Tuesday Sept. 27, 2005. As it happened, it was a day when I was doing everything right.
The day before, after a long drive up the Willamette Valley, I had driven past all the river attractions to get to Mount Hood. To my surprise and irritation, I had had to drive entirely past the mountain, and turn off to the west, before I could find a place to come in close enough to actually set foot on it. (Later I realized there had been such a place on the east slopes, but I had missed it.)
Awakening at Timberline Lodge the next morning, I had been tempted to keep going west toward Portland. But I still wanted to see the river! So I decided to retrace my steps to Hood River. I knew I’d done the right thing when the turn-off I needed proved to be less than a mile from the road leading from Timberline. I drove down to Hood River, decided against stopping for lunch, and therefore arrived at Cascade Falls at just quarter to twelve - with the Columbia Gorge scheduled to leave at noon.
This was a legitimate sternwheeler paddleboat that took people for a two-hour trip on the Columbia River, starting at Cascade Falls, dropping down to the Bonneville Lock and Dam, then proceeding back upriver a way and back down to its mooring. “I’d better do that,” said I to myself. I went back for my coat and watch cap, and was very glad of it before long.
Since this was a Tuesday, well after Labor Day, the boat was not particularly crowded. There was no trouble getting a spot just where I wanted to be — as high as I could get, and as far forward. Climbing the stairs (yes, they were stairs, not a ladder) toward the pilot deck, I heard a woman behind me say something to her husband. “British?” I said. “Where are you from?” “Wiltshire,” she said, and I blinked for a minute, then said, “oh, where the crop circles are. Near Marlborough, are you?” That was her turn to blink. I realized later they were probably more used to people mentioning Avebury and stone circles, not Marlborough and crop circles. But this was by way of an introduction, and we chatted for a few minutes. Nice couple. I took their picture with their camera, and they took mine with mine. As soon as we got underway, though, we were moving into a stiff breeze from the west, and talking got harder.
The ship’s captain kept up a running commentary, through which his experience and knowledge and his Oregonian pride showed clearly. He had us at his mercy, of course, but if I had to bet I’d put my money on most if not all of what he said being pretty accurate. He’d furnish us with impressive but ephemeral statistics on fishing and logging and rapids and dams and what-all.
And behind the (genuinely interesting) commentary was that river!
How to describe it? So much that describes scenery becomes cliché. Blue sky, blue water, unrelenting wind, distant prospects. Can we do better than that? How about this? The river flows through a huge ravine, gouged out of the land in massive ice- and water-flows over thousands of years. To the north, to the south, the land is higher, and you look out at what seem like mountain ranges on either side, sloping down to river level. The river flows not as a narrow interruption of the mountains, but as the lowest part of a valley between ranges, a valley that continues for a short distance on either side of the river, depending on where you are.
I know full well that the Columbia we sailed on is not the Columbia that was. It had been a mighty torrent, untamed and magnificent. Today it is a series of lakes defined by the dams that created them. Where there were falls so dangerous that pioneers preferred arduously portaging around them, now there is a river-lake-segment whose surface is higher than the highest part of the falls that were drowned beneath them. Where there was a great mass of water that flowed more or less where it wanted to, when it wanted to, as it wanted to, now there is stability, and tranquility, and no doubt this is all good for commerce, but it isn’t the Columbia that was.
Doesn’t matter, really. It was still so beautiful! The wind and sun in my face, the clean crisp air that was a joy to the lungs, the long vistas of blue and green, and the near views of blue and green and brown - what a day! As I said, it was a day when I was doing everything right.