Three miles above the powerhouse, at the edge of the pooled river, is a basalt boulder, forged in the hot heart of earth and shaped by the cold river and hammered by human hands into an unequaled petroglyph, a large beast-like face with great encircled eyes, a visage called She-Who-Watches. For centuries, that stone gaze has looked onto the river, onto people coming and going, descending and ascending—Indians spearing and drying fish, deceased chieftains borne to a memaloose, captains of discovery and those of mere haulage, settlers, idle travelers, engineers with blueprints, laborers with dynamite and concrete, programmers with computers. There is a chance she will still be watching when dams, like Roman aqueducts, are relics of an empire that prized technology over vision and natural harmony, creations of a mechanically clever people who in only a couple of hundred years, give or take a day or two, worked consciously to turn a zoggledyteen-million-year-old river valley into a great memaloose.
While we waited to enter The Dalles lock, we watched three young osprey beat their fledging wings on the rim of a nest in a steel tower that was part of the dam. Across the country, ospreys have found the great American power grid of transmission poles a boon to their survival. Now, if only salmon could learn to fly like some of their ocean cousins, or, only somewhat more realistically, if only Homo sapiens could practice the long vision of She-Who-Watches.
When the massive guillotine gate rose to let us out of the deep tomb, the low sun flooded into the chamber that moments earlier had been the inside of a river, and we passed over the tailwater turbulence. Straight ahead on the horizon loomed the snowy cone of Mount Hood in splendid symmetry as if drawn up by engineers to be another artifice like a river regular and rockless. Two miles down we pulled into the Port of The Dalles docks, tied up, and climbed the stacked streets of the narrow hillside town to find a room for the night. We had gone ten times farther than we had the day before, and I thought it a good thing I hadn’t evaporated.
Theater of the Graveyard
BEFORE I EVER set out on the voyage, I had thought mere duration, our heaped-up days, would be the element likely to best me, do me in, and put an end to passage. Because the potential for respites from the river would be few, I believed the sheer volume of miles, whether I accomplished them easily or otherwise, would be the enemy. But that isn’t what happened, perhaps because there’s something timeless about river travel, especially through lands nearly humanless, where flowing water somehow dissolves days down to a residue you could pour into a thimble. Never had I experienced such a quickly gone sixteen weeks. The Brooklyn Bridge, our Hudson lunch of smoked shad, the Flight of Locks up the Erie Canal, all seemed quite distant in space yet as fresh in memory as the cove at Hover.
Nikawa moved in country I’d much traveled before, even up and down the Columbia itself, and from time to time I was animated more by exploration of memory than of topography. Details bobbed up like so much flotsam (but certainly not jetsam, for I try never to cast overboard from the small barkentine of my life any incident, whatever its color), details that didn’t so much define a place as a moment in it. At times Pilotis must have thought me like a person revisiting the old neighborhood to search the wall for that penny hidden years ago, the kind of journey back we sometimes follow through our tumble of days gone to emerge with a refreshed memory that, almost by itself, can awaken one’s life.
I told of a dinner one chilly night a couple of years earlier in The Dalles. The bartender was a Japanese-American woman, a Nisei, about forty, sprightly, flirtatious. She said to me, “I’m from Maui. I wish I was there now. It’s sunny, eighty degrees, and I’d be with my cats and Daddy.” She stepped away to take an order, and an eavesdropping man next to me said in my direction, “At her age, cats and Daddy! I’d call that a goddamned sad cry for help.” A woman with him said, “And you’re just the man to help out?” And he: “No, Sally. If you’ll remember, I firebombed the Japanese.” The bartender heard the last several words, and even before she could grow angry, tears ran down her face, the man said nothing to her, and I realized he’d used my presence to speak out the aftermath of his war. I ignored him, but it was too late. When I left, I put down a large tip as apology for just being witness, and she pushed it onto the floor.
At The Dalles, the Columbia flows from under the rain-shadow cast by the Cascade Mountains and enters its great gorge, one of the loveliest river canyons in America and one easily accessible by auto, train, or excursion boat. The deep defile is fifty miles of hard evidence, if any were needed, that water is the master mason of mountains, seemingly able to cut them where it chooses. Yet, in the long and massive Sierra Nevada-Cascade cordillera, the gorge is the only place reaved by a big river, and to pass through such a cleft is to be dumbfounded that anything so inconstant, unfixed, vagrant, and undisciplined as water could achieve such an opening, even if the obdurate rocks resist and force the lower Columbia into its narrowest miles, a dark constriction of fierce gusts and water 150 feet deep.
We got under way slowly, giving the wind time to rise, then we thumped on west, down the shadowed canyon, past where the little Klickitat puts in. I wanted only twenty miles out of the day, just enough to reach Hood River, Oregon, a pleasant town and the home of a brew house, Full Sail, that offered a taproom with a high overlook of the Columbia and an exceptional glass of cask-conditioned India pale ale to lubricate lucubrations of time and the river. The run was bouncy but soon done, and we walked up into town.
For the last several days, as we neared the western terminus of the Great American Real Beer Desert, I’d been talking about the ales of the little brewery and leaving so many verbal clues across the dry miles even a bumbling Doctor Watson unaided could have found Pilotis and me there. Indeed, in walked a relaxed and smiling Photographer and his wife, then came the Reporter and his cameraman to follow us to our destination, and soon after even Cap’n Pike, our fellow voyager, whom I insincerely promised to overtake and beat across the Bar. Although the time had not yet come to celebrate, we were ready to try to remember how one expresses carefree joy and expectation of unburdened days, and the only thing that kept me from dancing atop tables was our last care, those dozen miles lying in wait at the very end. So we merely practiced at celebration.
But that night I read Pilotis a passage: “Where the Columbia meets ocean tides at journey’s end can be a fearsome place. Here, where waves often leap a hundred feet into the air to cascade down in torrents of sand and silt and sea life, have occurred some of the most violent adventures and tragic dramas in the history of the marine world.”
My friend said, “The Bar hangs over us like one of those three-hundred-fifty-ton guillotine gates.” Then, later, having thought about the situation: “The real reason you chose not to cross the country west to east is that you wanted the theater of the Pacific Graveyard as finale.” No, I said, I just needed five thousand miles to work up my nerve. Pilotis said nothing for some moments, then, “Most people have a cross to bear, but we, we’ve just got a bar to cross.”
A Badger Called Plan A
WHETHER IT’S TRUE that Dan’l Boone when living along the lower Missouri River actually said something on the order of “A durn badger at yore feet is worser than a big ol bar off yonder,” I don’t know, but based on our experience soon after leaving Hood River, I can testify to the validity of the proposition, something I ended up proving through my casualness in getting under way. When we set out, the wind was up, gusts to forty miles an hour, maybe higher when chucking through the gorge which provides such strong, steady blowing it has become a premier location for windsurfers. Because I knew the air was usually calmer beyond the narrows, we entered the river anyway and made a jolting course among weekend boaters and darting sailboards (“barge bait”) and went down a reach too removed for the “boardheads,” but we were soon on water free of everything but funneled wind. Measured from the summits there, the forested mountains rise three to four thousand feet above the Columbia, and we beat along past places like Wind Mountain and Viento Cr
eek, and a fine little cove now closed off by a railroad embankment and turned into misleadingly and maybe mischievously named Lake Drano, as in pioneer William Drano.
About five miles beyond it, the gorge opens to allow the river to spread out to a mile or so until it reaches another narrows just below old Cascade Lock, an artifact today but once the means of circumventing the severe rapids Bonneville Dam and its pool now cover. Nearby local toponymy goes from the waggish unflattery of Drano to, at first glance, the reckless grandiosity of Bridge of the Gods, a name surely not befitting a truss bridge, handsome as it is; but its moniker is true to Indian legend which holds that a great span of stone once ran from shore to shore, the only foot-crossing on the Columbia until the arrival of technicians. Given the landslides that occur here, some geologists believe such a bridge may have existed. Just beyond the splendid trusses, a traveler comes upon the Eyesore of the Gods, Bonneville Dam, which crosses the river in three sections separated and anchored by two islands. Recently designated a national scenic area, the gorge gets a good mocking from the heap of concrete and steel of the old spillway that appears to have been simply dragged in and stacked up like a beaver dam.
The Columbia, Hood River to Pacific Ocean, 178 river miles
Nevertheless, we were happy to see the infernal thing because it was the remaining engineered barrier between us and the Pacific. In our five thousand and some miles of crossing, we had locked through or portaged around eighty-nine major dams (and one fallen bridge), and now only a single final plug stood in our way. At last, Nikawa was about to enter a river running freely to the sea. We were a jovial lot.
I radioed our request for passage, the lockman answered we would have to wait for an upriver tow, so we went to the shore of Bradford Island and rafted beside a docked speedboat a third longer than Nikawa and capable of producing power on the order of Bonneville itself; hook up that boat engine to a transformer and you could light Portland. Still, such wasn’t enough for its skipper, a fellow not yet into his third decade, who told Pilotis that next year he would buy a bigger one. He and his two pals had broken the windshield the day before by ramming the boat through swells at a speed truckers would find almost satisfactory for a trooper-free four-lane, and he boasted of the damage as if it were a hit from a kamikaze. Said he, wearing a T-shirt imprinted up yours, “I’m going to get a boat that’ll eat this river.” He hated the dams because the runs between them were not long enough, to which I said, Without these dams your boat wouldn’t be here. He shook his head: “They oughta take them down and dredge this river all the way into Canada.”
After an hour the upstream gate opened, and out came a string of barges pushed by the Maverick, a name unlike any I’d ever seen on the towboats of the Mississippi or the Ohio where the nomenclature runs along the lines of Emily P. or Miss June Watson. As a long-time believer that names tend to become self-fulfilling, I was about to encounter further evidence. When the last barge was nearly out of the lock and the chamber almost cleared for our final descent, we heard a terrific crash and a tortured screaming of steel against steel. The tow came to a halt between the gates, and a distinct odor of putrescent garbage wafted up to us.
After some time I radioed the lockman who snapped, “We’re out of commission here!” I said to my mates, The single accident in a lock occurs at the last one, just when the salt spray of the Pacific is practically off our bow. The Reporter chided: “If only we’d been here a couple of hours earlier.” From the radio, although not addressed to us, we overheard, “Go to Plan A.” Any procedure requiring a letter designation sounded grave indeed, and we settled in for a tiresome wait, the lockman refusing to tell us any more. We sat long enough for the party boat to run out of beer; the three boys shifted to gin and, in the blast of heavy metal, began dancing on their bow and stern as they held up docking lines and strummed them like electric guitars, making lyrics of the situation:
We’re tied down, we’re tied up,
Locked out of Heaven and nowhere to go
’Cause we ain’t got the Power,
The Power of the Gate!
Yeah, yeah, yeah!
Only the Man’s got the Power,
The Power of the Gate!
Our condition thus expressed by a trinity of drunken whelps who would dredge the whole Columbia, we sat, we waited, we grumbled, and wondered whether to yield and head back upriver until tomorrow, or until the day after, or until the unthinkable. Practically truckling to the lockman, I finally pried out that the Maverick, now happily on its way, had smashed loose a piece of steel that seemed to prevent the upriver gate from closing properly. I did what all pilot manuals instruct the prudent mariner to do under those circumstances: mutter and cuss. Pilotis looked, in a needlessly obvious manner, at the aft plaque: AVOID IRRITATION. It isn’t irritation, I said, it’s frustration, and that the Code of Cross-Country Pilots allows. A mere 145 miles from the ocean, we suddenly were blocked off by a blunderhead who couldn’t steer a garbage scow straight.
At the end of the third hour I started the motors to head back upstream. The Reporter, making note of my action, gave me an idea. Over the radio I said, We have aboard a staff writer from the Kansas City Star who’s doing a story on the river and locks. A pause. Then, from the tender, “Stand by,” and in the background we heard someone say, “We’ve got two pleasure boats going down. They’ll be a good test.” The lockman told us to form up, and the Reporter said, “You’re actually going to go through on a test?” There’s a rule of thumb about plans designated by letters: the farther you go into the alphabet, the more desperate they become.
We set up in front of the gates, a safe distance from the well-ginned party boat, then we answered the signal to heaven or hell and entered the lock. A day earlier, I’d spent time thinking of a bear called the Bar instead of a badger called Plan A, and now we were about to find out how much of a miscalculation such foresight was. We took our usual positions, Pilotis on the bow to handle the line to the bitt, I in the welldeck to use the boat hook against the lock ladder. The gates closed ever so slowly, and we began a prolonged descent, the sluggishness indicating the questionable conditions. I watched the wall for signs of our nearly imperceptible creep downward, worried not about the tons of water building behind us nor about some disastrous malfunction that could sweep us to destruction, but rather only that we might stop and be floated back up. Again and again I chanted to the swirling water, Go, go, go! Drain, drain, Drano! The Sirens of the North Pacific sang full in my head, and I thought how far we’d come to hear the melody of the Hesperian surf now playing not far beyond the steel gates, thought of weeks of travail to reach the country of the Golden Apples and other sweet fruits of destination.
Bonneville Lock has the shortest drop on the Columbia, sixty-four feet, but our descent was taking twice the time of one nearly two times deeper. From the bow: “This rate isn’t reassuring.” About then I realized I’d been staring at the same lump of algae on the wall for several minutes. “We’ve stopped.” Nothing happened. “What if they can’t open the gate and can’t get us back to the top?” A climb up the slimily treacherous ladder was not so fearful as the notion of Nikawa having to stay in that tomb for a day, a week, for a who-knows. We sat trapped behind the speedboat in a ringing hell of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law” and Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize”—we doing the latter, they, with the gin, the former.
Should I have portaged around? Had my insistence on keeping water beneath the hull finally vanquished us? Had I traded a couple of hundred yards of river passage for the chance to complete the voyage? Was the way open or wasn’t it? “Be glad this happened on the last lock instead of the first—then you would have had eighty-nine new worries.” No fervent Christian ever waited for the gates of heaven to open more intently than did we those dripping and tenebrous doors.
Nikawa sat on the stilling water near the bottom in the dismal dank, and we did nothing but watch the front of the chamber. “Let there be light!” But there wasn
’t. “They’re up there figuring on how the bejeezis to get us out of here.” Then: a rumbling, a deep and sonorous opening, clanking and grating, chains of the entombed, valves groaning a cold, dead misery. A long white crevice no thicker than a ray of hope slid down the gates, and at the speed glaciers move to the sea, the slit opened to the width of my wrist, then my shoulders, and the bright western horizon unrolled before us. Between Nikawa and the sea, between our pulpit rail and the Pacific, ran nothing but open water. I went to the helm, started the engines, and at the signal we proceeded on. I had not felt so free, so unencumbered since the morning I walked across the brow of the USS Lake Champlain, saluted the flag for the last time, and followed the ladder down to the shore of civilian life.
Beyond the lock we entered into the tidal Columbia, the sea-level river where it exchanges depth for width and forces a navigator to use a chart. On a waterway of grand pilot marks, the finest lay just ahead, Beacon Rock, a distinctive black monolith some eight hundred feet high and shaped like a bishop’s miter; it is a hardened clog caught in the throat of a volcano long ago washed away. I’ve read, although I don’t believe it, that Beacon is, after Gibraltar, the biggest rock in the world. I do believe it’s the finest coign of vantage on a river full of them, a view achieved by a steep trail that in places clings to the sheer sides by means of steel catwalks. Lewis and Clark named Beacon Rock, and that it still exists is the work of a descendant of the first editor of their journals. To prevent a company from blasting the huge thing into road gravel, Henry Biddle bought it in 1915 and built the cliffhanger of a trail to the summit; his heirs later gave the monolith to the state, a gift Washington initially declined but then accepted when Oregon said it would be happy to include the marvel in its park system.
River-Horse: A Voyage Across America Page 52