Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

I don’t remember whether or not we ever got very far with the “interview,” but I do recall that Miss S—— talked very interestingly of Johan Bojer and his work, and that she was in the midst of a keenly analytical review of “The Great Hunger” when a sudden darkening of what up to then had been only a slightly overcast sky reminded me that I had been extremely remiss in the matter of keeping an eye on the weather. Indeed, up to that moment the menace of storms on the river had been of such small moment as compared to that of rapids that I had come to rate it as no more than negligible. Now, however, heading into the heart of the Cascades, I was approaching a series of gorges long notorious among river voyageurs as a veritable “wind factory”—a “storm-breeder” of the worst description. After all that I had read of the way in which the early pioneers had been held up for weeks by head winds between the Dalles and the Cascades, there was no excuse for my failure to keep a weather eye lifting at so treacherous a point. The only alibi I can think of is Adam’s: “The woman did it.” Nor is there any ungallantry in that plea. Quite the contrary, in fact; for I am quite ready to confess that I should probably fail to watch the clouds again under similar circumstances.

There were a few stray mavericks of sunshine shafts trying to struggle down to the inky pit of the river as I turned to give the weather a once-over, but they were quenched by the sinister cloud-pall even as I looked. The whole gorge of the river-riven Cascades was heaped full of wallowing nimbus which, driven by a fierce wind, was rolling up over the water like an advancing smoke-barrage. The forefront of the wind was marked by a wild welter of foam-white water, while a half mile behind a streaming curtain of gray-black indicated the position of the advancing wall of the rain. It would have been a vile-looking squall even in the open sea; here the sinister threat of it was considerably accentuated by the towering cliffs and the imminent outcrops of black rock studding the surface of the river. I had no serious doubt that Imshallah, after all the experience she had had in rough water, would find any great difficulty in riding out the blow where she was, but since it hardly seemed hospitable to subject my lady guest to any more of a wetting than could be avoided, I turned and headed for the lee shore. Miss S—— was only about half muffled in the rubber saddle poncho and the light “shed” tent I tossed to her before resuming my oars when the wall of the wind—hard and solid as the side of a flying barn—struck us full on the starboard beam. It was rather careless of me, not heading up to meet that squall before it struck; but the fact was that I simply couldn’t take seriously anything that it seemed possible could happen on such a deep, quiet stretch of river. The consequence of taking that buffet on the beam was quite a merry bit of a mix-up. The shower-bath of blown spray and the dipping under of the lee rail were rather the least of my troubles. What did have me guessing for a minute, though, was the result of the fact that that confounded fifty-miles-an-hour zephyr got under the corners of the tent and, billowing it monstrously, carried about half of it overboard; also a somewhat lesser amount of Miss S——, who was just wrapping herself in it. I had to drop my oars to effect adequate salvage operations, and so leave the skiff with her port gunwale pretty nearly hove under. As soon as I got around to swing her head up into the teeth of the wind things eased off a bit.

The river was about a mile wide at this point—ten miles below The Dalles and about opposite the station of Rowena—and, save for occasional outcroppings of black bedrock, fairly deep. The north shore was rocky all the way along, but that to the south (which was also the more protected on account of a jutting point ahead) was a broad sandy beach. That beach seemed to offer a comparatively good landing, and, as it extended up-stream for half a mile, it appeared that I ought to have no great difficulty in fetching it. The first intimation I had that this might not be as easy as I had reckoned came when, in spite of the fact that I was pulling down-stream in a three or four-mile current, the wind backed the skiff up-stream past a long rock island at a rate of five or six miles an hour. That was one of the queerest sensations I experienced on the whole voyage—having to avoid bumping the lower end of a rock the while I could see the riffle where a strong current was flowing around the upper end.

I settled down to pulling in good earnest after that rather startling revelation, trying to hold the head of the skiff just enough to the left of the eye of the wind to give her a good shoot across the current. Luckily, I had been pretty well over toward the south bank when the wind struck. There was only about a quarter of a mile to go, but I was blown back just about the whole length of that half mile of sandy beach in making it. The last hundred yards I was rowing “all out,” and it was touch-and-go as to whether the skiff was going to nose into soft sand or the lower end of a long stretch of half-submerged rocks. I was a good deal relieved when it proved to be the beach—by about twenty feet. We would have made some kind of a landing on the rocks without doubt, but hardly without giving the bottom of the boat an awful banging.

The sand proved unexpectedly soft when I jumped out upon it, but I struck firm bottom before I had sunk more than an inch or two above my boot tops and managed to drag the skiff up far enough to escape the heaviest of the wash of the waves. It was rather a sodden bundle of wet canvas that I carried out and deposited under a pine tree beyond high-water mark, but the core of it displayed considerable life after it had been extracted and set up to dry before the fire of pitchy cones that I finally succeeded in teasing into a blaze. To show Miss S—— that the storm hadn’t affected my equanimity, I asked her to go on with her review of “The Great Hunger;” but she replied her own was more insistent, and reminded me that I hadn’t served lunch yet. Well, rain-soaked biscuit and milk chocolate are rather difficult to take without a spoon; but a pound of California seedless raisins, if munched slowly, go quite a way with two people.

The worst of the squall was over in half an hour, and, anxious to make hay while the sun shone, I pushed off again in an endeavor to get on as far as I could before the next broadside opened up. Miss S—— and I landed at the Rowena Ferry, to catch the afternoon train back to The Dalles. She was a good ship-mate, and I greatly regret she had the bad luck to be my passenger on the only day I encountered a really hard blow in all of my voyage.

There was another threatening turret of black cloud beginning to train its guns as I pulled out into the stream beyond Rowena, and it opened with all the big stuff it had before I had gone a mile. While it lasted, the bombardment was as fierce as the first one. Fortunately, its ammunition ran out sooner. I kept the middle of the current this time, pulling as hard as I could against the wind. I got a thorough raking, fore-and-aft, for my temerity, but, except at the height of the wind, I managed to avoid the ignominy of being forced back against the stream.

The third squall, which opened up about three-thirty, was a better organized assault, and gave me a pretty splashy session of it. When that blow got the range of me I was just pulling along to the left of a desolate tongue of black basalt called Memaloose Island. For many centuries this rocky isle was used by the Klickatats as a burial place, which fact induced a certain Indian-loving pioneer of The Dalles, Victor Trevett by name, to order his own grave dug there. A tall marble shaft near the lower end of the island marks the spot. Now I have no objection to marble shafts in general, nor even to this one in particular—as a shaft. I just got tired of seeing it, that was all. If any skipper on the Columbia ever passed Vic Trevett’s monument as many times in a year as I did in an hour, I should like to know what run he was on.

Swathed in oilskins, my potential speed was cut down both by the resistance my augmented bulk offered to the wind and the increased difficulty of pulling with so much on. Down past the monument I would go in the lulls, and up past the monument I would go before the gusts. There, relentless as the Flying Dutchman, that white shaft hung for the best part of an hour. I only hope what I said to the wind didn’t disturb old Vic Trevett’s sleep. Finally, a quarter of an hour’s easing of the blow let me double the next point; and then it turned loose with all its guns again. Quite gone in the back and legs, I gave up the unequal fight and started to shoot off quartering toward the shore. Glancing over my shoulder in an endeavour to get some kind of an idea of where, and against what, I might count on striking, an astounding sight met my eyes, a picture so weird and infernal that I had to pause (mentally) and assure myself that those raisins I had for lunch had not been “processed.”

Of all the sinister landscapes I ever saw—including the lava fields of a good many volcanoes and a number of the world’s most repulsive “bad lands”—that which opened up to me as I tried to head in beyond that hard-striven-for point stands alone in my memory for sheer awesomeness. The early winter twilight had already begun to settle upon the gloomy gorge, the duskiness greatly accentuating the all-pervading murk cast upon the river by the pall of the sooty clouds. All round loomed walls of black basalt, reflecting darkly in water whose green had been completely quenched by the brooding purple shadows. The very pines on the cliffs merged in the solid opacity behind their scraggly forms, and even the fringe of willows above high-water-mark looped round the crescent of beach below like a fragment of mourning band. And that stretch of silver sand—the one thing in the whole infernal landscape whose whiteness the gloom alone could not drown: how shall I describe the jolt it gave me when I discovered that six or seven black devils were engaged in systematically spraying it with an inky liquid that left it as dark and dead to the eye as a Stygian strand of anthracite? It was a lucky thing those raisins had not been “processed;” else I might not have remembered readily what I had heard of the way the “South-Bank” railway had been keeping the sand from drifting over its tracks by spraying with crude oil the bars uncovered at low water.