Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

After having lunch in the railway men’s eating house at Columbia River, we went down to push off again. Finding the local ferry-man examining the skiff, I asked him if he thought she would do to run Cabinet Rapids, which we could hear rumbling a mile below. “Not if you try to push them out of the river the way you did that riffle above here a while ago,” he replied with a grin. He said he had been watching us through his glass, and that the boat had disappeared from sight for three or four seconds when she hit the big roller. He offered to bet his ferry-boat against the skiff that we couldn’t do it again and come through right-side-up. No takers. Speaking seriously, he said that, by keeping well to the left, we could run Cabinet all right—if nothing went wrong. “But better not make a practice of breaking an oar just where you’re going to need it most,” he added with another grin; “there’s nothing on the river that would live through the big riffle over against the right bank. You’ll see what she did to the Douglas.”

Landing from the slack water above a rocky point which juts out into the river at the head of Cabinet Rapids, we climbed a couple of hundred yards over water-scoured boulders to the brink of the gorge. It was a decidedly rough-looking rapid, but by no means so hopeless for running with a small boat as Rock Island. In that the main riffle was thrown against a sheer bank of the river, it reminded me a good deal of Death Rapids on the Big Bend. But this riffle, while appearing fully as rough as that of the dreaded Dalles des Morts, was not, like the latter, unavoidable. The chance of passing it in only fairly broken water to the left looked quite good enough to try. The wreck of the Douglas, standing out white and stark against the black boulders a mile below, was a good warning against taking any unnecessary chances. I looked well to the oars and the trim of the boat before shoving off.

Once out into the river, I could see that the rapid was white from bank to bank, but still nothing that ought to trouble us seriously. I stood for a minute or two looking ahead from the vantage of one of the thwarts, and it was just as I was taking up my oars again in the quickening current that the corner of my eye glimpsed the narrow opening of a deep back-channel winding off between splintered walls of columnar basalt to the left. I wasn’t looking for any more one-man portages, but this opening looked good enough to explore. It might lead through by an easy way, and there was hardly enough water to do much harm if it didn’t. It took hard pulling to sheer off from the “intake” now we had drifted so close, but we finally made it and entered the dark back-channel. Narrowing and broadening, just as the other had done, it led on for a couple of hundred yards, finally to discharge over a six-foot fall into a deeply indented pool that opened out to the river about half way down the rapid. The wedge-shaped crack at the head of the little fall was narrower than the skiff at water-line, but by dint of a little lifting and tugging we worked her through and lowered her into the pool below. Pulling out through the opening, we headed her confidently into the current. There was a quarter-mile of white water yet, but we were far enough down now so that the loss of an oar or any other mishap wouldn’t leave the skiff to run into those wallowing rollers over against the further cliff. A sharp, slashing run carried us through to the foot of Cabinet Rapids, and a few minutes later we had hauled up into an eddy under the left bank opposite the wreck of the Douglas.

The little stern-wheeler had come to grief at high-water, so that we had to clamber all of three hundred yards over big, smooth, round boulders to reach the point where the wreck was lying. The latter was by no means in so bad a shape as I had expected to find it. The principal damage appeared to have been done to the wheel, which was clamped down tight over a huge boulder, and to the starboard bow, which was stove in. The rest of her hull and her upper works were intact; also the engines, though terribly rusty. There was not much from which one could reconstruct the story of the disaster; in fact, I have not learned to this day any authentic details. The chances are, however, that the wheel struck a rock somewhere in Cabinet Rapids, and, after that, drifting out of control, she had come in for the rest of the mauling. If her captain is like the rest of the Columbia River skippers I met, I have no doubt that she will be patched up again before next high-water and started off for Portland.

With towering cliffs on both sides and the great black boulders scattered all around, Roos felt that both subject and setting were highly favourable for an effective movie, and started to think out a way to work the wreck of the Douglas into his “continuity.” After some minutes of brown study, he declared that the best way to work it would be for the “farmer” to land, come clambering across the boulders registering “puzzled wonderment,” and then to stand in silent contemplation of the wreck, registering “thankfulness.” “Thankfulness for what?” I demanded; “it doesn’t strike me as Christian to gloat over the wreck of a ship.” “You don’t get me at all,” he expostulated. “I don’t mean for him to show thankfulness because of the wreck of the steamer, but because his own boat has so far escaped a similar fate. He just stands here with his arms folded, casts his eyes upward, moves his lips as if....”

“Nothing doing,” I cut in decisively. “If you’d been raising beans and hay and apricots as long as I have, you’d know that a farmer never registers thankfulness about anything but a rise in the market, and there ain’t no such thing any more.” While we were arguing that moot point, the sun dipped behind the loftily looming wall of brown-black cliff across the river and the trouble settled itself automatically. Because there was no longer light, Roos thought it would be a good stunt to camp where we were until morning, and as a camp was always “continuity”—there we were!

There was plenty of cordwood left, and the galley stove was in good condition. As we had no candles, dinner was cooked by the mingled red and green gleams of the port and starboard lights, transferred to the galley for that purpose. I slept in the cook’s cabin and Roos—with his bed made up on the wire springs from the Captain’s cabin—on the deck of the galley. With water freezing half an inch thick in the coffee-pot on the galley stove, we had an insufferably cold night of it—one of the worst we spent on the river. In the morning Roos made his “camp shots,” which consisted principally of the farmer chopping cordwood on the main deck, building a fire in the galley stove and cooking breakfast. Out of deference to my esoteric knowledge of the way farmers feel about things, he consented to omit the “thankfulness stuff.”

Shoving off into a steady six-mile current at nine-thirty, a few minutes brought us in sight of a striking basaltic island, which Symons had characterized as “one of the most perfect profile rocks in existence.” “Approaching it from the north,” he wrote, “it presents a striking likeness to the profile of Queen Victoria.... Coming nearer to it and passing it on the west, the profile changes and merges into a more Grecian and Sphinx-like face, whose placid immobility takes one’s mind involuntarily to far-off Egypt. It rises from the surface of the water about a hundred feet, and a pair of eagles have selected it as their home, and upon its extreme top have built a nest, giving, as it were, a crown to this goddess of the Columbia.”

Roos declared himself strong for that “Sphinx stuff,” and had his camera set up in the bow ready for a close-up of every change of expression. He was doomed to disappointment. The first thing we discovered missing was the crowning eagles’ nest, and then Victoria’s nose, mouth and chin. Her brow and hair were there, but both considerably eroded and inroad-ed by the weather. The “Grecian-and-Sphinx-like face” we never did locate, although I pulled around the island twice in search of them. Roos declared her an “oil can,” and packed up his camera in supreme disgust. That was, I believe, the last time he had it set up on the Columbia.

As Lieutenant Symons had proved so invariably accurate in all of his topographical descriptions, I am strongly inclined to the belief that floods and the elements had conspired to wreak much havoc with “Victoria’s” features in the forty years that had elapsed since he limned them so strikingly with pen and pencil. I have known fairly stonily-featured ladies to change almost as much in a good deal less than forty years.