Otter Country by Miriam Darlington

We are eye to wild eye; its face is armed with a startling array of walrus bristles. Its ears are larger than I expected, almost like a cat's, and its nostrils are visibly measuring my scent. There is nothing shy about this animal. I have got close enough to see five different sets of whisker around its face and under its chin. In its eyes I can see shock at what on earth I am, and at what I could be doing in its hunting ground. The live current in both of us prickles. When I do not move, it comes a little closer, huffs, then melts bodily into the water surface, leaving the shadow of a ripple and nothing else.

As a child, Miriam Darlington was obsessed with otters: otters in aquarium, otter skeletons in the natural history museum, and so forth. And who wouldn't? Few animals seem to combine the wildness and precociousness, the sheer charisma of an otter. But Darlington's obsession was confined to aquaria and museums because it's very hard to see a river otter in the wild; unlike their sea cousins who float happily in the harbors of northern America, river otters are secretive creatures whose sensitive powers of perception are rivaled only by their power to slip away and not be perceived. Otter Country is the story of a year in Darlington's life in which she vows to seek out the otter in the wild and learn its ways, a journey that takes her from Scotland to Wales to Cornwall and elsewhere in the British Isles.

Otter Country, it must be said, contains mostly scenes of Darlington not finding otters. Like I said, they seem to be quite elusive. They leave behind certain signs of their existence, like the feces, called spraint, they use to mark the paths of their territory, but by the time you see them, the otter has already disappeared again. It's all right, because Darlington is a talented writer of landscapes and a patient noticer of the natural world. Though she never makes this quite explicit, I got the sense that one of the great rewards of Darlington's otter search is that it forces her to pay closer attention to the world around her, to take in what one might not ordinarily notice. The otters are rare visitors, but there always trees and birds and things. When the otters do appear, the encounters are transformative: Darlington describes coming face-to-face with an otter while disguised as something like a hunk of tree branches. And of course these encounters last only seconds--small fare when compared with the months and months that Darlington spends searching.

Otter Country reminded me quite a bit of H is for Hawk, perhaps pointedly so. Darlington makes a push at the kind of intertextual literary quality that book possesses when she brings in a pair of otter books: Gavin Maxwell's accounts of raising African otters at his Scotland home (haven't read it), and Henry Williamson's imagining of an otter's life, Tarka the Otter (read it, liked it). Later, the book takes a more scientific-personal-essayish mold, as Darlington meets with otter experts about the significant ecological dangers that the river otter faces in the England of the 21st century. (Like the stories of many of the world's endangered species, it's one of great improvement and still-great risk.)

I'm not sure if I learned much about otters, and the book is quite intentionally very slow. But I did find it pleasant and purposeful, and like Darlington, I felt the enchantment of providence when the otters finally do show up.

The Good Rain by Timothy Egan

The Snake, the Pend Oreille, the Spokane, the Clearwater, the Owyhee, the Deschutes--all of these rivers used to carry salmon to the desert, a twice-yearly occurrence surely as miraculous as the irrigation which brought wheat and plump fruit to the treeless hills above the central Columbia. Now the desert east of here is full of Corps of Engineers trucks; the salmon travel the interstate, or die. Most of the young fish don't do well on the highway. A maze of ladders, locks, lifts, channels and portages is used to help the dying older chinooks reach their spawning grounds upstream. When their eggs hatch and the young fry start to head downstream, they run smack into the hydroelectric turbines. Many are sliced and diced in these massive blenders. Others die of the bends, tossed to such depths and then pushed up so quickly that their respiratory systems can't adjust in time. More than half of all the young salmon which head downstream, seeking the ocean and three or four years of wandering, expire before they get past the first hurdles.

The Pacific Northwest of North America is one of the truly great places. The wildflowers of Mount Rainier, the looming haystacks of the Washington and Oregon coasts, the volcanic power of Mount Saint Helens and Crater Lake, the rugged cliffs of the Columbia River--the PNW offers all of this, plus places you'd never think to look for, like the high desert of eastern Oregon or the lush orchards of Washington. Timothy Egan, the one-time Seattle correspondent for the New York Times, writes about all these places in The Good Rain, subtitled "Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest," traveling as far north as the English gardens of Victoria and as far south as the Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon's timber basin.

The book begins with Egan scattering the ashes of his grandfather, a lifelong Pacific Northwesterner, along the flanks of Mt. Rainier. In the distance is a glacier named for Theodore Winthrop, a Civil War officer who traveled extensively throughout the region when there were few white people off of the coasts. Egan's journey ostensibly follows Winthrop's, but the conceit is lightly held, and the essays are more linked to theme than place: "Salmon," "The Natives," "Wood Wars," "Under the Volcano," "Columbia." Still, a little pen-and-ink drawing accompanies each chapter, pegging each one to square of the map: the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the North Cascades, the Yakima Valley, etc. Egan evokes each of these places with the easygoing fluency of a journalist, and often with the awe of a PNWer endeavoring to see the majesty of the places that have underpinned much of his life.

The Pacific Northwest that Egan describes is one threatened by capital and greed. Once, he suggests, the borders of the Pacific Northwest were easy to adjudicate: the Pacific Northwest reaches as far as the salmon do on their journey back to their hatching grounds. But the mighty Columbia and all its tributaries have been dammed, and the hatching grounds replaced with fish hatcheries which not only produce weakened, inferior salmon, but which have devastated the lifeways of the Indigenous tribes who live throughout the region. The book's heroes are men like Billy Frank, the Nisqually elder who successfully led a campaign to preserve the tribe's fishing rights. Like the salmon, the trees are threatened by rapacious logging, which has rooted up a majority of the region's old-growth forests, abetted by the National Forest Service. (Egan suggests the Forest Service ought to know better, but anyone who's seen the way Ken Burns depicts NFS founder Gifford Pinchot as a mustache-twirling villain will know it's always been this way.) Threatened, too, are the wolves, the orcas, the wild river.

In some ways, The Good Rain wears the thirty years since its publication poorly. In a chapter on Seattle, Egan focuses on a movement to "freeze" the city by preventing new residents and new development, likened either by Egan or the movement's proponents to the "monkeywrenching" of Edward Abbey. It's a little strange, actually, to read a dispatch from a time before density disputes had reached the level of nationwide intensity they now have, and when you could call yourself an environmental warrior for standing in the way of housing development with a straight face. We now know, of course--though I suppose not everyone wants to admit it--that encouraging new growth in cities and away from sprawling suburban tracts is an important step toward the healing of the environment. And I'd like to think that if The Good Rain were written now, a good journalist like Egan would reveal a little more clearly the chauvinism at the heart of people who, by the very nature of history, have only a handful of generations of history in a place and want to pull the door closed behind them. It's as quaint to read, in a way, as Egan's description of Washington's Red Delicious apples as the country's most popular--well, it took a while, but we figured out those apples sucked, too.

The best parts of The Good Rain for me were the descriptions of the places I'd never visited: the eerie bend of the Columbia at Hanford Reach, left wild because it was where uranium was processed for nuclear bombs; the wild wooded Siskiyou; the Yakima Valley. I read the chapter about Astoria, Oregon--the oldest town west of the Rockies--on an airplane headed to a visit there, and I loved seeing the rainy, hardscrabble town through Egan's eyes. (I also wondered if, given the number of bakeries and breweries we saw there, and the long line of people queued up for the old boat that sells fish and chips out of a parking lot, if the town's circa-1990 motto of "We Ain't Quaint" has been revised.) I've been lucky enough to see a lot of the PNW in my life, but The Good Rain made me feel like there's much more to explore.