River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (71 page)

By afternoon the wind and water conspired to pound
Nikawa
, so after a spell of nasty bouncing, I made for protection in the small-boat harbor at Kalama, and we left the Columbia. The town was gritty, drab, and overwhelmed by the roar of Interstate 5, a place only blasted river could drive us into. When we found quarters for the night in a motel Elvis Presley once used—photographic proof of the miracle everywhere like crutches affixed to walls of the grotto at Lourdes—I spent some time apart from the crew.

The winter before I had heard, “Are you going to trade a boat trip for our marriage?” an impossible question for me since to walk away from the river, once the idea of crossing took hold of me, was to walk away from a long dream, a deep aspiration. The voyage was not more significant than the marriage because it had become one pillar of it—or, at least, one pillar of my life. Either way, I believed the long rivering necessary to my continuance as a man. To the question I said, If I fail even to try the trip I won’t be worth being married to. And I heard, “Then you’ve made your life contingent on rivers.” To that I could say nothing.

When I found the crew for dinner, one so poor it got us to laughing in the way desperate people laugh, the Reporter said, “If the wind keeps us here tomorrow, you’ll find me hanging by my neck from the shower rod,” to which someone said, “One more Kalamaty.”

J
UST AFTER SUNRISE
—an occurrence I knew from the clock rather than the dark sky that was neither fog nor mist but the heart of a deep cloud—I went down to the river to see how it ran. The surface was like cobblestones, nothing more, so I hurried back to wake the mariners with coffee and pastries, and they turned out readily but for Pilotis. I called out, The wind’s on its way! Nothing. The men are here to launch your mattress! Groaning, no movement. How about a swell little cruise on Lake Wallula? That’s what’s going to happen! Grousing, rising at the rate tectonic plates make their subterranean way along, sulking to the shower.

Before seven we were under way and beyond the gloom of the stilled Trojan nuclear power plant, on beyond the mouth of the Cowlitz River which fifteen years earlier poured into the Columbia tons of heated ashen mud from the Mount St. Helens eruption and for two weeks dammed in ships upstream. The Cowlitz, so I heard, flowed with enough warmth to make salmon try to jump out of it. When it comes to a great river coursing through a land of fire, the Columbia is almost a Phlegethon, and for eons it has treated magma as other rivers do silt. No matter how the earthen plates shove, shift, slip, and melt the earth beneath and send it back up in massive violences even humankind has yet to match, the Columbia, like a patient lover, crawls over and feels out the hot country, finds its crevices and gaps, and then thrusts its wet way in, penetrating the rock to shoot it full of life.

We couldn’t see Longview despite its name, a double-entendre from lumber baron R. A. Long of Kansas City, Missouri, who, inspired by Pierre L’Enfant’s elegant (if sometimes incomprehensible from the ground) hub-and-spoke plan for the federal capital, had his milltown similarly laid out in the 1920s. What we did see—and smell—was riverside timber industries and freighters being loaded with pulp and logs cut for a pittance in national forests and now ready to become Japanese newspapers and hot tubs. The nickname of Washington is the Evergreen State, but a few days earlier, in front of one large clear-cut, we saw a hand-lettered protest:
WELCOME TO THE WAS-GREEN STATE.
Nevertheless, west of the marine facilities the way was green indeed, with conifers and a ground cover of ferns and salal, and the river was full of marshy islands that are its beauty as crags and cliffs are farther upstream.

In my dawn hurry to check the water, I had banged into a bulkhead and put a lump on my forehead, a defect the native people here a couple of centuries earlier would have found nearly hideous before they gave up the head flattening that could turn a human profile into a perfect forty-five-degree slope from the tip of the nose to the hairline. They achieved the effect by a several-month compression of a newborn infant’s skull between a cradleboard and another strip of wood, cushioned by moss, pressing down across the brow. Meriwether Lewis made several sketches of their peculiar profiles, and the naturalist-explorer John Kirk Townsend in 1834 wrote:

I saw today a young child from whose head the board had just been removed. It was without exception the most frightful and disgusting looking object that I ever beheld. The whole front of the head was completely flattened, and the mass of brain being forced back caused an enormous projection there. The poor little creature’s eyes protruded to the distance of half an inch and looked inflamed and discolored, as did all the surrounding parts. Although I felt a kind of chill creep over me from the contemplation of such dire deformity, yet there was something so stark-staring and absolutely queer in the physiognomy that I could not repress a smile; and when the mother amused the little object and made it laugh, it looked so irresistibly, so
terribly
ludicrous that I and those who were with me burst into a simultaneous roar which frightened it and made it cry, in which predicament it looked much less horrible than before.

We passed around the rock-stacked bend known as Cape Horn, a label repeated at least twice on the river and a place that compares to the real Cape as an Iowa snow field to the Antarctic. Perhaps, given the likes of names just north of here—Queets, Oyhut, Humptulips, Duckabush, Dosewallips, or a wilderness called Colonel Bob—early residents just wore themselves out with naming and found emptily derivative toponyms a refreshing change.

The Columbia was now two miles wide, but it let islands large and small nearly fill it and thereby hide its size and character so we had no sense we were moving atop an American river that discharges into the sea more water than all but the Mississippi. I once knew a woman, a dancer with erect carriage, who managed always to keep her shoulder blades pointed forward so that her full breasts could disappear in the drapings of blouses; as the Columbia approaches the sea, it too does its best to disguise the truth of itself. I, an appreciator of small bosoms and gentle waters, had no special urge to encounter either the woman or the river in such a potential reality, so we took the islands leeward and fairly skimmed along up to Cathlamet, the tiny seat of Wahkiakum County, smallest in Washington, the village encompassed by the woody rumples of the north end of the Coast Range, a darkly and deeply forested area of only three highways, two of them dead ends, but with more logging roads than Seattle has streets.

Cathlamet carries an aura of being hidden away, the kind of place one might abscond to with the company payroll or the neighbor’s spouse instead of, say, Bolivia or Tasmania. We went up tree-lined Elochoman Slough (no shortage of good names here) and put out our docking lines in a quiet and secluded harborette surrounded by damp evergreens and gray weather, the air full of the scent of each, a combining that made the place a veritable image of the Pacific Northwest: blindfold me, spin me around four times, throw me willy-nilly across the country, then ask me where I am. Were I to land here, I could tell you.

It was just nine in the morning, and my mates urged me to press on to Astoria, but they had never before seen the Columbia estuary, the one that made William Clark think he had reached the Pacific when he was still three leagues away. My plan for our last fifty miles was to find a route “behind” the string of islands and through shallow but protected sloughs and channels, and thereby turn the flat hull of
Nikawa
to advantage rather than otherwise. Soon enough we would reach unforgiving water where we’d have no choice but to set out on it and take our chances against not mere river winds but the greater ones off the ocean. I said to Pilotis, Consider it—the estuary of the Columbia by itself could hold half a dozen Lake Wallulas.

We climbed the slope above the sailboats to find the harbormaster, a jovial man appropriately surnamed Mast. We could indeed, he said, run a course through the backwaters, using the islands as shields, but even with our hull, to minimize shoals and deadheads we should do it on a flood tide. For that day we had missed it. “Tomorrow at seven-fifteen,” he said, “you’ll have water and light.” “And no wind?” said Pilotis. “I guarantee tides and sunrises—air I don’t do.”

We walked into the village, essentially two streets, Main and the other one, population 500, and only three or four fewer espresso bars than in all of Pittsburgh and St. Louis together. No Mormon town this. We found breakfast, then went to the old hotel, about halfway through renovation, including installation of an espresso bar in the lobby, and took second-floor rooms connected in pairs to a central bath. I turned on my Northwest-coast air conditioner, that is, I opened the window, propped it up with a Gideons Bible, and thought how holy writ was now wafting along Main and maybe working on those dismal, caffeine-blighted souls below. I was happy to see across the street the Cathlamet weather channel—a large flag on the courthouse lawn; already it was lifting into the wind, and I knew the next morning that banner would tell me whether or not we would sail into our last day.

If you like good coffee, exploring Cathlamet can take longer than you might expect, but even then, not so long as to preclude an afternoon snoozing or, given the espresso, an afternoon tossing. An hour before sunset we walked down to a rickety tavern, the River Rat Tap, sitting on tired and uncertain pilings at the edge of the water, reputedly the oldest bar—after
the
Bar—on all the Columbia. We looked around the place for any remaining ninety-degree angles, but tides had so long danced with pilings as to bend and soften walls, floor, and ceiling into flexibility if not limpness, a sagging Raggedy Ann room. Even the pool table was chocked and propped to give its slate top an approximation of levelness, although before we picked up cues, an old fellow with a bit of sag in himself advised us to play for a strong lie toward the north rail on the incoming tide and toward the south on the ebb. He said, “Check your watch before you shoot.” Having spent so many recent weeks atop water, the creak and sway of the place seemed steady enough to me, and I reckoned table angles like a naviga tor, my sextant of an eye giving me the best stick of my life, which still failed to beat anyone.

For most of the last light of day, I sat mellow against the weary wall and watched through the west window as if, across the river and through the forest, I might see our final mile and the Bar and even beyond to the whither-thou-goest my life was about to become. Pilotis put down a cue and asked where I was, and I said, In this area the Indians buried—if that’s the word—their dead in canoes placed in cottonwood trees, prows pointed west, ready for the flood tide to the next life. My friend seemed to turn the image mentally, then spoke Tennyson:

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

I said, Tomorrow, whatever else we see, I hope it’s not any Great Pilot’s face—your visage will be quite sufficient.

I
WOKE AT DAWN
with equal measures of expectation and apprehension, and rose to look out at the courthouse flag. While it didn’t lie against the pole, it was far from garnering enough air to reveal all fifty stars, and we could move into a morning that might lead us to destination. The rush of water in the shower brought the others to their feet and soon down onto Main for the walk to the dock. The weather was good for that place—that is, depending on direction, skies of gray, grayer, and ominous, but all rainless. As the flood tide rose to its peak, I started the engines, synchronized them, Pilotis pulled in our lines, and we set off down the slough of black water and dark trees in a boat bright with hope of entering the Graveyard of the Pacific. It was August the second.

Pilotis took up a snag watch, the Reporter tried to interpret the chart we’d heard was unreliable, the
Los Angeles Times
writer made notations for me, and we entered Clifton Channel to find a Columbia of moderate waves, the shores wooded and quiet.
Nikawa
pottered past an occasional settlement, some of them once wooden fishing outposts, one a ruined salmon cannery, and the route became a maze of crooked channels, inlets, shoals, and marshes—a strange realm at the end of a big river rather than what you might expect to lie so near the largest ocean on earth. As the sky lightened, the wind picked up just enough to throw wrinkles over the places where backwaters opened to the main river, rucks that disguised the shallows so that gulls seemed to walk the surface. Said someone, “Jesus birds.”

There were snags aplenty, but
Nikawa
avoided them as if she’d been there before. Over almost twenty miles we wended through the dark-water narrows, a riverland so quietly lovely it seemed enchanted, and all the way we hid from the wind like a field mouse from the fox. Then at last the islands thinned and fell away, and we came into a bight, and from there on we could hide no longer. But the river was only harder and not a bludgeoning. After four miles we reached the bluff at Tongue Point, the name reminding me to taste the Columbia to discover whether we’d yet reached the salt line. Not yet.

Then we rounded the point, and for the first time since the Atlantic, straight ahead through the parted headlands lay nothing but a perfectly level horizon of water, a flat gray line uninterrupted by shore. I spoke the sentence William Clark jotted in his notebook at about that same place: “Ocian in view! O! the joy.” We too felt joy, a deep one, though we knew a
prospect
of arrival is hardly the same as arrival, and for us arrival meant the far side of the Graveyard.

Harbor seals rose to break the water and peer at
Nikawa
, and we passed a big freighter taking aboard a Bar pilot, one of only a few people licensed to direct ships through the collision of river and ocean ahead. We would have no pilot other than me, although I had asked the Photographer, who had gone before us, to check on conditions at the mouth and try to find a fully reliable chart. Of the several concerns I had, not least was being tricked by the size of the lower estuary into believing we’d reached the Pacific when we hadn’t. Pilotis: “That would be like hitting a Series-winning grand slam and being called out for missing home plate.”