The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (40 page)

Looking the other way, upriver to the east, I see Bonneville Dam, the first of the big harnesses on the Columbia, completed seventeen years after Roosevelt committed a rough draft of his thoughts to paper. The Gorge itself is about eighty-five miles long, a cleave in the Cascades that begins in the mist of the Sandy River near Portland and ends in the desert of The Dalles. After years of abuse, the Gorge is on the mend. I climb down Henry Biddle’s rock for a closer look.

From here on out, I’m heading upstream, following the late salmon, the early winter windsurfers, and Winthrop. I have already paid my respects to Fort Vancouver, birthplace of the modern Pacific Northwest, which Winthrop visited three times in 1853. The fort was the center of a universe that stretched from Mexico to Russian America, and from the Rockies to Hawaii. For twenty years, Dr. John McLoughlin ruled this empire from the Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters on a level bank across from the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia. A Scot, he was six feet, four inches tall, with shoulder-length hair. The Indians called him the White Eagle. Under his direction, the Gentlemen Adventurers salted barrels of salmon, milled timber at a water-powered sawmill, grew vegetables and shipped these elemental products of the Northwest up to two thousand miles away. He never removed Indians from their land, but saw the value of keeping the tribes strong and their fishery alive. Capitalism needed healthy trading partners, not conquered serfs—a lesson lost on most of the American settlers and government agents who followed McLoughlin. Visitors to Fort Vancouver drank French wines from Waterford crystal glasses and picked at their sturgeon caviar with sterling silver. As the Americans began to pour in, McLoughlin directed them south of the Columbia, hoping he could keep Washington as part of what became British Columbia. The fort’s setting, in the words of a young company man who first visited in 1833, was “The finest combination of beauty and grandeur I ever beheld.” Across the river, Mount Hood rises from rumpled hills, enough water locked in its glaciers to feed the valleys that surround it. Behind the fort, Mount St. Helens floats on the northern horizon. But paradise lasted only a bit more than
two decades; McLoughlin retired soon after the English gave up claims below the 49th Parallel in 1846. He moved to Oregon City, became an American citizen, and died shortly thereafter.

Nothing could be further from the Hudson’s Bay Company idyll than the cluster of timber towns on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge in Skamania County. Sasquatch, the photo-defying Bigfoot, is legally protected from hunters by order of the county council, but no similar resolution for the Gorge has come from local politicians. When I ask Arlene Johnson at the Chamber of Commerce what is unique about the area, she thinks for a long time and then brightens: “In the winter, we have the highest unemployment rate of any county in America—thirty-five percent.”

The people of Skamania County fought to keep the Gorge from becoming a National Scenic Area. They grew up in the tail end of an era when the scenery belonged to whoever could get to it first and hold onto it. What they didn’t like was the idea that you wouldn’t be able to just mow down a swath of timber or put up a mini-mart without going through some kind of land-use committee made up of blue-hairs and birdwatchers. The American frontier may have been officially pronounced closed in 1890, but land-use laws and zoning remain foreign terms to many Western counties possessing some of the finest scenery in the country. It took an act of Congress in 1986 to force on the area a sentiment that Winthrop said would rise naturally. Following the legislation, citizens of Skamania County scorned the federal government and prepared for hard times. Pretty scenery won’t pay the bills, they said. Like their union brothers downriver in Astoria at the Columbia’s mouth, the loggers of the Columbia Gorge asked, What are we supposed to do now?

The river today is wall-to-wall windsurfers. It’s midweek, cold in the morning, mild by noon, but nobody’s talking about the temperature. All that matters is the wind. They come from Germany and Australia and Texas and Nova Scotia, the skin-cancer-be-damned set, lawyers and trust-funders and drifters and dropouts; on the Columbia, hopping five-foot swells with a forty-mile tail wind, they go by just one name: Boardheads.

Nearby, the last log flume in America hangs from the high walls of the Washington Cascades. A seven-mile-long wooden slide, it’s built over thick-timbered trestles and runs from the forest to the Columbia. The cliffs of the Gorge are too steep for roads, so the timber companies devised these flumes over which logs scooted downhill. Lumberjacks used to
bundle up their best clothes and slide down the flume into town for a Saturday night drunk, which was followed by the Sunday morning walk back up, with hangover. The flume here shut down in the mid-1980s’ timber recession, for good. In a way, the last flume is a fitting symbol of the transition under way in the Gorge, and throughout much of the Northwest. The future has something to do with the squeal of delight on those Saturday night rides.

Farther upstream, at Hood River, the Columbia is sluggish from the brace of Bonneville Dam, but with the wind, it looks like a choppy cross section of the Pacific. Everybody’s talking about “catching a blow” and “rigging up” and how great it is when rain falls in Portland because the cooler air gives the desert air a real yank. The radio news in the morning begins, not with bulletins from the Mideast, but with a wind report. The town of Hood River, named for the glacial stream that runs nearby, is surrounded by pear and cherry orchards that thrive on the east-Cascade sun and meltwater from the pyramid of Mount Hood. Walking the streets, I see few signs of the depression which was supposed to kill the Gorge economy once the scenery was protected. Carpenters are hammering away at new homes. Restaurants are full of people. Old houses with big gardens have converted to bed and breakfasts.

When word first got out among the international community of transient thrill-seekers that the best wind in the world blew through the Columbia River Gorge, most locals were suspicious. Bums on water, who needs ’em? There are Pacific beaches in Hawaii with stronger winds, but in no place is the wind more consistent than in the Gorge. A University of Oregon study found that the average windsurfer earns thirty thousand dollars a year and is twenty-eight to thirty years old. They contribute up to $20 million a year to the economy of the Gorge. I stroll into an old wooden building in Hood River, two stories and a loft that used to be a fruit warehouse, across the street from a long-deserted salmon cannery. The ground floor is cluttered with sailboards fresh off the assembly line. I talk wind with a salesgirl who moved from Salt Lake City because she can ski any day of the year on the eternal snows of Mount Hood, and windsurf the same day. In the back shop a dozen workers blend fiberglass and plastic into lean boards which sell for $1,500 and up. Three small manufacturing facilities like this one have opened in Hood River. They make the boards from scratch; at some of the shops, the craftsmen get a share of the overall sales. Wages are good, usually better than union timber jobs. At one of the shops, work stops on days when the wind is really howling, a consensual rule.

One man in his forties, still making the rough transition from timber beast to sailboarding hipster, says, “If you’d a told me ten years ago I could make a good living off windsurfing, I’d a said you were fucking-ay crazy. But hey, look at me. I just bought a new car. Windsurfing has done wonders for this town. They’re even talking about putting in a second street light.”

Unemployment is at six percent in Hood River, lower than in any timber town on the Columbia. Windsurfing has given the town back its pride. But now with new prosperity has also come the first signs of discontent: Californians. You expect to see their pictures in the post office. They take home-equity loans on overpriced bungalows in Santa Monica and buy sixty-thousand-dollar farmhouses here for summer playpens. The equity exiles talk about Hood River’s becoming the Aspen of the windsurfing set. It already is. So why the anxiety? Flash and cash are not easily transplanted to Oregon, a state closer in spirit to its New England ancestors than to its neighbors in California.

Across the river, in Skamania County, timber is selling at an all-time high price, and still twenty-five percent of the county’s work force is jobless. The logging companies, pouring profits into automated sawmills that cut wood with a minimum amount of human help, have been shedding workers by the thousands. But in the town of Stevenson, the riverside burg where the opposition to a Scenic Columbia Gorge bill was centered, a new business has opened up, the first new enterprise in more than a decade—a windsurfing shop. For 150 years the people of Skamania County never did anything but tear and gnaw at their natural resources, and nobody ever got rich but a few timber barons. Now, they’re starting to feel the wind; it never stops blowing.

At dawn the next day, with the tufts of brown grass hardened by frost, I slip under barbed wire and scramble down basalt cliffs near The Dalles. In the desert 190 miles upstream from the river’s mouth, there is no life without the Columbia. Everything looks baked and burnt, the river walls tiered by bath-rings from the prehistoric course of the Columbia. Winthrop called this area “the Devil’s race course,” the overland end of the Oregon Trail, a place where the river tumbled down Celilo Falls. From here, wagons were portaged around the falls, stripped of their wheels, then lashed to a barge for the final trip to the Willamette Valley. If I had been here with Winthrop, instead of following his ghost, we would not have been able to hear each other speak; the Columbia crashed down
the stepped cliffs with such force as to drown all other sound. It was a place that moved the tongue-tied to fluid fits of poetry, the agnostic to divine reconsideration. Now it’s gone forever, another casualty of the Corps. Today, somewhere around the bend, I hear a dog bark guarding a federal bureaucrat; I hear the bee-swarm sound of electricity sprinting along transmission lines that are strung from The Dalles Dam to Los Angeles, 846 miles to the south; I hear the morning—an oddly modern sound—and nothing else.

I come upon six abandoned shacks, sun-blasted to a deep brown and perched on level rock. Each dwelling is no bigger than an average bedroom; the roofs are perforated, and the floorboards are crumbling. One of these structures has a cross at its apex. When I walk inside, the smell of rats is overwhelming. Outside, I pick through old bottles and a rusted stove. More ghosts. Farther upstream, I find a couple of wooden planks, sun-peeled plywood nailed to poles of pine on the edge of the river. But unlike the long-deserted hamlet, these platforms show signs of recent life. One, covered by blue tarp, includes a bed mattress, rat-chewed and stained by mildew. It is indented from a human form. I look around and see beer cans, an old rocking chair, and everywhere, strings and wire. The smell of salmon is unmistakable. This Indian dipnet platform, little changed in style over centuries, surprises me; it’s like a gramophone in a video store. I had thought that the Indians of the desert Columbia, like most of the whites, took their salmon from Safeway. A frightful contraption, the platform is bound to the rocks by two guy-wires. Another surprise: The river at this point is actually moving. Little swirls and eddies.

I scramble along more rocks, looking for the owners of these platforms, but find nothing more than the hum of transmission lines sending electricity out from the half-mile-long powerhouse of the Dalles Dam. No Celilo Falls, of course; they were buried when the dam opened in 1957. No spillway, even; the dams have become so efficient at channeling all water through deep turbines that a flow over the top is considered purely cosmetic. I climb around a turn and drop down, closer to shore, still on precariously vertical rock. There, on an enormous, wobbly platform is an Indian fisherman. He is wearing a wool cap and overalls, and his long hair is braided in matching pigtails. His body leashed to a climbing rope and harness, he leans way out over the river. Looking around, I see three twenty-foot-long dipnets near three different platforms. He jumps from pole to pole, pulling them through the water and coming up empty. He looks like a museum piece—the deep color of his face and hair, the traditional pine dipnet—set against the enormity of the dam. After ten
thousand years, perhaps he is the end of the line. I ask him about the fishing. A late fall chinook run is still underway, and he had hoped to bring back a big catch for a tribal salmon feed. After three days of work at a spot where a single person used to take up to five hundred fish a day, he has a half-dozen salmon to show.

Thousands of Indians used to gather at Celilo Falls to spear chinook and coho or catch them in dipnets. Because of this salmon bounty, The Dalles was the great trade mart for all Northwest tribes, the center of a native network that spread out across the Rockies to the Plains, and far north into British Columbia. Here, the Klamaths of Northern California traded slaves for salmon, the Nez Perce brought horses and bighorn sheep horns, the nomadic Shoshoni swapped buffalo hides, the Makah came down from the rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula with sea otter pelts, the Vancouver Island tribes brought their trademark canoes to exchange, the Chinook bartered with dried clams and bright shells. On a fall morning, The Dalles was like an open-air shopping center, crowded with perhaps as many as fifty thousand people.

By the time of Winthrop’s arrival, there were few hints of what used to be; a majority of the Columbia Plateau natives had died of disease. Fresh from the jungled forests of the Cascades, Winthrop considered these basalt walls and bristled fields to be the northwestern corner of hell.

“Before me was a region like the Valley of Death, rugged, bleak and severe,” he wrote. “A tragical valley, where the fiery forces of Nature, impotent to attain majestic combination and build monuments of peace, had fallen into despair and ugly warfare.” What bothered the Yankee traveler, aside from the fact that he contracted smallpox and was forced to spend his three-week convalescence quarantined inside Fort Dalles, was the lack of any vegetation, bare hills all around in the Sahara of the Northwest. How could this be in the land of the Big Green? Fifty miles from impenetrable forest, and not a stick of timber anywhere, not a fern or blade of grass.