River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (68 page)

We went back to the sand to warm up, and I said, All we can do now is hover in Hover where we’ve hove up—take cover in Hover. “No doggerel.” So I sang a corrupted version of the World War Two song:

There’ll be blue skies over

The black beach of Hover

Tomorrow, just you wait and see.

There’ll be joy and laughter

And love ever after,

Tomorrow when
Nikawa’s
free.

Pretending to ignore me, Pilotis said: “If the Columbia is this violent three hundred miles from the third most dangerous river mouth in the world, then what’s it going to be like crossing the Bar?”

I didn’t say it, but I knew pilots in the so-called Graveyard of the Pacific considered twelve-foot swells calm water. Until that day, I had interpreted the Columbia according to what I’d learned from the deck of a small ship in a gentler season two years earlier, and for several months I’d foreseen our final river as a Sunday cruise. What a happy and beneficial fiction to believe that our last days, could we hold on long enough to reach them, would become easy. My ignorance and miscalculations drove us forward every bit as much as knowledge and planning, for no sane person would work hard only to end up with a fearsome and possibly fatal final drubbing.

We had to move
Nikawa
again, and this time the mooring line reached its bitter end; the next shift would mean anchoring and staying aboard. The day wore on and seemed to wear out the wind, and before sundown we waded in, shoved off, clambered aboard, Pilotis on the bow until we cleared the concrete and steel bones of the ghost town, and we went again onto the river. The water, turned clinquant by the sunset, lay rather than stood. We ran down four miles to cross the Columbia above the Walla Walla River just below the huge, peculiar twin basalt towers called Two Sisters, or Two Captains (I suppose for Lewis and Clark), to a weather-beaten little dock in the shelter of a hump of shore, and tied up near Port Kelly for the night. As we squared away the pilothouse, I noticed red splotches all across the bulkheads. It was dried blood. Pilotis started to wipe it clean. No, I said, leave it.

We were but a dozen miles below the mouth of the Snake. At that rate, we’d cross the Bar in a month. When people are exposed to repeated threats, they either become inured to them or finally find their nerve eroded. A craven inkling came to me that I’d entered the latter category when I heard a weather report predicting more wind for the next day. Before I fell into weary sleep, I guessed I didn’t have a week of risks left in me, and I lay in a blackness of soul that exceeded what the sorry night was passing off as darkness.

A
S IF IT HAD BEEN
following me cross-country—upstream and down, over the plains, into mountains—my life off the river caught up that morning. By spending most of the day before trapped in the Hover cove, I’d given that other existence time to find me and bring with it much I’d recently failed to do well or even adequately—marriage preeminently—so that when I fully woke, even before I thought I heard the wind, I wanted nothing to do with anything, and I lay wishing I could evaporate like a creek when feeder streams dwindle in summer heat until one day the water is gone, leaving behind only an imprint in its bed.

With destination so near, how could such a deflation of heart happen? I tried the proven nostrum of simply getting up; if that didn’t work, at least I’d confirm the miserable conditions on the river. What I found was a bright Thursday fresh from the Horse Heaven Hills, and before I could stop myself, I fell into the routine of rivering, perhaps half believing that going through the motions might call up real purpose and squelch thoughts of an empty house waiting for me at home. I roused Pilotis, and in the full bloom of morning we set out with nothing more than a narrow hope of gaining a few miles before the wind would drive us to cover.

The night had much dulcified the air and river, and our passage through the great Wallula Water Gap, where I was expecting to catch a zephyrean fist in the face, was nothing but a mild flowing between beautiful shores of brown basalt cliffs. At the point Oregon comes up to share the Columbia with Washington, the river was like an oiled tabletop, flat and slick, and
Nikawa
marked across it a long, trailing V.The banks, about a mile apart, ran nicely parallel as if the engineers had been at them too, and we saw not another boat anywhere under the ideal July sky.

At the Gap, the Columbia ceases its southerly run out of the Canadian Rockies and makes a grand western turn, a bend that allows the river to become a truncated Northwest Passage. Were it not for this shift—that is, were the Columbia to keep running longitudinally as do most of the other big rivers west of the Rocky Mountains—the old Oregon country might today be in Canada because that three-hundred-mile westerly flow to the ocean was just long enough for nineteenth-century Americans to use it to gain the territory. Once more, and for the penultimate time,
Nikawa
was heading directly for the Pacific. With only a single short northern deviation ahead of us, we could look down the broadly sweeping bends and believe that soon the west wind would carry across her bow the smell of the sea.

McNary Dam gave us a prolonged wait while an upriver tow locked through, so we went to see fish ascend the ladder past a counting window. Although the trough at that point is high above the lower river, we stood watching fish and lampreys wriggle against the current as if we were in a diving bell on the bottom of the Columbia. In the subdued light, the viewing station was a weird, clammy, netherly place where we were interlopers, voyeurs into a life otherwise hidden, and Pilotis said, “The best human beings can do is borrow a river. We can live in a forest, in the mountains, in the earth, in the grasslands, but not in a river. That’s strange for creatures two-thirds water.” When
Nikawa
descended the deep lock, dropping through what only minutes before had been seventy-five feet of dark river, we could smell the heart of the Columbia as if it had just exhaled. Before us lay almost eighty miles of open water.

Umatilla, Oregon, is a dusty town on the stark Columbia Plateau, a victim of careless agriculture which sometimes turns the wind brown, a treeless vacuity of sage and other plants that can live a year on the amount of water a human drinks in a day, a land of dead magma and wuthered heights, wind-haunted canyons and gulches, a country seemingly able to suck even a big river dry, an ostensible barrens requiring an artist in summer to carry a palette of nothing more than yellow ocher, burnt umber, and Vandyke brown to paint everything below the horizon—even the tail of a lizard, the eye of a rattler. You can find white men’s early estimation of this terrain in three names—Golgotha Butte, Dead Canyon, Freezeout Ridge—or six words—ordnance depot, bombing range, Indian reservations. Yet, like any landscape, the scablands are not ugly except where the hands of people have made them so.

Beyond the dam, the ridges don’t rise quite sufficiently to be foothills, and the river widens and becomes shoaly as if it too were leveling; that place once full of low islands is now, after the dammings, a spread of mud flats and shallows requiring a pilot to consult the chart, something we failed to do when I took a severely direct route down a wide stretch and
Nikawa
got dragged to a halt. I tilted up the motors to find a thick green wreath around each prop and twin hawsers of stringy weeds tying her to the swampy bottom. After we unwrapped and cut free, I turned perpendicular to our former course and, within the length of the boat, the depth went from three feet to five fathoms as we floated off the edge of a drowned island, perhaps one Indians used to call a
memaloose
, “place of the dead.” In the midst of the river they built wooden charnel houses, structures Lewis and Clark, violating their usual code of not disturbing native possessions, twice disassembled in the timber-poor canyon to fuel their fires.

Before impoundment, the Blalock Islands were a couple of estimable if low rises about six miles long but are now only a scramble of flats and islets presenting a temptation of shortcuts down sloughs and weedy channels. Yet for a few miles they give the Columbia the aspect of a real river again instead of deep pools of human artifice controlled by keyboards and silicon chips. Near the Blalocks, Interstate 84 leaves the Oregon tableland and descends almost to river level to run beside the Columbia right next to the Union Pacific Railroad—across the water is the Northern Pacific—all the way to Portland. In narrow strips of river terrace were small irrigated orchards and higher up the steep slopes occasional vineyards and wineries, but those things did little to deny that this place is forever a locale where human habitance is marginal with its continuance depending more on technology than on the land itself. If you’ve ever walked a vast and isolated piece of nature and not thought it lonely until you unexpectedly discovered someone else’s bootprint, then you know the feeling of that scarceness which only the river keeps from desolation.

The Columbia narrowed to about a mile across and deepened to holes of more than a hundred feet, but in spite of the sediment traps dams are, the water was a murky jade, we guessed from agricultural runoff. Near Arlington, little more than a grain elevator atop a dredged-up jetty, the Columbia Plateau begins loosening its grip and gives up trying to wring the river dry. We could see to the north forested foothills of the Cascades, and the desert of scant green, the land of rain-shadow we’d been in since the Bitterroots, fell behind.

We came upon a fisherman, about thirty years old, whose boat motor had quit, and he worked in vain to propel himself to shore with a water ski. Pilotis called, “Very inventive, but don’t you believe in spare paddles?” and threw him a line, and we towed him to shelter in the mouth of Rock Creek. I asked what he would have done had wind come up. He considered, then said, “Drowned comes to mind.” When we went on, I told Pilotis one of the constants I’d seen among water folk was their notion that a river is just wet land, and I thought they no more feared dying in one than a farmer does of dying in his field.

I’ve always found it peculiar that Oregonians named two rivers, one valley, one town, one geologic stratum, one rich fossil bed, a lock and dam, and I don’t know how many transmission shops and laundromats after John Day, since the trapper’s fame rests on losing his britches to Indians in 1811 and his mind to the desert soon after, thereby becoming the first recorded white man to walk the Northwest naked and unhinged. Perhaps, had he a more singular name to match his history, say Eliphalet Nott or Belazeel Wells, the nomenclature might make sense. While I’m at it: I try never to pass up a chance to complain about the undistinctive name for a most imposing volcano just fifty miles away, Mount Adams. In fact, in the grand string of volcanoes of the Northwest, several have names sadly deficient in color and vigor: Baker, Hood, St. Helens, Jefferson. I told Pilotis I wanted our great and deadly mountains to have names I couldn’t find in the White Pages. Where are the American equivalents to Popocatépetl, Krakatoa, Stromboli? Said my friend, “Did Canadians do the naming?”

A couple of miles below Mr. Day’s river, the version in eastern Oregon, we entered his lock, one of the deepest drops in America, and descended to the accompaniment of an ungreased mooring bitt tracking down its slot and trumpeting uncannily like an elephant. As we left the chamber I said to Pilotis, I consider that flourish proper for the reach of river ahead. “What makes it special?” Our five thousandth mile, I said.

On a high, sloping terrace on the north shore is rail magnate Sam Hill’s full-scale replica of Stonehenge in ferroconcrete, a monument that happened to mark another significant moment, the halfway point on a journey I’d made seventeen years earlier, a long loop around America over what have since come to be called blue highways. Equally by chance, across the river is the place where travelers on the Oregon Trail got their first glimpse of the river that, had it truly been part of a Northwest Passage, would have made the famous American trail unnecessary. Some settlers did use the river to finish their western journey, but most found the rapids too risky and paid a toll to follow a track around the base of Mount Hood. Pilotis: “You couldn’t have orchestrated a better conjunction of national and personal history,” and I said, If you travel long enough, space and time and self will coalesce here and there.

The Great River of the West went into some short bends and twisted past the mouth of the Deschutes, and we entered what was once the big bottleneck of the Columbia, a ten-mile run of rapids and cascades that stymied whites but provided a way of life for at least four thousand years of Indians. From Celilo (rhymes with “Ohio”) to The Dalles (rhymes with “fowls”), the river once was a constriction of white water visited by natives during the salmon run, a place so important that tribes agreed to share it as their paramount bartering and social rendezvous. Today, even after the damming, atop certain rocky overhangs Indians still build flimsy wooden platforms that allow them to reach down with eighteen-foot dip nets to snare fish, a means only they may use.

White people found the rapids not a faucet of nourishment but a nuisance, and they blasted out a boat channel, and below the cascades they erected huge fish wheels, one of them in 1913 scooping up in a single day thirty-five tons of fish. Not for Anglo-Americans any of that inefficient catching coho or chinook one at a time. A few years later the devilish wheels were outlawed to keep from exterminating the salmon, a job the dams quite legally now threaten to complete. In 1957, when engineers closed the gates of The Dalles Dam for the first time, the river took only five hours to cover the rocks and the ancient way of life they fostered—an event analogous to the virtual eradication of the bison and the consequent cultural decline of the Plains Indians.