16 The 'Est, 'Est West (continued)

Here is a riddle for you. What is it that has no legs and yet can jump as high as the Washington Monument? I'll tell you the answer in a minute.

Between Oregon and Washington is a river named Columbia, after Columbus. In the Columbia River are large fish called salmon. Salmon live in the salt ocean, but when Mrs. Salmon wants to lay her eggs she goes way up the Columbia River, far above the falls to fresh water, looking for a quiet place to do so. How can she get by the falls? She jumps the falls. You may wonder how fish without legs can jump at all, and it is peculiar that they can, but they do. They bend their tails into a kind of spring, then flip! —up they go; for a salmon can jump as high as the Washington Monument.

“Are the falls as high as the Washington Monument?”

“No, they are all low.”

“But you said a salmon could jump as high as the Washington Monument.”

“A salmon can, for the Washington Monument can't jump at all!”

Millions of salmon together called “schools” swim up the river and fishermen catch them in nets, but they leave most of them so that they can lay eggs from which little salmon are born, and the little salmon swim down the river and out into the ocean, where they live and grow up until it comes time for them also to lay eggs, and then they in their turn swim up the river, jump up the falls, and are either caught or left to raise more families of little salmon. Salmon meat is pink; we call it salmon color. It is packed in cans. You have probably eaten salmon from the Columbia River yourself.

The oldest fruit in the World is the apple. It is the fruit that grew in the Garden of Eden, but people believe the apple that Eve gave Adam was a very poor one compared to the apples that grow in the State of Washington. People in Washington, D.C. —all the way across the country—buy apples that have been shipped from Washington State—3,000 miles away—for they are so much better than ordinary apples. They are “skookum.” That's what the Indians of the Northwest call something very nice—whether it is a girl or an apple.

There are great forests in Washington and Oregon. The forest trees are cut down to make lumber for building houses;and the paper I am writing on was made from trees that grew in Oregon. How do I know that? When I hold the paper up to the light, there is printed in white—we call it a watermark—the word “Oregon.”

At the northwest corner of America is a large country that belongs to the United States and yet it is not a State. It is called a Territory. It is Alaska. The highest mountain in North America is there. It is called Mount McKinley. Alaska is so cold, so far off, and so hard to get to, and yet the United States bought it and paid millions of dollars for it, not because it had the highest mountain, but chiefly because of the fish in its waters and the fur on its animals, and then one day gold was discovered there.

Gold is a magic word. Again, as in the days of the Forty-niners, thousands of people, when they heard of the gold, left everything and, with nothing but shovels to dig the gold and sieves to strain it out of the water, started off to that far-away place, hoping to make their fortunes before the new year. Many foolishly went off with nothing to live on after they reached Alaska. They didn't seem to know that where the gold was to be found there was no food, nothing to eat,and no stores where one could buy food. Others, more wise, carried cans of food with them, and when the foolish gold-diggers had found gold, the wise ones sold them food for their gold. For a can of beans they often asked hundreds of times what it had cost, and the foolish gold-diggers had to pay it or starve, for they couldn't eat gold and they had to eat or die. So the wise ones came back with the gold which the foolish ones had dug, and the foolish ones were lucky to get back at all.

In the parts of Alaska where fish can be caught for food, Indians live in small villages. In the center of each village they put up a tall pole carved and painted in the forms of birds and animals with big ugly faces. These are called Totem Poles. Each tribe or family has some bird or animal such as an eagle or a bear for its mascot, as you might call your club “the Lions” or “the Owls,” and the Totem Pole is the tribe's sign.

If you should suddenly see at night the whole northern sky hung with curtains of fire and ablaze with flashing flames shooting from the ground far up into the heavens, you might think, as I did the first time I saw it when a boy, that the World was coming to an end. It looked as if the World were on fire and were about to explode. This amazing sight is called the Aurora Borealis or Northern Light, and it may be seen often in Alaska and sometimes, though perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime, much farther south. It is a terrifying sight to those who have never seen or even heard of such a thing before, and yet the Aurora Borealis does no more harm than a beautiful sunset or a rainbow in the sky.

What causes the Aurora Borealis? That's a hard question to answer. Electricity has something to do with it and so have sun spots. Have you ever heard of sun spots? Sometimes a dark spot will appear on the sun and move slowly across it. You can't see sun spots because the sun is much too bright to be stared at. But men who look through telescopes with darkened glass to protect their eyes can see these spots and they can photograph them with special cameras. After a sun spot appears on the sun there is usually a very bright Aurora Borealis.

That's all I can tell you. A little girl once asked, “What is a thought made of?” That's a hard question to answer too.