Down the Columbia Part 19

Of all the great rivers in the world, there are only two that have had the audacity to gouge a course straight through a major range of mountains. These are the Brahmaputra, which clove a way through the Himalaya in reaching the Bay of Bengal from Tibet, and the Columbia, which tore the Cascades asunder in making its way to the Pacific. But the slow process of the ages by which the great Asian river won its way to the sea broke its heart and left it a lifeless thing. It emerges from the mountains with barely strength enough to crawl across the most dismal of deltas to lose its ident.i.ty in the brackish estuaries at its many insignificant mouths. The swift stroke by which the Cascades were parted for the Columbia left "The Achilles of Rivers" unimpaired in vigour. It rolls out of the mountains with a force which endless aeons have not weakened to a point where it was incapable of carrying the silt torn down by its erosive actions far out into the sea. It is the one great river that does not run for scores, perhaps hundreds, of miles through a flat, monotonous delta; the one great stream that meets the ocean strength for strength. The Nile, the Niger, the Amazon, the Yangtse, the Mississippi--all of the other great rivers--find their way to the sea through miasmic swamps; only the Columbia finishes in a setting worthy of that in which it takes its rise. Nay, more than that.

Superlative to the last degree as is the scenery along the Columbia, from its highest glacial sources in the Rockies and Selkirks right down to the Cascades, there is not a gorge, a vista, a panorama, a cascade of which I cannot truthfully say: "That reminds me of something I have seen before." The list would include the names of most of the scenic wonders that the world has come to know as the ultimate expression of the grand and the sublime; but in time my record of comparisons would be complete.

But for the distinctive grandeur of that fifty miles of cliff-walled gorge where the Columbia rolls through its t.i.tan-torn rift in the Cascades, I fail completely to find a comparison. It is unique; without a near-rival of its kind.

Because so many attempts--all of them more or less futile--have been made to describe the Cascade Gorge of the Columbia, I shall not rush in here with word pictures where even railway pamphleteers have failed. The fact that several of the points I attained in the high Selkirks are scarcely more than explored, and that many stretches I traversed of the upper river are very rarely visited, must be the excuse for such essays at descriptions as I have now and then been tempted into in the foregoing chapters. That excuse is not valid in connection with the Cascade Gorge, and, frankly, I am mighty glad of the chance to side-step the job. I must beg leave, however, to make brief record of an interesting "scenic coincidence" that was impressed on my mind the afternoon that I pulled through the great chasm of the Cascades.

It was a day of sunshine and showers, with the clouds now revealing, now concealing the towering mountain walls on either hand. The almost continuous rains of the last four days had greatly augmented the flow of the streams, and there was one time, along toward evening, that I counted seven distinct waterfalls tumbling over a stretch of tapestried cliff on the Oregon side not over two miles in length. And while these shimmering ribbons of fluttering satin were still within eye-scope, a sudden shifting of the clouds uncovered in quick succession three wonderful old volcanic cones--Hood, to the south, Adams, to the north, and a peak which I think must have been St. Helens to the west.

Instantly the lines of Tennyson's _Lotos Eaters_ came to my mind.

"A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

They saw the gleaming river seaward flow From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops, Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, Stood sunset-flushed; and, dew'd with showery drops, Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse."

Tennyson, of course, was writing of some tropic land thirty or forty degrees south of Oregon, for in the next verse he speaks of palms and brings the "mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters" swimming about the keel; and yet there is his description, perfect to the last, least word, of what any one may see in a not-too-cloudy day from the right point on the lower Columbia.

The Hood and the White Salmon flow into the Columbia almost opposite each other, the former from Mount Hood, to the south, and the latter from Mount Adams, to the north. White Salmon, perched on the mountains of the Washington side, is, so far as I can recall, the "Swiss-iest"

looking village in America. At close range it would doubtless lose much of its picturesqueness, but from the river it is a perfect bit of the Tyrol or the Bernese-Oberland. The Hood River Valley is one of the very richest in all the West, running neck-and-neck with Yakima and Wenatchee for the Blue Ribbon honours of Northwestern apple production. It is also becoming a dairying centre of considerable importance. I was genuinely sorry that my "through" schedule made it impossible to visit a valley of which I had heard so much and so favourably.

Nearing the Cascades, I headed over close to the Oregon bank for a glimpse of the famous "sunken forest." This is one of the strangest sights on the lower river. For a considerable distance I pulled along the stumps of what had once been large forest trees, the stubby boles showing plainly through the clear water to a very considerable depth.

There is some division of opinion as to whether these trees were submerged following the damming up of the river by the slide which formed the Cascades, or whether they have slid in from the mountainside at a later date. As there is still enough of a riverward earth-movement to necessitate a realignment of the rails on the south bank of the Cascades, it is probable that the latter is the correct theory. The self-preservative character of Oregon pine is proverbial, but it hardly seems reasonable to believe that it would last through the very considerable geologic epoch that must have elapsed since the Cascades were formed.

Hugging the Oregon sh.o.r.e closely, I pulled down toward the head of the Cascades ca.n.a.l. The water continued almost lake-like in its slackness even after the heavy rumble of the fall began to beat upon the air. I was taking no chances of a last-minute bolt from the still restive _Imshallah_, however, and skirted the sandy bank so closely that twice I found myself mixed up in the remains of the past season's salmon-traps.

Pa.s.sing a big sawmill, I entered the ca.n.a.l and kept rowing until I came plump up against the lofty red gates. An astonishingly pretty girl who peered down from above said she didn't know what a lock-master was (being only a pa.s.senger waiting for the steamer herself), but thought a man hammering on the other side of the gate looked like he might be something of that kind. She was right. The lock-master said he would gladly put me through, but would be greatly obliged if I would wait until he locked down the steamer, as he was pretty busy at the moment.

That would give me half an hour to go down and size up the tail of the Cascades, which I would have to run immediately on coming out at the foot of the lock.

There is a fall of twenty-five feet at the Cascades, most of it in the short, sharp pitch at the head. It is this latter stretch that is avoided by the ca.n.a.l and locks, the total length of which is about half a mile. The two lock chambers are identical in dimensions, each being ninety feet by four hundred and sixty-five in the clear. They were opened to navigation in 1896, and were much used during the early years of the present century. With the extension of the railways, (especially with the building of the "North-bank" line), and the improvement of the roads, with the incidental increase of truck-freighting, it became more and more difficult for the steamers to operate profitably even on the lower river. One after another they had been taken off their runs, until the _J. N. Teal_, for which I was now waiting, was the last steamer operating in a regular service on the Columbia above Portland.

Opening the great curving gates a crack, the lock-master admitted _Imshallah_ to the chamber, from where--in the absence of a ladder--I climbed up fifty feet to the top on the beams of the steel-work. That was a pretty stiff job for a fat man, or rather one who had so recently been fat. I was down to a fairly compact two hundred and twenty by now, but even that required the expenditure of several foot-tons of energy to lift it out of that confounded hole. The main fall of the Cascades was roaring immediately on my right, just beyond the narrow island that had been formed when the locks and ca.n.a.l were constructed. It was indeed a viciously-running chute, suggesting to me the final pitch of the left-hand channel of Rock Island Rapids rather than Grand Rapids, to which it is often compared. I had heard that on rare occasions steamers had been run down here at high water; at the present stage it looked to me that neither a large nor a small boat would have one chance in a hundred of avoiding disaster.

The ca.n.a.l and locks avoided that first heavy fall of the Cascades completely, but the swift tumble of waters below was quite rough enough to make a preliminary survey well worth while. The steamer channel was on the Washington side, so that it was necessary for a boat to head directly across the current immediately on emerging from the lower lock chamber. The Oregon side of the river was thick with rocks right away round the bend, with not enough clear water to permit the pa.s.sage of even a skiff. My course, therefore, would have to be the same as that of the steamer--just as sharply across to the opposite side as oars would take me. I had put _Imshallah_ through worse water than that a score of times, and, while it wasn't the sort of a place where one would want to break an oar or even catch a "crab," there was no reason to believe that we should have the least trouble in pulling across the hard-running swirls. Of course, if _Imshallah_ really was still smarting under the indignity of that oil-bath.... But no--I honestly think there was nothing of distrust of my well-tried little skiff behind my sudden change of plans. Rather, I should say, it was due to the fact that a remark of the lock-master had brought me to a sudden realization that I now arrived at what I had always reckoned as my ultimate objective--tide-water.

I had been planning to run on four miles farther to Bonneville that afternoon, in the hope of being able to pull through the forty miles of slackening water to Vancouver the following day. There I would get a tug to take the skiff up the Willamette to Portland, where I intended to leave her. As some of the finest scenery on the Columbia is pa.s.sed in the twenty miles below the Cascades, this promised me another memorable day on the river--provided that there was only an occasional decent interval between showers. It was the lock-master's forecast of another rainy day, together with his a.s.surance that the foot of the locks was generally rated as the head of tide-water, that prompted me to change my mind a few moments before I was due to pull out again to the river, and book through to Portland on the _Teal_.

With the idea of avoiding the wash of the steamer, I pulled down to the extreme lower end of the locks before she entered, taking advantage of the interval of waiting to trim carefully and look to my oars for the pull across the foot of the Cascades. I was intending to let the _Teal_ lock out ahead of me, and then pull as closely as possible in her wake, so as to have her below me to pick up the pieces in case anything went wrong. It was close to twilight now, with the sodden west darkening early under the blank grey cloud-ma.s.s of another storm blowing up-river from the sea. If that impetuous squall could have curbed its impatience and held off a couple of minutes longer, it might have had the satisfaction of treating me to a good soaking, if nothing more. As it was, I flung up my hands and _kamerad-ed_ at the opening pelt of the big rain-drops. Speaking as one Columbia River skipper to another, I hailed the Captain of the _J. N. Teal_ and asked him if he would take me and my boat aboard.

"Where bound?" he bawled back.

"Portland," I replied.

"Aw right. Pull up sta'bo'd bow lively--'fore gate open!"

A dozen husky roustabouts, urged on by an impatient Mate, scrambled to catch the painter and give us a hand-up. I swung over the side all right, but _Imshallah_, hanging back a bit, came in for some pretty rough pulling and hauling before they got her on deck. The two or three of her planks that were started in the melee const.i.tuted about the worst injury the little lady received on the whole voyage.

And so _Imshallah_ and I came aboard the _J. N. Teal_ to make the last leg of our voyage as pa.s.sengers. The gates were turning back before I had reached the upper deck, and a few minutes later the powerfully-engined old stern-wheeler went floundering across the foam-streaked tail of the Cascades and off down the river. Castle Rock--nine hundred feet high and sheer-walled all around--was no more than a ghostly blur in the darkness as we slipped by in the still rapidly moving current. Multnomah's majesty was blanked behind the curtain of night and a driving rain, and only a distant roar on the port beam told where one of the loveliest of American waterfalls took its six-hundred-foot leap from the brink of the southern wall of the river.

Cape Horn and Rooster Rock were swathed to their foundations in streaming clouds.

Once the _Teal_ was out on the comparatively open waters of the lower river, the Captain came down for a yarn with me--as one Columbia skipper to another. He had spent most of his life on the Snake and lower Columbia, but he seemed to know the rapids and canyons below the Canadian line almost reef by reef, and all of the old skippers I had met by reputation. He said that he had never heard of any one's ever having deliberately attempted to run the Cascades in anything smaller than a steamer, although an endless lot of craft had come to grief by getting in there by accident. The only time a man ever went through in a small boat and came out alive was about ten years ago. That lucky navigator, after drinking most of a Sat.u.r.day night in the town, came down to the river in the dim grey dawn of a Sunday, got into his boat and pushed off. It was along toward church-time that a ferry-man, thirty miles or more down river, picked up a half filled skiff. Quietly sleeping in the stern-sheets, with nothing but his nose above water, was the only man that ever came through the Cascades in a small boat.

The Captain looked at me with a queer smile after he told that story. "I don't suppose you were heeled to tackle the Cascades just like that?" he asked finally.

And so, for the last time, I was taken for a boot-legger. But no--not quite the last. I believe it was the porter at Hotel Portland who asked me if--ahem!--if I had got away with anything from Canada. And for all of that incessant trail of smoke, no fire--or practically none.

The day of my arrival in Portland I delivered _Imshallah_ up to the kindest-faced boat-house proprietor on the Willamette and told him to take his time about finding her a home with some sport-loving Oregonian who knew how to treat a lady right and wouldn't give her any kind of menial work to do. I told him I didn't want to have her work for a living under any conditions, as I felt she had earned a rest; and to impress upon whoever bought her that she was high-spirited and not to be taken liberties with, such as subjecting her to garbage shower-baths and similar indignities. He asked me if she had a name, and I told him that she hadn't--any more; that the one she had been carrying had ceased to be in point now her voyage was over. It had been a very appropriate name for a boat on the Columbia, though, I a.s.sured him, and I was going to keep it to use if I ever made the voyage again.

Portland, although it is not directly upon the Columbia, has always made that river distinctively its own. I had realized that in a vague way for many years, but it came home to me again with renewed force now that I had arrived in Portland after having had some glimpse of every town and village from the Selkirks to the sea. (Astoria and the lower river I had known from many steamer voyages in the past.) Of all the thousands living on or near the Columbia, those of Portland still struck me as being the ones who held this most strikingly individual of all the world's rivers at most nearly its true value. With Portlanders, I should perhaps include all of those living on the river from Astoria to The Dalles. These, too, take a mighty pride in their great river, and regard it with little of that distrustful reproach one remarks so often on the upper Columbia, where the settlers see it bearing past their parched fields the water and the power that would mean the difference to them between success and disaster. When this stigma has been wiped out by reclamation (as it soon will be), without a doubt the plucky pioneers of the upper Columbia will see in their river many beauties that escape their troubled eyes to-day.

The early Romans made some attempt to give expression to their love of the Tiber in monuments and bridges. It would be hard indeed to conceive of anything in marble or bronze, or yet in soaring spans of steel, that would give adequate expression to the pride of the people of the lower Columbia in their river; and so it is a matter of felicitation that they have sought to pay their tribute in another way. There was inspiration behind the conception of the idea of the Columbia Highway, just as there was genius and rare imagination in the carrying out of that idea. I have said that the Cascade Gorge of the Columbia is a scenic wonder apart from all others; that it stands without a rival of its kind. Perhaps the greatest compliment that I can pay to the Columbia Highway is to say that it is worthy of the river by which it runs.

(THE END)