Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [48]
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