Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

We pulled for a half hour or more down a broad stretch of slackening water that was more like a lake than a river. Out of the looming shadows of the banks for a space, mountain heights that had been cut off leaped boldly into view, and to left and right lifted a lofty sky-line notched with snowy peaks rising from corrugated fields of bottle-green glacier ice. Mt. Sanford, loftiest of the Selkirks, closed the end of the bosky perspective of Gold Creek, and the coldly chiselled pyramids of Lyell, Bryce and Columbia pricked out the high points on the Continental Divide of the Rockies. We held the vivid double panorama—or quadruple, really, for both ranges were reflected in the quiet water—for as long as it took us to pull to a beach at the narrowing lower end of the long lake-like stretch above the rapids, finally to lose it as suddenly as it had been opened to us behind the imminently-rearing river walls.

The two trappers of whom the fire-ranger at Beavermouth had spoken were waiting for us on the bank. They had permits for trapping on a couple of the creeks below Kinbasket Lake, and were getting down early in order to lay out their lines by the time the season opened a month or so hence. They had been packing their stuff over the three-mile portage to the foot of the rapids during the last three weeks, and now, with nothing left to go but their canoes, were free to give us a hand if we wanted them. Blackmore replied that he could save time and labour by running and lining the rapids. “Besides,” he added with a grin, “I take it these movie people have come out to get pictures of a river trip, not an overland journey.” The trappers took the dig in good part, but one of them riposted neatly. Since he was out for furs, he said, and was not taking pictures or boot-legging, time was not much of an object. The main thing with him was to reach his destination with his winter’s outfit. If all the river was like Surprise Rapids he would be quite content to go overland all the way. Neither of them made any comments on the stage of the water or offered any suggestions in connection with the job we had ahead. That was one comfort of travelling with Blackmore. In all matters pertaining to river work his judgment appeared to be beyond criticism. If he was tackling a stunt with a considerable element of risk in it, that was his own business. No one else knew the dangers, and how to avoid them, so well as he.

Blackmore looked to the trim of the boat carefully before shoving off, putting her down a bit more by the stern it seemed to me. He cautioned me on only one point as we pulled across the quarter of mile to where the banks ran close together and the quiet water ended. “Don’t never dip deep in the white water, and ’specially in the swirls,” he said, stressing each word. “If you do, a whirlpool is more’n likely to carry your oar-blade under the boat and tear out half the side ’fore you can clear your oar-lock. That’s the way that patched gunnel next you came to get smashed.” As we were about at the point where it is well to confine all the talking done in the boat to one man, I refrained from replying that I had been told the same thing in a dozen or so languages, on four different continents, and by “skippers” with black, yellow and copper as well as white skins, at fairly frequent intervals during the last fifteen years. There were enough slips I might make, but that of dipping deep in rough water was hardly likely to be one of them.

The rumble of the rapid grew heavier as we proceeded, but only a single flickering white “eyelash” revealed the imminent ambush lurking beyond the black rocks. The current accelerated rapidly as the walls closed in, but ran easily, effortlessly, unripplingly, and with an almost uncanny absence of swirls and eddies. “Have plenty way on her ’fore she hits the suds,” cautioned Blackmore, and Andy and I grunted in unison as we leaned a few more pounds of beef onto our bending spruces. That started our inside elbows to bumping, but without a word each of us sidled along an inch or two toward his gunwale to get well set while yet there was time.

With an easy bob—quick like a rowboat rides the bow wave of a steamer, but smoother, easier in its lift—we ran into the head of the rapid. There was a swift V-shaped chute of smooth jade-green water; then we slapped right into the “suds.” High-headed waves slammed against the bows and threw spray all over the boat and far astern of it. But they lacked jolt. They had too much froth and not enough green water to make them really formidable. We were in rough but not really bad water. I tried to grin at Blackmore to show him I understood the situation and was enjoying it highly; but his eyes, pin-points of concentration under bent brows, were directed over my head and far in advance. Plainly, he was thinking as well as looking well ahead.

Reassured by the smart way we were slashing through that first riffle, I ventured to steal a look over my shoulder. In the immediate foreground Roos, with his waterproof buttoned close around his neck, was shaking the spray out of his hair and watching for a chance to snap with his kodak. Ahead there was perhaps another hundred yards of about the same sort of water as that in which we were running; then a yeasty welter of white where the river disappeared round a black cliff into what seemed a narrow gorge. Opposite the cliff the river wall sloped slightly and was thickly covered with a dense growth of evergreen. The heavy roar we had been hearing for hours was still muffled. Evidently the main disturbance was somewhere beyond the bend at the cliff.

The thunder of falling water grew louder as we headed down toward the white smother in the embrasure of the bend, and it was from Blackmore’s lips rather than from any words I heard that I gathered that he was calling for “More way!” Still keeping fairly good stroke, Andy and I quickly had her going enough faster than the current to give the big paddle all the steerage “grip” Blackmore could ask for. Swinging her sharply to the right, he headed her past the out-reaching rock claws at the foot of the cliff, and, with a sudden blaze of light and an ear-shattering rush of sound we were into the first and worst fall of Surprise Rapids.

That dual onslaught of light and sound had something of the paralyzing suddenness of that which occurs when a furnace door is thrown wide and eye and ear are assailed at the same instant with the glare and the roar from within. One moment we were running in a shadowed gorge with a heavy but deadened and apparently distant rumble sounding somewhere ahead; the next we were in the heart of a roar that fairly scoured our ear-drums, and blinking in a fluttering white light that seemed to sear the eyeballs. The one hurried glance that I threw behind me as I began floundering on the end of my kicking oar photographed an intensely vivid picture on my memory.

What had been merely a swiftly-flowing river with a streak of silver riffles down the middle had changed to a tumultuous tumble of cascades that gleamed in solid white from bank to bank like the churned snow of a freshly descended avalanche. There was no green water whatever; not even a streak that was tinged with green. All that relieved the coruscating, sun-silvered tumble of whiteness were the black tips of jutting bedrock, sticking up through the foam they had churned. The deeply shadowed western wall, hanging above the river like a dusky pall, served only to accentuate by contrast the intense white light that danced above the cascade. It was as though the golden yellow had been filtered out of the sunlight in the depths, and only the pure blue-white of calcium reflected back into the atmosphere.

Heavy as was the fall of the river over the stretch we had now entered, I could just make out a point perhaps a half mile farther down where it dropped out of sight entirely. That, I told myself, must be the place where there was an unbroken reef of bedrock all the way across the stream, and where there was an abrupt drop of eight or ten feet. A great throbbing rumble cutting into the slightly higher-keyed roar that already engulfed us also seemed to indicate that the steepest pitch had not yet been reached. I had, of course, seen worse water than this, but certainly had never (as appeared to be the case now) been irretrievably committed to running it. I had heard that it was quite unrunnable in any kind of a boat, it certainly looked unrunnable, and I seemed to have the impression that Blackmore had said he was not intending to run it. Yet here we were into it, and without (so far as I could see) anything to do but drive ahead. However, that was Blackmore’s affair....