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Winning a National Book Award brings a lot of stilted, formal accolades, but Tim Egan will always be known to friends as a rocker and Bruce Springsteen fan and as a fast-moving, perspiring mountaineer nicknamed "Lord of the Deer Flies."
A Spokane boy, the product of Gonzaga Prep and the U-Dub, Egan is never going to speak with an English accent or preside at long liquid lunches.
In a quarter-century of knowing the guy, he has spent less time talking about past scoops than do writers for The Stranger in a few days' worth of blogs and columns.
Still, Egan has reached pre-eminence as a chronicler of the West, its environment and its history of triumph and folly.
He is having a fall for the ages. Not only did his book "The Worst Hard Time," a chronicle of the nation's Dust Bowl catastrophe, win America's top book prize, but also Egan exposed a boondoggle that helped define an election.
Egan wandered into a Ketchikan luncheon a few years back and heard Alaska Rep. Don Young bluster about using his post as chairman of the House Transportation Committee to bring home the pork.
Young talked about two pricey ($451 million total) bridges to sparsely populated corners of Alaska, one of which would connect Ketchikan to its airport on Gravina Island. A six-minute ferry ride is now required.
A front-page New York Times article began debate over Alaska's "bridges to nowhere."
Richard Viguerie, the conservative strategist, wrote last week how Young and Sen. Ted Stevens deserved thank-you cards from House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi "for creating an engineering marvel worthy of the Roman Empire -- their beloved bridges to nowhere."
In the 1990s, Egan delivered a lethal blow to big federal subsidies of logging in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, writing in The New York Times that the U.S. Forest Service was selling 800-year-old trees for the price of a Big Mac.
Enough with the past triumphs. Don't want to jack up Tim's lecture fees, or vent hot air in the style of a Seattle City Council tribute resolution.
What's fun, instead, is to look at how Egan shares a set of common attributes with others who've worked to protect the Northwest's environment, safeguard its human heritage and livability and give life to its history.
Three come to mind:
Generations, before and after: In his Northwest book, "The Good Rain," Egan began with a hike up to Third Burroughs Mountain on Mount Rainier, where he committed the ashes of a beloved uncle to the wind. The deceased had taught him a bundle of outdoor skills.
Later, the author is camped along the Naches River, cooking up a trout he had just caught, and musing whether his progeny will be able to enjoy the same marvelous experience.
It's been like that with a lot of folks: Our parents and grandparents taught us to appreciate a not-yet-used-up corner of the planet. They bequeathed a sense of duty to keep it that way. Parenthood sharpened it.
In the past few weeks, I've run into scions of three prominent Northwest timber families at conservation fundraising events.
Giving back: In fields from business to literature to the arts, achieving folks have realized their success is linked to where they live. In Egan's case, "The Good Rain" was followed by "Breaking Blue." Based where the author grew up, it's an account of a sheriff who solves a long covered-up Depression-era murder.
Physio-Control Corp. founder W. Hunter Simpson explained it best years ago. Emergency medical technology developed at the University of Washington made Simpson a successful man with a wonderful life. In what he called a duty to "give back," he became a UW regent and major benefactor.
The Skagit River delta has long inspired photographers, artists, writers and poets. They put on amazing arts fundraisers to fund the opposition when Puget Power tried to put a nuclear power plant in their valley.
Grunt Work: Technology novels have lately proliferated, but the Northwest has both a blue-collar and hardscrabble work-on-the-farm heritage. The rural heritage was celebrated a couple of years ago in Egan's novel "The Winemaker's Daughter."
As U.S. House speaker, Spokane's Rep. Tom Foley was headed to a lawyers' lunch at the posh resort on Lake Coeur d'Alene. Crossing the lobby, he made an under-the-breath crack. What bothered Big Tom? He pointed at a bunch of loud, expensively dressed teenagers carrying tennis rackets. Growing up, Foley sweated summers (as did Egan) in Kaiser Aluminum's Spokane-area smelters.
The decline of all that -- shutdown smelters, polluted mine sites, depopulated farm towns, fishing boat basins opening their berths to yachts -- represents a genuine loss.
Egan has become a chronicler of such social change and, in the case of the Dust Bowl, how environmental blindness can lead to human catastrophe.
Enough! Writers can lose their edge when celebrated, analyzed or distracted from their work by too many gigs.
Egan is at peak form. We need him to stay that way. It used to be that Southerners claimed ownership of literature, while history belonged to tweedy Northeast folk. Our "classics" were such books as Betty MacDonald's "The Egg and I."
At the National Book Awards, however, the New Yorker table got to be grumpy. A Northwest boy got the prize. How 'bout them apples?
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