River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (66 page)

Thirty-five miles out we reached Lower Granite Dam where we happened upon Rob Pike, the boater-bicyclist, in his swift runabout, waiting to lock through. We wished he were
returning
from the Pacific so that he might give us word about conditions downriver but settled for asking him as he went oceanward to tie warning messages to trees, as Lewis did for Clark. There were in that country, of course, no trees anywhere visible.

The descent in the locks of the Snake-Columbia system is far greater than anything we’d yet faced on the Ohio or the Erie Canal, as much as ten times greater, three of the drops about a hundred feet. More than ever before,
Nikawa
was but an oyster cracker bobbing in the dark soup being drawn down into the valves. Enclosed in the deep concrete casements, her smallness made our venture too seem picayune, a game played by idle kids, for unlike those first captains to come this way, we were after neither empire nor science; we were there simply to experience the empire, learn the science, and report it to those who might not ever make the journey. As Pilotis said on another occasion, perhaps presumptuously, “Our voyage is a kind of fulfillment of their voyage.” If so, maybe that was enough to justify for an hour the massive manipulation of river it took to get us down. Once we were free of the lock, Pike jackrabbited away, and I knew he wanted, whatever else, to reach the ocean before us, as well he should—after all, he’d been at it seven years.

We proceeded on through the canyon-torn shores, a river edge that could not decide whether to rise vertically or stretch out horizontally, so it did a little of both beautifully. The wind dropped with the sun and temperature—hence also the waves—and our river horse moved at a merry canter. But I reined her in, why I’m not sure. Perhaps I could feel the voyage coming to an end.

C
ENTRAL FERRY, WASHINGTON
, should be today—were history to catch up with contemporary fact—Central Bridge. The highway span, the first we’d passed under since leaving Clarkston, served as a piloting mark to direct us into a hidden little sidewater harbor on the north bank and a dock for the night. The ranger who oversaw the place asked where we were headed, a common question but one with an answer no longer interesting; now a better query was where we were coming from. We answered both, but he, a wideshouldered, slender-hipped man who cast a triangular shadow, cared only about destination, as if bored by multitudes of voyagers from New York Harbor stopping over. He gave such a disquisition on the perils of trying to cross the bar at the mouth of the Columbia River that the Photographer again grew uneasy. I listened, perhaps too nonchalantly, although I was only practicing my belief that fearlessness is contagious, or, perhaps more accurately in this instance, semifearlessness is semi-contagious.

I knew the mouth of the Columbia is, by wide consensus, the third most dangerous confluence of river and ocean in the world, a place mariners call the Graveyard of the Pacific. I reminded the hands that we no longer had a calendar working against us, and we could afford to wait for good weather and boatable water when our approach into the ocean arrived, but I carelessly said, Too much caution can stop us dead. The retort: “And so can too little.”

The ranger talked about something else that concerned me far more—wind. Two days earlier a bad blow had come through with gusts he estimated at 125 miles an hour. I discounted that figure by a third, yet it still would have been enough to lay low a small craft like
Nikawa
, particularly when blasts get channeled up the gorge against the river current to become two flailing fists smacking into each other. Other than losing my logbook to the water, I most feared wind. When not itself a direct threat, it lay behind almost all the nasty moments we’d encountered, and now we’d come into one of the blowiest places in America during a season of winds.

The next morning we moved out in yet more fine conditions, good water and sky, but by afternoon it had become, in William Clark’s inventive orthography, “a verry worm day.” Other than brief squalls, we’d been spared nasty weather since South Dakota. That streak surely couldn’t continue, but somehow I believed it would. Pessimism and negativism are cankers in the soul of long-distance voyagers, and continuance of journeys owes about as much to blind faith as realistic assessment—at least that is my interpretation, drawn from reading many travelers’ accounts, including those of Columbus.

Shortly after noon we reached Little Goose Dam, named for an island now inundated. The Snake today is poor in islands as if it were a forest without streams, a prairie without ponds. The lock, we got told over the radio, would not open for nearly three hours, and I was unable to interest the voice in our crossing, so we found a safe landing and went ashore to look at the long fish ladder that allows adult salmon (and other species) returning from the sea to reach spawning grounds but is almost useless to down-bound smolts, partly because the little ones head for the ocean tail-first.

We talked to a Corps of Engineers employee who asked the question the way we now liked to answer it, and we told her where we’d started from. Deciding we weren’t lying, she tried to guess a possible route, became more interested, then said, “Maybe we can help you,” and went to a phone and called someone who called someone who called someone, and finally she said, “Get your itsy-bitsy boat in position. You’re going through.” The lockman, the one who had cut me off on the radio, grudged himself toward the control house to fill the chamber. In excellence, he manifested the swiftness of a mollusk, the leanness of a possum, and the smile of a badger. To him,
Nikawa
expressed everything that was wrong with his job, and were it possible to suck her down the giant drains of the lock and flush her seaward like a turd, he would have done so. Said Pilotis, “Our little cruiser just doesn’t have much command bearing.” True, I said, unless you know her history.

On we went, past occasional orchards in the broadening valley bottom, past the mouth of the Palouse River and its marvelous cataract a few miles north, past Skookum Canyon. We were twenty-five miles from any place one might call a town, and we saw no other small boats and only one tow. By holding to a steady speed, we had a chance of reaching Lower Monumental Dam for the next scheduled opening; while we understood the efficiency in assigning times for locking through, an open-on-request system gave more freedom. Even though the big federal dams of the lower Snake fascinated me and the challenge of their locks enlivened our passage, I can’t say I believe them either necessary or ultimately beneficial because their two major purposes, commercial transport and generation of electricity, other means can readily provide. It is not cheaper to move wheat or timber by barge rather than rail when you figure in the costs of extinction of species and the decimation of salmon fishing, nor is it expedient to haul bauxite from South America to the hydropower-rich Columbia Basin to be turned into pop cans if that means the destruction of native cultures dependent on a naturally abundant river. The damming of rivers today is primitive engineering, like paving highways with flagstones or moving ocean vessels with paddlewheels, and our time has seen that gothic management reach its zenith. Despite the dams of the lower Snake being only twenty to thirty years old, I thought of them as cabooses, things at the end of their era. To someone who might counter, “But they let you get down the Snake River,” I would say, They let us get down the Snake faster and easier, but it was not speed or ease we were after. We wanted the crossing
itself
, however we found it at the time of our passage. I’ve never believed speed and ease are conducive to living fully, becoming aware, or deepening memory, a tripod of urges to stabilize and lend meaning to any life.

We passed under the big, isolated upthrust of basalt that gives its name to Lower Monumental Dam, and as we neared the lock Pilotis radioed our standard message: “Lower Monumental, this is
Nikawa
, the boat crossing America, requesting passage through.” No answer. Repeat. No answer. Repeat. Keeping a small vessel in position above a lock, especially in high water, is tricky and trying (as the
Doctor Robert
discovered when she lost power on the Ohio and had to be rescued from being swept over Montgomery Dam), so we were always happy to receive quick instructions. Working to check the current by turning
Nikawa
in a tight circle, I said, Norman Numbwit’s either asleep up there or thwarting us. We couldn’t go to shore and wait because the hour of operation was at hand and no lockman will start the machinery until he sees a boat in position, but after thirty minutes I headed for the nearest landing. Immediately the radio crackled alive, and the tender ordered us to get ready and alleged we had not been receiving his transmissions. Pilotis: “I think that last lockman had a little chat with him.”

When open, the gates of Lower Monumental hang above like massive guillotines and on a hot day drip cool relief on any line-handling sailor on a bow. Pilotis liked the dousing. The gate closed, locking
Nikawa
in to lock her down, and we dropped ten stories in fifteen minutes, then headed again for open river.

At last, the engineered barriers between us and the ocean were no more than digits on a hand; we celebrated the number five with a tuck of something from a small, labelless tin that we could identify only as deviled something, but the other food we could recognize: dried cherries and chocolate bars. We were near a place called Windust, not for its weather, accurate though it can be, but for an old ferryman long ago become his name. In that spare and demanding part of southeast Washington, beyond the bending river, a road can run for thirty miles with no more deviance from straightness than you find along the immaculate edge of an engineer’s rule, yet because of the broad-backed hills, travelers may not realize they are on a perfect course. Pilotis, never before in the fertile if arid Palouse, watched the smooth, sensuous slopes, fondled them visually, and said, “How would it be to take a tractor into a fallow wheat field and plow in a short poem, a haiku, something writ short but large?” Geograms? Tractoglyphs? “Sky poetry.”

The long, enclosed river began opening into something too broad to be a canyon and too steep-sided to be a valley, but it remained treeless, an arboreal vacancy that made it seem yet vaster than it already was, and the afternoon lay across the big pool in such stillness that even the slow and punctilious step of great blue herons seemed quick and careless. We went along, moving the water more than it moved us, a golden glide in full leisure, and for the first time in weeks I sat back to steer with my stockinged feet. Pilotis said, “In
The Wind in the Willows
, Water Rat says to Mole, ‘There’s nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’” Then, moments later, “Does the ease of downstreaming make you second-guess yourself about refusing to take a jet boat up the River of No Return so you could have cooperated with the flow of the Missouri for halfway across the continent?” No, I said, because those two rivers that so defined our voyage forced us to earn passage—I think it’s like rock climbing where the point is to go a difficult way, otherwise ascent is almost meaningless—the object isn’t just to get to the top but to get there in such a way you learn the nature of the mountain—I’ll bet somebody, if all went flawlessly, could jet boat our route across the country in a quarter of our time, maybe less, but it would be a stunt, or like stock-car racing, going nowhere fast. “Four-lane highways are for passing, not passage.”

We waited about an hour in the warm afternoon to be admitted into the relief of the mossy coolness in the lock at Ice Harbor Dam. When we left it behind, evening was upon us, and we slid down the final ten miles of the Snake and into the Columbia, our last river, and turned upstream a couple of leagues to Kennewick and a quiet berth behind Clover Island, a place dredged up from the river bottom, where we helped tow a disabled cruiser to the dock. Nearby we found both quarters and supper overlooking the Great River of the West, the one that more than any other has borne Americans to the Pacific. As I sat with a small and satisfying shot of budge, then ate my meal, and later lay abed, I watched the Columbia roll darkly down carrying fish and flotsam, sand and silt, and soon a small boat come from the Atlantic 4,892 miles away. But for a rising wind, all was exceeding well, a bad portent on a river if I ever saw one.

XII

The Columbia is our twentieth-century river. Its dams represent the optimistic faith in technology of the century’s beginning, and the restless misgivings about large-scale engineering at the century’s end. It is the river of the turbine, dynamo, the reactor, and airplane. It is the river of Tom Swift, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Popular Mechanics
, and Nagasaki. In the first three decades after World War II, major dams were completed in the Columbia Basin at a pace faster than one per year. It is a river so transformed as seemingly invented. If you want to see how America dreamed at the height of the American Century, come to the Columbia.