Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

The sheer two-thousand-foot cliff on the inside of the bend that gives its name to the rapid is well called Squally Hook. What had been a gentle ten-miles-an-hour breeze on the river above began resolving itself into a succession of fitful gusts of twenty or thirty as I approached the rock-walled bend. Even a steady head-wind makes steering awkward in going into a rapid; a gusty one is a distinct nuisance. To avoid the necessity of any sharp change of course after I was once among the white-caps, I resolved to use every care in heading into the rapid at exactly the right place. That was why, when I became aware that two girls from a farm-house on a bench above the right bank were motioning me imperiously in that direction, I swerved sharply from the course I had decided upon in an endeavour to locate the channel into which I was sure they were trying to tell me to head. Just what those confounded half-breed Loreli were really driving at I never did learn. Perhaps they had apples to sell, or some sweet cider; or perhaps they thought I had some cider that was not sweet. Perhaps it was pure sociability—the desire of a bit of a “talky-talk” with the green-boated voyageur. At any rate, they were certainly not trying to pilot me into a clear channel. That fact walloped me right between the eyes the instant I discovered that I had pulled beyond the entrance of a perfectly straight channel and that there was a barely submerged barrier of rock blocking the river all the way on to the right bank.

That, of course, left me no alternative but to pull back for all that was in me to wait the “intake.” It was a very similar predicament to the one in which the mist had tricked me at the head of Umatilla; only there I had room to make the channel and here I didn’t. The current, running now like a mill-race, carried me onto the reef sixty feet to the right of the smooth green chute of the “fairway.”

If it had taken half an hour instead of half a second to shoot out across the shoaling shelf of that froth-hidden reef there might have been time for a goodly bit of worrying anent the outcome. As it was, there was just the sudden thrill of seeing the bottom of the river leaping up to hit the bottom of the boat, the instant of suspense as she touched and dragged at the brink, and then the dizzy nose-dive of two or three feet down into deeper water. It was done so quickly that a stroke checked by the rock of the reef was finished in the up-boil below the little cascade. With an inch or two less of water she might have hung at the brink and swung beam-on to the current, which, of course, would have meant an instant capsize. The way it was, she made a straight clean jump of it, and only buried her nose in the souse-hole for the briefest part of a second when she struck. The rest was merely the matter of three hundred yards of rough running down a rock-clear channel.

The authors of my near-mess-up came capering down the bank in pursuit as I swung out into the smoothening swirls, but I only shook my fist at them and resumed my oars. Darn women, anyway!—when a man’s running rapids, I mean.

Now one would have thought that those two performances were enough for one afternoon, especially as both were very largely due to my own carelessness; but I suppose the “trilogy of trouble” had to be rounded out complete. From the foot of Squally Hook Rapids to the head of Indian Rapids is about three miles. The water became ominously slack as I neared what appeared to be a number of great rock islands almost completely barring the river. It was not until I was almost even with the first of them that a channel, very narrow and very straight, opened up along the left bank. Various other channels led off among the islands, but with nothing to indicate how or where they emerged. That flume-like chute down the left bank was plainly the way the steamers went, and certainly the quickest and most direct course on down the river. Peering through the rocky vista, I could see a rain storm racing up the Columbia, with the grey face of it just blotting out a wedge-shaped gorge through the southern cliffs which I knew must be the mouth of the John Day. That storm was another reason why I should choose the shortest and swiftest channel. There ought to be some kind of shelter where this important southern tributary met the Columbia.

Of course, I knew all about still water running deep (which was of no concern to me) and “twisty” (which was of considerable concern). I should certainly have given more thought to the matter of trimming for what was sure to be waiting to snap up Imshallah at the foot of that speeding chute of green-black water had not an old friend of mine breezed along just then. He was the engineer of the way freight on the “South-bank” line. We had been exchanging signals in passing for three days now—twice on his down run and once on his up. This was the first opportunity I had had to show him how a rapid should be run, and I noted with gratification that he appeared to be slowing down so as to miss none of the fine points. On my part, dispensing with my wonted preliminary “look-see,” I swung hard on the oars in an effort to get into the swiftest water before the spectators were out of sight.

As the engine drew up even with me, I balanced my oars with my right hand for a moment and waved the engineer greetings with my left; he, in turn, ran the locomotive with his left hand and waved with his right. Then I saw that the fireman was also waving, and, farther back, the brakeman, from the top of a car, and the conductor from the “lookout” of the caboose. The occupants of the “dirigible grandstand” at the Poughkeepsie regattas had nothing on the crew of that way freight. And the latter, moreover, were treated to a burst of speed such as no man-propelled boat in still water ever came close to. I was not pulling over four or five miles an hour myself, but that smooth, steep, unobstructed chute must have been spilling through its current at close to twenty. In a couple of hundred yards I pulled up three or four car-lengths on the comparatively slow-moving train, and I was still gaining when a sudden “toot-a-too-toot!” made me stop rowing and look around. I had recognized instantly the familiar danger signal, and was rather expecting to see a cow grazing with true bovine nonchalance on the weeds between the ties. Instead, it was the engineer’s wildly gesticulating arm that caught my back-cast eye. He was pointing just ahead of me, and down—evidently at something in the water.

Then I saw it too—a big black funnel-shaped hole down which a wide ribbon of river seemed to be taking a sort of a spiral tumble. It was that entirely well-meant toot-a-toot, which was intended to prod me, not a cow, into activity, that was primarily responsible for what followed. Had I not ceased rowing on hearing it, it is probable that the skiff would have had enough way when she did strike that whirlpool to carry her right on through. As it was Imshallah simply did an undulant glide into the watery tentacles of the lurking octopus, snuggled into his breast and prepared to spend the night reeling in a dervish dance with him. I must do the jade the justice of admitting that she had no intention of outraging the proprieties by going any further than a nocturnal terpsichorean revel. Going home for the night with him never entered her mind; so that when he tried to pull the “Cave-Man stuff” and drag her down to his under-water grottoes, she put up the most virtuous kind of resistance. The trouble was that I didn’t want to go even as far as she did. Dancing was the last thing I cared for, with that rain-storm and night coming on. Yet—at least as far as my friends on the way freight ever knew—an all-night Danse d’Apache looked very much like what we were up against; for I recall distinctly that when the train was disappearing round the next bend Imshallah, her head thrown ecstatically skyward, was still spinning in circles, while I continued to fan the air with my oars like an animated Dutch windmill.

It was a mighty sizeable whirlpool, that black-mouthed maelstrom into which Imshallah’s susceptibility had betrayed both of us. I should say that it was twice the diameter of the one which had given us such a severe shaking just above the Canadian Boundary, and with a “suck” in proportion. What helped the situation now, however, was the fact that the skiff carried rather less than half the weight she did then. At the rate she was taking water over the stern during that first attack, she could not have survived for more than half a minute; now she was riding so much more buoyantly that she was only dipping half a bucket or so once in every two or three rounds. When I saw that she could probably go on dancing for an hour or two without taking in enough water to put her under, something of the ludicrousness of the situation began to dawn on me. Missing the water completely with half of my strokes, and only dealing it futile slaps with the rest, I was making no more linear progress than if I had been riding a merry-go-round. I didn’t dare to put the stern any lower by sliding down there and trying to paddle where there was water to be reached. Crowding her head down by working my weight forward finally struck me as the only thing to do.

With the forward thwart almost above my head this was not an easy consummation to effect, especially with an oar in either hand. Luckily, I was now using the “ring” oar-locks, so that they came along on the oars when I unshipped the latter. Standing up was, of course, out of the question. I simply slid off backwards on to the bottom and wriggled forward in a sitting position until I felt my spine against the thwart. That brought her nose out of the clouds, and she settled down still farther when, after getting my elbows over the seat behind me, I worked up into a rowing position.