often two settlements within a quarter mile in open warfare.” While waiting for property values to rise, the towns had to do something to stay afloat and to make a name for themselves. In Seattle, they sold timber and sex—the only two reasons for a ship to tie up at the mud village in Elliott Bay. A few months after the Denny party arrived at Alki, they loaded a cargo of logs onto a brig bound for San Francisco, which the goldrush had transformed from a tent camp of a few hundred people to a rough city of 35,000. But every few months Baghdad by the Bay caught fire; in four years’ time, San Francisco burned down five times.

  The forests of northern California and Oregon were full of the straightest, tallest and thickest timber whites had ever seen, but the woods were impenetrable, and it was impossible to land a ship along most of the raging coastline. In Puget Sound, the lumber merchants from San Francisco found safe harbor, compliant pilgrims from the Midwest, and wood that could be purchased for a fraction of the price it would bring back in California. By 1853, the year Winthrop canoed past Elliott Bay, Seattle was home to the only steam sawmill on Puget Sound. Logs were cut from the hills above Madame Damnable’s and skidded down a grease-planked road to Henry Yesler’s mill. In San Francisco, after one of its town-consuming fires, those logs could bring as much as $300 per thousand board feet, which is not far from the price paid for raw logs today. As long as there were trees to cut, the people would prosper. Initially, the town looked no different than Port Gamble, the Pope & Talbot Company milltown on the other side of the Sound, or any other Northwestern timber village choking on sawdust and clay muck. Seattle was a filthy, foul-smelling lumber camp and vice pit that would, within a few generations, be called the most livable city in America.

  By the time coal was being gouged out of the nearby Cascade foothills for export, Seattle was a full-blown resource colony, and a rowdy wart of a town at that. There were mob hangings, riots against the Chinese, saloon shootings, plagues of venereal disease. The Indian prostitutes who roamed the roughest parts of Maynard’s plat were known as “sawdust women.” A famous story has it that a hat remained in the middle of the muddy street for days on end because residents were afraid to pick it up and see who might be under it. Chief Sealth, appalled at how his emerald garden had been trashed so quickly, wrote a letter in 1854 to President Franklin Pierce. “The whites, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than the other tribes,” he wrote with the help of a translator. “Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in waste.” To the white founders of the city, the new land was not a garden to be cultivated, but a wilderness to be crushed; it was not a paradise populated by an ancient race, but a vacant lot.

  Sealth died in 1866, one year after the city which bore his name passed an ordinance to ban Indians from town. His youngest daughter, Angeline, continued to live in an eight-by-ten-foot shack on the edge of Seattle for another thirty years. She became a sad-faced curiosity, the frequent subject of sympathetic photo-essays. In the summer of 1889 the entire city went up in flames, and when the immense purple cloud lifted, all traces of the old town of driftwood shacks and wood-planked sidewalks were gone forever. Rebuilding in stone and steel, the new city musclemen went on a pell-mell push for greatness. The native land ethic and Sealth’s warning to a president would return, but not for several decades.

  There was a lot of work ahead in the reshaping of the natural setting. First, they took up pickaxe and shovel against the seven miles of earth separating Puget Sound from Lake Union, a canal project completed in 1916 with the help of an army of immigrant laborers, mostly Scandinavian. Then, on a belief that the city could not expand because of the steep hills, civic leaders began the most ambitious earth-moving project of any urban center in North America: the war against Seattle’s hills. These bizarre regrades would take half a century, move more dirt than was displaced by the Panama Canal, and reduce the city’s downtown elevation by 107 feet. Day and night, the glacial till of Denny Hill, Jackson Hill, First Hill and smaller city lumps were sluiced and gouged away—sixty-eight square blocks in all. “Some people seem to think that just because there were hills in Seattle originally, some of them ought to be left there,” said R. H. Thompson, the chief city engineer, clearly disgusted by such an attitude. A few houses, their owners refusing to cooperate, were left teetering on the remnant towers of the old hills. At times, the city resembled a moist moonscape. The tidelands where Sealth’s people used to dig for clams and set weirs for salmon were filled in, two thousand acres in all, first with sawdust, then with regrade dirt from the shrinking hills.

  Murray Morgan, the Northwest historian, has said that the natural scenery of this city is better than if it had been planned. But from 1876 to 1930 more than 50 million tons of original Seattle was scraped away like gravel in a goldmine—a horror to the aesthete, a delight to the technocrat. Seattle was praised by the American Society of Engineers as a city “that had the courage to fill in its tideflats and regrade its hills.” The great urban crew cut, they noted, “is the result of allowing full play to the imagination and creative energy of the engineers.”

  Winthrop would’ve been shocked at the initial appearance of the biggest city in the Northwest, an area he said was endowed with “the best, largest, and calmest conditions of nature.” In this part of the world, poet would never be dwarfed by engineer, he predicted. Winthrop never mentioned Seattle in his book, in all likelihood because it appeared as nothing but a curl of smoke from a distant mill as he paddled past Elliott Bay, heading south for Nisqually. The prophet of 1853 found only the seven forested hills over which Seattle would eventually conquer and sprawl, but no city. He was high on Puget Sound, calling it by the native name, Whulge, and saying “Whulge is more interesting than any of the eastern waters of our country.” Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, Long Island Sound, “even the Maine archipelago cannot compare with it.”

  Stirred by the soft beauty of the Sound, Winthrop wrote:

  Again, I thought of the influence of this most impressive scenery upon its future
pupils among men. The shape of the world has controlled or guided men’s growth; the look of the world has hardly yet begun to have its effect upon spiritual progress. Multitudes of agents have always been at work to poison and dwarf poets and artists in those inspiring regions of earth where nature means they shall grow as naturally as water-lilies by a lake, or palms above the thicks of tropic woods.

  More than two million people live in metropolitan Seattle, a population larger than that of the entire states of Idaho and Montana put together. With all that open space just across the mountains, why cram onto a narrow band of land situated at a latitude farther north than half the homes of Canada? Tonight, stuck in traffic on a rain-slicked freeway at the edge of town, I grope for a type-A answer to this question. The new crowds of the city have forced the pace of thought and the pulse of routine. Gone from these streets is the favorite bumper sticker of the West: “If You Can Read This, You’re Driving Too Close.” Large, full-windowed houses with big yards and wonderful views are grafted to every available lot from south of Seattle to Everett, a forty-five-mile stretch. In between are three Boeing plants, each with its own police force, its own passports, and, at the 747 plant in Everett, a building so large clouds have been known to form inside. It’s hard to see why jet factories have grown so naturally in this climate. An accident of timing, a world war, plenty of cheap property, and before you know it, the land of salmon and evergreen trees is the airplane capital of the world.