To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
Money half gone, I’d come up with a bit of epistemological small change.
Not knowing what else to do, I drove off westward. The highway rolled out of the mountains into the basin of the Willamette River, a broad trough with at least as many shades of green as the Irishman can count in Eire. The level and verdant valley should have soothed after so much aridness and stone, so much up and down, but I sat absorbed in my own blue funk.
Old Oregon 99 led into the clean college town of Corvallis. I had no heart for more road. At a grocery I bought six bottles of Blitz beer and six of Buffalo and a hunk of smoked salmon and drove to the campus of Oregon State University and pulled up under a flowering cherry tree of large girth. I walked in the rain, came back in the dark, sat in the truck, and drank a Blitz, then a Buffalo, ate some salmon, and drank another, and one more. I just stared into the morose rain and watched petals slip wetly down the windows.
That’s when I remembered the slug. Too late for pictures now. I turned on the light to release the damn thing. It wasn’t in the pail, and it wasn’t in the box the pail was in; it wasn’t anywhere I could discover. Impossible. With the van tightly sealed, the slug couldn’t have gotten out, but the rain prevented me from emptying the truck.
Listing a little from the beer, I crawled around hunting one of the most primitive and unsightly creatures on earth. Nothing. I looked for the telltale glossy trail. No trail. Whether or not slugs have ears, I didn’t know, but I called to it anyway. Finally, unsteadily, I undressed and went to bed.
Somewhere in Ghost Dancing was a slug—horned, fat, gelatinous with primeval slime, and free to ooze its footless way anywhere while I slept: up walls, onto bunks, over eyelids, across lips. Of all nights for this to happen.
The biggest hindrance to learning is fear of showing one’s self a fool. But this was ridiculous. Never had I figured on this kind of humiliation.
3
FOR two days, two days of drizzle, I waited for the slug to make its move. In western Oregon it can rain a hundred and thirty inches a year, making weather so dismal that even a seadog like Sir Francis Drake complained about it four centuries ago when he sailed here on the Golden Hind in search of the Northwest Passage. Those two days I wandered around Corvallis more dispirited than edified by the blue-road perception. I walked and walked. “Nothing,” Homer sings, “is harder on mortal man than wandering.” That’s why the words travel and travail have a common origin.
During those days, I was drawn to telephones, and on four occasions I dropped in coins and four times I put the receiver back. On the fifth I didn’t.
“Hello?” the Cherokee said.
“It’s me.”
A quiet. “Could I call you back?”
Well, boys, there you have it. Struggling to put it all out of mind, I went to the university library to find how Lookingglass, the town I hadn’t seen, got its name. One theory held that Lookingglass was a local Indian who so admired himself he always carried a small mirror. Well, boys…
Another etymology: Corvallis, a Latin combination meaning “in the heart of the valley.” For me, it was more a valley of the heart. No wonder Pascal believed man’s inability to stay quietly in his room is the cause of his unhappiness.
In darkness and rain I left the library. I began fighting the fear that I was about to lose heart utterly and head back. Oh, god, I could feel it coming. The old Navajos, praying for renewal of mental strength, chant, “In the ways of the past, may I walk,” but my chant went the other way around.
Oregonians, also known as “Webfeet,” learn to live with rain as Texans do wind. In front of me, a man walked a small white dog. White Fong. I remembered the old Californian and his business card. Up went a windowshade. What I needed was to continue, to have another go at reading the hieroglyphics, to examine (as Whitman says) the “objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape.”
I had been a man who walks into a strange dark room, turns on the light, sees himself in an unexpected mirror, and jumps back. Now it was time to get on, time to see WHAT THE HELL IS NEXT.
4
THE wind came in over the Coastal Range in the night and blew the sky so clean it looked distilled. As the sun cast long morning shadows, I went west into the mountains toward Philomath and Burnt Woods. Either the return of sun or a piece of cornpone etiology from a California cafe gave the feeling I’d begun the journey again. As for the slug, I hadn’t found it.
U.S. 20: a scribble of a road, a line drawn by a palsied engineer. The route was small farms—one with a covered bridge—and small pastures and mountainsides of maple and fir and alder and wet green moss. Oblique sunlight turned blossoms of Scotch broom into yellow incandescence that illumined the highway; settlers brought the plant from Scotland to use in broommaking, but it had escaped cultivation and is now a nuisance to coastal farmers as well as a fine ornament of spring.
The road squeezed through a narrow pass, then dropped to Yaquina Bay with its long arches of bridging. In the distance, the blue Pacific shot silver all the way to the horizon. I had come to the other end of the continent.
Newport has been a tourist town for more than a century and it showed: a four-lane runway of beef-and-bun joints and seashell shops; city blocks where beach bungalows jammed in salty shingle to shiplap. On north to Agate Beach. Shoreline I had camped on fifteen years before was now glassy condominiums and the path to the ocean posted. Again northward to a pocket of shore between developments near Cape Foulweather. The surf rolled out an unbroken uproar like a waterfall rather than the intermittent crash I’d listened to in North Carolina. In the lee of a big tussock of beach grass I ate lunch, as gulls, slipping over the drafts and yawing and tilting in the stiff sea wind, watched me watch them. It’s a curious sensation when nature looks back.
I stayed so long that dark clouds moved in and piled against the mountains like flotsam washed ashore. Then it began to hail. Cape Foulweather, named by Captain James Cook exactly two hundred years earlier, showed itself true, and I cursed and ran for the truck. By the time I reached Depoe Bay, a few miles up the coast, the western sky had cleared again, and the afternoon sun seemed to glare off the ocean all the way from the Orient. Cycles. The cold waves, coming unimpeded from Japan six thousand miles away, struck the rocks hard, and the high surf so struggled, it looked as if the sea were trying either to get out or pull the shore back in.
A high, concrete-arch bridge crossed a narrow zigzag cleft of an inlet leading to a small harbor under the cliffs. Depoe Bay used to be a picturesque fishing village; now it was just picturesque. The fish houses, but for one seasonal company, were gone, the fleet gone, and in their stead had come sport fishing boats and souvenir ashtray and T-shirt shops. In Depoe Bay the big fish now was the tourist, and, like grunion, its run was a seasonal swarming.
Several streets scotched the town but you could forget them all except the big one: U.S. 101. What happened economically happened on 101 or the water. Two restaurants faced the highway: one called the Happy Harpooner or some silliness; the other had no sign visible. A beanery needing no name had to be good. As if suspended above the harbor, it sat on a cliff with all comings and goings of men and boats and tide and wind in complete view.
I took a plate of fresh bottomfish, chowder, and slaw. At the next table four charterboat seamen, watch caps pulled tightly to their skulls, bent into the vapor of coffee mugs and talked about snapped shafts, leaking holding tanks, environmental regulations, creosoted timbers. Down in the harbor, cabin lights blinked on and bobbed in the dusk. I asked a seaman who sat alone if I could park overnight on the waterfront. “Coast Guard station down there surveys things close,” he said. “Why don’t you take a state campground?”
“I’d rather see Oregon than trailers from Ohio.”
The man operated a charterboat company that catered to tourists.
He said this: “Depoe Bay used to be a good commercial fishing town, but they overfished this corner of the Pacific. Then they polluted the spawning streams. Maybe the big schools will come back, maybe not. I don’t care. My sport boats are easier and income’s more predictable—can’t always land greenling, but you can always hook a Californian. But there was a time when all those wood buildings on the bay processed our catch, back when the commission gave out commercial fishing licenses to anybody. Then we started getting irresponsible jackbats ruining the grounds. Next year, to get a license, you’ll have to earn sixty percent of your income from fishing. Going to keep out the exploiters.”
“Changes everywhere.”
“This coast is a story of one thing after another disappearing. Except people. We don’t have sea otters much now, but you used to see them floating on their backs with a flat rock on their stomachs, cracking open shellfish on it. Razor clams hard as hell to find now. Beach used to have agates, petrified wood, Japanese net floats—those colored glass balls, you know. Pieces of broken-up schooners too. Coast was full of skookums. That’s what the Chinooks called ghosts. Know what you’ll find beachcombing now? Clorox jugs. The highway department even dug into old Indian shell piles to get material to build beach roads. Now people are fighting over somebody trespassing on the beach. Christ-to-mighty, Supreme Court even got into it.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know all of it, but the Court declared the whole Oregon coast open to the public. Amazed me. Who’d want to go down there now anyway?”
“People who don’t remember the way it was.”
“I’ll tell you about the people. ‘The people is a beast.’ Alexander Hamilton said that. Too many people catching fish, digging clams, buying up the coast. Too much crud in the streams. More and more people, less and less of everything else except regulations.”
“Can regulations bring fish or clams back?”
“What’s left to try?”
I went down to the harbor, slipped past the Coast Guard station, and pulled up at the wharf. I counted on my delivery-wagon appearance not arousing attention. Cold wind stirred the surf, but the little harbor lay quiet. I heard laughter and a card game on a boat, and from out in the Pacific came the deep-throated dolor of sonobuoys groaning in their chains (seamen say) the agony of drowned sailors.
5
IN 1788, the Lady Washington, the first American ship to visit the Northwest coast, anchored inside Tillamook Bay so that a party could go ashore to gather fresh fruit for a crew suffering from scurvy. During the mission a Negro sailor attempted to recover a cutlass stolen by Indians. The mate, Robert Haswell, recorded the incident:
[There] was a very large group of the natives among the midst of which was the poor black with the thief by the collar loudly calling for assistance, saying he had caught the thief; when we were observed by the main body of the natives to hastily approach them, they instantly drenched their knives and spears with savage fury in the body of the unfortunate youth. He quieted his hold and stumbled but rose again and staggered towards us but having a flight of arrows thrown into his back and he fell within fifteen yards of me and instantly expired while they mangled his lifeless corpse.
Nearly two centuries later, Fort Stevens to the north of Tillamook Bay earned the distinction of being the last place in the forty-eight states attacked by a foreign power when the Japanese shelled it in June of 1942. The four-hundred-mile Oregon littoral, as much as anywhere in the country, has been an area of confrontation and conflict.
In the morning I took U.S. 101 up the blue coast of high headlands and broken sea stacks that demark the old shoreline. The route was a far stretch of history and beauty (“romantic,” Meriwether Lewis called it in 1805) if you ignored clapboard-by-the-sea motels, Jolly Whaler buffets, and clear-cut mountain slopes with tall stumps bleached into tombstones by the salt wind. Years ago, loggers tried to reduce the heavy flow of pitch by cutting trees higher than usual. Yet it was this abundant pitch in coastal firs that made clearing the land easy for settlers: a farmer would bore two holes in the trunk, one horizontal and a second slanting into the other to provide a draft; he fired the pitch in the first hole, and a two-hundred-foot fir became a living wick.
Only after the Federal Highway Act of 1921 coordinated, standardized, and encouraged road construction did 101 appear on the coast; but for thousands of years, the level beaches, and the hazardous tidal waters too, were routes for Clatsops and Tillamooks, Coos and Siuslaw, and later for Spaniards coming in search of the mythical Straits of Anian that would give passage east.
The long view south down the coast from the steep headlands near Neahkahnie Mountain seemed to reach the length of Oregon. Northward stood Haystack Rock, a three-hundred-foot domed skerry topped by a mantle of snowy bird stain, looking like a chipped whale’s tooth. And, in fact, it was near the great monolith that a whale swam ashore in 1806; Lewis and Clark, camped to the north, got word of the sea beast. Sacagawea, the Shoshone guide for the Corps of Discovery—as Jefferson called the expedition—who had never asked the captains anything for herself, insisted on making the hard trek to see the whale. She and the explorers sampled the blubber and found it, in Lewis’s words, “white and not unlike the fat of pork, though the texture was more spongy and somewhat coarser.” Clark thanked Providence that he got to swallow a piece of leviathan rather than having it Jonah’s way. Years later, the story goes, after Sacagawea returned to the Shoshones, of all things she saw in her twenty-three months with the corps, the Bird Woman never tired of telling about the great beached “fish” that gave milk.
North of Haystack, at the old resort town of Seaside, was the site of a firepit where the expedition, in preparation for the long return east, boiled down seawater to make salt, a commodity they ran out of coming west. Lewis writes:
My friend Captain Clark declares [salt] to be a mere matter of indifference with him whether he uses it or not; for myself, I confess I felt a considerable inconvenience for the want of it; the want of bread I consider trivial, provided I get fat meat; for as to the species of meat I am not very particular, the flesh of dog, the horse, and the wolf having from habit become equally familiar [as] with any other, and I have learned to think that if the cord be sufficiently strong, which binds the soul and body together, it does not so much matter about the materials which compose it.
Although Clark believed the party healthiest on a subsistence of dog flesh, the favorite meat of the explorers, when they could get it, was beaver tail.
Inland some distance from Seaside, near the base of the northwestern prong of Oregon that sticks into the Columbia estuary, Lewis and Clark made winter camp, their last outpost before returning home. Here at Fort Clatsop they celebrated the first American Christmas in the Northwest. The men who smoked received a gift of tobacco, the others handkerchiefs; Sacagawea gave Clark two dozen weasel tails, and Lewis gave him a pair of socks. Their dinner on that “showery, wet, and disagreeable” Christmas, Clark said, was “poor elk so much spoiled that we ate it through mere necessity, some spoiled pounded fish, and a few roots.” All without salt. Despite the pester of fleas and mosquitoes, the group was “cheerful all the morning.”
The great sea reach of the Columbia ranges in width from about three miles to ten miles and was bridged just recently at Astoria. When it comes to fall and force, no other American river can match this one; near its mouth, sudden whirlings of water will suck logs under only to spit them forty feet into the air. The Columbia, once called the Oregon, gets its name from the ship of Captain Robert Gray, the first American to sail over the dangerous bar at the mouth. The Bostonian thought the new name would help claim the territory for the United States then contending Britain for it. Gray’s primary mission, however, wasn’t to stake claims; rather it was to buy valuable sea otter skins (an iron spike for a beaver pelt, but a sheet of copper for an otter skin) to use in the lucrative China trade. In that way, the Chinese helped Americans claim Oregon territory—the only parce
l of the United States never under European dominion. The Northwest came directly from the Indians.
Astoria, the oldest city on the river and now an industrial center, began as a trading post established by John Jacob Astor’s fur traders. Soon after the founding, Indians gathered to annihilate the white men; one of Astor’s partners, a devious man named Duncan McDougal, thought to save the company by threatening to uncork a black vial that he said held smallpox; the tribes quickly agreed to peace and Astoria survived. It was smallpox, of course, that did more than repeating rifles to subdue the American Indian. But McDougal’s ruse came back to haunt later settlers. The story of the vial spread among the natives, and years later when smallpox did break out (partly from infected blankets deliberately given tribes), Indians began massacring pioneers in an effort to eradicate little black bottles.
McDougal sought to solidify the company’s position—and his own—by marrying an esteemed daughter of the Chinook chief. On the wedding day, the princess arrived made up in red clay and anointed with sacred fish oil. The horrified whites, ignoring the affronted Indians, scrubbed her down. Washington Irving describes it in his book Astoria:
By dint of copious ablutions, she was freed from all adventitious tint and fragrance, and entered into the nuptial state, the cleanest princess that had ever been known, of the somewhat unctuous tribe of the Chinooks.
U.S. 30 bent where the Columbia bent, but for much of the way, hills blocked any view of the water. On occasion I could see sandbars, where in times gone, old horses from the Portland streetcars and fire wagons walked belly deep, pulling thousand-foot seines filled with the silver violence of salmon. Now horse seining is illegal.
St. Helens, Oregon, high above the river, was remarkable that day for splendidly clear views of the white summits of four great volcanoes: Rainier, St. Helens, and Adams northward across the river in Washington, and Mount Hood southeast in Oregon. Each has its distinction: Hood is the most notable American mountain named after an enemy military leader (Admiral Samuel Hood, second in command of the British fleet during the Revolutionary War); Mount Rainier, even after blasting away two thousand feet of summit, is still the highest volcano in the country; Mount St. Helens (Lord St. Helens was an English ambassador to Spain), youngest of the peaks, was quiet again but perking; Klickitat Indians have a better name for St. Helens: Tawonlatkla, “Fire Mountain.” And there’s Mount Adams; poor Adams, second in height only to Rainier. Easily as imposing as the others the way it rises so separately from the land, it remains the greatest unknown American mountain. The anonymity, if you ask me, results from the name (after the second President). They might as well have called it Mount Jones or Schwartz Peak.