Big Dreams Read Online Free Page B

to stick tothe crewmen’s skin. They had to keep clenching and unclenching their hands to prevent their brittle fingers from breaking. Their noses dribbled and their sinuses impacted. The only escape from the debilitating elements was down below, where a fellow could lie on a hard bunk beneath a thin, gray blanket and flip the bilge-swollen pages of an ancient copy of
Playboy
from which his brethren had surely torn the centerfold.
    Even when the boats returned to shore, the poor men would find precious little to distract them. Crescent City might be the largest town in Del Norte County, but it had less than four thousand residents. Only twenty thousand people were scattered over the entire county, an expanse of some 641,290 acres. That worked out to about one person per 30 acres. The state and federal governments owned three-quarters of the land and preserved it in parks and forests. There were no metropolitan areas nearby.
    An economic depression stalked Del Norte County. Fishing and logging, the traditional industries of the Far North, were both battling to survive. The locals complained about too much government regulation, but the ocean and the forests had been attacked with a vengeance over the years, and their dwindling resources were in need of protection. An era of Wild West-style plundering that had always supported the area was drawing to a close.
    In Crescent City, the powers-that-be were looking to tourism to patch the holes in their economy. Every tackle shop in the harbor was piled with fliers and pamphlets advertising such stellar attractions as the annual Dungeness Crab Festival, but there was still the problem of the weather to be surmounted—a bleak, damp grayness in the spring, and in the summer a dizzying, gray fogbank that lifted for just two hours each afternoon.
    Throughout the long day I felt the forlornness of Crescent City. Young men cruised absently around the harbor in their trucks, smoking dope and popping the tops on half-quart beers. They were tough kids raised to work in mills or on boats, and they wouldn’t stoop to being waiters or clerks—they weren’t servants. They’d been cheatedof a future, really, so they behaved recklessly and acted out their anger, getting into fights and copping DUIs.
    Outside the canneries in the harbor, workers stood around in bloodstained aprons. Trucks pulled up to chutes that fed into the cannery buildings and disgorged butchered fish in pieces—heads, tails, and guts in a roaring gush. On one pier, some fish buyers were huddled in shanties to cut their deals.
    By the Seafarer’s Hall and the Commercial Fishermen’s Wives Association, I paused at a drinking fountain inlaid with a plaque that said, In Memory of Steve Williams, Lost at Sea, March 6, 1970, and then these words:
    They that go down to sea in a ship

That do business in great waters

These see the works of the Lord
,
He maketh the storm a calm
,
Then they are glad

Because they are quiet

So he bringeth them into

Their desired haven
.
    Psalm
107,
Verses
23–30.
    M ORE RAIN FELL ON MY SECOND DAY in Crescent City, buckets of it, so I took shelter at the Visitor Center of Redwood National Park. The park covers about 106,000 acres in California’s redwood country, a strip of land that extends from the Monterey Peninsula into Oregon.
    Children were stretched out on the floor of the center reading books, while their parents bought postcards and quizzed the rangers on duty, who wore uniforms and Smokey-the-Bear hats and sometimes showed a humorous grace-under-pressure when they responded to questions.
    “What did Lady Bird Johnson plant in the grove that’s named for her?” somebody asked.
    “Her feet,” came a ranger’s response.
    I studied the exhibits and learned that Spanish explorers had called our
Sequoia sempervirens “palos colorados”
on account of their reddish color. An average redwood lived for about two thousand years. The same watery, gray climate that chilled the blood of