by Timothy Egan
The oldtimers here, the men with ocean-polished faces who still speak with thick accents and congregate at the Sons of Norway Hall for secret rituals and snorts of chilled vodka with their vile-tasting lutefisk, refer to this area by its historical tag: the Graveyard of the Pacific. Justifiably, such talk makes them feel more alive. The Columbia River Bar has swallowed more ships, about 2,100 at last count, than any other location on the Pacific north of Mexico. “Graveyard of the Pacific” is not some desperate booster slogan seized upon after all the canneries closed down and the money left town. The Chamber of Commerce hates it when locals bring up shipwrecks. They don’t want to scare people. It’s all under control now, they say.
As we move out beyond the rock walls of Cape Disappointment and into the ocean, my stomach softens to mush. The sealed half-barrel seems as helpless as a twig in a whirlpool. Now the roar of the surf is too loud for conversation; Lt. Monteith communicates with hand signals and eyebrow pushups. Looking back toward the river entrance, I see nothing but a wall of breakers. The Columbia … disappears! Then, to the front—more breakers. The River of the West, which first began showing up on maps as early as 1709—eighty-three years before it was officially discovered—where’d it go? The Northwest Passage? I’m sorry. There is no river into the continent from the west, your majesty. It’s a phantom, this Northwest Passage. Now I have some understanding of why it took so long for Europeans to find this waterway: it has been protected by natural camouflage. Just as a porcupine throws quills at intruders and a cactus guards its moisture with stinging lances, the land here has its own front line of defense in the violent surf. But, in an age when most of the river-wrestling is done by government workers sitting behind green computer screens in underground rooms, does this old guardian of the Northwest still mean anything?
Still dazed by a ride through the spin-dry cycle of the bar, I walk the ancient streets of Astoria. Surrounded by fresh-cut logs stacked for export to Japan and studded with old hotels where a seasonal worker can still rent a room for sixty dollars a week, Astoria is among the last of the West’s true Resource Towns. They used to be everywhere in this part of the world—Monte Cristo, Washington; Bonanza City, Idaho; Goldcreek, Montana; Barkerville, British Columbia. Somebody would strike gold, or find a vein of coal, or build a planked skid road to scoot the timber downhill, or set up a fishwheel, and people would swarm in. Overnight, the towns sprouted hotels, whorehouses and hiring camps, and just as easily shed them when all the timber was cut or the silver mined or the fish netted. Theodore Winthrop’s song to the scenery was seldom heard above the growl of all the primitive machines used to attack the object of his flattery. Not to the Resource Towns of the Northwest was the New England model of village-platting and orderly agricultural communities applied. In the hamlets notched from mountain sides and scratched into river valleys, it was grab and guzzle.
Most of those towns have been used up, and the honest outdoor laborer is an endangered species. Even though timber and fish are selling at record high prices, the towns built near the source of these basic products of the Pacific Northwest are sick. Some say it’s the revenge of the land. The Resource Towns that are healthy, like Bend, in the high desert of central Oregon, or Coeur d’Alene, in the Idaho Panhandle, have put in tanning salons and River-Vue Estates. Others have gone Cute, packaging a savage past in theme-park sanitation. Astoria? In the center of this town is a section of a Douglas fir, a slice of botanical history from a six-hundred-year-old tree that once stood 230 feet high and provided enough wood to build a dozen homes. It’s a museum piece, the kind of stump you see in every spent timber town of the Northwest. Once, the waterfront here was cluttered with thirty-nine salmon canneries, wobbly warehouses built on piers over the Columbia, a sight which astonished Rudyard Kipling when he got off the boat. But no more—every cannery in Astoria has closed. The Columbia River chinook run, once the greatest wild salmon run on the planet, was nearly wiped out by overfishing and dams. For a while, there was talk of declaring the fish that is synonymous with this land an endangered species.
For the time being, there are enough trees around Astoria still to cut, mostly scrawny second-growth from the timber farms, and enough fish still to catch, mostly dim salmon from the fish hatcheries, to keep this seaport from joining the ranks of the Resource Towns that have gone Cute. But this is a tough year to hold on to the land and the sea as a source of livelihood. Not since the Dust Bowl days, when Woody Guthrie wrote a populist anthem about how the great River of the West would turn “our darkness to dawn,” has the Columbia been so low.
However, even in low-water years, the river still has a considerable amount of punch left at Astoria. I’m drawn to one such casualty of the capricious Columbia, the wreck of the Peter Iredale, a four-masted British sailing vessel that went aground in the fall of 1906 off Clatsop Spit, just south of the bar. The fully barnacled skeleton of this relic lies half-buried in soft sand. I step around the rusted ribs, late sun tinting the frame to cinnamon. The waves are gentle at Clatsop, no hint of the horror just around the corner, where it looks as if dynamite is blasting the sea at the location of the bar. And at night, there’s fresh evidence that the Columbia lives: when I return to Astoria, I hear news of a shipwreck.
Just past sunrise this morning, during the opening week of a brief commercial fishing season, the frenzied bar crushed a salmon boat and dumped the crew into the swirling mouth. It’s all very ho-hum around Astoria, where tragedies at sea provide a steady business. Not by accident was the first millionaire on the Columbia a pilgrim who set up a bar pilot service, guiding the frightened through hell for a stiff fee. The fishermen whose boat went down this morning were chasing the first returning salmon of the year, the big spring chinook. Following the rough outline of the old Siberian land bridge, then down along the Continental Shelf, the chinooks may swim eight thousand miles sniffing for clues to direct them back to the natal homeland. The Columbia carries so much water to the Pacific that the salmon sense some dilution three hundred miles from the river mouth. After picking up the hint, they start to make the left turn home. Ten thousand years or more of Indian prayers have been directed at the left turn.
Before the dams, some chinook would swim as far inland as the Continental Divide, deep in Idaho, Montana and British Columbia, before committing the final act of fornication, a very proper squirt before death. Like British sex, it is dignified and oddly ritualistic, following a strict set of biological rules, most of which seem to make no sense at first glance. From a seasonal perspective, the year really begins now, at the start of the first salmon run. Up and down the length of the Columbia and along the coast and into the interior, all things slowly come to life with the start of the left turn. The rain forest quakes, giant fern stems coiled for release; the fifth-generation anglophiles in Victoria prune their roses and mow their lawns for the first time since October; the skiers on the volcano of Mount Baker wax their K2S for corn snow; the tavern owners of Seattle’s Pioneer Square hold a week-long drunk outdoors in the drizzle, set to music, on the site of the original Skid Road; the overbundled eco-activists shed their sweaters and hold their first howl for the wolves; the vintners in the Yakima Valley crack inaugural bottles from last year’s crush; Indians shore up faulty wood platforms for dipnet fishing and pray to a variety of gods that the Army Corps of Engineers will not go ahead with a plan to dredge the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia. All life, pulsing in late winter to begin the new year, craves the clouds that ride across the Pacific on the warm Japan Current and then collide with the Olympic and Cascade mountains.
This morning, the white commercial fishermen, most of whom seem to hate the Indian fishermen, are finding a decent number of chinook who’ve reached the Columbia. Migrating salmon do not eat once they enter the river. The Indians have traditionally caught them by spear or dipnets attached to the end of twenty-foot-long poles. The whites set up nets that snag the fish in their gills. Approaching the bar where the fish funnel into the Columbia,
the boats navigate through a tide that courses at up to ten knots and an equally powerful river current pushing the other way. In places outside the narrow channel of the bar, a boat can ground on sand, and is then quickly crushed by the fist of the surf. Nobody ever really masters it. Today the crew of the ill-fated twenty-eight-foot boat are thrown into the froth, but manage to find their way to Sand Island, an ever-shifting oasis of silt and sediment which has been to shipwrecked sailors what the Heartbreak Hotel is for broken lovers. Nobody lives there; the island is too windswept, too waterswept, too unconnected. But it’s something to hold on to. Both Washington and Oregon used to claim Sand Island, a dispute that led to gunfights between gillnetters and purse-seiners, each armed with different state fishing laws. The salmon wars of Sand Island lasted until the United States Supreme Court awarded the island to Oregon. Washington now begins at Cape Disappointment.
The Snake, the Pend Oreille, the Spokane, the Clearwater, the Owyhee, the Deschutes—all of these rivers used to carry salmon to the desert, a twice-yearly occurrence surely as miraculous as the irrigation which brought golden wheat and plump fruit to the treeless hills above the central Columbia. Now the desert east of here is full of Corps of Engineers trucks; the salmon travel the interstate, or die. Most of the young fish don’t do well on the highway. A maze of ladders, locks, lifts, channels and portages is used to help the dying older chinooks reach their spawning grounds upstream. When their eggs hatch and the young fry start to head downstream, they run smack into the hydroelectric turbines. Many are sliced and diced in these massive blenders. Others die of the bends, tossed to such depths and then pushed up so quickly that their respiratory systems can’t adjust in time. More than half of all the young salmon which head downstream, seeking the ocean and three or four years of wandering, expire before they get past the first few hurdles.
Under pressure, the Corps started trucking some of the young fish downstream several years ago. In early spring, Interstate 84, which follows the Columbia River Gorge from desert to rain forest, is full of these silver government trucks. This particular year, Congress directed the Corps to spend $9 million to help the young salmon get around the turbines of the government dams. But the Corps is balking. They are willing to spend $60 million on a proposal to dredge Grays Harbor to make easier the foreign exploitation of raw logs from the forests nearby, but they have nothing for the native salmon. And it gets stranger yet. While one arm of the government is serving Columbia River salmon at the state dinner for Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev—the fish is a national treasure, the White House chef says—another arm is trying to kill off the remaining wild stock of that salmon.
When asked about all of this, Corps officials point out that their mandate is to dam, dredge and direct rivers. Fish belong to Fisheries. River-bottom-scraping and rapid-taming and lock-building have made Lewiston, Idaho, an ocean port. Everything gets through but the salmon. But at what price? The loss of a regional right. The Pacific Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to. Rivers without salmon have lost the life source of the area. I will stick to that yardstick, following the historical fish arteries from the continental crest to the ocean, and consider the dams a false boundary marker.
I wonder now, staring at one of the last bucking stretches of the Columbia, whether the river will soon become just another quaint background object, the tame centerpiece of the next Western theme park. While Seattle, Portland and Vancouver gleam and prosper with their glass monoliths to match the mountains, virtually every town along the river and up and down the coast has double-digit unemployment. Several of the river villages are officially bankrupt and have had to close their police and fire departments, the last vestiges of government. In the grocery stores of these towns, king salmon sells for eight and nine dollars a pound. Timber, with the Japanese demand, is at an all-time high; a ten-foot cedar two-by-four sells for twelve dollars in Astoria. Both are out of reach for the person who helped bring them to market.
And where have all the jobs gone? In the last decade, more timber was cleared from the Northwest than ever before, by the fewest amount of loggers ever employed for such volume. Like the big trees themselves, romance and heroism are fast fading from the lumberjack trade. Today, evergreens are cut with giant snippers attached to bulldozer-like vehicles, and mills are slouching toward full automation. Nearly a century and a half after Winthrop sailed up the Columbia, saying no amount of avarice or technology could control or deplete this bounty, salmon and trees are in short supply, owned by companies whose fortunes are traded on Wall Street, three thousand miles from this colony, and sold in a fashion similar to the exporting behavior of Third World countries. From the damp timber village of Raymond to the oyster-rich ghost towns on Willapa Bay, the working stiff hears the refrain: give up the land and sea. Here, among the last of America’s outdoor warriors, fishermen and gyppo loggers are told they must become waiters who say, Hello, my name is Bud.
Walking along Astoria’s waterfront, I pass another car with the “We Ain’t Quaint” bumper sticker. There seems to be some kind of revolt under way. This has always been a working waterfront. Bar pilots. Tugboats. Gillnetters. Hookers with orange hair. Seasonal marketplaces. Windowless taverns facing the water. Astoria still sweats, but only in spurts. The bar pilots are housed atop a rotting pier, perforated and mushed by the moisture, the wood washed to Pacific gray. Inside, everybody is chain-smoking and black-coffee-slurping. Captain James McAvoy takes off the bright orange coat he wears when he’s inside his small ship that looks like a drainpipe, and he talks about the latest problem he’s having with captains trying to cross the bar—they don’t speak English. They come in for wood, from Japan or Korea or Taiwan or China, five-hundred-foot vessels looking for a load of raw logs from the Northwest colony. McAvoy was trying to lead one over the bar a few days ago, barking directions to make sure the ship found the fifty-five-foot-deep channel which would allow it to enter the continent. He said, “Turn to starboard three degrees.” They thought he said, “Have a nice day.”
At its worst, the collision of river and sea can create waves of up to a hundred feet at a point in the river that is so shallow from sediment that few ships can get through without expert guiding. Captain McAvoy, bearded and with blue eyes buried by overhanging brow, is the head of the Bar Pilots Association of Astoria. A chain smoker who knows how to use an active verb, he ain’t quaint. He says the bar is like “two giant hammers smashing into each other.”
What’s it like inside his ship, which was built to take the biggest hit the bar could deliver?
“You seen a steel pipe before. Imagine one that can hold three guys, then roll it downhill. That’s my ship on the bar.”
He bought his boat from the German Coast Guard years ago; it looks like a submarine, painted orange, fully sealed, ugly as hell. He calls it the Peacock, after the ship Captain Charles Wilkes lost in 1841 when he tried to enter the bar. McAvoy’s Peacock is designed to take the pressure of a hundred tons of water banging up against the skin of the hull. Twenty years after he started escorting ships into the Columbia, McAvoy still is scared to death of the bar. Any ship, any size, can get tossed. Earlier this year, while he was leading a container ship twice the length of a football field through the mouth, the current turned the Korean vessel around when it lost power temporarily. For more than an hour, the big boat was helpless, caught in the vise of river current and angry Pacific breakers. If it broke up, well, some of the beach-dwellers still count on a good wreck every now and then to get by. Oldtimers who live on Long Beach, the twenty-eight-mile-long Washington peninsula formed over the years by Columbia River sediment, say they used to pray for this manna from the sea, the charity of shipwrecks. It was God’s way of redistributing wealth. A hundred years ago, the Queen of the Pacific was caught in the usual bind; three hundred tons of merchandise had to be thrown overboard, including pianos, fancy new clothes, hats, barrels of liquor. The whiskey ended up in the hands of some Sand Island fishermen, who threw a p
arty that lasted a week. Stetson hats, plucked from the beach, were worn around the mouth of the Columbia for years.
These days, the big ships from Pacific Rim countries have autopilot and sonar and fathometers which warn of approaching shallow water; they come with fax machines printing out the latest from weather satellites above, and video channel charts. A lot of their captains don’t want to use some old-fart bar pilot in an orange coat, approaching them in an orange ship that looks like a pipe. But the high-tech stuff—it doesn’t mean shit here, says McAvoy.
“This river is like a snake,” he says. “You gotta know when to turn and when to jump. All the gadgetry behind the wheel won’t help you decipher local currents. We’re talking a quarter-million-odd cubic feet a second out there, a ten-knot current, sometimes. I’ve seen floating lighthouses go down.”
Does McAvoy feel like he’s part of a dying profession, the last of a breed. “Dying?” he says, lighting a new cigarette with his old one. “What d’ya mean by that?”
“The trends don’t look good. Ever thought of opening a tanning salon?”
“Hell—everybody’s dying.”
Early the next morning, still no sign of the low clouds that permanently park themselves over these parts in winter. I go up to the top of Coxcomb Hill, the highest point in Astoria, where a faded column frieze commemorates the two centuries of white history here. Firmly anchored to the north slope of the hill, Astoria could’ve been San Francisco but for the abusive storms of the dark season. Astoria is crafted to the peculiarities of this hill, washed by the rain and sculpted by the Pacific wind. The town seems a place of brooding resignation, where hope and commerce peaked long ago. The population, stalled at ten thousand for half a century, still makes Astoria one of the most populous towns on the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco.