Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

There is a fall of twenty-five feet at the Cascades, most of it in the short, sharp pitch at the head. It is this latter stretch that is avoided by the canal and locks, the total length of which is about half a mile. The two lock chambers are identical in dimensions, each being ninety feet by four hundred and sixty-five in the clear. They were opened to navigation in 1896, and were much used during the early years of the present century. With the extension of the railways, (especially with the building of the “North-bank” line), and the improvement of the roads, with the incidental increase of truck-freighting, it became more and more difficult for the steamers to operate profitably even on the lower river. One after another they had been taken off their runs, until the J. N. Teal, for which I was now waiting, was the last steamer operating in a regular service on the Columbia above Portland.

Opening the great curving gates a crack, the lock-master admitted Imshallah to the chamber, from where—in the absence of a ladder—I climbed up fifty feet to the top on the beams of the steel-work. That was a pretty stiff job for a fat man, or rather one who had so recently been fat. I was down to a fairly compact two hundred and twenty by now, but even that required the expenditure of several foot-tons of energy to lift it out of that confounded hole. The main fall of the Cascades was roaring immediately on my right, just beyond the narrow island that had been formed when the locks and canal were constructed. It was indeed a viciously-running chute, suggesting to me the final pitch of the left-hand channel of Rock Island Rapids rather than Grand Rapids, to which it is often compared. I had heard that on rare occasions steamers had been run down here at high water; at the present stage it looked to me that neither a large nor a small boat would have one chance in a hundred of avoiding disaster.

The canal and locks avoided that first heavy fall of the Cascades completely, but the swift tumble of waters below was quite rough enough to make a preliminary survey well worth while. The steamer channel was on the Washington side, so that it was necessary for a boat to head directly across the current immediately on emerging from the lower lock chamber. The Oregon side of the river was thick with rocks right away round the bend, with not enough clear water to permit the passage of even a skiff. My course, therefore, would have to be the same as that of the steamer—just as sharply across to the opposite side as oars would take me. I had put Imshallah through worse water than that a score of times, and, while it wasn’t the sort of a place where one would want to break an oar or even catch a “crab,” there was no reason to believe that we should have the least trouble in pulling across the hard-running swirls. Of course, if Imshallah really was still smarting under the indignity of that oil-bath.... But no—I honestly think there was nothing of distrust of my well-tried little skiff behind my sudden change of plans. Rather, I should say, it was due to the fact that a remark of the lock-master had brought me to a sudden realization that I now arrived at what I had always reckoned as my ultimate objective—tide-water.

I had been planning to run on four miles farther to Bonneville that afternoon, in the hope of being able to pull through the forty miles of slackening water to Vancouver the following day. There I would get a tug to take the skiff up the Willamette to Portland, where I intended to leave her. As some of the finest scenery on the Columbia is passed in the twenty miles below the Cascades, this promised me another memorable day on the river—provided that there was only an occasional decent interval between showers. It was the lock-master’s forecast of another rainy day, together with his assurance that the foot of the locks was generally rated as the head of tide-water, that prompted me to change my mind a few moments before I was due to pull out again to the river, and book through to Portland on the Teal.

With the idea of avoiding the wash of the steamer, I pulled down to the extreme lower end of the locks before she entered, taking advantage of the interval of waiting to trim carefully and look to my oars for the pull across the foot of the Cascades. I was intending to let the Teal lock out ahead of me, and then pull as closely as possible in her wake, so as to have her below me to pick up the pieces in case anything went wrong. It was close to twilight now, with the sodden west darkening early under the blank grey cloud-mass of another storm blowing up-river from the sea. If that impetuous squall could have curbed its impatience and held off a couple of minutes longer, it might have had the satisfaction of treating me to a good soaking, if nothing more. As it was, I flung up my hands and kamerad-ed at the opening pelt of the big rain-drops. Speaking as one Columbia River skipper to another, I hailed the Captain of the J. N. Teal and asked him if he would take me and my boat aboard.

“Where bound?” he bawled back.

“Portland,” I replied.

“Aw right. Pull up sta’bo’d bow lively—’fore gate open!”

A dozen husky roustabouts, urged on by an impatient Mate, scrambled to catch the painter and give us a hand-up. I swung over the side all right, but Imshallah, hanging back a bit, came in for some pretty rough pulling and hauling before they got her on deck. The two or three of her planks that were started in the melée constituted about the worst injury the little lady received on the whole voyage.

And so Imshallah and I came aboard the J. N. Teal to make the last leg of our voyage as passengers. The gates were turning back before I had reached the upper deck, and a few minutes later the powerfully-engined old stern-wheeler went floundering across the foam-streaked tail of the Cascades and off down the river. Castle Rock—nine hundred feet high and sheer-walled all around—was no more than a ghostly blur in the darkness as we slipped by in the still rapidly moving current. Multnomah’s majesty was blanked behind the curtain of night and a driving rain, and only a distant roar on the port beam told where one of the loveliest of American waterfalls took its six-hundred-foot leap from the brink of the southern wall of the river. Cape Horn and Rooster Rock were swathed to their foundations in streaming clouds.