Rite of Northwest Passage : THE GOOD RAIN Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest<i> by Timothy Egan(Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 254 pp., maps; 394-57724-8) </i>

Some years ago, Timothy Egan climbed to a rock-strewn precipice on the flank of Mount Rainier and tossed his grandfather’s ashes into a stream born from the Winthrop Glacier. When he traced the glacier’s name, he discovered one Theodore Winthrop, who traveled through the Northwest in 1853 and wrote a best-selling book about his adventures. Captivated by the story, Egan spent a year retracing Winthrop’s route. He wanted to see how the land and people had changed, and to learn if Winthrop was right when he prophesied that “new systems of thought and life” would arise in the West.

Egan kayaked the waters of Puget Sound, hiked Olympic Peninsula trails, drove among farmlands in eastern Washington and Oregon, climbed peaks in the Cascade Range, made his way through the logging country of the Siskiyous, walked the streets of Seattle and Victoria, and followed the Columbia River from the Pacific to the high desert.

Along the way, he met a fascinating array of people, each expressing the unique character and history of the region. It is these individuals--many of them quietly heroic--who most deeply engage Egan’s attention, and ours as well. A Puyallup Indian leader fights for justice in a shattered homeland. A 65-year-old mountaineer, who wrote guidebooks to every climbing route in the Cascades, now laments that the slopes have become overcrowded. A boat captain braves massive seas off the Columbia River to rescue mariners in distress. A man buys the second largest monolith on Earth to protect it from being pulverized by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Through these encounters, and many more, Egan explores the wonderfully diverse relationships between people and environment in the Northwest. And in the process, he finds his own way home.

Deep inside the Olympic National Park, Egan recalls the years he spent traveling to distant countries. “Only now,” he writes, “am I starting to learn that this place across Puget Sound, forty miles from my home in Seattle, contains enough secrets to last a lifetime.” We have become a nation of highway and airline nomads, searching beyond the horizon for promised lands. But here we have a young man discovering the place in which he lives and learning the rewards of what Wendell Berry calls “traveling at home.”

Egan is well equipped to undertake this exploration. He belongs to that rare breed, a native son of the Pacific Northwest. As Seattle correspondent for the New York Times, he knows how to uncover a story and write it well.

Not surprisingly, one of the liveliest chapters in the book describes his hometown, the largest city in our country named for a Native American. We can only imagine how Chief Sealth would view his Duwamish homeland today--the seven hills of Seattle bulldozed to fill tidelands where his people once gathered food; amber air surrounding a forest of high-rises; twice-daily gridlock on roads outstripped by population growth, and 40,000 newcomers settling in the metropolitan area each year.

While he regrets the Northwest’s growing popularity, Egan adds his voice to those celebrating (and therefore advertising) its natural attractions. The same dilemma faces anyone who loves a threatened landscape. Unless others know about it and care deeply enough to take action, “growth” will have its way. But the trade-off is clear. Natural wonders may be jeopardized because they are unknown, as Yosemite was in John Muir’s time, or because they are known too well, as Yosemite is today.

“The Good Rain” traverses the wild Northwest’s full diversity and shows how much there is to protect here--orca whales coursing among emerald archipelagoes; salmon flinging over waterfalls to reach ancestral spawning grounds; starkly rugged cliffs looming above the Columbia Gorge, and lavish moss-hung coastal rain forests climbing the mountainsides.

In the parking lot of an Oregon sawmill, Egan sees bumper stickers that read: “Save a Logger. Kill a Spotted Owl.” He describes in painful detail the vast tracts of land ravaged and denuded by clear-cut logging. Ancient forests of the Northwest are being cut at a rate of 170 acres per day, 621,000 acres per year. The U.S. Forest Service has built 343,000 miles of logging roads so private corporations can convert expanses of public timber into stump-covered wastelands.

Americans pay about $200,000 per working day to subsidize clear-cutting in southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest temperate rain forest left on Earth. A Japanese-owned corporation cuts trees that were seedlings when the Magna Carta was signed, destroys habitat for bald eagles and brown bears, jeopardizes the salmon industry and undermines tourism dependent on pristine scenery. For this privilege, the industry pays approximately $2 per tree, the cost of eight first-class stamps.

The long-term environmental consequences are immeasurably greater than those caused by the Prince William Sound oil spill. Yet logging of ancient forests in the Northwest is sanctioned by the U.S. government and supported by our tax dollars. All this while we protest the destruction of rain forests in distant tropical nations.

“The Good Rain” is both a celebration of natural bounty and a warning that too much has already been lost. Timothy Egan is an engaging guide, a worthy spokesman for his homeland, a fluent and crafty writer. There are some lapses, including a penchant for hyperbole that undermines the author’s credibility. The text also contains numerous minor inaccuracies, such as attributing to sea otters the river otters’ habit of making slides. These are small but nagging flaws in a book that is otherwise excellent.

In the end, we realize that Joseph Winthrop may have been right when he predicted the West would spawn new systems of thought and life. Natives and newcomers have begun to see that the beauty and richness of our Western land is vanishing, and that our own existence may be threatened as a consequence. They question the old American values of taking the land for all it’s worth, and seek instead a more balanced, harmonious and sustainable relationship to the environment.

With “The Good Rain,” Egan makes an important contribution to this new way of thinking and to the cause of protecting a land he loves.