Read The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest for Free Online Page A

hurry. If you really want to butt heads with the bar, the bullet is the way to go, he says. The smaller vessel, called a surf rescue boat, coasts to within three feet of our craft, which is riding six-foot swells.
    “When I give you the word, jump over to the other boat,” Monteith says.
    “What?”
    “Jump! Now!”
    On board the thirty-foot bullet are two men in helmets, face visors and orange-sealed body suits; they look like hornets. They pull me up on deck and strap me into the boat with two cables, so that I’m completely tethered to the deck. Coxswain Randy Lewis tells me to hold on to the bars up front, and forget about the laws of gravity and the notion of balance. The bullet is fast, with a top speed of twenty-seven knots, and can handle just about anything except stopping. Inert, it dies, a passive cork on an angry sea. If it slows to a certain speed, the breakers will toss it. We headfor Peacock Spit, where no ships of any size or purpose are supposed to go, a mile or so northwest of the bar. Yet, three days out of five, this is where Lewis gets called in for rescues, steering the bullet up close enough to the shipwreck so his partner can lean over and grab the poor bastard.
    Low clouds start to shove the high pressure ridge off the coast. Just the smell of rain has everybody excited. Piloting the bullet scares Lewis—it always has—but he’s hooked on the thrill. There is nothing else like it on land or sea. As he says, “You’ve got to be good in order to be lucky out here. And you can’t be lucky unless you’re good.” Now, the waves are on either side of us, building—fifteen feet, twenty—cutting off everything else on the horizon. I’m afraid. It’s like being stuck in a grave and watching dirt shoveled down from above. There is no order to the breakers, no rows of successive curls. They come from port and starboard, bow and stern. At all times, Lewis moves his head back and forth, dodging and ducking—radar the old-fashioned way.
    “Back there!” He points. “Where’d that one come from?” Another curled wall crashes over the bow and into our faces. When my eyes clear, Lewis looks down at me and smiles.
    “Look back at the Cape,” he yells. “See the inlet, just below the rock. That’s Deadman’s Cove, where all the bodies wash up. When somebody’s missing, that’s the first place we look.”
    Seeking the Northwest Passage, Francis Drake, the reformed pirate of the late sixteenth century, sailed as far north as the coast of Oregon and then turned back because of the weather. “The most vile, thicke and stinking fogges,” he wrote, in the first description of the Northwest by a Western writer. A land of “congealed rain.” A Greek, Apostolos Valerianos, sailing under his Spanish alias of Juan de Fuca, thought he’d hit paydirt in 1592. Instead, what he apparently found was the passage to Puget Sound, a strait that would bear his assumed name forevermore. He never went inside to investigate. He was said to be a gifted liar, an invaluable asset for any mariner in the company of benefactors and historians. The English captain James Cook, his reputation on the line, tried three times to find the bloody river, the last attempt coming in 1778 when he poked around the mouth of the Umpqua River on the southern coast of Oregon, then missed both the Columbia and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. While eating human arms at Nootka Sound, a culinary gift of the Vancouver Island tribe, he agonized about his place in history, which as mattersturned out would have more to do with his death in Hawaii than with his failures off the Northwest Coast. With him was a young midshipman, George Vancouver, who would return.
    Captain John Meares, a British trader, came next, following Cook’s maps and the recent chartings of a Spaniard, Bruno Heceta. Meares saw the discolored water, the pounding surf, and tried to find an entry point. There had to be a river here. It was July, the best weather month of the