The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan Page A

Rim National Park. The joke around Victoria is that the tree is the only western red cedar left on the island. A marvel, this tree, twenty stories high, as big in diameter as a municipal water tower, sixty-two feet around, more than 2,100 years old. It was a seedling before Julius Caesar was born, an aging giant long before Columbus landed in the Bahamas. There are more of these monoliths hidden in the park, but few people know about them.
    Going from the perfection of the Butchart Gardens to the fecundity of the island’s remaining rain forest, I’m struck by this irony between the British view of natural beauty and the native perspective. In Victoria, they have taken virtually every plot of available land and whipped it into a proper, weedless, well-mannered thing of beauty—controlled at all times by the tastes of the master. Much of the rest of the island is a moonscape with stumps. Those groves of old trees still standing and theunmarred shores of rock and wildflower—the draws of a province which advertises itself to the rest of the world as Super, Natural—have received only belated attention from the government or the garden clubs. “Yes, that’s the old-growth forest,” you hear them say. “And where’s the bloody horticultural identification tag?” The wild becomes beautiful only after it’s shackled, put on a diet of chemical nutrients, and trained to perform on a seasonal schedule.
    According to the native ideal common among most Coast Indian tribes, The Trees and The Rocks were thought to be as endowed with spirit and beauty as The People. When British civilization, then less than 1,800 years old (dating to the point of the early Roman invasions) landed on these shores in the form of fur-trading mariners, they met a people who had been building wood-framed homes, conducting religious ceremonies rich in theater and myth, creating artwork as startling as twentieth-century Cubism, and feeding themselves quite nicely, for nearly ten thousand years.
    Before the arrival of Europeans, more than eighty thousand people lived in the land now called British Columbia, perhaps half of them on the coast of Vancouver Island in permanent villages enriched by a prosperous fishing industry. They dried and smoked enough fish to live comfortably through the winters, supplementing their diet with berries, seaweed cakes, roots. Cedar, the mighty Western Red with its waterproof, mildew-resistant qualities, was the source of all life, hollowed into forty-foot war canoes, shredded and twined into dresses, hats, baskets, mats and baby diapers. Their houses, most of which were much bigger than the typical home found on the island today, were built of planks cut from the big cedars. The tribes of the northern part of the island used more than 110 species of plants for food, tools, twine and art. They also traded in slaves and waged short, vicious wars with other native peoples, and killed the second of newborn twins.
    “The vices of these savages are very few when compared to ours,” wrote José Mariano Mozino, a Mexican-born botanist who visited the island more than two hundred years ago. “One does not see here greed for another man’s wealth, because articles of prime necessity are very few and all are common. Hunger obliges no one to rob on the highways, or to resort to piracy.” The natural bounty was so great that the natives actually fought some wars with food, trying to outdo one another with culinary gifts at their potlatches.
    When Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy arrived in 1778, his men were sick with scurvy, having found little along the Northwest Coast toadd to their diet of hardtack and pickled pork. The natives taught them how to brew spruce beer and catch salmon. What gave the Salish such a bad reputation was one particular feast with Cook’s men, an imaginative meal that didn’t go over well and may have doomed the tribes for centuries afterward. Cook’s two British ships were looking for the