Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

We cast off at ten o’clock, Earl swung the raft’s head out by a steady pull with the launch, and the current completed the operation of turning. Once in mid-stream she made good time, the motor-boat maintaining just enough of a tug to keep the towing-line taut and give her a mile an hour or so of way over the current. That gave Earl a margin to work with, and, pulling sharply now to one side, now to the other, he kept the great pile of logs headed where the current was swiftest and the channel clearest. It was all in using his power at the right time and in the right way. A hundred-ton tugboat would have been helpless in stopping the raft once it started to go in the wrong direction. The trick was to start it right and not let it go wrong, Ike explained—just like raising pups or kids. It was certainly no job for a novice, and I found constant reassurance in the consummate “raftsmanship” our taciturn engineer was displaying.

The hills on both sides of the river grew loftier and more rugged as we ran to the south, and the trees became patchier and scrubbier. The bunch grass on the diminishing benches at the bends was withered and brown. It was evident from every sign that we were nearing the arid belt of eastern Washington, the great semi-desert plateau that is looped in the bend of the Columbia between the mouth of the Spokane and the mouth of the Snake. The towering split crest of Mitre Rock marked the approach to the slack stretch of water backed up by the boulder barrage over which tumbles Spokane Rapids. The run through the latter was to be our real baptism; a short rapid passed a few miles above proving only rough enough to set the raft rolling in fluent undulations and throw a few light gobs of spray over her “bows.” We were now going up against something pretty closely approximating the real thing. It wasn’t Hell Gate or Box Canyon by a long way, Ike said, but at the same time it wasn’t any place to risk any slip-up.

Save for two or three of the major riffles on the Big Bend of Canada, Spokane Rapids has a stretch of water that must go down hill just about as fast as any on all the Columbia. The channel—although running between boulders—was narrow in the first place, and the deepest part of it was still further restricted by an attempt to clear a way through for steamer navigation in the years when a through service up and down the Columbia was still dreamed of. The channel was deepened considerably, but the effect of this was to divert a still greater flow into it and form a sort of a chute down which the water rushed as through a flume. Being straight, this channel is not very risky to run, even with a small boat—provided one keeps to it. A wild tumble of rollers just to the left of the head must be avoided, however, even by a raft. That was why we had the motor-boat—to be sure of “hitting the intake right,” as Ike put it. And the motor-boat ought to be able to handle the job without help. He had been working hard ever since we started on a gigantic stern-sweep, but that was for Hell Gate and Box Canyon. Here, with her nose once in right, she should do it on her own.

Mooring the raft against the right bank in the quiet water a couple of hundred yards above the “intake,” Earl ran us down to the mouth of the Spokane River in the launch. We were purchasing gasoline and provisions in the little village of Lincoln, just below the Spokane, and Ike thought that the lower end of the rapid would be the best place for Roos to set up to command the raft coming through. It was indeed terrifically fast water, but—because the launch had the power to pick the very best of the channel—the run down just missed the thrill that would have accompanied it had it been up to one’s oars to keep his boat out of trouble. Earl shut off almost completely as he slipped into the “V,” keeping a bare steerage-way over the current. Twenty miles an hour was quite fast enough to be going in the event she did swerve from the channel and hit a rock; there was no point in adding to the potential force of the impact with the engine. As there was a heavy wash from the rapids in even the quietest eddy he could find opposite the town, Earl stayed with the launch, keeping her off the rocks with a pole while Ike, Roos and myself went foraging. Ike spilled gasoline over his back in packing a leaking can down over the boulders, causing burns from which he suffered considerable pain and annoyance when he came to man the sweep the following day.

After dropping Roos on the right bank to set up for the picture, Earl drove the launch back up the rapid to the raft. I hardly know which was the more impressive, the power of the wildly racing rapid or the power of the engine of the launch. It was a ding-dong fight all the way. Although he nosed at times to within a few inches of the overhanging rocks of the bank in seeking the quietest water, the launch was brought repeatedly to a standstill. There she would hang quivering, until the accelerating engine would impart just the few added revolutions to the propellers that would give her the upper hand again. The final struggle at the “intake” was the bitterest of all, and Earl only won out there by sheering to the right across the “V”—at imminent risk of being swung round, it seemed to me—and reaching less impetuous water.

Throwing off her mooring lines, Earl towed the raft out into the sluggish current. There was plenty of time and plenty of room to manœuvre her into the proper position. All he had to do was to bring her into the “intake” well clear of the rocks and rollers to the left, and then keep towing hard enough to hold her head down-stream. It was a simple operation—compared, for instance, with what he would have on the morrow at Hell Gate—but still one that had to be carried out just so if an awful mess-up was to be avoided. Novice as I was with that sort of a raft, I could readily see what would happen if she once got to swinging and turned broadside to the rapid.

That was about the first major rapid I ever recall running when I didn’t have something to do, and it was rather a relief to be able to watch the wheels go round and feel that there was nothing to stand-by for. Even Ike, with no sweep to swing, was foot-loose, or rather hand-free. Knowing Earl’s complete capability, he prepared to cast aside navigational worries for the nonce. He had picked up his axe and was about to turn to hewing at the blade of his big steering-oar, when I reminded him that he was still an actor and that he had been ordered to run up and down the raft and register “great anxiety” while within range of the camera.

Perhaps the outstanding sensation of that wild run was the feeling of surprise that swept over me at the almost uncanny speed with which that huge unwieldy mass of half submerged wood gathered way. In still water it would have taken a powerful tug many minutes to start it moving; here it picked up and leapt ahead like a motor-boat. One moment it was drifting along at three miles an hour; five seconds later, having slid over the “intake,” it was doing more than twenty. The actual slope of that first short pitch must have been all of one-in-ten, so that I found myself bracing against the incline of the raft, as when standing in a wagon that starts over the brow of a hill. Then the pitch eased and she hit the rollers, grinding right through them like a floating Juggernaut. The very worst of them—haughty-headed combers that would have sent the skiff sky-rocketing—simply dissolved against the logs and died in hissing anguish in the tangle of cordwood. The motion had nothing of the jerkiness of even so large a craft as the launch, and one noticed it less under his feet than when he looked back and saw the wallowing undulations of the “deck.”

But best of all was the contemptuous might with which the raft stamped out, obliterated, abolished the accursed whirlpools. Spokane was not deep and steep-sided enough to be a dangerous whirlpool rapid, like the Dalles or Hell Gate, but there were still a lot of mighty mean-mouthed “suckers” lying in ambush where the rollers began to flatten. There was no question of their arrogance and courage. The raft might have been the dainty Imshallah, with her annoying feminine weakness for clinging embraces, for all the hesitancy they displayed in attacking it. But, oh, what a difference! Where the susceptible Imshallah had edged off in coy dalliance and ended by all but surrendering, the raft simply thundered ahead. The siren “whouf!” of the lurking brigand was forced back down its black throat as it was literally effaced, smeared from the face of the water. Gad, how I loved to see them die, after all Imshallah and I had had to endure at their foul hands! Imshallah, perched safely aloft on a stack of cordwood, took it all with the rather languid interest one would expect from a lady of her quality; but I—well, I fear very much that I was leaning out over the “bows,” at an angle not wholly safe under the circumstances, and registering “ghoulish glee” at the exact point where Roos had told me three times that I must be running up and down in the wake of Ike and registering “great anxiety.”

As there was no stopping the raft within a mile or two of the foot of the rapid, it had been arranged that we should launch the skiff as soon as we were through the worst water, and pull in to the first favourable eddy to await Roos and his camera. It was Ike bellowing to me to come and lend him a hand with the skiff that compelled me to relinquish my position at the “bow,” where, “thumbs down” at every clash, I had been egging on the raft to slaughter whirlpools. The current was still very swift, so that Ike was carried down a considerable distance before making a landing. As it was slow going for Roos, laden with camera and tripod, over the boulders, ten or fifteen minutes elapsed before they pushed off in pursuit of the raft. The latter, in the meantime, had run a couple of miles farther down river before Earl found a stretch sufficiently quiet to swing her round and check her way by towing up against the current.