Roads From the Ashes Read online

  Our haughty disdain for cruise ships and their clientele vanished as we sank into the sybaritic luxury of the Regal Princess, the newest and fanciest craft in the Love Boat fleet at the time. Seduced by the perfectly-orchestrated week-long performance of a crew of thousands, we ate enough to power a chain gang for a month and washed it down with an ungodly amount of fruit-diluted alcohol. We enjoyed the quintessential cruise experience, perfect to the last bite of baked Alaska. It was easy to ignore the conveyor belt feeling while we were being so thoroughly indulged, but I came away with the distinct impression that unless your ship hits an iceberg, one cruise is pretty much like another.

  Mark and I spent a lot of time on the top deck, where we made friends with Craig and Susan, a couple of Canadians with an unending supply of jokes we hadn’t heard. From our perch, we saw eagles, dolphins and whales. One day, when the ship drew near land, we even saw bears. Because we were cocooned in luxury, we had to keep reminding ourselves it was all real. For all the genuine contact we had, we might as well have been watching a National Geographic video on a really big television.

  So have we really been to Alaska? I felt like I was really there the first night, when we stayed in a hotel in Anchorage. It was the summer solstice, and the sun never set. Men in waders fished all night in the river outside our window, pulling salmon after salmon out of the water. The feeling returned the sunny morning that the Regal Princess pulled into Glacier Bay. The sky was so clear we could see for miles, and skyscraper-sized shards of ice broke off the face of the glacier, falling down to the sea in a roar of “white thunder.” Beyond those two riveting scenes, I’ve had only a postcard view of that wonderful wilderness, a peek from an incongruous lap of luxury with comfortable beds and gigantic refrigerators. Being a VIP felt good, but the insulation had its price.

  Not long after we returned to Washington, the couple whose anniversary we’d celebrated announced that they were getting a divorce. “So much for the Love Boat,” said Mark. We were driving up Whidbey Island, on our way to the Olympic Peninsula. The scenery was achingly lovely, and a soft breeze blew over new grass on rolling hills. Purple foxgloves lined the road.

  We should have been happy. We’d just returned from the kind of cruise that makes a winning game show contestant delirious with joy. We were pursuing our own dream of living on the road. We were driving through paradise in the world’s snazziest motor home.

  And we were fighting.

  Chapter 8

  “To Fight No More Forever”

  Trouble in Paradise

  Yes, we were fighting. We bickered over where to go, what to eat, how to drive. It mattered not that beyond our windows lay the Olympic Peninsula, that glorious amalgam of geographical extremes. It made no difference that snow-capped Mount Olympus towered over us, the gods’ New World aerie. We were impervious to divine influence, bent only on hurling verbal sticks and stones. Surrounded by splendor, we responded with a whine.

  It was high-contrast proof that psychic baggage is hard to lose. You can’t set it down in an airport and wait for the bomb squad to dispose of it. You can’t leave it out with the trash. You can drive a thousand miles, believing all the way that you left your heart in San Francisco, but danged if you don’t find it still stuck on your sleeve in Tacoma.

  I don’t know why we fought. The answer is as elusive as the reason the world had to explode just because one Archduke got assassinated. Dominoes fall. Wars happen. Maybe it was because inventing a new life is hard. Maybe you get bellicose when your assumptions are shattered. In any event, life isn’t all lush valleys, and we’d clawed our way to the other extreme. We languished in our own private intemperate zone, somewhere east of Eden.

  We should have laughed out loud at the irony of it all. We really were east of Eden and closing in on it fast. We drove west from Port Angeles on highway 101 through Sappho and Beaver. Then the road turned south, skirting the foothills of Mount Olympus. Following the High River to the peninsula’s western edge, we soon found ourselves at the gates of North America’s garden of delight, the Queets rain forest. Angels with swords should have been there to keep the fallen away, but the narrow road was ours alone. Soon we found ourselves in the valley, surrounded by darkening green quiet.

  There was a campground at the end of the road, and it was nearly empty. We selected a spot overlooking the Queets River, and I got out to guide Mark into the site.

  At least that was the theory. I was supposed to stand at the back of the Phoenix and use hand signals he could see in a mirror to direct him into position without falling off a cliff or crushing something. What really happened was so stupid we were lucky no one was around to watch.

  I climbed out of my seat and assumed a logical position at the back corner of the truck. I looked up to check for low-hanging tree branches. I looked down to check for low-lying impediments like logs or boulders or stray puppies. Then I started waving. “Come back, come back,” I gestured. “Come back more.” The Phoenix had about ten feet to cover, but it moved backwards about nine inches and stopped. I waved some more. The Phoenix didn’t budge. The door on the driver’s side opened. Mark climbed out. He lumbered toward me with daggers shooting from his eyes. “You’re doing it all wrong,” he shouted. “Hold your hands like this, and don’t stand there. Stand here.” If this sounds fairly civil, it’s because I’ve purged the expletives.

  I had a choice of two responses. I could blast him with a reciprocal salvo of contumely, or I could dispense an annoying whimper. Either one would draw further invective. I whimpered. He roared. Then he stormed back to the driver’s seat.

  I heard him throw the truck into reverse, and he backed up way too fast. Wham! The Phoenix smacked a tree stump. The impact put a noticeable dent into the back corner, and it cast an even darker pall over our spirits.

  It was too late to go exploring, but too early to go to bed. Mark decided to build a fire, and I set up a folding chair in the moss on the riverbank. I wanted time to myself to sulk, and the darkening forest provided a perfect gloomy backdrop.

  Thirty minutes later, there was still no fire, and Mark was in an even blacker mood than before. “I give up,” he said finally. He went inside the Phoenix and slammed the door. I sat on the riverbank until darkness blotted out my surroundings. All was quiet except the river. All was serene except the battle raging in my soul.

  We slept together in the bunk over the cab, and in our dreams we were lovers again. How can it be, I wondered, that we fight all day and then rest exhausted in one another’s arms? Love burns and warms, rages and soothes, screams and whispers.

  Sleep sponged up the day and delivered us a new morning. A luminous verdure glowed through the window, and I looked out into a primeval paradise. Moss-shrouded spruce trees reigned over a floor of ferns, and translucent maple leaves fluttered in the sunlight.

  We walked through the forest in silence. The only sound came from our footsteps, and even those were muted by the soft carpet of leaves and lichen. The spruces and maples were completely shrouded in moss, great primeval festoons of it. A robust slug glistened on the path ahead of me, and great fungal shelves protruded from stumps and tree trunks. Everything was damp. Water glistened on the edges of leaves and dripped softly from the ferns.

  A mile or so into the forest, a large spruce tree had fallen across the trail, and someone had sawed through it in two places to clear the path. The cuts looked fresh, the exposed wood almost pink against bark blackened by dampness. I touched the wood. It was wet, and it fell apart in my hand like canned tuna. “Who knows how long ago this was cut,” I whispered to Mark. “This place lives under an eternal freshness spell.”

  Before my visit to Queets, I’d always thought of rain forests as tropical phenomena, places full of parrots and monkeys and huge constricting serpents. From my sojourn in Central America as a child, I also knew their denizens could be deadly, even the tiniest spider or most benign-looking caterpill
ar.

  But the rain forests of the temperate zones are utterly different. Instead of palms and strangler figs, the northern pockets of heavy precipitation and mild temperature are home to conifers and maples. Instead of monkeys, you may find deer and bear and otter. The noisiest avian isn’t a parrot, but a woodpecker. And if you’re hoping for anacondas, forget it. The closest thing we came across was the slug.

  All of which means that Queets pulses with a more muted vitality. It’s a pregnant place, swelling with silent life and quiet activity. I was engulfed with the feeling that something supernatural was about to happen, that Merlin was peeking from behind a tree, that gnomes were watching from under mushrooms. There’s magic in clear water and green stillness, and I soaked up the enchantment.

  Somewhere along that soft trail, I lay my troubles down. Walking in that verdant Eden, I was innocent again, lost in the quiet wonder of a secluded paradise.

  East of the Cascades

  Of course the baggage returned. I had yet to learn that you can’t hire surroundings to do a human’s job. Views can inspire you, sunsets can awe you, landscapes can challenge you, but not a one can transform you unless you cooperate. When all is said and done, you’re the ferryman. You decide what stays in your boat and what turns into flotsam. It’s not the river’s job.

  The river’s task is to flow to the sea, and we followed it there, turning back towards Seattle when we reached the coast. We were headed east.

  Everyone knows about East-West rivalries. The perennial clash between New York slick and LA slack caps the list, followed closely by classic sporting events like the Rose Bowl. What was new to me is the rift that runs through Washington and Oregon. It’s a psychic fault line than runs north to south not far inland from the coast. To the west lie Seattle and Portland, home of global trend setters and backyard boat docks and rooms with a view. To the east lies, well, the east. It’s the macaroni-and-cheese side of a poached salmon coastline.

  Actually, that’s putting it far too nicely. The inland zone is a region of dirty secrets, and because most of the area’s population lives on the west side of the Cascades, the decisions to keep it that way keep on filtering down from above.

  I mean, who’s ever heard of the Tri-Cities? Sorry, Richland- Pasco-Kennewick, but you weren’t part of my vocabulary until I saw your sign on Interstate 82. Oh, I suppose “Hanford Nuclear Reservation” rang a faint bell. Wasn’t that where they built atom bombs during World War II?

  When the Cold War thawed, the big new enterprise was nuclear power. The Columbia River could be harnessed once again to provide cooling, and who cared if the whole operation looked like an ugly scar and produced radioactive sewage? There was nobody important out there to notice.

  For decades, the trend setters have been able to ignore their backyard, but times are changing. Nuclear waste doesn’t just disappear. Giant underground tanks have kept it out of sight, but it won’t be out of mind much longer. Tanks have a penchant for leaking, and toxic effluent with a half-life longer than War and Peace is slowly making its way into the aquifer. From there it will make its noxious way into the Columbia River. The Columbia River will bear it all to Portland, where coastal water patterns will soon share it with Seattle.

  So what was I saying about jettisoning psychic baggage? It can still come back to haunt you, even if you dump it in the river. Simple ditching is only a temporary solution. For permanent results, you’ve got to change the stuff that bites you into something you can pet. Once transformed, it will either fly away on its own, or you won’t mind having it around after all.

  Clean isn’t enough if a polluted river is the price. Unburdened isn’t sufficient if true freedom is your goal. But what mystery turns lethal effluent into the water of life? By what baptism is a life transformed? With a sigh that stretched to the horizon, I realized that freedom doesn’t arrive simply because your baggage is out of sight. Freedom knows you may have hidden it on the other side of the mountains. Freedom has the sneaking suspicion you may have dumped it into the river. Freedom stays just ahead of you, just out of your reach, a perennial horizon. It’s there waiting at the vanishing point, that ever receding destination that can only be achieved when you quit faking, when you’ve cleaned up your act so well that a god will drink the wash water.

  I sighed again, disgusted with my own sophistry, my own spineless words that had no agenda to give them a skeleton. It’s easy to spew platitudes and wax eloquent, but the universe expands on action. I had no idea how to solve the problem of nuclear waste. I couldn’t even get along with my husband. I was a fine one to be pontificating about major environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest.

  And the eastern sides of Washington and Oregon are not wastelands. They hold some of the most fascinating, beautiful and pristine places in the country. The best apples in the world hail from orchards around Yakima, and on toward Spokane, there’s the glory of the Selkirk Mountains. Walla Walla is more than just a jolly name. The Oregon Trail ended in the Willamette Valley, where homesteading pioneers found a rainbow’s end in the green hills and rolling river.

  Wisdom Comes to Us in Dreams

  We stopped in Pendleton after we crossed the Oregon border, a town that revels in the afterglow of its Wild West heyday. Its famous woolen mills turn out thousands of yards of distinctive plaid fabric and Indian-inspired blankets every day, and welcome the public to don ear protectors and walk through the whole clattering operation.

  We camped by the river, where a young entrepreneur named Rick was trolling for tourists. He said he was a third-generation resident of Pendleton, and he offered an insider’s tour of the surrounding countryside. We were his only charges that warm afternoon.

  “First we’ll go through the Umatilla Indian Reservation,” he said as we climbed into his van. Driving east from town, he pointed out the tribal headquarters and told us a casino was about to open on reservation land. “Every Indian who wants a job is guaranteed one,” he said, “But the interesting thing is, many of them don’t want jobs, so what will probably happen is the same thing that’s happened with their farmland. Much of it is worked by white tenant farmers.

  “Most outsiders think this means that Indians just want to live off government handouts, but it’s not true. What we’re seeing is what’s always happened when two totally different cultures are thrown together. Whites think that if Indians don’t want nine-to-five jobs, it has to be because they’re lazy. To the Umatillas, nine-to-five jobs are a foreign weirdness. They’ve always been a migratory nation, moving according to the seasons, living off the land.

  “The Umatillas aren’t farmers, never have been. So when the government gave them the ownership of land, which, by the way, was also an alien concept, most of them didn’t have the slightest inclination to work it. In fact, it flew in the face of everything they held sacred. The result was that they rented it out to people who wanted to farm. In some cases, they sold their parcels.

  “The casino is a similar situation. I won’t be surprised if very few Indians end up working there. Even though times are changing, it’s still not their custom to ‘hold jobs’ in the way white folks do.

  “The Umatillas used to be famous horse breeders, and horses were an important part of their lifestyle. They gave them mobility, an essential for nomadic people. See that house there? It’s very modest, but the truck parked next to it is nice and new. That says it all. They’re movers, not sitters. They like to be on the road.”

  Houses and farms stretched out in all directions. Just as Rick said, it was easy to tell which farms were being operated by tenants. They were Norman Rockwell classic, with neat farmhouses, barns, windmills. The Indian establishments were ramshackle, with abandoned furniture dotting the yards and old cars serving as chicken coops. Barefoot children played in the dust. Good old European feudalism had been set on its head. These were the manor houses.

  With a 200-year history of failed communication,
mutual mistrust, and gross inequity of power, it’s remarkable that Native American culture has survived at all. As recently as 1877, after newly developed agricultural methods made the Umatillas’ reservation a potential farming gold mine, the editor of Pendleton’s East Oregonian newspaper wrote, “We favor their removal, for it is a burning shame to keep this fine body of land for a few worthless Indians.”

  The U.S. government shared the view. Not far from Pendleton lies the fertile Wallowa Valley, the homeland of the Nez Perce nation. Eighteen seventy-seven was the year the U.S. Army received orders to remove the Nez Perce so that white settlers could turn the land into farms. The resulting conflict ended only after Chief Joseph led 600 warriors, women, children and old men on one of the longest and most acclaimed retreats in military history. After three months and more than a thousand miles, the cavalry caught the Nez Perce forty miles shy of the Canadian Border. Chief Joseph and his people, starving and freezing in an early winter, were shipped off to Oklahoma. “I will fight no more forever,” said Chief Joseph when he surrendered.

  The same Chief had once authored these words: “The Earth was created by the assistance of the sun, and it should be left as it was. The country was made without lines of demarcation, and it is no man’s business to divide it.” How can such a leader find common ground with the sons of Cincinnatus, men who had been marking lines on land since Adam’s fall?

  “My young men shall never work,” wrote another leader, the Wanapum shaman Smohalla. “Men who work cannot dream; and wisdom comes to us in dreams. You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s breast? .You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair?”