River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (65 page)

Tim Palmer

The Snake River: Window to the West
, 1991

B
ECAUSE
of the river canyon, we could not discern from below that we were leaving the Rockies, nor could we see how the Blue Mountains to westward descend toward the Snake as an outwash slope opening to the great Columbia Plateau—an open and arid country of cindery hills and basalt exposures cooked up in volcanic kettles and pitched across the miles only to be heated again by the sun day in and day out in the shadeless land. The mountains still ahead of us, the Cascades and the Coast Range, lie sundered by the Columbia River and its engineers and their dammed and locked pools, a route we expected
Nikawa
to run easily after our arrival in Clarkston, Washington.

From the mouth of the Salmon, the Snake River rattles over a few rapids hardly more than riffles until it broadens and deepens enough to lure weekend boats of high gloss and power. Their slickly swim-suited occupants stared at our beat-up raft and the motley and disheveled band within as if we were poorlings wandering into a debutante cotillion. On both sides of the river above its rocky shorelines, treeless hills rose from layers of ancient magma stratified into terraces, and where there was sufficient soil, grasses, yellowed by July, topped out the slopes. The green realms east of the Rockies were gone, and we descended through a country of golden midsummer. Idaho was still on our starboard, but now, to the west for a dozen miles, lay Oregon, succeeded by Washington; two hundred miles farther we would loop back to the Beaver State.

Along the east bank, under low hills hunched as if ready to shrug, were a number of vacation homes, nearly all new places that our isolation in the wilds made appear inimical encroachments on a cleanly open land. We felt like Indians of another century as they watched log cabins go up beside their paths, in their old campgrounds, next to their springs, and we went down the river in silence, resigned toward features we could view only as temporary inevitabilities; such is one result of living, even for a few days, in an unsullied billion-anda-half-year-old canyon. I found it difficult to see myself as other than floating ephemera, and I believed the images and words I was gathering were headed for the same place as the red pictographs of Legend Creek—eventual erasure. Yet, of the times in my life I must count as wasted, squandered, spent aimlessly, I knew our river days would never be among them because, ephemeral as they too were, the river had done what it could to make them memorable enough to carry forward to the end. I floated along contentedly. Brevity does not make life meaningless, but forgetting does. Of the gifts of the rivers, none was greater than their making our time upon them indelible, or nearly as indelible as the old pictographs.

On the fringe of settlement by Heller Bar—a sand spit, not a tavern —we pulled ashore for lunch at a riverview café. The table of food we ordered up reminded us that civilization and its discontents were also not without their contentments, and of some of those we partook roundly. There we came upon four middle-aged men swimming 450 miles from Redfish Lake in central Idaho to Lower Granite Dam, to dramatize what sockeye and chinook smolts face as they try to descend from their hatching in the mountains to the Pacific, a nine-hundred-mile journey that federal hydroelectric dams have turned into a virtual suicide run. Each of the eight massive dams on the lower Salmon and Columbia rivers kills about ten percent of the fingerlings. The year before, only a single adult male sockeye, called Lonely Larry, returned to the lake, even though its route was once so full of redfish and chinooks that riders had to scare back the plunging salmon to get horses to ford a stream. Our raftsman said the last good spawning run he saw was in 1973: “It just isn’t pleasant to be a witness to a disappearance like that.” Some time later, I came across an 1882 issue of
Harper’s Magazine:
“[The salmon] is indeed a noble fish, and if means are taken to prevent the diminution of the run, will prove a source of wealth for many years to come.”

One of the swimmers, whom the media called “the Sal-men,” said, “We’re doing a crazy thing to get the word out that there are some insane things going on with the Corps of Engineers and their dams. We want to save our river, and we want to save its fish. Without question, there are problems with ranching, logging, and mining, but that’s not what’s killing most of the fish. The salmon were thick all through here until the dams started closing. We want those dams operated to assist the seasonal migration of fish, and we want people to know that the aluminum industry and power authorities are influencing Idaho politicians to say that saving salmon will cost jobs. It’s untrue. Salmon bring money with them.”

Each swimmer had managed the rapids by wearing a wet suit over a dry suit, neoprene boots, gloves, neck cowl, helmet, goggles, shin guards, hip pads, shoulder pads, and flippers as he clung to a kick-board. Even with such protection, their descent of the “Big-fish-water” made a voyage by raft seem cheating, and I said so. Pilotis: “Call me a sissy, but I’m not swimming from here to the sea—
that
you do alone.” We watched as one of the Sal-men took up his relay in the down-bound river; although he left only fifteen minutes ahead of us, it was almost an hour before our motored raft overtook him. When we passed, I stood and gave my old naval salute.

I regained some perspective on the varieties of river passage when we crossed the wake of a jet-boat bus, coiffed and cleanly dressed tourists seated next to a banner,
RIVER ADVENTURES!
As we neared the twin towns, we floated into a swarm of ripping water scooters and bikinied speedboats that gave further perspective. In the late afternoon heat we pulled up on the Washington shore at Clarkston (formerly Jawbone Flats), deflated the raft, rolled it up, and packed it onto a trailer, then went off to find a couple of rooms overlooking the Snake. We showered and crossed the bridge to Lewiston (formerly Ragtown), a historic center of brick and stone more pleasing than the one on the other side, and took dinner in a place of some elegance, the food less so. I started off at the bar so I could make entries in my logbook undisturbed, but I drew the attention of two psychologists, a couple who referred to my scribbling as “writing behavior.” Her eyelashes, genuine ones, nearly dipped into her cocktail when she put it to her lips, and he had a black mustache that could have, were it attached to a handle, swept a floor. The wife was working to calm herself after visiting her father recovering from a stroke. Said the husband when she went to the women’s room: “Papa’s taking it hard. He was a softdrink distributor for years, in good health except for the cigarettes. He told us today he was just an old, broken-down pop machine and we should hang a sign on him like they do:
OUT OF ORDER, SORRY.
”

The wife returned, and the husband said, “You okay?” She: “Sort of. Sort of not.” He to me: “Clinical lingo.” Then, as he put his arm around her: “We have a wonderful permeability—we seep into each other—tears, hopes, lives.” I nodded, and he asked about me, and I said the Snake River and I were doing a little co-permeating just now, and gave a précis of the voyage. Glancing again at my logbook, she said, “Are you illegible?” I said my boatmates read me about as well as they did my handwriting. “No, no,” she said, enunciating. “Are you il-eligible?” For what? “Oh, good god! Are you married?” Sort of not, I said. In full certainty she said, “When a man takes to the road, even if it’s a river, he’s running away, but when a woman takes off, she’s looking for something.” I said I was running away from looking for something. She considered, then leaned over to tap my logbook and whisper, “Here’s a title for your journaling:
Crossing Waters:
A
Hermaphroditic Quest
.” Does that mean, I said, you don’t like
That Dang River
?

T
HE PHOTOGRAPHER
, in fine yeomanly manner, returned on
the truck hauling the deflated raft back to the Lemhi Valley where he hitched our tow wagon to
Nikawa
and trailered her up along the Bitterroots, across Lolo Pass, and down the narrow defiles of the Lochsa and Clearwater rivers to the Snake, his route similar to the one Lewis and Clark used to avoid the Salmon gorge. During his absence, I prepared for our last two waters by gathering what materials I could, trying to learn whether the way was truly as open as it appeared. Twice Pilotis and I walked to Wasem’s drugstore in Clarkston, drawn not by the addled slogan stuck to a window (
SOVEREIGNTY FOREVER—U.N. RULE NEVER
) but to the soda fountain that let me answer a desperate lack of ice cream sodas with an excellent pair while Pilotis ate a slice of huckleberry cheesecake pie and one of peach cream, the latter tasting like 1949, not in freshness but in that distinctive way gustatory memory can summon up the past.

On the third afternoon in Clarkston, once we’d prepared the engines, idle since middle Montana, we stopped at a filling station to fuel
Nikawa
and then went to the river to launch. I’d not been behind her wheel in four weeks, and taking the helm again felt strange and good, like kissing a long-absent lover. She responded immediately, her motors humming out eagerness, and we set off under a warm but cloudless sky, and the Photographer drove off westward. The Snake below Lewiston is not so much a river as a tail end of the long impoundment behind Lower Granite Dam, so we ran smartly, and I tried to control a growing notion that we had nothing ahead but easiness. The main mechanism checking such overconfidence was a little burr of a thought resident in phrases like “And we almost made it” or “Well, we came close.” As a marathon runner knows, it’s one thing for a long race to fail in its early miles, but quite another to fall just shy of the finish. I realized that still before us there were likely even more potential coups de grâce than the Photographer could dream up. Yet, that day
Nikawa
and I hummed along in a heretofore unexperienced ataraxia that even certain reaches where the wind got a hard run at the water could not dispel.

The Snake is one of only five rivers of more than a thousand miles entirely within the contiguous states, but we would see just a fifth of it as we descended to its union with the Columbia. Of those five rivers, the Snake is unique in that once it leaves its natal territory in the Yellowstone basin, only sixty miles from the true headwaters of the Missouri, it traverses desert. Any water flowing through such extensive aridity is going to get dammed, and the Snake suffers from twenty of them. The lower four are huge things with locks, although as far as we could testify, commercial navigation on the upper Snake right then was as scarce as on the lower Missouri. Despite other pretexts, those dams exist largely to employ the Corps of Engineers and make big corporate money selling power to citizens as far away as California who simply must have their cans of beef stew opened electrically, their roofs outlined with Christmas lights, and their socks dried by turning a dial to number seven. A bumper sticker I once saw in Oregon:
HATE THE DAMS? SQUEEZE YOUR ORANGES BY HAND.

Below the mouth of the Clearwater at Lewiston, we again picked up the wake of the Corps of Discovery, not because we sought it out but because it is the most complete water route to the Pacific. The section of river we skimmed that day was, before impoundment, white water that gave the Expedition fits by smashing canoes, throwing men, sinking the stores. Clark, in this passage representative of several, wrote:

Examined the rapids which we found more dificuelt to pass than we expected from the Indians information. A Suckcession of Sholes appears to reach from bank to bank for 3 miles which was also intersepted with large rocks Sticking up in every direction, and the chanel through which we must pass crooked and narrow. We only made 20 miles today, owing to the detention in passing rapids &c.

From Clarkston, the Snake westers through generally broad bends along a gentle arc to the Columbia, no longer slowed by rapids but only by four stair-step impoundments, each about thirty miles long. Unlike the great pools behind the Missouri dams, the less silty Snake has not yet so visibly begun to return to a natural river in its tailwaters. So before us lay merely long, deep “flatwater” troughs that would present not riverine but lacustrine problems, most likely wind, for the blowing season in that vastly open place was fully at hand. Indeed, once we were well under way, the Snake considerably thumped
Nikawa
and forced us to slow and bucket along through water so sun-struck it was like sailing a small sea of fractured mirrors.

The shores rose steeply a few hundred feet into bastions of basalt broken by fallen ramparts of volcanic crust and long ledges weathered into delicate traceries like petticoat hems or coarsely eaten into lacunas and strange shafts, the canyon virtually devoid of anything human but an empty rail line and impounded water. Grasses grew where they could among the dead magma, the stems toasted golden, the stones burned dark like meat held too long to the fire, and for hours we saw, other than water and sky, only grass and rock, the latter here and there stacked on end in long skinny columns as if so many igneous noodles and in other places tumbled into the river like massive granules of brown sugar. It was as culinary a landscape as I ever saw, one that—unless it was my hunger—got me rambling about food and how I longed for an old-fashioned plate of chow mein. Such happens during long hours of water passage. Pilotis extended the empty-fortune-cookie metaphor I’d heard on the Missouri: the year before, my friend finished a meal in a Chinese restaurant with the usual slender slip of prognostication; not long afterward, at a different place, the cookie that night contained precisely the same fortune; a few weeks later, at yet another restaurant, arrived a third cookie, it too containing the exact words. It’s great, I said, to get your kismet triply promised—was it on the order of, “You will travel far with a great master of waters”? “Not at all,” said Pilotis. “Each time it was ‘Someone is kissing your triding keepsake.’”