Blue Highways (40 page)

A few miles upstream on the Clearwater, eastward-bound Lewis and Clark stopped for a meal with the Nez Perce, Clark’s favorite tribe. The explorers, trade goods nearly exhausted, had resorted to eating bear-grease candles and to cutting off coat buttons to barter for a dog or horse they could butcher when their huntsmen returned empty. But more in demand among Indians than buttons or tobacco was Clark’s ability to dress a wound or drain an abscess or soothe a lesion. Clark wrote, “In our present situation, I think it pardonable to continue this deception [as a physician] for they will not give us any provisions without compensation in merchandise.”

After treating one Nez Perce, Clark sat down with the party to eat roasted dog, dried roots, and root bread. He described the meal:

While at dinner an Indian fellow very impertinently threw a half-starved puppy nearly into the plate of Capt. Lewis by way of derision for our eating dogs and laughed heartily at his own impertinence; Capt. Lewis was so provoked at the insolence that he caught the puppy and threw it with great violence at him and struck him in the breast and face, seized his tomahawk, and showed him by sign that if he repeated his insolence that he would tomahawk him; the fellow withdrew apparently much mortified, and we continued our dinner without further molestation.

Through such combinations of boldness and humanitarianism (and a little magic with friction matches, magnets, and magnifying glasses), Lewis and Clark moved their small group for twenty-six months through eight thousand miles of wild land with only the loss of two Indians and one soldier (apparently to an appendicitis; Lewis almost became a casualty when the half-blood boatman, Peter Cruzat, mistook him for an elk and shot him in the rump). For three-quarters of a century after the two visits by the Corps of Discovery, the Nez Perce did not fight white men because the captains had conducted the first encounters so well.

Lewiston, some residents think, looks like a European mountain town, what with its old brick buildings pressed in the valley. Maybe so, although a yellow pother over it from the Potlatch particle-board mill on the Clearwater gave it the appearance of a one-industry town anywhere. A potlatch, by the way, was a Northwest Indian ceremonial feast in which the host either distributed valuable material goods or destroyed his own to prove his wealth. Which conclusion the Potlatch company had in mind I couldn’t say.

Old U.S. 95 up barren Lewiston Hill, two thousand feet of grinding steepness, is such a fearsome thing travelers often carry an extra pair of undershorts when forced to drive it. Even the engineers of the new route approached the “hill” most reluctantly, tacking evasively as if ascent and descent weren’t their goal. But once on the summit, the rider sees the highways turn to mere dribbles trying to gain the great basin below.

Above the hill, the land again took on the soft face of the Palouse, fields alternating green wheat with tilled brown fallow. A few trees stood in the deep glens now going blue in the dusk; otherwise the horizon was a smooth concatenation of hills as fertile as the valleys. When pioneers arrived, they found the Palouse covered with tall bunchgrass, which Indians of the plateau wove into huts, baskets, and clothes. The settlers cleared the grass, planted wheat, and reaped huge yields despite a usual annual rainfall of less than twenty inches. The secret of this land that has never known a crop failure, in addition to good soil, is that seventy-five percent of the precipitation occurs between October and April when it helps most. Now farmers, still reaping harvests double the national average, sow in alternate years and control weed growth during the fallow period so that each crop gets two years of moisture. The Palouse is that ideal blend of rain and sun that Sam Hill dreamed of but looked for in the wrong place.

I
SPENT
the night in Hog Heaven, as early settlers called Moscow, Idaho, after they saw the gustatorial excitement pigs got into snorting up camas roots. Although settlers refused to eat the tubers, they were an Indian staple that helped sustain the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Citizens later tried to counteract the swinish name by changing it to Paradise, but that was much too unbelievable. In 1877, a transplanted Easterner applied for a postal permit under the present name to honor Moscow, Pennsylvania. That ended the silliness; but, as best I could tell, many residents, unable to agree whether the last vowel is long or short, don’t like the toponym Moscow any better than Hog Heaven.

The night before I had left on the trip, I met Fred Tomlins. He and his wife, Peggy, lived in Moscow. He had said, as people carelessly do, “If you ever get out to our corner (ho-ho), give us a call.” So I did.

Tomlins flew two hundred twenty-five combat missions in the F-100 Super-Sabre in Viet Nam and received three Distinguished Flying Crosses. After his tour, he finished his Air Force hitch as a test pilot in Georgia. He moved to northern Idaho, where he tried to earn a living by making wooden toys, but it didn’t work out. He talked with several airlines about flying for them, but, at thirty, he was too old. So Tomlins began studying for a master’s degree in Wildland Recreation Management at the University of Idaho. Someone had said the night I met him that he and his wife watched more television—especially game shows—than any two-member family in the country. Tomlins told me privately that was a lie. They had come in third in the district regionals.

After breakfast, I called. He suggested we meet for lunch at a new Mexican cafe housed in an old filling station. “Can’t remember the name,” he said, “but you won’t miss it. It’s the only gas station on Main serving enchiladas. No Margaritas though.” He liked Margaritas very much.

At Moreno’s we took a table about where the grease pit had been. The owners served a good lunch but had grown tired of the “get gas” jokes. “How do you like the Palouse?” Tomlins said.

“A strange piece of land. Beautiful.”

“Want to fly over it this afternoon?” He was not an indirect man.

After his afternoon class, we drove nine miles out to the airfield at Pullman, Washington. Pullman, home of Washington State University, and Moscow are the “U cities.” We rented a Cessna 150 and flew southeast toward the lower Snake River Canyon.

“I read today that topsoil in the Palouse can be a hundred feet deep!” I yelled over the engine and wind.

“Not true. Up to two hundred feet. First farmland in the country to sell for a thousand dollars an acre.”

“How do you get two hundred feet of topsoil?”

“It’s not all topsoil in the usual sense, but three layers. The first is silt, the second’s a lighter soil, and the third layer is loess—windblown glacial dust, old topsoil. An absorbent stuff that holds water. Under all that you’ve got volcanic rock. Weird, isn’t it? Glacier dust over lava.”

Much of the time we were flying so low I could see the men on tractors plowing stubble under and raising tall spumes of dust. The rigs, riding the high swells of land, looked like smoky ocean freighters.

Tomlins pointed at a drove of Appaloosa. “The breed gets its name from the Palouse. Indians invented the Appaloosa and white men discovered it. The strain almost died out after the Nez Perce were forced out of here in the eighteen seventies and the Army sold off their horses. But in the thirties, some Anglos started working to save the breed by using pure stock the Nez Perce still had. Lots of Appaloosas now.”

The man was a good pilot and didn’t mind showing his skill. The horizon tilted on its axis like a teeter-totter, the altimeter needle swung back and forth like a windshield wiper, and my stomach crawled up my throat.

“The thing I like when I’m up here,” he said, “you know what it is?”

“Your parachute?”

“Simplicity. Up here life has just one clear purpose: get back down.”

“Using the wings and wheels, I’m hoping.”

He rolled the Cessna on its side to show me the hills. “The tan fields are lentils and peas. The Palouse grows ninety-nine percent of the lentils in this country and ninety-five percent of the dry peas. Also a good share of the wheat which they rotate with the beans.”

He flipped the 150 on the other side, and I checked both wings to make sure they had followed after. We were twelve hundred feet above the fields, but at least we weren’t hanging under fifty-five-pound Dacron.

“Can’t believe it,” he said. “Not now anyway. But sometimes I miss Viet Nam. Not the war—I’m talking about the flying and how things were clear cut. Like the work. We all wanted just one major thing—stay alive long enough to get back home.”

15. Fred Tomlins in Moscow, Idaho

He locked the right wing in place as we pinwheeled above a silvery barn roof. Around and around, down, down. “You haven’t lost wanting that, have you, Fred?” We were in a sharp descent. “Fred?”

“What? Just thinking.”

“Are you thinking about great things living men do on the ground—like watching
Tic Tac Dough
and drinking Margaritas? Things that make life worth living?” We were still dropping. “Captain?”

He pulled out and leveled off. “I’ll show you the Snake River Canyon. One of our great rivers and almost unseen because it’s so hidden.” He nosed around toward the setting sun. “I was just thinking about one Christmas Day in Viet Nam. Sounds piss-poor to tell it, but we were on a bombing run to Laos because Nixon said we couldn’t bomb in Nam on Christmas. The nape—napalm cans—had been painted like candy canes. On the ADF radio they were playing Creedence Clearwater singing ‘Rollin’ Down the River.’ I sang along all the way.” He looked at the altimeter and pulled the nose up. “I guess the war was a hundred-thirty-billion-dollar waste, but it was a hell of a time if you lived.”

The Cessna went
whump-whump
when we reached the Snake. “Normal turbulence over a river,” he shouted. We were a thousand feet above the green rim of the gorge and three thousand feet over the river, a twisted strand of tourmaline.

“Take a good look,” Tomlins said. “Next time you see it, it may be a lake. Corps of Engineers has plans for hydroelectric dams all the way from the Columbia through Hells Canyon and on up. They’ve already built a couple dozen. Half the river’s drowned and so are a lot of Indian pictographs. Lewiston’s four hundred miles from the Pacific and now it’s a seaport because of the dams.”

“The Corps’ job is to keep free rivers from going to waste. That and to replace every salmon and sturgeon with carp,” I said.

We crossed and recrossed the great Snake, a task virtually impossible on the ground. “Steamboats used to run this lower section,” he said. “Hard to believe when you look into that crooked thing.”

We turned back toward Moscow. Later, driving into town, Tomlins said, “I hate going slow. You know what fun is? Fun is flying ten feet off the ground at Mach one.” He shook his head. “Oh well,
Twenty-Thousand-Dollar Pyramid
is on tonight. I’ll make it through another day.”

T
HE
thing that finally got my attention was his little aluminum suitcase. Except for the “spiritual material” consisting mostly of typed testimonials in the satchel, everything he owned was in the aluminum case. But I didn’t really see it until later.

Early afternoon: overcast, cheerless. A few miles north of Moscow I saw him hitching. The crosswind pulled his gray beard at a right angle to his face so that he looked like Curry’s painting of John Brown standing before the Kansas tornado. I stopped, and the small man quickly limped up the road with a hobble that reminded me of Porfirio Sanchez. Pushing the aluminum case ahead, he climbed in, smiling, introducing himself. His name was Arthur O. Bakke. The O stood for Olaf. He spelled the last name, asked mine and how to spell it.

Now the first question from a hitchhiker never varies: “How far ya goin’?” After making certain of spellings, Arthur O. Bakke’s first question was, “Do you want a free Bible course?” Oh, god, not this, I thought. “Jesus is coming,” he said. Save me, I thought and started working on a reason to turn back and head the other way. There’s little you can do to stop a soul claimsman; even aluminum siding salesmen run out of words before these guys. He was saying something about “God’s strategy.”