A Paradise Lost in My Hometown

The dead trout were long gone when I visited my hometown, Dunsmuir, for the first time since the July 14 chemical spill into the Sacramento River.

The river, where I swam as a boy, where I caught my first fish, swirled green and brown over volcanic boulders, looking as clear as ever. The willows on its banks were unharmed. Only a few small rust-colored plants caught my eye--signs of poison or just of the season?

The river splashed and whispered. It smelled, as always, of pines, moss, the air it cooled, wet rock and ineffable mystery.

The forest comes down to it on either side of the canyon. To the north is Mt. Shasta. To the south, under the Interstate 5 bridge, was what used to be Dunsmuir High students’ favorite make-out spot--and maybe still is.

My first impulse was to crouch and drink the water, to convince myself that nothing had really changed.

“We were on ‘Good Morning, America,’ ” my mother had said when I phoned her from Long Beach just after the spill. My hometown--that remote place that I carry inside myself like a talisman--had become famous, its name a synonym for environmental ruin, alongside Love Canal and Exxon Valdez.

My mother is 74, the widow of a Southern Pacific trainman. She came to Dunsmuir to teach at the high school in 1940. Like most of the old-timers I talked with on this visit, she took the spill stoically. She scoffed at the Bay Area law firms that offered to file suit on her behalf and the reports of injuries from metam-sodium fumes. She looked askance at some of the newer residents, who had been in the forefront of televised protests against the railroad.

It isn’t that she loves the Southern Pacific, but without it there wouldn’t be a Dunsmuir.

The railroad founded the town in 1886. Its original name was Pusher. At the site, extra engines were hitched onto trains to shove them up the Cantara Loop grade, where this summer’s spill occurred. The issues of cargo weight and track maintenance that the spill raised are nothing new. Since the railroad came, there have been derailments here, fires set by sparks from locomotives, injuries and deaths among the crews.

I remember my father being hurt once when two boxcars slammed together as he was adjusting the brakes or coupling between them. He died at 59, of ailments to which the long hours and irregular schedules of railroading probably contributed.

Still, in other ways, the Southern Pacific blessed us. It paid decent money. It enabled us to live amid scenery that Beverly Hills, even Malibu, can’t hope to match.

We could have this scenery without being rich, without being tourists, without the obvious stratification of nearby logging towns such as Weed and McCloud--true company towns in those days, where the bosses lived in big houses on the hill and the workers in little houses on the flat.

Beauty flowed through our lives like the river.

The spill reminded us that places like Siskiyou County are controlled from the outside; that nature is a hostage to the larger economy; that our privileged existence there was the result of a historical accident, a gift that always could be revoked.

The town zigzags along the canyon, two miles long and four blocks wide. It has two main streets. The older, Sacramento Avenue, fronts the tracks. The mostly boarded-up buildings there date from 1903, when a fire razed the saloons and whorehouses of Dunsmuir’s youth. A second fire, in 1924, brought a new business district a block west on Florence Avenue.

After that, except for the freeway slicing through town and the construction of two new schools, little changed.

Then, in my lifetime, Dunsmuir began to shrink. The Southern Pacific centralized its facilities in larger depots such as Roseville and Klamath Falls. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the engine-repair shops and the roundhouse disappeared. Fewer trains parked in the yards south of town. The population dwindled from 4,000 to a little more than half that.

Elsewhere in Siskiyou County--most of whose 6,300 square miles are owned by the federal and state governments, the railroad, lumber and power companies and absentee landlords--the timber firms and mills went the way of the railroad. Near the Oregon border, Hilt, one of the last company towns, folded completely. Three hundred people had lived there.

Despite this, the county’s population is growing slowly--but the makeup of that population has changed, say officials in Yreka, the county seat. More well-to-do retirees are building homes in the hills west of Mt. Shasta City or the Lake Shastina golf development northeast of Weed. More welfare recipients are taking advantage of the area’s cheap rents. There are fewer working people in the middle.

“We need industry,” Siskiyou County Welfare Director Joseph DuJardin says flatly.

But industry big enough to matter means more outside control and the risk of further environmental damage. Small, home-grown industry, such as tourism and Dunsmuir’s new bottled-water company (though it doesn’t tap the river), proved painfully vulnerable to the spill.

Three things happen to beautiful places in America. They can be destroyed. They can become outdoor museums, like Yosemite. Or they can become enclaves for the wealthy, like Aspen or the Monterey Peninsula.

In southern Siskiyou County, the third scenario is most likely. It takes only a little paranoia to imagine my hometown as the bottom tier in a two-tiered society, a rural slum whose residents chop wood, shovel snow, clean and baby-sit for the people in the executive condos.

To forestall such a fate, Dunsmuir has been trying to market its own past. It bills itself as a “historic railroad town,” sliding a little down the slope from real town to theme park. Old rail cars have been restored; the nondescript brick buildings downtown have been designated a historic district.

But what’s worth preserving isn’t so much the town itself as the water, the air, the forest: our connection with the land, which seemed to us--though it was an illusion--as close as any Indian’s.

The illusion lasted, because there were so few of us and the damage we did was so gradual, and because our isolation let us ignore our dependence on railroads, mills, Alaskan oil, the Japanese lumber market and the Central Valley farms that use the pesticides the derailed train was carrying--the whole economic web.

In Siskiyou County, the National Rifle Assn. members aren’t necessarily gun nuts. The loggers who slap profane bumper stickers about spotted owls on their pickup trucks aren’t really anti-environment. They love the forest--but the forest they love had room for them, for hunting, fishing, camping, earning good blue-collar wages and raising families.

It doesn’t sound like much to ask--for ordinary people to be able to live with nature. In America, it used to be everyone’s birthright. No more.

What happens to us when the birthright is gone?

Here in the Los Angeles Basin, the major environmental battles were lost so long ago that we’ve forgotten them. What pass for such battles today are mostly arguments about how to rearrange the wreckage.

I watch my son grow up in a city where rivers run--when they run at all--in concrete channels, and where every tree has been planted.

He doesn’t seem to mind. He’s a happy boy. I reflect that most of us, given a chance, have fled the country for the city, and that I joined in this migration.

With this difference: my anchor is still deep in Dunsmuir.

The town will survive the July spill. The Southern Pacific has pumped in money to shore up Dunsmuir’s economy. In time the aquatic plants and insects will return to the river, followed by trout. Unless babies are born with genetic defects--it’s too early to tell--no physical evidence of the spill will remain.

Only the evidence in the mind. Only the memory of the sickening jerk we felt when a strand of the line that binds us to the human heritage went snap. That line, once broken completely, may not be repairable. The next generations, without our memories, may not even notice the loss.