Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

Now that it was too late to line back, I saw why it was the old captain had advised working down the side of the island. The left bank of the cascade (which latter was tumbling close beside me now), was all but sheer. Only here and there were there footings close to the water, so that the man with the line would have to make his way for the most part along the top of the rocky wall. He could get along all right, but there was no place where a man could follow the boat and keep it off with a pole. It might have been managed with a man poling-off from the boat itself, but I hardly felt like urging Roos to take the chance. It was out of the question trying to line back up the “intake” of the fall, but there was one loop-hole which looked worth exploring before risking an almost certain mess-up in trying to work down the side of the cascade.

I have mentioned that I had expected to find a whirlpool under the big jutting rock. The only reason there wasn’t one was because what at high water must have been a very considerable back channel took out at this point and acted as a sort of safety-valve. There was still a stream a few inches deep flowing out here, running off to the left into a dark cavernous-looking crack in the bedrock. That water had to come back to the river somewhere below, and there was just a chance that the boat could be squeezed through the same way. At any rate, there was not enough of a weight of water to do any harm, and it ought not to be hard to “back up” in the event it proved impossible to push on through. Leaving Roos to set up and shoot a particularly villainous whirlpool he had discovered, I dragged the skiff through the shallow opening and launched it into a deep black pool beyond.

Poling from pool to pool, I entered a miniature gorge where I was presently so walled in by the rock that the raw roar of the cascade was muffled to a heavy, earth-shaking rumble. This tiny canyonette opened up at the end of a hundred yards to a sheer-walled rock-bound pool, evidently scoured out by the action of a high-water whirlpool. This turned out to be an enormous “pot-hole,” for I had to avoid the water-spun boulder, which had been the tool of the sculpturing River God, in pushing into the outlet crack. The latter was so narrow and overhanging that I had to lie down and work the skiff along with my up-raised hands. Twenty yards of that brought me out to a winding little lake, less steeply walled than the gorge above, but apparently closed all the way round, even at the lower end. I was in a complete cul de sac. A gurgling whirlpool showed where the water escaped by a subterranean passage, but that was plainly no place to take a lady, especially a lady of quality like Imshallah.

Tying Imshallah up to a boulder to prevent her amiable weakness for rushing to the embraces of whirlpools getting the better of her, I climbed up a steeply-sloping pitch of bedrock and looked down to the head of a long narrow arm of quiet water. The gay little waterfall breaking forth from the rock beneath my feet was leaping directly into the main stream of the Columbia—and below the cascade. A stiff thirty or forty-foot portage, and we were through. We might have to wait for the pump-man to help us lift the boat up that first pitch, but he ought to be along almost any time now.

Taking a short-cut back across the water-washed rock, I found Roos just completing his shots of the cascade. The sun was on the latter now, and its dazzling whiteness threw it into striking relief against the sinister walls between which it tumbled. Save the first two falls of Surprise Rapids, there is not a savager rush of water on the upper Columbia than this final three hundred yards of the left-hand channel of Rock Island. Roos was delighted with the way it showed up in his finder, and even more pleased when he learned that we were not going to have to line the boat down it. Then he had one of his confounded inspirations. That portage over the reef of bedrock, with the little waterfall in the background, would photograph like a million dollars, he declared; but to get the full effect of it, and to preserve “continuity,” the “farmer” ought to do it alone. It wouldn’t do to include the pump-man in the picture, now that the “farmer” was supposed to be travelling alone. If I had to have his help, all right; only it wouldn’t do to shoot while the other man was in the picture. But it would really be the “Cat’s ears” if the “farmer” could make it on his own. He wouldn’t have to make that big pull-up without stopping; he could jerk the boat along a foot or two at a time, and then get his breath like the pursued villain did in the processional finales of knockabout comedies. Then he showed me how, by resuming the same grip on the boat and the same facial expression at each renewed attack, the action could be made to appear practically continuous.

Well, I fell for it. Tom Sawyer was not more adroit in getting out of white-washing his fence than was Roos in getting out of that portage job. He wanted to preserve “continuity” by starting back at the head of the cascade, but we compromised by making it the “pot-hole.” Emerging to the lakelet, I registered “extreme dejection” at finding my progress blocked, and “dull gloom” as I landed and climbed up for a look-see. But when I reached the top of the reef and discovered the quiet water below, like sunlight breaking through a cloud, I assumed as nearly as I knew how an exact imitation of an expression I had seen on the face of Balboa in a picture called “First Sight of the Pacific.” “That’s the ‘Cat’s ears,’” encouraged Roos; “now snake the boat over—and make it snappy!”

I made it snappy, all right; but it was my spine that did most of the snapping. And it wasn’t a foot at a time that I snaked the boat over. (Roos had been too optimistic on that score); it was by inches. Roos took infinite pains in coaching me as to “resuming grip and expression;” but even so, I am afraid the finished film will display considerable jerkiness in its “continuous action.” I gained some solace by calling Roos names all the time, and so must again beg “lip-readers” who see the picture to consider the provocation and not judge too harshly. Once tilted over the crest of the reef, the boat took more holding than hauling. Being pretty well gone in the back and knees, she got away from me and slid the last ten feet, giving her bottom a bumping that it never did entirely recover from. I was caulking incipient leaks all the way to Portland as a consequence of that confounded “one man” portage.

Just as we had loaded up and were ready to push off, the pump-man breezed along and asked us to give him a passage as far as Columbia River station, two or three miles below. He wanted to take an oar, but as the distance was short and the current swift, I told him it was not worth bothering with. So he laid the oar he had taken out along the starboard gunwale, and knelt just aft the after thwart, facing forward. Roos always claimed that it was the loom of the pump-man’s back cutting off his view ahead that was responsible for the little diversion that followed. A good part of the blame was doubtless my own for not keeping a sharper watch over my shoulder, as I certainly should have done had I been alone. In any event, Imshallah’s alibi was complete. She behaved through it all like a real thoroughbred.

There was a sinuous tangle of swirls where the right-hand and left-hand cascades flew at each other’s throats at the lower end of the rock island, and then a gay stretch of sun-dazzled froth where the teeth of a long reef menaced all the way across the channel; then a stretch of lazily-coiling green-black water, flowing between lofty brown cliffs and broken here and there with the loom of house-like rocks of shattered basalt. The roar of Rock Island died down in muffled diminuendo, and it seemed mighty good to have that diapason muttering in bafflement astern rather than growling in anticipation ahead. There was only one little rapid between here and the siding, the pump-man said, and it wouldn’t bother us much as there was plenty of room to get by. He was right—for the most part.

I took a good look at the riffle as we headed down to it. It was a short stretch of rough, noisy water, but nothing that would have had to be avoided except for a single big roller in the middle of it. As this was throwing a great dash of spray high in the air every now and then, I felt sure the rock responsible for it was very slightly submerged—perhaps not more than a few inches. As this was so obviously an obstacle to steer well clear of, it never occurred to me to give Roos any especial warning about it, especially as he continued standing and sizing up the situation for half a minute after I had resumed my oars. The main current ran straight across the riffle, but with fifty feet of clear water to the left there was no need of getting into any of the worst of it, let alone trying to hurdle that foam-throwing rock.