Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [47]
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