Big Dreams (4 page)

A
LIGHT RAIN WAS FALLING
when I got to Crescent City the next day, and everything in sight was gray. The sky, the streets, the dogs, the cats—all gray, as gray as flophouse linens. The grayness had an inordinate strength and seemed to suck the brilliance out of other colors, leaching them of their substance. Here was a primal gray that could not be appeased with coffee, tea, brandy, or flames, a gray so clammy and relentless that prolonged exposure to it threatened to sever your ties to the universal oversoul.

The doldrums, then. April twentieth, noon, and the thermometer was bottlenecked at forty-six degrees. I took a room at American Best Motel, a confident establishment if ever there was one, and discussed the weather with the manager, Bob Young, who advised me that there would be no change until early evening, when the mercury would drop a few more notches to add another dollop of misery to the prevailing chill.

For with the grayness, the abiding gray, came a weird sort of cold that couldn’t be measured reliably on any gauge. No matter how you tried to resist it, it got to you sooner or later, seeping through your clothing to reside in the marrow of your bones. It felt as if a steady clatter of miniature ice cubes were being released into your bloodstream. You shivered, stiffened, and stamped your feet, but your metabolism refused all entreaties.

Crescent City was a famous fishing town. Touring the harbor, I could see some boats out on the ocean and pitied the poor crewmen aboard them. Say, for example, that they were into the twelfth day of a two-week voyage, at a point in nautical time when the cramped quarters of an old trawler became almost unbearable—the decks slick with slime, the heater broken, the head a holy nightmare, and the stink of bait, entrails, and dead fish permeating every inch of enclosed space.

At sea, in frigid weather, every metal surface seemed to stick to
the crewmen’s skin. They had to keep clenching and unclenching their hands to prevent their brittle fingers from breaking. Their noses dribbled and their sinuses impacted. The only escape from the debilitating elements was down below, where a fellow could lie on a hard bunk beneath a thin, gray blanket and flip the bilge-swollen pages of an ancient copy of
Playboy
from which his brethren had surely torn the centerfold.

Even when the boats returned to shore, the poor men would find precious little to distract them. Crescent City might be the largest town in Del Norte County, but it had less than four thousand residents. Only twenty thousand people were scattered over the entire county, an expanse of some 641,290 acres. That worked out to about one person per 30 acres. The state and federal governments owned three-quarters of the land and preserved it in parks and forests. There were no metropolitan areas nearby.

An economic depression stalked Del Norte County. Fishing and logging, the traditional industries of the Far North, were both battling to survive. The locals complained about too much government regulation, but the ocean and the forests had been attacked with a vengeance over the years, and their dwindling resources were in need of protection. An era of Wild West-style plundering that had always supported the area was drawing to a close.

In Crescent City, the powers-that-be were looking to tourism to patch the holes in their economy. Every tackle shop in the harbor was piled with fliers and pamphlets advertising such stellar attractions as the annual Dungeness Crab Festival, but there was still the problem of the weather to be surmounted—a bleak, damp grayness in the spring, and in the summer a dizzying, gray fogbank that lifted for just two hours each afternoon.

Throughout the long day I felt the forlornness of Crescent City. Young men cruised absently around the harbor in their trucks, smoking dope and popping the tops on half-quart beers. They were tough kids raised to work in mills or on boats, and they wouldn’t stoop to being waiters or clerks—they weren’t servants. They’d been cheated
of a future, really, so they behaved recklessly and acted out their anger, getting into fights and copping DUIs.

Outside the canneries in the harbor, workers stood around in bloodstained aprons. Trucks pulled up to chutes that fed into the cannery buildings and disgorged butchered fish in pieces—heads, tails, and guts in a roaring gush. On one pier, some fish buyers were huddled in shanties to cut their deals.

By the Seafarer’s Hall and the Commercial Fishermen’s Wives Association, I paused at a drinking fountain inlaid with a plaque that said, In Memory of Steve Williams, Lost at Sea, March 6, 1970, and then these words:

M
ORE RAIN FELL ON MY SECOND DAY
in Crescent City, buckets of it, so I took shelter at the Visitor Center of Redwood National Park. The park covers about 106,000 acres in California’s redwood country, a strip of land that extends from the Monterey Peninsula into Oregon.

Children were stretched out on the floor of the center reading books, while their parents bought postcards and quizzed the rangers on duty, who wore uniforms and Smokey-the-Bear hats and sometimes showed a humorous grace-under-pressure when they responded to questions.

“What did Lady Bird Johnson plant in the grove that’s named for her?” somebody asked.

“Her feet,” came a ranger’s response.

I studied the exhibits and learned that Spanish explorers had called our
Sequoia sempervirens “palos colorados”
on account of their reddish color. An average redwood lived for about two thousand years. The same watery, gray climate that chilled the blood of human beings helped the trees to stay alive so long and grow to such an impressive size. The damp soil kept their roots moist, and their trunks and branches didn’t lose much water through evaporation or transpiration.

Passing through Crescent City in 1863, William Brewer had spent some time in a redwood grove and had recorded his wonderment.

“The bark is very thick and lies in great ridges,” he wrote, “so that the trunks seem like gigantic fluted columns supporting the dense and deep mass of foliage above.… A man may ride on horseback under some of these great arches.” There was a special tree down the coast in Trinidad, he said, that a speculator proposed to cut down and turn into a schooner.

It was December, and Brewer mentioned that the grove had an “almost oppressive effect upon the mind.” In summer, a redwood forest with its slanting light can be likened (and, too often,
was
) to a cathedral, but the same forest in winter is a cold, dark, hostile environment. Already the redwoods were under siege, Brewer implied. “A man will build a house and barn from one of them, fence a field, probably, in addition, and leave an immense mass of brush and logs as useless.”

The ravaging of virgin redwood groves had continued unabated for more than a century, and now the few remaining old-growth forests were increasingly off-limits to the timber companies that had harvested them for ages. Around Crescent City, the bitterness toward organizations like the Sierra Club ran deep and played itself out in such bumper stickers as Stamp Out Spotted Owls. Loggers took it hard when they perceived that a bird’s life mattered more to society than a man’s did.

The rain kept falling. One of the rangers removed her hat
for a minute to take a breather, and we got to talking. Linda lived with her husband and her daughter near Lake Earl, on the outskirts of town. She was completely at home on the coast and could hike, camp, fly-fish, and even make a meal off the land if it came to that.

Although Linda held redwoods in high esteem, she wasn’t sentimental about them. Her appreciation for the trees was strictly botanical. She marveled at how unique they were and what they meant to the ecology of the planet. Logging had always been part of life in Del Norte County, she said, and she only objected to the cutting of irreplaceable, old-growth stock.

Linda told me a parable about the redwoods. A friend of hers who was broke and without hope had once accepted a job as a logger to feed his family. Everything went well until he was ordered to top an old-growth stand behind his grandmother’s house. She ragged him about it, and so did the neighbors. The logger felt guilty and couldn’t sleep. He’d try to scale a tree, and down he’d slide, wedging splinters into his face and his hands. He thought to himself, Those redwoods are fighting back!

“So what happened?” I asked.

“He quit and got a job driving a bulldozer where the prison’s going in,” Linda said. “Out on Lake Earl Drive.”

I had heard about this prison, Pelican Bay, a maximum-security institution, in town. It was supposed to have beds for 2,200 inmates, but it would doubtlessly hold many more than that. Prisons in California were in short supply and always exceeded their carrying capacity. Since 1984, the state had been constructing them as fast as it could after a hiatus of twenty years.

It surprised me that a little place like Crescent City would welcome a prison, especially one for murderers, kidnapers, rapists, and gang members, all the rottenest apples in the barrel. I was even more surprised when I saw that it was being built in a residential neighborhood close to a school.

That evening, I remarked on Pelican Bay to Bob Young at
American Best, and he set me straight by telling me that the prison had a projected annual payroll of about $42 million.

O
N MY THIRD DAY IN CRESCENT CITY
, the sun miraculously began shining, and the town became its ideal Chamber-of-Commerce self, all salt air and sparkling sea. My thoughts turned to fishing again, so I phoned Bob Dearth, the president of Del Norte Fishermen’s Marketing Association, to indulge in some talk of hooks and down-riggers and the ocean brine.

I had it in mind to ask Dearth to show me his boat, but his wife intervened. He had promised to paint their house that morning, and she meant to hold him to it. After some hushed bargaining, though, he was granted a grace period of one hour, and I went to meet him at his berth in the harbor. In a while, a little Japanese pickup came steaming toward me. It stopped abruptly, and Mrs. Dearth released her husband to my custody.

Bob Dearth was a solid man in his fifties. He had the chafed skin of a seafarer and spoke gently and with respect for words. He had twinkly eyes behind glasses and enjoyed a joke. Pens and pencils were jammed into the front pocket of his Big Mac overalls as a tribute to his presidential rank.

“Time to switch on the bilge pump,” he said cheerfully, stepping onto his boat, the
Vilnius
, a twenty-five-foot-long salmon trawler equipped with a 160-horsepower outboard engine, more juice than such boats usually had. The skipper was a speed jockey.

Dearth had built the
Vilnius
from scratch in his backyard, starting with a fiber-glass hull that had cost him seven hundred dollars. He’d intended it to be the first rung on a ladder leading him to a bigger craft, but times were rough, and he had decided to hang onto it instead of going into debt. Age had taught him caution and forebearance.

“See that over there?” He pointed across the harbor to a nice,
big, all-weather shrimp trawler, the
Catherine Marie
, that was about forty-five feet long. “That’s
my
boat. I bought that boat down in Texas, but I lost it here in a bad year.”

Dearth hailed from a fishing family. His father and his two brothers had all fished commercially. His home port was in the Department of Fish and Game’s Klamath Management Zone, and he shared the zone with two other groups of users, sports anglers and Indians.

In the KMZ, the salmon runs were so depleted that a “season” might only last for a day or two, he said. The season changed from year to year, but regardless of
how
it changed, there were never enough salmon for Dearth to earn a living on them. He ran the
Vilnius
as a transit boat, traveling around to more fertile waters. He went down to Fort Bragg in early April, a trip of about two hundred miles, and up to Coos Bay, Oregon, in July, where he remained until autumn. He was always back in Crescent City by Halloween, mending his gear for Dungeness crab season, which could still be rewarding in the KMZ.

The traveling caused him difficulties. Dearth missed his wife while he was away in Oregon, and he missed his two sons all the time. The boys had crewed for him on the
Vilnius
since they were just out of diapers, but they were adults now and had left home to see what they could of the world. That was often the case around town, Dearth said. The children felt a tug when they were in their teens. There were no jobs to hold them, so they took off.

As president of the Marketing Association, a co-op, Dearth was adept at reciting the troubles confronting fishermen in the Far North. The decimated salmon fishery was the most serious problem. In the past, the fleet had contributed to it by taking too many salmon, but Dearth felt that the Department of Fish and Game was overcompensating by unspooling too much red tape and creating regulations that were too harsh.

Logging companies had also caused some of the wreckage
through negligent practices that had ruined many spawning streams, poisoning them with silt and pollutants. Then there were the boats that pursued hake, a cod, in the mid-water fishery and caught incidental salmon in their nets—27,000 incidentals in a recent year. The hake had no real value in the United States. Mother ships from Russia, China, Korea, Poland, and Japan processed it offshore and readied it for export. Abroad, it was used in synthetic crab and shrimp products.

Fishermen also paid exorbitantly for their disaster insurance, Dearth said, and they had to compete with fish dealers who sold pen-raised salmon from Norway and giant sea bass from Chile. There was a bottom line to all this. It used to be that any lout with a boat could survive, but now you had to be smart. You had to sweat and be willing to work the debilitating hours.