Twain's Feast (15 page)

Driving north from Reno, you come on Pyramid Lake all at once—you’ve been hauling through the desert, leaving behind the casinos and tract homes as you pass the dust cloud of the Bureau of Land Management’s mustang-adoption corrals. Then there’s only stony hills and sagebrush, the occasional ranch house or American-flag-draped fence, thirty miles of desert until you cross the final ridge, and the lake is there: sand-bound, turquoise in late afternoon. It’s wide, bright, and almost painfully inviting.

It’s also hugely and invisibly diminished; the lake covers more than five hundred square miles, held entirely within the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation, but that’s a last spare remnant of the water that once spread over most of northern Nevada. Twelve thousand years ago, Lake Lahontan was as big as Lake Erie; Pyramid lies in its ancient low point. The high desert here once lay under nine hundred feet of water.

Today, as Twain wrote to his mother, this is dry, dry country. The Sierras create a dramatic rain shadow, stealing clouds that approach from the west; the summit of Wheeler Peak might get fifty inches of rain annually, the Great Basin only five. Living here seems, to the unfamiliar eye, like an impossible challenge. But twelve thousand years ago, the Paiute’s genius forerunners realized just how much the seemingly bare hills and alkali flats actually held.

“There’s this misperception, ‘Oh, those poor Indians, how did they survive?’” says Paiute Cultural Resource Manager Ben Aleck. Ben’s been dealing with such attitudes for a long time, and as he talks about them, he’s both patient and audibly weary. “Some places that’s true, sure, where northern hunters were moved to bad land and told to farm. You know—cow-and-plow. But this is our historic land. We know how to live here, and how to keep the land and water healthy, too.” Part of what that meant was respecting the land’s natural contours, the water’s natural course. “The river used to meander, and you’d have cottonwood groves along the bends, cooling the water. The fish needed that. But the Army Corps of Engineers came in here and straightened it all out.”

Twain, sad to say, might have shared the corps’s misunderstanding of the Truckee—he described another desert river, the Carson, as “so villainously rapid and crooked, that it looks like it had wandered into the country without intending it, and had run about in a bewildered way and got lost in its hurry to get out again before some thirsty man came along and drank it up.” The Nevada desert is one landscape he doesn’t seem to have had an eye for. Now, Ben says, putting the Truckee’s curves back could be a $12 million project. “You’ve got the corps coming back in, talking to tribal people, saying, ‘What did the river look like, what plants were here, where were the bends?’ It’s been a hundred years, but that information’s been passed on.”

Though most visiting anglers come to Pyramid Lake after cutthroat trout, historically the most important fish for the Paiute has been the giant suckerfish called the cui-ui
.
“There’s a piece of boneless fillet in there from the back of the head to the dorsal fins,” Ben tells me, holding his fingers to show a chunk the size of a cereal bowl. “
This
big. Tastes real good, too. That’s what our band is named for—we’re the Kuyui Dokado
,
or ‘Cui-Ui Eaters.’ In the old days, when the river was running free, the mouth of the river would just run black at spawning time.” There’s no fishing for cui-ui anymore, but the fish hasn’t vanished entirely from the local diet—every year researchers catch fish, remove the opercular bone, and pass the remainder on to the band membership. The people called the Cui-Ui Eaters are, once again, the only people who eat cui-ui.

Of course the cutthroats were always important as well. “There’d have been fish out there twenty, thirty pounds, even more than that,” Ben says. “Just one would feed a lot of people. And this was a good, healthy lake—we still consider it healthy, but those cottonwood groves along the river and the streams running to it would have supported a lot more game back then. We still have people go out for deer, antelope . . . we’ve got rabbits, ducks, geese. Everything the lake will support has been here for thousands of years.” There were buckberries, desert parsley, bitterroot, and pine nuts—pine nuts most of all. Every year some Pyramid Lake Paiute still go and gather the nuts; it’s become a challenge, with much of the good mountain land now controlled by uncooperative private landowners, but they can still gather with one of the other Paiute bands or with the Western Shoshone.

Long before there were people along its now shrunken shoreline, Lake Lahontan was the incubator of the Lahontan cutthroats. Their progenitors originated along the Pacific coast, making their way up the Columbia River before heading south via a network of now mostly vanished lakes. Sixty-thousand-year-old fossils of the old fish have been found in what’s now a dangerously dry, alkaline basin. Among the region’s lakes, only Pyramid still has the old array of ecological relationships—including the only large predator, the cutthroat trout, which here sometimes approached the size of oceangoing salmon (the trout’s great size helped them feed on the tui-chub, a still-abundant fifteen-inch fish).

I sleep in a pup tent on the shore of Pyramid (the Paiute’s lone camping regulation, wonderfully, is to keep twenty-five feet back from the waterline; Ben made it clear that they don’t believe in fencing off the lake). As the sun sets, the tufa formations go red, deep purple, and finally gray; at the lake’s far edge, close to the namesake tufa pyramid, something shimmers on the water like heat from off the desert. It takes binoculars to see that the shimmer is pelicans—white pelicans by the hundreds or thousands, flown from as far away as Mexico. There’s far more life in this desert than my unpracticed eye can make out; in this I’m like Twain, who saw little in the sand of Washoe but sagebrush, which he said smelled like a compromise between magnolia and polecat. As the pelicans fade into the evening, the stars emerge, gleaming, filling the Big Dipper’s cup. I go to sleep hugely satisfied after a dinner of beef jerky and almonds and whiskey, feeling peaceful and surprisingly at home until a midnight bathroom break, when the scuffle of an approaching tumbleweed scares me nearly into an early grave.

In the morning I’m creakingly sore, and I make cowboy coffee, throwing a handful of grounds directly into boiling water. I didn’t use water from the lake; Twain called coffee made from alkaline water (the lake is about a sixth as salty as the sea) “the meanest compound man has yet devised.” Even with decent water, the coffee is bitter enough that I understand why sugar was a standard provision in wagon trains.

Interestingly, though, the alkaline water may be why many people thought that Pyramid Lake cutthroats were among the best eating fish. In 1844 a group of Paiute brought a cutthroat to John C. Frémont, the first white explorer to see the lake. Having “had the inexpressible satisfaction to find [that it] was a salmon-trout,” Frémont judged the flavor of the trout “excellent—superior, in fact, to that of any other fish I have ever known” (seeing his delight, the Paiute brought more cutthroats up to four feet long, fully stocking the camp). Frémont may have been noticing the effects of Pyramid’s alkaline water; though it makes terrible coffee, it also makes fish taste particularly rich. The dire desert that Twain detested had flavors of its own.

Soon I’m heading along the shore toward Sutcliffe, whose twelve hundred people make up about half the reservation’s population. The first step in maintaining Pyramid’s Lahontan cutthroats takes place at the town’s Lake Operations, a few nondescript tan buildings and garages surrounded by round, fifteen-foot-wide tanks. When I arrive, Lake Operations Supervisor Robert Eagle is leaning easily against an outside wall, watching what looks like a culverted stream flow past the building and down to the lake. The stream, it turns out, is an artificial channel, dry unless they pump in water; doing so in the spring attracts trout desperate to head upstream. Now dozens of huge dark fish drift easily in submerged cages, all facing against the flow.

“There’s nothing smaller than seventeen inches in there,” Robert says. “Some go seven, eight, ten pounds—we take them all trying to spawn.” Historically, of course, most fish would have preferred the Truckee, both because of size and because it enters Pyramid from the east; cutthroats still have a genetic memory of the ocean and instinctively try to head in the direction their spawning ancestors followed from the Pacific. But these fish were released here soon after hatching, and this is their natural point of return.

Robert and the workers have already separated out fifty males and fifty females; the latter are ripe, ready to shed their eggs. They’re big fish, drifting gigantic and gentle in the holding tanks. This many females will produce about a hundred fifty thousand eggs, which is all the hatchery’s trays and tanks can handle until the renovations on the Numana hatchery are complete. “But that’s nothing against what we’d have had before the whole lake basically got fished out,” Robert says. “The original cutthroat would head up the Truckee up to the vista, way up in the mountain area into the cold water from the spring snowmelt, and there were so many that they’d say the river would turn black. But at the time there was a commercial fishery right alongside the people fishing for sport—they were taking them left and right, and there was no program to replenish it.”

At its peak the fishery at Pyramid Lake was taking out up to two hundred thousand pounds of trout a year with traps and gill nets, the equivalent of twenty thousand ten-pound fish. And that’s only the fish that were shipped by Wells Fargo—the numbers don’t include any sold locally or caught for personal use. The combination of Sierra ice and the speed of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad meant that trout could be eaten as far away as Chicago. Such shipments were becoming a national habit; in the decades after the Civil War, ice and railroads let Americans get used to eating fish caught hundreds of miles away (on the day New York’s Fulton Fish Market first opened in 1882, it offered trout from Vermont, Quebec, and Long Island, along with hatchery-raised brook trout, rainbows, two kinds of bass, and landlocked salmon). “Fresh” and “local” were no longer synonymous.

“There used to be a railroad right up there—they were taking the trout out through Fernley, sending them all over the place,” Robert says, “and with the agricultural dams there was no way for them to recover. It got to the point that there was no fishery at all.”

When Robert said there was no program to replenish the trout, he was actually understating how bad things got—in fact, the programs that
were
in place couldn’t have done more damage to the local cutthroat if they’d been designed to. The worst of these was the Derby Dam. The Derby was the Bureau of Reclamation’s very first project (literally Specification Number 1, Drawing Number 1), and when completed as part of the 1905 Newlands Project it instantly sealed off the trout’s historic spawning channels. The day the dam closed for the first time, hundreds of trout were left flopping in what little water remained downstream; onlookers rushed into the channel and clubbed them to take home. Meanwhile the agricultural diversions—which removed some quarter million acre-feet of water a year from the river, mostly to grow cantaloupes on land better suited for growing native pasture and other low-value crops—promptly dropped the level of Pyramid Lake some eighty feet. Though the Nevada Fish Commissioners complained loudly about the lack of adequate fish ladders, Frederick Newell, the bureau’s first commissioner, said outright that “fish have no rights in water law,” with Senator Newlands, the project’s namesake, adding that “Pyramid Lake exists solely to satisfy the thirsting sun.”

That attitude, Ben said, is still a problem. “People say, ‘Do you want water for people in Reno, or a suckerfish in Pyramid Lake?’ It’s all about development. They don’t realize that when you start chipping away bits and pieces of the ecosystem, you get problems in the food chain. We’ve done all right in the court system—we were here first, our water claims have priority. But it’s hard to make people, politicians, understand—water is sacred. It’s for
all
life. Fish and Game, Reclamation . . . they all tend to separate it out. But if the tiniest creature—the frog, the fish—gets in trouble, the problems just head right up the line.”

The last spawning run of the original Pyramid cutthroat strain was in 1938. Tahoe’s last run was the same year; though Tahoe’s commercial fishery had been banned in 1917, Lahontan cutthroats had been declining since the 1880s. Before that time some seventy thousand pounds of fish were caught annually for long-distance sale, some with traps and nets that captured entire spawning runs. By the time twenty-two thousand pounds were shipped in 1904, the population was nearing collapse—when disease struck in force twenty years later, it was too much for the diminished numbers to handle. Tahoe’s cutthroats have never returned; most of Pyramid’s are a strain collected in Summit Lake in the seventies, maintained today only by the Paiute’s rigorous stocking program.

In the hatchery’s main room, fifteen men and women gather around a long wooden table with three round holes down its centerline. The flopping, stranded fish below Derby Dam were twenty or even thirty pounds, numbers I understood only intellectually; it’s when Steve Samson picks out a female trout, handing her through the window to Kia Blindman, that I realize how big even an eight-pounder is. She’s colored a dark olive, shining as though glazed, and like any fish straight from the water she looks vivid—in shockingly sharp focus. She’s big enough that Kia has to hug her against his rubber-aproned chest: this is a serious fish, over two feet long. The world hook-and-line record for trout is for a forty-three-pound Lahontan cutthroat caught here by Paiute John Skimmerhorn in 1925; there were unconfirmed reports, back in 1912, of a fish weighing in at a colossal sixty-two. Elizabeth Thomas, who works just up the hill with the cui-ui at the Dunn Hatchery, says that “a ten-pounder’ll kick us around pretty good,” and that’s clearly true. A
sixty-two-
pounder? Bring a harpoon.