Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

BRIDGE ON COLUMBIA HIGHWAY NEAR PORTLAND, OREGON

When I had splashed back to the river in the morning, I found that Imshallah anxious to hide the shame of that oil-bath, had spent the night trying to bury herself in the quicksand. Dumping her was out of the question, and I sank mid-thigh deep two or three times myself before I could persuade the sulking minx even to take the water. I knew she would take the first chance that offered to rid herself of the filth, just as she had before; but, with no swift water above the Cascades, there seemed small likelihood of her getting out-of-hand. Knowing that she was quite equal to making a bolt over the top of that terrible cataract if she hadn’t managed to effect some sort of purification before reaching there, I made an honest attempt at conciliation by landing at the first solid beach I came to and giving her oily sides a good swabbing down with a piece of carpet. That seemed to mollify the temperamental lady a good deal, but just the same I knew her too well to take any chances.

Of all the great rivers in the world, there are only two that have had the audacity to gouge a course straight through a major range of mountains. These are the Brahmaputra, which clove a way through the Himalaya in reaching the Bay of Bengal from Tibet, and the Columbia, which tore the Cascades asunder in making its way to the Pacific. But the slow process of the ages by which the great Asian river won its way to the sea broke its heart and left it a lifeless thing. It emerges from the mountains with barely strength enough to crawl across the most dismal of deltas to lose its identity in the brackish estuaries at its many insignificant mouths. The swift stroke by which the Cascades were parted for the Columbia left “The Achilles of Rivers” unimpaired in vigour. It rolls out of the mountains with a force which endless æons have not weakened to a point where it was incapable of carrying the silt torn down by its erosive actions far out into the sea. It is the one great river that does not run for scores, perhaps hundreds, of miles through a flat, monotonous delta; the one great stream that meets the ocean strength for strength. The Nile, the Niger, the Amazon, the Yangtse, the Mississippi—all of the other great rivers—find their way to the sea through miasmic swamps; only the Columbia finishes in a setting worthy of that in which it takes its rise. Nay, more than that. Superlative to the last degree as is the scenery along the Columbia, from its highest glacial sources in the Rockies and Selkirks right down to the Cascades, there is not a gorge, a vista, a panorama, a cascade of which I cannot truthfully say: “That reminds me of something I have seen before.” The list would include the names of most of the scenic wonders that the world has come to know as the ultimate expression of the grand and the sublime; but in time my record of comparisons would be complete. But for the distinctive grandeur of that fifty miles of cliff-walled gorge where the Columbia rolls through its Titan-torn rift in the Cascades, I fail completely to find a comparison. It is unique; without a near-rival of its kind.

Because so many attempts—all of them more or less futile—have been made to describe the Cascade Gorge of the Columbia, I shall not rush in here with word pictures where even railway pamphleteers have failed. The fact that several of the points I attained in the high Selkirks are scarcely more than explored, and that many stretches I traversed of the upper river are very rarely visited, must be the excuse for such essays at descriptions as I have now and then been tempted into in the foregoing chapters. That excuse is not valid in connection with the Cascade Gorge, and, frankly, I am mighty glad of the chance to side-step the job. I must beg leave, however, to make brief record of an interesting “scenic coincidence” that was impressed on my mind the afternoon that I pulled through the great chasm of the Cascades.

It was a day of sunshine and showers, with the clouds now revealing, now concealing the towering mountain walls on either hand. The almost continuous rains of the last four days had greatly augmented the flow of the streams, and there was one time, along toward evening, that I counted seven distinct waterfalls tumbling over a stretch of tapestried cliff on the Oregon side not over two miles in length. And while these shimmering ribbons of fluttering satin were still within eye-scope, a sudden shifting of the clouds uncovered in quick succession three wonderful old volcanic cones—Hood, to the south, Adams, to the north, and a peak which I think must have been St. Helens to the west. Instantly the lines of Tennyson’s Lotos Eaters came to my mind.

“A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; And some thro’ wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. They saw the gleaming river seaward flow From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops, Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, Stood sunset-flushed; and, dew’d with showery drops, Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.”

Tennyson, of course, was writing of some tropic land thirty or forty degrees south of Oregon, for in the next verse he speaks of palms and brings the “mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters” swimming about the keel; and yet there is his description, perfect to the last, least word, of what any one may see in a not-too-cloudy day from the right point on the lower Columbia.

The Hood and the White Salmon flow into the Columbia almost opposite each other, the former from Mount Hood, to the south, and the latter from Mount Adams, to the north. White Salmon, perched on the mountains of the Washington side, is, so far as I can recall, the “Swiss-iest” looking village in America. At close range it would doubtless lose much of its picturesqueness, but from the river it is a perfect bit of the Tyrol or the Bernese-Oberland. The Hood River Valley is one of the very richest in all the West, running neck-and-neck with Yakima and Wenatchee for the Blue Ribbon honours of Northwestern apple production. It is also becoming a dairying centre of considerable importance. I was genuinely sorry that my “through” schedule made it impossible to visit a valley of which I had heard so much and so favourably.

Nearing the Cascades, I headed over close to the Oregon bank for a glimpse of the famous “sunken forest.” This is one of the strangest sights on the lower river. For a considerable distance I pulled along the stumps of what had once been large forest trees, the stubby boles showing plainly through the clear water to a very considerable depth. There is some division of opinion as to whether these trees were submerged following the damming up of the river by the slide which formed the Cascades, or whether they have slid in from the mountainside at a later date. As there is still enough of a riverward earth-movement to necessitate a realignment of the rails on the south bank of the Cascades, it is probable that the latter is the correct theory. The self-preservative character of Oregon pine is proverbial, but it hardly seems reasonable to believe that it would last through the very considerable geologic epoch that must have elapsed since the Cascades were formed.

Hugging the Oregon shore closely, I pulled down toward the head of the Cascades canal. The water continued almost lake-like in its slackness even after the heavy rumble of the fall began to beat upon the air. I was taking no chances of a last-minute bolt from the still restive Imshallah, however, and skirted the sandy bank so closely that twice I found myself mixed up in the remains of the past season’s salmon-traps. Passing a big sawmill, I entered the canal and kept rowing until I came plump up against the lofty red gates. An astonishingly pretty girl who peered down from above said she didn’t know what a lock-master was (being only a passenger waiting for the steamer herself), but thought a man hammering on the other side of the gate looked like he might be something of that kind. She was right. The lock-master said he would gladly put me through, but would be greatly obliged if I would wait until he locked down the steamer, as he was pretty busy at the moment. That would give me half an hour to go down and size up the tail of the Cascades, which I would have to run immediately on coming out at the foot of the lock.