South and West by Joan Didion

At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn't matter, doesn't make any difference, doesn't figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South they are convinced they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.

How could it have come to this?

I am trying to place myself in history.

Joan Didion's South and West isn't really a book, or if it is, it's a failed book, the scaffolding to a book. Published in 2017, it was taken from her notes, and mostly about a trip that Didion took throughout the deep South in the 1970s, followed by a brief collection of memories of California occasioned by the abduction of Patty Hearst. Whether Didion meant to contrast the two, I have no idea, but the contrast is there from the beginning of her journey through the South, which she writes attracted her because it seemed to be "for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center." It was also a kind of return for Didion, who spent a few turbid years in Durham, North Carolina. Never mind the vast difference between Durham and Birmingham; the South may be, for Didion, a kind of shadow life not lived.

It's clear enough to me why the manuscript of the "South" section of South and West, at least, waited years to be published: Didion has no idea what to do with the South. She applies her journalistic eye, her withering eye, everywhere, but what she sees lies only at the surface of things: signs, gravestones, the front porches of houses. The language that Didion uses to describe the South is the language of mystery; the kudzu and tropical greenery seem, at every vantage point, to conceal an essential impenetrability. Uncharacteristically, Didion seems to shrink from the South. She seems to spend much of the trip in hotel swimming pools. She even tells us that she finds these pools, with their familiar interchangeability, comforting.

The greatest insights of the South instead come from the mouths of the few people that Didion interviews--all of whom seem to be known acquaintances from the world of writing and the academy. Like the white southerners of V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, they offer up a fear of change and integration dressed up in the language of moderation. One interviewee laments how he has been forced by integration to send his kids to private school, and somehow manages to make it sound like a tragedy for the Black kids, too. (Didion interviews no Black Southerners, though they linger at the margins of the scrupulously reported scenery.) Is this the dark heart that Didion gestures at? It seems to me that these cultural dynamics, while vile, are not particular difficult to understand, and do not amount to any kind of essential mystery. But Didion has no interest in probing further into this or anything else, and it seems to me that in the place of insight she offers a number of Gothic metaphors, chief among them that of the snake pit. The still brown waters of the Mississippi provides a "sense of water moccasins." An anecdote tells of dripping gasoline down a snake hole to make the snake emerge, "drunk" and easy to kill. Over and over again--in a way she might have toned down, I think, if she'd ever fashioned these notes into something more--she imagines snakes lurking in the greenery. No wonder she doesn't want to touch.

We get Didion's tremendous power of noticing, but no understanding. At a movie theater in Meridian--another fungible place and easy escape from the part of the world she supposedly wanted to discover--she describes the crowd as gazing at the screen "as if the movie were Czech." But how does a Mississippian watch a movie any differently than a Californian? And why should they understand it any less? It seems like a rich comment, to me, from someone so obviously stymied by her own choice of subject. Better to say that Joan Didion looked at the audience as if they were Czech.

The "West" part of South and West is even less polished, more partial. It's slapdash in a way that reveals the true nature of the book as "notes"; "South," by contrast, seems to have gone through at least some process of arrangement and shaping. And yet, it has a richness to it that "South" never manages, especially with regards to the effusive material culture of the Californian upper middle class: the "Lilly Dache and Mr. John hats, the vicuna coats, the hand-milled soap and the &60-an-ounce perfume." In these shop-items Didion gets deeper into the identity and culture of the Californian West than she ever allows herself to do in "South"--or, at least, that's how it seems to me as a Southerner. Maybe a Californian would feel differently. But I don't think so. "West" reads like a quickly abortive attempt by Didion to find her own place in the world, her "place in history," as she writes, and though she quickly hits a wall--it's not easy to write about yourself--it made me go back and think about "South" as an attempt to do the same thing by contrast, to discover the Californian Didion by discovering the Didion-that-was-not in the South. Perhaps it's not the South that Didion was shrinking away from in those hotel pools--maybe it was herself.

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.