New York

Driving West down Interstate 84 into Portland, Oregon, during my first trip to the Pacific Northwest, I was jolted up from a road-weary stupor by a horizon's-eye view of Mt. Hood looming out over my dashboard. At first glance from sixty miles out, the well-known peak appeared as a giant, snow cone-shaped cloud. To me this picture verged on the surreal, given the fact that I was riding on a savagely packed freeway. Recalling this I-84 vision a few days later, as I was searching through the behemoth Powell's bookstore in Portland, I came to the realization that the Pacific Northwest is actually a giant case study in the conflict-well known to American high school students everywhere-of man vs. nature, or Mt. Hood meets the highway if you will.

Deciding to learn more about the region and explore my theory further, I did some research at Powell's and walked out of the store with a well-worn copy of The Good Rain, written eleven years ago by Timothy Egan, then the Seattle correspondent for The New York Times. Egan's observations unfold in a thirteen-chapter account of a yearlong journey across the Pacific Northwest, which itself traces an earlier journey by a mid-nineteenth century traveler named John Winthrop. In 1853, Winthrop was a young Boston blueblood, with an adventuring soul and the means to satisfy it. When he reached the Northwest, Winthrop ventured 320 miles in fourteen days, starting off from the south of Vancouver Island and ending up in the Portland area. Afterwards, he published his account of the journey, The Canoe and the Saddle, which became a brief phenomenon-the On the Road of 1860-but soon fell into obscurity.

Egan's own journey takes place over the course of a year and remains faithful to the spirit of Winthrop's original pilgrimage. Egan references Winthrop constantly to provide the perspective of 150 years past-a particularly effective tactic in illustrating the overwhelming influence that Western Civilization, with all its sins and achievements, has had in the region.

Along the way Egan trains his journalist's eye on topics including the Columbia River Gorge, the state of Pacific salmon, the metropolis of Seattle, the Canadian city Victoria, and the history of the timber industry. In the process, Egan brushes the reality of life in the Northwest onto a broad yet detailed canvas, packed with history, anecdotes, ecology lessons and sociological studies.

Among some of Egan's more interesting tidbits: Seattle was originally named New York Alki, which translates to "New York, eventually."

William Boeing made his fortune in the lumber business, and the aircraft company that bares his name today is based in Seattle because it required large swathes of prime Northwestern forestland to harvest timber for its early, wooden aircraft-built to fulfill World War One military contracts.

The mouth of the Columbia River may be the most dangerous seafaring place on Earth, providing constant, Perfect Storm-like sailing conditions.

The book is organized so that one may flip from chapter to chapter and page to page, while retaining a high interest level. The thirteen chapters are really individual long essays, weaving tales of shame and glory, suitable for framing in The New York Times magazine or some similar venue.

The fourth chapter, for instance, recounts the life of Fred Beckey-a mountain man in every sense of the word. His story is compelling stuff: The man has named over a dozen mountain peaks in the Cascades, his hard earned privilege as the first man ever to set foot on them. Beckey earned his living as a delivery truck so he could meet women on the road while making enough money for his next climbing expedition. At sixty, Beckey was still climbing solo up some of the most difficult terrain in the Northwest. Always a lone climber who scaled any peak, any time he saw fit, with very little equipment, Beckey was so respected by the forest service and the national park rangers that they never hassled him about permits or restrictions. Revered for his natural, light-equipment climbing style, Beckey was known in mountaineering circles as better than an equal to famed climbers like Hillary and Messner. Beckey could have become a household name as part of the first expedition team to reach Mt. Everest's summit, but his maverick behavior and individualism kept him sidelined as others grabbed Everest glory.

Elsewhere, Egan examines the Mount St. Helens eruption, a devastating blast that spread ash, ruin and sorrow throughout the region. Yet catastrophic as the eruption was, Egan reminds us that other destructive forces were-and continue to be-afoot in the region. Consider Egan's transcription of a conversation among some reporters flying out towards the ruins of the blast area.

"I can't believe it," said one reporter. "Everything is gone."

"Like the surface of the moon," said another pointing to gray covered stumps and creek beds shaved to bristle "There's nothing left standing."

Their frenzy was interrupted by the only local writer on board, "This area wasn't destroyed by the volcano," he said. "We're not out of the blast zone yet."

"Oh?"

"That's a Weyerhaeuser clear cut below."

Weyerhaeuser, of course, is the mammoth paper corporation, responsible for a significant portion of all logging activity in the Northwest. Egan recounts Weyerhaeuser's history as a cycle of greed, destruction, and fabulous profits-perpetuated by serious political influence.

The Good Rain catalogues a staggering number of disgusting and damnable acts perpetrated on the Pacific Northwest environment and its original inhabitants. All the clear cutting, the over fishing, the swindling, the raping, and the pillaging can become wearisome at times. I nearly titled this review "Dr. Earth Love, or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love the Forest."

Egan's troubling observations are sufficiently punctuated, though, by his accounts of the great and the good-both human and natural. For every Weyerhaeuser, there's a Beckey in other words. And with most every turn of phrase, Egan conveys a sense of the overwhelming quality and quantity of natural beauty in the Pacific Northwest: "A land that has yet to give up all its secrets." The tension created between the sublimity of the terrain and the reality of its human habitation is what drives the book. Egan sums it up best:

Man vs. nature indeed. And society. And himself. Egan has confirmed my juvenile bookstore revelation and then some. At Powell's that day in Portland, I stumbled onto Egan by way of a popular tourist guidebook, which recommended The Good Rain as "still the best and most accessible tome on the region." For once, I'm happy to report, the Lonely Planet has spoken true.