Nonfiction: Hope Without Hope

Humbug Valley was not easy to reach. In early summer, I flew to Reno, rented a car, spent the night with friends, and in the morning drove a two-lane highway toward the Sierras as white clouds floated in the sky like the painted backdrop in a Western, and yellow balsamroot speckled green foothills and road construction backed up traffic for miles. It’d be a long trip, and I wasn’t sure how to get where I was going, but Beverly Ogle, a Maidu elder, had invited me to a healing ceremony, and I did not intend to miss it.

I’d talked to Beverly about Humbug Valley a year earlier. She’d told me about her family’s long history there, about the natural soda springs and the archaeological sites, and about her small federally unrecognized tribe’s effort to reclaim this sacred place. I’d talked to her more recently too, about what happened in the fall after a wildfire burned through the valley. Throughout the winter and into the spring, I kept in close touch with her about the damage.

Now it was time for healing. If, that is, I could find the valley.

Even at the ranger station in Chester, the nearest town, the receptionist didn’t know the route for sure. We checked the fifteen-minute topographic maps and then the seven-and-a-half-minute maps. Humbug Valley lay at the juncture of three maps’ corners: upper right, lower right, upper left. You’d have to buy them all, she said apologetically, and paste them together. Instead I bought a forest map—too big, with details too small—and headed out. I stopped for watermelon and some ice, a meager potluck contribution, and drove past Lake Almanor, a drowned Maidu valley that is now a clear blue reservoir reflecting Mt. Lassen in the distance.

Not far out of town I turned off the highway and followed logging roads that branched at intersections marked by flimsy brush-hidden posts with four-digit Forest Service road numbers or, more often, by paper plates with first names I didn’t know and arrows drawn in Sharpie or crayon. The roads were rutted and washboarded, ungraveled and twisty, the trees dense enough to shade blind curves and obscure the landscape. Tall peaks? Creek ahead? How would you know? The trees were thick as my arm is long, the bark sun-stained orange. The day was windows-rolled-down hot, and classic rock on the rental car radio blared loud: Van Halen, Foreigner, Blue Öyster Cult, and, finally, fittingly, AC / DC, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.”

I parked beside a small shelter over the naturally carbonated springs. This, at last, was the place. On one side of the road, a newly green meadow stretched to pine-fringed ridges and beyond. On the other: a clearcut slope with stumps black and not-black and slash—discarded trunks with telltale green needles—piled high. The postcard invitation Beverly had sent showed this view exactly: the forested hillside as it looked before, separated diagonally by a fierce red line, from another view showing how it looks now. In person it was even more disconcerting.

Don’t get me wrong. After two decades in the Pacific Northwest, a clear-cut alone can’t shock me, but this one with its sloppy skid marks and massive heaps of green-needled slash, seemed wasteful or worse. Pink flagging fluttered around what I assumed, from Beverly’s description, were the archaeological sites. Some flags were wrapped around fresh stumps smack in the middle of the cut-over area. A dozen vultures circled overhead, so I walked out into knee-high grass to find what they were after: a half-deer carcass with the head still intact, one glassy eye bulging, a cougar kill by the looks of the tidy gut pile nearby, covered entirely by flies, an image as disgusting and predictable as what had happened here.

In a nutshell: Humbug Valley had...