Big Dreams (3 page)

To the east, some fields planted with Easter lily bulbs pressed up against hills that were studded with a diversity of trees—tan oaks
and red alders, chinquapins, incense cedars, and a tall stand of Douglas firs that gave way at last, on the hilltop, to ponderosas and fleecy-needled digger pines. Almost the entire crop of Easter lilies in the United States came from the Brookings-Smith River area, about $4 million worth of flowers annually.

Pelican Beach was a strip of sand on a quiet inlet a mile or two down the road. The Knottical Inn, a curious building on a bluff above it, caught my eye. It had the merry nonchalance of a folk-art piece. The entrance was festooned with multicolored fishing floats and almost blocked by old wooden barrels. A battered dinghy sat landlocked near the front door. Dogs barked with menace when I pulled into the parking lot, but once I got by them, I was in a beautifully situated restaurant that offered grand views of the limitless Pacific, a vivid aquamarine.

At a small redwood bar, an elderly couple were having a quiet cocktail before dinner. The restaurant’s cook sat on a stool next to them, taking a break before the evening crunch. He had robust, gray sideburns that flowed in cottony columns from under his toque. He was watching
Coal Miner’s Daughter
on the bar’s TV and vetting it for any possible deviance from his notion of reality.

“That’s the original Grand Ole Opry, all right,” he said approvingly when Sissy Spacek, as Loretta Lynn, began to sing. He finished up his coffee and retired to the kitchen, leaving the rest of us in charge of the facts.

From the bartender, an open-faced, thirtyish woman, I ordered a beer. Her name, I discovered, was Penny Knott. Her family owned the restaurant—hence, The Knottical—and everybody pitched in to run it. Penny greeted the customers, her brothers worked as waiters, and her mother was the general overseer, responsible for the decor and making no apologies about it.

The Knotts had come to California from Colorado in 1964, so that Penny’s father, a carpenter, could take a job helping to rebuild the town of Klamath after the Klamath River had destroyed it in a major flood. Her parents had never been especially comfortable in
the freewheeling California atmosphere, Penny said. They thought the state was “debauched.” She wasn’t dissatisfied herself, she went on—just feeling restless and in need of something new, a change of some kind. She was considering a move to Phoenix or Tucson.

I asked Penny what it was like to straddle a border between states, and she told me that she noticed a difference in her customers from either side.

“The people from California are more graceful, and they tip better,” she explained. “Oregonians are much more careful. They’re legalistic—you know what I mean? They always want to be sure they’re getting full value for their dollar.”

Apparently, we’d hit on a controversial topic around Pelican Bay because when Dusty, the cook, and his sous-chef overheard us through the open kitchen door, they played their own variations on the theme until Dusty felt compelled to emerge again to offer a good-natured defense of Oregon and Oregonians. He let it be known that he was a native Californian, Sacramento-born, but that he would never live there again, not even if hell froze over.

“What do you pay for your car’s license fee?” he inquired.

I could sense a trap being set. The gears in the cook’s finely tuned brain were spinning. “A lot,” I answered.

Dusty nodded vigorously and almost sent his toque flying. “In Oregon,” he said, “we pay almost nothing.” He described a house he was renting, a lovely, tranquil, Oregonian house that he could never have afforded on the other side of the great divide.

“Doesn’t Oregon bore you sometimes?” I asked, remembering all those chain saws and flannel shirts.

The cook smirked and laid down his trump card. “You can always
drive
to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, putting an abrupt end to the debate.

In the fading evening light, customers were filtering into The Knottical and engaging in the eternal struggle for the prize tables by the windows. Penny would seat them and then return to talk some more. Her current restlessness had to do with searching for a
vision of her future, she said. She had recently attended a meeting at a grange hall nearby, where Billy Mills, the famous Olympian who was half Sioux, had given a speech about how Indians of all tribes lacked representation in Congress and needed to band together. The speech had inspired her to do some thinking.

It dawned on me that the Far North was still Indian country in California, and that Penny might have some Indian blood herself.

“Are you part Indian?” I asked, feeling foolish as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

She looked at me as if I ought to know better, pinching an arm and glancing quizzically at a leg. I was getting an object lesson, the first of many.

“It’s not so simple, eh?” Penny said, with a knowing smile.

C
IRRUS CLOUDS AND A SMOKE-HUNG SKY
. A ship appeared on the horizon, an ocean liner plunked down by the highway. The Krupps had built it in Germany years ago as a yacht for a New York millionaire, who had christened it
Caritas
.

When the navy requisitioned the ship in the 1940s, it became the U.S.S.
Garnet
, but the
Garnet
fell into private hands after the war, and tugboats towed it from Oakland to the mouth of Smith River. Twelve tractors dragged it from there to its present position, where its job was to lure tourists like me to Ship Ashore Resort.

After a late supper in the dining room, I took a stroll along the river. The tide was low, revealing mud flats and shell debris. A great blue heron stood on its long, spindly legs by the timbers of a rotting pier, waiting patiently for its evening meal. Surfbirds, black-and-white, waddled over rocks that little breakers kept washing clean.

In a region that had once boiled and spilled over with water, the Smith was thse last big, free-flowing stream—the last anywhere in California, really. On the North Coast, the Klamath, Eel, Trinity, Mad, Van Duzen, and Russian rivers had all been dammed for flood
control, to supply irrigation to farmers, or to fuel suburban development.

Like the U.S.S.
Garnet
, the Smith belonged in a museum. It showed how bountiful the coastal rivers used to be. It still supported large runs of spawning salmon and steelhead, and they were often of legendary size, with a few thick-bellied chinook weighing in at almost sixty pounds each year. Because the stream had no impoundments, it cleared quickly after a winter storm, but its uniqueness was also its curse. If the fish were thick, so were the fishermen, jammed in elbow to elbow.

Jedediah Smith, fur trader and mountain man, had lent his name to the river. In prints and sketches, he was always dressed in fringed buckskins, but he was actually born in New York and didn’t see the other side of the Mississippi until, in his early twenties, he signed on as a hunter with General William H. Ashley of Saint Louis, who advertised in newspapers for “enterprising young men.”

In 1828, while on a beaver trapping expedition, Smith passed along the North Coast on his way to Oregon, eager to be gone from California. The Mexican authorities had created difficulties for him since his arrival, pestering him for detailed papers and even for a passport bearing the seal of Mexico, so he was bound for the relatively unpoliced Willamette Valley, where he could set his traps without interference.

Smith had great skill as a mapmaker. On the maps that he drew of the area, he labeled a stream that emptied into the ocean at Requa as the “Smith River,” but subsequent explorers corrected him. That stream had its headwaters in Oregon and was already known as the Klamath River, so “Smith River” got bounced from one place to another by cartographers until it stuck to the next river to the north, where it remained.

Word of the change never reached Jed Smith. Some Umpqua Indians ambushed his party in Oregon and killed most of his men, and he died himself three years later in a battle with some Comanches
on the Santa Fe Trail. His associates in Saint Louis mourned his loss and honored him with a hyperbolic eulogy in the
Illinois Monthly Magazine
.

“And though he fell under the spears of savages,” it said, “and his body has glutted the prairie wolf, and none can tell where his bones are bleaching, he must not be forgotten.”

An evening mist, cool and damp, settled onto my skin. The mist, the smoky sky, the spiraling trees, the spooky quiet—they were a signature of the Far North, its essential elements. While gulls whirled and piped, I watched a blood-red sun sink into the ocean and saw two dusky shapes at the river’s edge, a teenage girl with a ponytail and a young man who was being enterprising.

“You’re going to be something when you grow up,” he told her in a syrupy voice.

“I already am grown up,” she said.

“No, you’re not. You’re already just pretty.”

She could have been tiptoeing on a log. I imagined all the girls on all the beaches in California who were trying to keep their balance as the sun went down.

S
MITH
R
IVER TOWN WAS A SPECK
in the enormous greenery of the Far North, a relic of the nineteenth century. Two roads converged at the town’s center before running by some shops and winding past dilapidated migrant shacks into open country. The buildings on Fred Haight Drive, the main street, were old and shabby and in need of paint. They looked much as they must have when settlers had hammered together Smith River in the 1850s, chopping down ferns that were sometimes knotted and tangled to a height of ten feet.

Nothing much was happening on the morning I stopped to visit. I found a transients’ hotel, a video store, and, unbelievably, a tanning parlor that was defunct and shuttered, its radiant appliances collecting dust. Who would ever pay for a tan in Smith River? I wondered. Farmers got brown by working outdoors in the fields. The parlor
was like a seed that had blown up from Beverly Hills and had failed to germinate, withering and dying in alien soil.

Dust had collected elsewhere in town, as well. Smith River seemed to be in the process of dismantling itself. At Hollie’s Market, fixtures were ripped from the walls, and the shelves were toppled. Goods of every kind were tossed randomly into shopping carts, aspirin bottles mingling with candybars and bottles of Pepto-Bismol.

Mrs. Hollie, a short, dark-haired woman, was counting greeting cards at a check-out stand, scratching numbers on a brown paper bag. I bought a bag of peanuts, her only customer.

“Are you about to open or about to close?” I asked.

“We’re closing,” she said. “It’s been twenty-five years!”

“So you’ve had enough?”

“Enough? Why,
yes!
”

Mr. Hollie joined us from the rear of the market. He wore a John Deere tractor cap and had a friendly, ruddy, country face. In his manner, I saw another old-fashioned thing, a gentlemanly urge to be around while a stranger was talking with his wife. We chatted about blameless subjects, about how the lily bulb growers were pushing out the last dairy farms and how 120 inches of rain might fall in Smith River during a wet winter.

“Will you be moving on?” I wanted to know.

Mrs. Hollie was a native of the town. She wouldn’t consider leaving. “It’s too late to start over in a new place,” she said.

Mr. Hollie laughed and said, “We’d be getting a pretty late start.”

Some Indian men were lounging on the front steps of an old house not far from the market. They fell silent and turned to stare when I drove by. They did the same thing to other cars, but if an Indian driver passed, usually in a scruffy pickup or an antique V-8 sedan, they would raise their arms to wave. It was as if an Indian driver afforded them some relief from an ongoing monotony that only they could feel. They were acknowledging the presence of an Indian world that was ordinarily concealed within the white one.

The men were probably from the Tolowa tribe, I thought. Once,
the Tolowa had dominated the land around Smith River, controlling a territory that stretched from Crescent City, just to the south, all the way to the Rogue River in Oregon. They were efficient hunter-gatherers and had feasted on the rich resources of the North Coast—the game, the berries, the fruit, and the waterfowl.

In 1872, Stephen Powers, a reporter with a gift for ethnography, had set down his impressions of the tribe for the
Overland Monthly
, then the premiere journal in the state. The Tolowa, Powers wrote, were tall, haughty, aggressive, bold, and altogether forceful. They were in the habit of marching down to Requa, a Yurok village, rounding up a few captives, and holding them for ransom. They liked gambling and card games and had a superstitious reverence for the dead, never speaking their names, even by category, as in “father” or “mother,” so as not to insult them.

For the Tolowa, Powers said, heaven was somewhere behind the sun. This belief was a natural outgrowth of their coastal climate, he maintained, since they had to suffer through “chilling, dank, leaden fogs” all summer and dreamed of bathing in “warm, soft rays” through eternity.

That afternoon, I took a back road out of Smith River, and it led me by chance to a neatly kept Indian cemetery enclosed by a white picket fence. Little ovals of rust had bled into the wood from aging nails, and the gates were held fast with twine.

For some minutes, I stood at a gate deciding whether or not to go in, but then I did and walked carefully among the headstones and the gravestones and read the chiseled inscriptions. I looked out at the ocean, so near, and at Prince Island, an uninhabited rock where seabirds were flocking.

Most of the Indians buried in the cemetery had not lived very long, but I came across some exceptions, such as Joe Seymour, who’d lived to be a hundred. A vase of plastic flowers on Seymour’s grave had toppled over, so I set it right. The only sound I could hear was the crying of the seabirds.