The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (35 page)

Along the banks of this river, Winthrop treated his horses to a patch of wild pea vines and himself to a grouse which he shot and slow-cooked over the fire. His head sated with sublimity, his stomach full of grouse, he fell asleep next to the cold river. Later, he concluded, “There are things to be said in behalf of cobblestone beds by rivers of the Northwest. I was soft to the rocks, if not they to me.”

I wake up shivering, the top of my sleeping bag covered with frost. It’s not quite morning. I try to return to a dream, just to see how it turns out, but I can’t get back in. I get up, dress, fold my bag and continue downstream. At a junction of the Naches and the Bumping, a road leads down to the Yakima Valley from Chinook Pass. By plan, I’m supposed to follow the river to the valley, just as Winthrop did. It’s the late twentieth
century, no reason to stay on two feet; Winthrop didn’t have the benefit of the interstate highway system. I stick my thumb out. An hour goes by, three cars pass. Then a logging truck stops, and a man with a baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan “We Interrupt this Marriage to Bring You Deer-Hunting Season,” leans over and says, “Hop in.” He’s heavily into deforestation, carrying a load of old-growth ponderosa pine down to the mill in Yakima. His cargo looks a lot like the trees I slept next to, two-hundred-year-old beauties. With the casualties in back and me in front we wind down the road along the Naches.

Coming into the Yakima Valley, we pass a few orchards in the high country, sloped rows of trees clinging to hillsides and bluffs. The earth is overcooked, seared of any late season vegetation, but huge patches of green are grafted to this quilt of brown. Sprinkler heads spit water above the treetops. The blades of giant windmills rotate slowly, trying to mix the cold air of the orchard floor with the warmer air ten feet above ground. The Naches widens and slows, changing from mountain stream to valley irrigation artery. Along the river, before we enter the sprawl of the town of Yakima, shacks of corrugated tin, plywood and cardboard appear, the homes of migrants. An army of forty-five thousand Mexicans picks the hops that are brewed into three-dollar-a-glass ales, the spearmint that becomes gum for sluggers in the World Series, the Rainier cherries that so delight, the grapes that ferment to fine white wine, the asparagus of spring, the peaches and pears and prunes for summer tables, the apples for the world.

According to natural law, nothing should grow here but sage and scrub brush and those creatures of the desert that don’t need drinking water to stay alive. On the floor of the Yakima Valley I do a 360-degree head turn, and all I see are fruit trees and vineyards and hop fields at the height of life. The wind carries the scents of the season, fresh-pressed cider, grapes under crush. Beyond the hillsides of irrigated green are the desert tops of two ranges which rise above the valley, Rattlesnake Hills and Horse Heaven Hills. Floating above the horizon on the western skyline is the 12,225-foot volcano of Mount Adams, a suspended snow cone.

The apples on Jim Doornink’s farm have reached climax. Ripe. Sweet. Full-colored. Firm. I pick a Golden Delicious, the color of winter sun. I polish it on the nap of my jeans and then bite into the fruit Eve used to tempt Adam, the ancient Greek symbol of love and fecundity. All that fiber and potassium and Vitamin C in a sweet orb of eighty calories.

“This is the best day of the year to pick these apples,” says Doornink, a big man in his late thirties with massive forearms who looks somewhat like his brother Dan, a onetime fullback for the Seattle Seahawks. He takes out a small handheld pressurizer and tries to punch through an apple.

“Look at that,” says Doornink. It takes eighteen pounds of pressure per square inch before the apple breaks, more than enough to meet the minimum Washington State apple firmness standard of eleven pounds per square inch. Nowhere else in the world are farmers required to poke eleven pounds of pressure against their apples before they’re allowed to sell them. He cuts open a few Red D’s and sprays them with iodine. The fruit goes black before it lightens in the center—the proof of maximum sweetness, another state requirement. But I don’t need the pressurizer or iodine to tell me that.

Ever since Doornink unleashed the bees of April for a pollination orgy, he’s been waiting for this—peak week. Every apple farmer in the Yakima Valley is jacked. Nobody sleeps more than a few hours at a time. The trees are dripping red and gold and a dozen shades in between. Following the blossom, the apples absorbed a summer of desert sun, sixteen hours of light every day, and then a month of cool night temperatures. An apple that hasn’t experienced the hard times of cold is flat, tasteless, bland. But an apple that’s hung in the hundred-degree temperatures of day and held through the thirty-five-degree nips of night is a fruit with experience. Cold helps to brings out acid, which makes an apple tart. Color is painted by warmth. When they connected snowmelt to the sun a hundred years ago here, they created a valley of plenty: The farmers of Washington will harvest half the apples grown in America this year—about 12 billion pieces of fruit, and more cherries than anyplace on earth.

Bouncing in the seat of Doornink’s truck, we listen as the radio picks up traffic reports from across the Cascades in Seattle. Here, we’re looking at a seventy-five-degree day, the sun reflecting back off the snows of Mount Adams, the air full of harvest and free of clouds. In Seattle, traffic is backed up practically to the Canadian border and drizzle is falling. They haven’t seen the sun for two weeks. I pick up a Yakima station, all Spanish, and another local one, all John Bircher, the broadcaster warning about the danger of a civilian population not sufficiently armed with AK-47
S
and other semiautomatic fruits of the Constitution. Doornink and I drop off a load of apples at the cold-storage facility, a warehouse of dark manipulation. Used to be, all apples were sold fresh until about Christmas, when they started to go mushy. Then came cold storage—or “controlled
atmosphere,” as they call it here. All but about one percent of the oxygen is sucked from the air inside these blackened rooms, and the temperature is maintained at thirty-one degrees. The conditions keep the fruit suspended, as is, for about a year, allowing farmers to sell a crisp apple twelve months after it was picked from the tree. A marvel of technology, controlled atmosphere has one drawback: every year, says Doornink, they lose a worker or two who mistakenly steps into the vacuum without his bottled oxygen.

Back at the Doornink family farm, I sample the Rome Beauties—my favorite, midsized, almost perfectly round. Doornink owns sixty acres, mostly Red and Golden Delicious, but he grows pears and cherries for diversity. Last year, he lost about fifty dollars for every bin of apples he sold. Too much sun. Too many apples. The fruit looked bad. Throughout the valley, millions of pounds were left to rot on the trees or poured into canyons. Farmers paid juice processors to take them off their hands. This year, the the volume is down, the fruit looks good, and Doornink and his wife, Rena, are hoping to go to Europe on the proceeds from the harvest.

Jim Doornink wanted to be a doctor like his father, Glenn, the patriarch. Side by side, they look Dutch Calvinist and mean, Gothic farmers, big-boned, slow to laugh, with massive hands. The vagaries of working the land shape a country face so differently from a city face. Usually, it’s an edge-of-bankruptcy look, neck and brow wrinkled by sun and worry. The doctor’s father was a dairy farmer who came to the valley in 1928 and then went bust. The doctor bought the orchard in 1957. Jim started working in the fields at the age of six. Today, with the fruit plump and full-colored, the Doorninks are lighthearted and generous of spirit. Those Dutch faces shine.

The surgeon inside Jim Doornink has never left. He is a practical doctor of horticulture. In the yard next to the eighty-year-old house where Jim and Rena Doornink live are rows of experimental trees. Doornink is constantly grafting one species to another, toying with taste and look. The average American eats nineteen pounds of apples every year, mostly Red Delicious, a species almost unheard of fifty years ago. Tastes change. If the consumer ditches the Red Delicious for one of the new boutique apples growing on small farms throughout the Northwest, then what? Some growers think the Red Delicious has already reached its peak. Doornink does not want to be left high and dry with yesterday’s fruit fad. The great thing about apples is that they lend themselves so easily to genetic alteration. A well-read amateur can play fruit god, adding a touch
of tart here, a douse of pink there, grafting to make smaller sizes for smaller appetites. The aerobic apple is all the rage now, a cute, eight-bite snack that fits into the purse or the suit pocket of a fat-phobic urbanite.

“Apples are kind of like kids,” says Doornink. “They all come from the same human family, but they all look slightly different. If you were to take ten thousand seeds out of this orchard, you’d get ten thousand different apples.”

“A valley bare and broad,” is the way Winthrop described this desert floor of the Yakima Valley. His prophetic powers were missing here; bothered by heat and conflicts with his Indian guides, he turned surly and short-sighted. Taking shelter at a Jesuit mission, he dined on local potatoes and salmon from the river, and argued philosophy with the blackrobes from the Society of Jesus. He poked fun at their attempts to wean the Indians away from polygamy and fishing. The Yakimas might take to potato farming, said Winthrop, but giving up spousal variety was another thing. He noted that the native women of the valley were gorgeous, much different from the round-faced, squat coastal tribes. “A strange and unlovely spot for religion to have chosen for its home of influence,” Winthrop wrote of his overnight stay in the mission. “It needed all the transfiguring power of sunset to make this desolate scene endurable.”

The sign in the upper Yakima Valley says: W
ELCOME TO
Y
AKIMA—THE
P
ALM
S
PRINGS OF
W
ASHINGTON
. The desolate scene is more than endurable, thanks to the transfiguring power of water, but Palm Springs it’s not. Five mountain dams provide water for a half-million acres of farmland in the valley. The Yakima River, birthed in snowmelt just east of Snoqualmie Pass, is held back by the turn-of-the-century dams of Keechelus, Kachess and Cle Elum. Two other forks, Tieton and Bumping, are also pinched by reservoirs. Every winter the farmers of the Yakima Valley watch the snow pile up in the Cascades; if the white tops disappear too early, as they did this year, water battles break out. The irrigation system here is an Old West anachronism: first grab, first served. If you were given irrigation access eighty years ago, you still get first shot at the water in a drought year, even if your farm is of marginal importance. Not only farmers are bound by the old rule; the tribes of the 1.3-million-acre Yakima Indian Reservation were promised by treaty adequate stream flow for their salmon runs. This spring saw the largest downstream migration
of young salmon in thirty-five years. The Yakimas wanted enough water released from the irrigation dams to help those fish get down to the Columbia, and then out the gorge to the Pacific.

The adult salmon, four- and five-year chinooks, are going upstream today. At an irrigation canal juncture, I watch them flop and leap up through a fish ladder. The same water that will fatten Jim Doornink’s apples is helping the big kings return to spawning grounds in the upper valley. Nature brought every taste of the human palate together here. Once, it was all covered by water, an Ice Age lake which shrank to a river that left behind twenty stories of rich sediment. Now it brings food to the tables of the world.

At the county fair, the 4-H Clubbers say if all of this year’s harvest were placed in boxcars of a single train, that train would stretch from here to Chicago. The fair is a celebration of fertility, a Yellow Brick Road of produce. The pumpkins dance. The squash gator. The gourds crawl. Japanese pear-apples—small and round, light beige in color. Firm like an apple, but sweet like a pear. An after-dinner fruit. And here’s grapes—four shades of purple.

Over a dinner of peppercorn duck, slices of scarlet tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, bread and a bottle of Sémillon—all Yakima Valley bounty, of course—I’m told the story of the Red Delicious apple, which is relayed like the narrative of the Nativity. In the midnineteenth century, a farmer in Peru, Iowa, noticed a renegade seedling growing among the apple trees he’d been raising in neat rows. He mowed the fledgling tree down twice, and twice it reappeared, more vigorous than ever. Finally, impressed with the tree’s fight, the farmer let it grow. In ten years’ time, it blossomed and bore a single apple—the first Red Delicious. Grafts from that tree were eventually brought to the Yakima Valley.

“And every damn Red Delicious apple grown in this valley is a descendant of that one tree,” says Lowell Lancaster, an oversized orchardist who is sitting across from me at the dinner table. He looks like Hoss from
Bonanza
. Everything in this valley—produce and people—seems big. The fruit at the county fair was of extraordinary size. Surely, the apples of the Yakima Valley get some boost from the lab.

“Just one,” says Lancaster. “Ethylene gas.”

These huge apple farmers wait for me to react, expecting some lecture on chemicals in fruit. They hold grins and food in their mouths, and then
laugh all around. One of them gets a piece of green bean stuck on his front teeth.

“Yeah, ethylene gas, that’s what the apples themselves produce as they start to get ripe,” says Lancaster. “It’s like a dog in heat. Tells the fruit it’s time to get ripe. If it’s late in the season, with a frost on the way, we spray ethylene to help get everybody going. Puts ’em in the mood to get ripe.”

The dirty word here is Alar, trade name for a growth-regulator that brings a brighter touch of red to apples and gives them a longer shelf life. A decade ago, no one had heard of Alar in the Yakima Valley. Apples, like tomatoes of thirty years ago, were raised fresh and fat without uniform size or look. Then the packagers and mass marketers started to influence the growers. They wanted all the fruit to look the same, factory-painted, firm enough to hide the scars from transportation. The supermarket chains, with their demands for color conformity, became one of the worst enemies of the small grower. Around the same time, an innovative Wenatchee Valley farmer named Grady Auvil started raising the biggest and best-tasting sweet cherry every produced—the Rainier, nearly as big as a plum, light yellow in appearance, with a blush of pink—but he couldn’t sell it to the big fruit wholesalers because it shows its bruises rather than hiding them as Bing cherries do. As a result, only a few thousand acres of Washington grow what has to be the best cherry in the world.