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 RIVER
NORTHWEST OF ASTORIA, OREGON
Iconogram 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.
William Dietrich
Northwest Passage, 1995
The Far Side of the River Cocytus
HAD WE NOT BEEN so lucky as to have a Coast Guard station next to our dock at Clover Island, we might have been spared what lay ahead, the kind of encounter that teaches one the nature of a river as climbing a rockface does a mountain—so my words would come back to me. While I filled the fuel tanks on Nikawa, I asked the Photographer to step next door and get a reliable weather forecast from the Guard. The wind of the night before persisted into the grum and unpleasant morning, and I thought it a good time to lay over, take a nap, try to find an interesting dinner, read something other than charts; after all, we were only a little more than three hundred miles from the ocean, a run we surely could make on the navigable Columbia in three or four days. Those numbers got me thinking of destination rather than of daily navigation and caused me to neglect other figures. The Photographer had been many days absent from his wife, and I should have considered his urge to get the tow wagon and trailer to Astoria, Oregon, where I planned to put Nikawa aboard it for the haul back to Missouri once the voyage was over; the quicker we finished, the sooner he could see her; perhaps that colored his report. Men who keep bachelor’s table forget such things and can believe everybody else lives in independence.
So, when the Photographer returned with an inexplicably rosy forecast—winds about fifteen miles an hour, waves to three feet—I thought, What the hell, Nikawa can handle those numbers, and found myself happy to trade repose for a batch of river miles. When we set out under a gray sky, I checked the time and discovered it was more than an hour later than I thought; because wind tends to increase as day progresses, we had lost what little morning calm there was. The first four miles gave us only chop, but once we passed below the mouth of the Snake where the Columbia widens to two miles across in an impoundment called Lake Wallula, “many waters,” the river began showing one of its natures.
The Columbia, Tri-Cities to Hood River, 155 river miles
Pilotis was unwell that morning, quite off the mark and fearful of a recurring “fouled gyroscope in the inner ear”; such an onset of vertigo could turn my friend into a lump of flesh incapable of even standing properly. Failing to match that condition with those on the river was my third error of the morning. When we turned south and shifted the wind from athwart our course to one head-on, we saw the currents in a like way directly counter the blowing as the gusts tried to pull the river upright, make it run toward the sky instead of the sea, working to stop it dead as if an Aeolian dam. It was a blast to blow the lights out of heaven.
But the Columbia, driven forward by nearly a thousand miles of itself and an equal length of the Snake, simply got vicious and smashed forward, its passage not to be denied, and let the air batter it open. I’d heard that water spouts occur on Wallula. Nikawa began rearing and plunging like a horse confronting an old terror, and she threw wobbly Pilotis. A saddle has a pommel for a terrified rider to grab, but the pilothouse of Nikawa had not so much as a nubble. Then she bucked the navigation table into the air and sent dividers, straightedge, pencils, and a smashed cup flying. Suddenly the cabin was full of daggers and razors. As on Lake Erie, the swells were too close together for us to rollercoast, and Nikawa could only drive forward, rising, hanging, crashing thunderously into the troughs, poor Pilotis trying to stand and keep eyes fixed on the stable horizon, fighting fear of vertigo while being pitched against the bulkheads. We were dice in a gambler’s cup, shaken, rattled, thrown, and the wager was our lives. Trying to brace in the opening of the cuddy, Pilotis was gasping. Breathe slowly! I shouted in the mayhem. Slowly! Mate’s ashen face locked on to a beyond that must have looked more like the edge of some hereafter than a horizon. Yelling, Can you secure the table? No answer. It’s dangerous like that! No response. Shouting, If I have to give up the helm, I’ve got to cut power and we’re going to get turned broadside! It’s going to be hell! A nod. Okay! Here we go! You’re not going to like this!
Freed from my grip, the wheel spun wildly, and the river took naked Nikawa and wrenched her around to molest her and set her rolling so that to starboard all I saw was trenched river and to port only menacing sky. If the welldeck shipped enough water, we’d founder; if the motors drowned out, we’d be less than a broken-winged duck. I got pitched down, my arms now bleeding like Pilotis’s, and from my knees I worked to secure the table and grab up loose objects and stow them, all the while getting clanged from side to side like a bell clapper. When I tried to get to my feet, I saw what a brutal broadside thrashing our helpless steed was taking, and I had no problem imagining the black bottom waiting for us below. I struggled up and made a lunge at the insanely jerking wheel, trying to grab it without breaking my fingers, and then working to wrest control of it from the river. My whole body went into cranking us back to meet the swells head-on, and when I did, Pilotis went down a second time. Nikawa climbed, hung, fell, then again, and again. So much water was coming across the windows, I could see little of the shore even when we crested. Those waves were hoodlums bent on kicking in the ribs of a flattened victim, and each shattering impact was a shout of worse to come.
I yelled, We’ve got to get off this bastard river! Pilotis stood unresponsive. You’ve got to read the chart! Nothing. To hell with the vertigo, pick up the goddamn chart! Nothing. You’ve got a goddamn choice—dizziness or drowning! Move! You can do it! Slowly bending, thrown down, seizing the chart, clawing back up only to find it impossible to read the thing. Hold the wheel! Give me the chart! But it was hopeless—I might as well have tried to look up a number in a phone book from the back of a Brahma bull. All I could make out was map colors, yellow and white—land and river. In the pounding I’d lost track of where we were, so the chart was useless anyway. I threw it down, wiped at the forward window, tried to make out the shoreline, but it was unbroken, without an inlet anywhere, and I wondered whether I should just head toward the bank and hope to wash up on a shoal. We were making only the slowest headway against wind and waves, so on we plunged, how long I don’t know, but I’d guess twenty minutes short of forever.
Finally I yelled, What the hell is that off to starboard, about two o’clock? Pilotis turned slowly to follow the horizon around but said nothing. I yelled, We’re down to hope and luck! I crashed out a course toward what seemed an opening. As we closed the distance I could see that it indeed was a small inlet, the kind of place that eats motor stems, but I was willing
to trade them for our lives. It would be better for us to say tomorrow, “We almost made it,” than for some undertaker to announce it a week later. We got hammered into the cove, a long crescent of quieting water, and made for the far shore.
Then I said, without having to shout, We’re the hell okay. Pilotis nodded. That’s when I saw a line of dancing water. In the seconds it took for me to remember such motion means trouble, my pull on the throttles was too late, and Nikawa coasted onto a rocky shoal, props dragging, hull scraping, noises only slightly better than the splintering crashes of moments earlier. For a minute I was even relieved to draw gravel—from that we at least could walk away.
Pilotis spoke: “Those stones make the sweetest music I ever heard.” Indeed, I said, and now we can fiddle our way off them. But there was no prizing free from that reef; neither trying to rock an immobile Nikawa nor pushing hard with the poles would loosen her. If you’ve ever attempted to get a terrified horse to face its terror again, you can imagine how securely she held to that shoal. “Why can’t we just wait here till the wind lets up?” When the big dams on the Columbia release water, I said, the impoundments drop so fast you can almost see it—I don’t want to be sitting here next week, and that means we’ve got to go over the side and try to shove her off.
Pilotis didn’t move. A debilitating vertigo last happened right after my friend got heaved off a dock into the Atlantic to celebrate a softball game; cold water seemed to cause the problem as readily as violent motion. I couldn’t help except to remind Pilotis there was no dizziness yet. I said, If the Corps has opened the gates at McNary, we’ve got no time to discuss things.