Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

The sun was just dipping behind the southern wall of Box Canyon (how funky I became later, when I was alone, about going into a rapid in that slanting, deceptive evening light!) as the launch hit the rough water. There was dancing iridescence in the flung foam-spurts above the combers, and at the right of Collision Bock the beginning of a rainbow which I knew would grow almost to a full circle when we looked back from below the fall. I snapped once with my kodak into the reeling tops of the waves that raced beside us, and then started to wind up to have a fresh film for the rock and the crowning rainbow. That highly artistic exposure was never made.

Earl, instead of shutting off his engine as he did in running Spokane Rapids, opened up all the wider as he neared the barrier and its refluent wave. This was because the danger of striking submerged rocks was less than that of butting into that one outcrop of ragged reef that was coming so near to throwing the river over on its back. If the launch was to avoid telescoping on Collision Rock as the Columbia was doing, it must get enough way on to shoot across the current into the eddy on the left. That was what Earl was preparing for when he opened up the engine. With both boat and current doing well over twenty miles an hour, we were literally rushing down at the rocky barrier with the speed of an express train when Earl spun the wheel hard over and drove her sharply to the left. That was when I stopped kodaking.

In spite of the rough water, the launch had been remarkably dry until her course was altered. Then she made up for lost time. The next ten or fifteen seconds was an unbroken deluge. With a great up-toss of wake, she heeled all of forty-five degrees to starboard at the turn, seeing which, the river forthwith began piling over her port or up-stream side and making an astonishingly single-minded attempt to push her on the rest of the way under. Failing in that (for her draught was too great and her engine set too low to make her easily capsizable), the river tried to accomplish the same end by swamping her. Fore and aft the water came pouring over in a solid green flood, and kept right on pouring until Earl, having driven through to the point he wanted, turned her head down stream again and let her right herself.

The water was swishing about my knees for a few moments in the cockpit, and it must have been worse than that forward. Then it drained down into the bilge without, apparently, greatly affecting her buoyancy. The higher-keyed staccato of the engine cut sharply through the heavier roar of the falls. It was still popping like a machine-gun, without a break. Reassured by that welcome sound, Earl orientated quickly as he shook the water from his eyes, and then put her full at the head of the falls. Just how much of a pitch there was at this stage of water I couldn’t quite make out. Nothing in comparison with the cataract there at high water (when the river rushes right over the top of Collision Rock) certainly; and yet it was a dizzy bit of a drop, with rather too deliberate a recovery to leave one quite comfortable. For a few seconds the launch’s head was deeply buried in the soft stuff of the souse-hole into which she took her header; the next her bows were high in the air as the up-boil caught her. Then her propellers began striking into something solider than air-charged suds, and she shot jerkily away in a current so torn with swirls that it looked like a great length of twisted green-and-white rope. We had missed Collision Rock by thirty feet, and given the dreaded whirlpool behind it an even wider berth.

The next thirteen miles we did at a rate that Ike figured must have been about the fastest travelling ever done on the Columbia. The current runs at from ten to twenty miles an hour all the way from the head of Box Canyon to Bridgeport, and Earl, racing to reach Foster Creek Rapids before it was dark, ran just about wide open nearly the whole distance. It was real train speed at which we sped down the darkening gorge—possibly over forty miles an hour at times. Earl knew the channel like a book, and said there was nothing to bother about in the way of rocks as long as he could see. We were out of the closely-walled part of the canyon at Eagle Rapids, and the sunset glow was bright upon the water ahead. There is a series of short, steep riffles here, extending for a mile and a half, and Earl slammed right down the lot of them on the high. Ike was right about their being sloppy, but the beacon of the afterglow gave the bearing straight through. Two miles further on the river appeared suddenly to be filled with swimming hippos—round-topped black rocks just showing above the water; but each one was silhouetted against a surface that glinted rose and gold, and so was as easy to miss as in broad daylight.

It was all but full night as the roar of Foster Creek Rapids began to drown the rattle of the engine, with only a luminous lilac mist floating above the south-western mountains to mark where the sun had set; but it was enough—just enough—to throw a glow of pale amethyst on the frothy tops of the white-caps, leaving the untorn water to roll on in fluid anthracite. Earl barely eased her at the head, and then plunged her down a path of polished ebony, with the blank blur of rocks looming close on the right and an apparitional line of half-guessed rollers booming boisterously to the left. For three-quarters of a mile we raced that ghostly Ku-Klux-Klan procession, and Roos, who was timing with his radium-faced watch, announced that we had made the distance in something like seventy seconds. Then there was quieter water, and presently the lights of Bridgeport. Earl put us off opposite the town, and ran down a quarter of a mile farther to get out of the still swiftly-running current and berth the launch in a quiet eddy below the sawmill.

Bridgeport, for a town a score of miles from the railway, proved unexpectedly metropolitan, with electric lights, banks, movie theatres, and a sign at the main crossing prohibiting “Left Hand Turns.” The people, for a country town, showed very diverting evidences of sophistication. At the movies that night (where we went to get the election returns), they continually laughed at the villain and snickered at the heroine’s platitudinous sub-titles; and finally, when word came that it was Harding beyond all doubt, they forgot the picture completely and gave their undivided attention to joshing the town’s only avowed Democrat. The victim bore up fairly well as long as his baiters stuck to “straight politics,” but when they accused him of wearing an imitation leather coat made of brown oil-cloth, the shaft got under his armour. With a ruddy blush that was the plainest kind of a confession of guilt, he pushed out to the aisle and beat a disorderly retreat.

A prosperous apple farmer sitting next me (he had been telling me what his crop would bring the while the naturally vamp-faced heroine was trying to register pup-innocence and “gold-cannot-buy-me” as the villain was choking her) sniffed contemptuously as the discomfited Democrat disappeared through the swinging doors. “Seems to feel worse about being caught with an imitation coat than about being an imitation politician. Better send him to Congress!” Now wasn’t that good for a small town that didn’t even have a railroad? I’ve known men of cities of all of a hundred thousand, with street cars, municipal baths, Carnegie libraries and women’s clubs, who hadn’t the measure of Congress as accurately as that. I wish there had been time to see more of Bridgeport.

It was down to twelve above when we turned out in the morning, with the clear air tingling with frost particles and incipient ice-fringes around the eddies. Fortunately, Earl had bailed both boats the night before and drained his engine. Just below Bridgeport the river, which had been running almost due west from the mouth of the Spokane River, turned off to the north. In a slackening current we approached the small patch of open country at the mouth of the Okinagan. The latter, which heads above the lake of the same name in British Columbia, appears an insignificant stream as viewed from the Columbia, and one would never suspect that it is navigable for good-sized stern-wheelers for a considerable distance above its mouth. On the right bank of the Columbia, just above the mouth of the Okinagan, is the site of what was perhaps the most important of the original Astor posts of the interior. As a sequel to the war of 1812 it was turned over to the Northwest Company, and ultimately passed under the control of Hudson Bay. I could see nothing but a barren flat at this point where so much history was made, but a splendid apple orchard occupies most of the fertile bench in the loop of the bend on the opposite bank.

The mouth of the Okinagan marks the most northerly point of the Washington Big Bend of the Columbia. From there it flows southwesterly for a few miles to the mouth of the Methow, before turning almost directly south. We passed Brewster without landing, but pulled up alongside a big stern-wheeler moored against the bank at Potaris, just above the swift-running Methow Rapids. It was the Bridgeport, and Ike had spoken of her skipper, whom he called “Old Cap,” many times and with the greatest affection. “Old Cap” proved to be the Captain McDermid, who had run the Shoshone down through Grand Rapids, and who was rated as the nerviest steamer skipper left on the Columbia.