Timothy Egan won the 2006 National Book Award for Non-Fiction last year for his book The Worst Hard Time. I was working at Barnes and Noble at the time, and it was good news to us because Egan is a local. We figured there would be even more interest. One of our customers wanted The Good Rain also by Timothy Egan to give as a gift. He thought it was better and more appropriate than the previously mentioned The Worst Hard Time. So I put it on my own wish list because I’ve always wanted to have a book that I could point to that was about me.
Let me explain a bit. A good friend of mine has a decade of experience working in restaurants. She claims to be only a so-so cook, but the cook’s life is in her blood. She tells people that if they want to understand her, they should read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (which, incidentally, will show up for review here sooner or later). The one thing that is in my blood more than anything else is the Pacific Northwest. Some members of my family came to the northwest in covered wagons on the Oregon Trail, five or six generations ago. My grandfather was raised in Ballard, in north Seattle, making me the fourth generation to have lived in that or a neighboring section of town (the house I lived in until I was five was in Greenwood, on a hill that overlooks Ballard). I love Seattle. I love Washington. I love the Pacific Northwest. It’s that simple.
The Good Rain isn’t exactly what I expected it to be. I don’t think I can point to it and say read this book to understand me.
It is not a paean to the Northwest I know. Rather, it praises the Northwest as it was before the white man arrived, and it anecdotally shows how we’ve transformed the country from an idyllic nature to a slim caricature of what it once was. It’s a wonderful book, but it’s less to do with the place I live in now than what we want it to be or it could have been.
Egan starts with Theodore Winthrop’s The Canoe and the Saddle (free version from Google Books) as the basis for his exploration of the description and history of the Northwest. Theodore Winthrop visited the area for a few weeks in 1853. He was a Massachusetts native, a child of some wealth who traveled the world. Later he would be the first Union officer killed in the Civil War, which brought some exposure for his writings, this being the only book of non-fiction he was to write. He visited the coast of Washington starting from Astoria, where he disembarked from a voyage from San Francisco. He got as far north as Victoria, and then canoed south through Puget Sound. It’s not completely clear from Egan’s writings where he went from there, but he also traveled through Oregon and ended up at The Dalles where he recovered from smallpox before heading back east.
Egan doesn’t recreate Winthrop’s trip. Rather, over the course of a couple of years he visited each of the places that Winthrop did, as well as nearby locales. For each, he writes about the history of the area focusing on the changing landscape from approximately the time of Winthrop through today, relating the key changes to each area. For Astoria, the reader will learn about the mouth of the Columbia, known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. A water flow mighty despite the damming of the river causes swells and breakers that continue to wreck ships to this day. For a place like the Olympics, we learn how the airplane industry’s use of spruce trees for World War I’s fighter planes was sourced to the forests on the peninsula. For Victoria, we learn why the city has such an English character, and Egan contrasts that with the deforestation of Vancouver Island. For the North Cascades, Egan writes of Fred Beckey a mountain climber passed over for the first American climb of Everest because he was considered reckless and didn’t have many friends. He specialized in be the first to climbs peaks in the Cascades starting in the 1920s and 1930s and continuing through the publication of this book in 1990. Further south, Egan writes of the Indian’s way of life and the many broken treaties.
It’s not all self-flagellation though. Quite a bit of the book is how various communities are finding ways to survive that are not based on resource extraction. Egan writes also of how some Indian tribes have fought back, winning concessions that will empower them to continue, albeit on a different basis than as communal-property-owning hunter-gatherers netting fish from the rivers. Many smaller cities, formerly logging towns that blame their downfall on the spotted owl rather than automation, are turning to tourism to provide a living for their residents. Along the Columbia Gorge the constant strong winds are proving a haven for windsurfers, for instance.
I’m not sure how much anyone who doesn’t have a significant connection to the environment or the Northwest will care about the book. I’d have much less interest in a similar book written about the Everglades, for instance. Nevertheless, for those with that connection, I highly recommend this book.
Title: The good rain: across time and terrain in the Pacific Northwest
Author: Timothy Egan
Cover photographer: Galen Rowell
Imprint / publisher: Vintage Departures / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 254 p.
Publication date: December 1991
ISBN-10: 0-679-73485-6
Subject: Northwest, Pacific — Description and travel
Subject: Northwest, Pacific — History
Subject: Landscape — Northwest, Pacific
LC classification: F851.E28 1991
