Naked Against The Rain

His name was Rick Rubin.  He was a friend of mine.  We’d sit on his Victorian porch – featured in the movie Drugstore Cowboy – and share a tasty bowl, wondering about every passerby on Northwest Irving.  We could make up some stories, we certainly could.  He was a crazy, wonderful man.

Rick wrote a historic book about the great Chinook tribe of the Pacific Northwest. Four hundred pages, sub-titled The People of the Lower Columbia River 1770-1830.   You won’t believe the amount of research the man did.  I watched him do a little bit when I lived nearby, later a little bit whenever I was passing thru.  A labor of love, a story he felt compelled to tell. 

Here’s a small slice, presented Wild Dog-style, of a brilliant work, Naked Against The Rain. – JDW

WHAT COYOTE DID IN THIS LAND  Myth Age

All things went up the river.  The Chinook moved upriver, the salmon ascended annually, the British sailed up the river, the smelt went up in thick schools.  Likewise, Coyote went up the river.

He did so every winter, wherever someone recited the many-tale epic of how Coyote made the world inhabitable and grew to maturity, while ascending Big River from the breakers at its mouth to the far shining mountains.

Myth age coyote, the creative spirit and transformer of the world, was at the same time a greedy, selfish, lascivious Everyman.  He had wonderful powers but he played all manner of tricks, many of them on himself.  He would try anything, just to see what would happen.

Coyote was dishonest, oversexed, forever ravenously hungry.  He invented incest, suicide, and some of the meanest tricks imaginable, often for no apparent reason.

Sudden anger was the worst of his numerous flaws.  Too often it affected adversely the destiny of the human beings who would come.  Lust, gluttony, and stealing glory from others were Coyote’s ways, too.

Yet the Chinook took him seriously indeed.  Anthropologist Edward Sapir wrote of his informant Menait:  “Coyote he considers as worthy of the highest respect, despite the ridiculous and lascivious side of his character; and with him he is strongly inclined to identify the Christ of the whites, for both he and Coyote lived many generations ago, and appeared in this world in order to better the lot of mankind.”

That lean-flanked one was the most human of the beings before the people came, the one without horn or tusk or claw.  He made up the world as he went along.  That was the Myth Age, a long while ago.  In that world the creatures were still shaped like humans but on account of their predilections they were becoming the totemic animals they would be, developing and receiving their differences.

“The people are coming soon,” Coyote always reminded them.  All this was preparation for the coming of the human beings.

Coyote is the wild dog we know so well now, having watched him spread to distant reaches of North America and far into Central America.  Coyotes live near people successfully while the other animals die out.  But those are coyotes, while this is Coyote.

He never knew a good thing when he had it.