The Good Rain in the Land of Bad Snow...

O K dear readers- I am so buried in school I may never surface. I am not the type of anal retentive procastinator who takes getting behind lying down (if any person decides to comment on that last sentence, the poor word choice(s), and the double entendre, well, just try me...) I am in a bit of a rush and I can't think of any other way to phrase it.

So I have to read a ton of stuff these days. I figure I might as well post some of these annotations because these words might inspire you folks to go out and buy a few books at Barnes and Noble or your local bookstore, if you still have one left in your neighborhood.

My vision is really forcing me to come up with creative solutions to maintain fusion (single verses double vision) so I can get through all this reading...which means I spend a lot of time hanging upside down (again, just keep any thoughts or visualization to yourselves, thank you) with books propped at disturbing and unforgiving angles. It works for me, although I am behind and especially all this reading is reminding me of just how fragile and comical things remain.

I am grateful for the fusion I still have, but I am seriously glad that no one sees these contortions...

Anyway, my point is!!!

I want to share the best of the best with you...so you can go out and buy these great reads and go on and on about how grateful you are to have been turned on to authors such as Timothy Egan, Peter Fromm and whoever else I decide to annotate right here on these pages....

so without further delay, I introduce you to, drum roll please..."The Good Rain."




I first discovered the wonderful voice of Timothy Egan as I read through the New York Times during the 2008 campaign season. Here was a writer who seemed to understand the nuances of the west, the contradictions of this land, without descending into the predictable eastern tendencies of ridicule or aloof curiosity.

As I began regularly searching for his columns in the online version of the times; his way of describing the untold fabric of the election, the circus like appearance of Sarah Palin and conveying that in our western context, all of these versions of the truth could be possible, I wanted to read more.

After Googling Timothy Egan, I learned that his first work was the brilliant, if not haunting, The Good Rain. If ever there was a Northwest Manifesto, a historical accounting of how we got to where we are, Egan’s version is certainly among the best explanations currently offered.

I’ve always found it amazing that here in this place of unlimited splendor and with our clear endless skies that create a canvas for the most stunning dreams, we’ve often settled for the most limiting of solutions to our challenges. Egan examines the history of the terrain, the indigenous peoples who superseded the arrival of the white man, and the eyeblink-like transformation of a region in little more than a century---A change that has occurred in compressed time, and mostly resulting from an unending human invasion originating from everywhere in the rest of the world.

I have lived in the Northwest for most of my life, and this identity is central to my global positioning on the planet. I can not imagine a life well-lived in any other location, and this sense of place---one that Egan seems to share, is central to our voice.

From Egan’s observations, recalling the gentrification rebellion among the old-timers of Astoria, Oregon with their rebellious “We Ain’t Quaint” bumper stickers to his painstaking recounting of the regions timber, mining, and fishing exploitation, this work enlivens what might otherwise be stale history.

Although I am not Native American, I am related to nearly half a dozen tribes through marriage and even two of my previous relationships. I appreciate Egan’s sensitivity to the plight of the tribes, to the history that is just as bloody in the rest of the country and which surely calls into question the sincerity of the Christian Faith.

That anything this horrific could have been intentionally done to others in the name of God is a most perplexing problem. Human memory, and especially history, tends to lean toward the subjective. Egan travels back and forth across the Northwest to capture the voice of all the stakeholders, from the Indians rotting on the reservations, to the Timber Managers contemplating the few remaining stands of old growth, to the newspaper columnists lamenting the arrival of Californians. Although this book was written in the early 1990’s, it remains painfully relevant and surprisingly current.

I have met many of the primary subjects of this book, from the Okanagon’s most tragic family, the Goldsmiths, to Oregon’s former governor Tom McCall. Indeed their stories were already part of the fabric of my life. But, Egan fleshes out the lesser known details and his brilliant use of scene, interviews, and quotations turns this history alive as it spins off the page.

One can not be an educated resident of the Northwest without understanding this conflicted resource extraction history of timber, salmon, precipitation, mountains, desert, rainforest, mighty rivers and first nation culture. And one can not write about this stunning place without paying homage to a reality that the best story teller among all of us here is most certainly the earth itself. Egan writes:

Now the sky is heavy with darkness and fresh thunderheads. A wicked wind ricochets through the Dry Falls coulee. Alone as I stand with trough of ages, the narrative lines come through: without help, earth can still tell a good story. (Egan p. 244)

As much as the west is about serene, breathtaking beauty and hundred mile views, it is also about conflict. The conflict between resource extraction industries and sustainability, the conflict between sustainability and livability, and the conflict between Native American Spirituality and other belief systems; this is a never ending story that is a most unique feature of this region.

No other place in North America was blessed with so much abundance and no other place on the continent has already seen so much dilution and transformation. Toward the end of The Good Rain, Egan travels to the Colville Reservation, among whom I am related to several of the oldest families. He encounters Martin Louie covered in flies and bitter about the lot of his people.

Louie attended two schools he says: white school and Indian. At white school, he learned about “the two books you haven’t got a chance against: the Bible and the law book.” At Indian School, a classroom without walls, he learned about the land.
The white creator lives up there. The Indian creator lives all around. You see him in the sun, and at night, in his brother the moon. But most of all you see him in that water (the Columbia River). It’s never emptied out yet. It controls all life. It controls everything. The Indians call that father. (Egan p. 248)

Egan is as impartial as possible as he navigates these conflicts while conveying the cultural roadmaps that are the Northwest. Without a firm understanding of this context, one’s sense of place here can only be stunted and incomplete. It remains true that in order to know where we are going, we have to know where we have been. And to know where we’ve been, Egan traversed thousands of miles and navigated untold stories. Unfortunately, the most honest and undisputable keepers of the region’s history are the few remaining old growth timber stands, the decreasing salmon runs, and the mountains which seem to regularly explode our most trusted foundations in every direction.

Works Cited
Timothy Egan, The Good Rain. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.