When the federal government decided to wrestle the Columbia River away from nature and place it in the permanent custody of the Army Corps of Engineers, it did so with some trepidation. Man as a geological force—this was a line that had never been crossed. The land could be altered, customized to human scale, but surely not controlled. And what a way to start: no river in North America except the Mississippi is more powerful than the Columbia; it carries a quarter-million cubic feet of water per second to the ocean, ten times the flow of the Colorado, twice the discharge of the Nile into the Mediterranean. The Corps planned nothing less than radical surgery, a fifty-year operation that would involve ripping open the chest of the Northwest and redirecting the main artery.
Elsewhere, the earth-movers had won a string of significant victories, cutting a canal fifty miles across the Isthmus of Panama, blasting railroad tunnels through the Rockies and Cascades, stealing water from the High Sierra and the Colorado for delivery to the desert of Southern California. There was no reason scrubland could not be green, or forests leveled to plain, or long-dry coulees filled with fresh water, or dead seas resurrected from salty graves. By the time the West was old and the twentieth century was young, the men from the platoon of progress had little trouble playing God. And so a deity with sliderule and bulldozer took over the Columbia, expecting all mortal elements to fall in place.
Building is the great art of our time, it was said then. And technology, of the heavy-metal, grind-and-grunt school, was king. Salmon were caught in fishwheels and canned by an octo-armed machine called the Iron Chink. Seattle was lopping off its hills, filling in its tidelands and constructing the biggest skyscraper west of the Mississippi. Portland was drawing hydroelectric power from the Willamette and sending forth enough lumberjacks to fell a thousand acres of virgin forest a day. British Columbia was starting work on an ill-fated canal across its interior. The leading citizens of Vancouver, just a few years removed from the mines which made them rich, were planning to tailor their tidelands and gouge open the bordering mountains. Idaho had demonstrated that the unruly Snake River, which brings water from half of the intermountain West to the Columbia, could be dammed to satisfy the interests of a few powerful desert cattlemen and potato farmers. The geo-technicians of the early twentieth century approached the Columbia with the zeal of the first plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. There was just so much potential.
Problem was, things could be a bit outsized in the field, as they called the world outside the drawing room. Take Beacon Rock, the largest monolith of stone on earth except for Gibraltar. Rising from the north shore of the lower Columbia, the rock is the basaltic core of a broken-down Cascade volcano, a piece of vertebra from the spine of the mountain range. Seeking the Pacific, the Columbia long ago smashed through this range, carving out the magnificent gorge and leaving chunks like this along the way. Lewis and Clark named Beacon Rock and admired its stark, vertical beauty. In a New World of magnificent proportions, it seemed to fit. The Corps of Engineers saw it as a nuisance. Although the rock never impeded river traffic, it was just sitting there, not doing anything for anybody, and therefore it was the Enemy. So, the Corps drew up a plan to pulverize the second-largest monolith in the world and use the shattered pieces to build a breakwater at the Columbia’s mouth, thereby accomplishing two enormous tasks at once.
A man named Henry Biddle, a naturalist, new to the Northwest, tried to stop the Corps. He was a descendant of Nicholas Biddle, of Philadelphia, who had edited Lewis and Clark’s journals and later became president of the United States Bank. Unable to dissuade the Corps, Henry Biddle bought Beacon Rock in 1915. The whole thing. For the next three years, he built a path of stone and wood from the base to the summit, a mile-long trail up the nine-hundred-foot vertical length of the rock. He then sold the rock to the state of Washington for one dollar on the provision that it remain a park—and a finger in the eye of the Corps—for eternity. Until recently, it was the only significant battle the Corps of Engineers had lost.
Atop Beacon Rock, the wind out of the west is warm this morning. The vine maple growing from the rock is drained of green and tinged in red, and a few Doug firs, dwarfed by the constant wind, cling to the edge of the monolith, their roots spread out in a pattern that reveals a strained scramble for soil. In a few weeks’ time, the wind will shift the other way, as the colder desert air is sucked into the mild west side of the Cascades. Either way, there is always a breeze in the Columbia Gorge, stiff and new, blowing twenty or thirty miles an hour. The River of the West may have given up its current and most of its independence to the Corps, but the wind has never been touched; carrying the spirit of the old Columbia, it rushes through the Gorge, more dominant than ever.
From this view on Beacon Rock, the Columbia appears as a river of paradox, overwhelmed with responsibility but holding to a few wild quirks of character. To the west, the river is banked by steep, green walls from which pour the torrents of the Cascades. One of these waterfalls, Multnomah, drops 620 feet, pummeling rock and creating a misted mini-rain-forest all around. The Columbia flows these last 140 miles west unimpeded by man, picking up the Willamette, the Sandy, the Lewis, the Kalama, the Cowlitz, the Clatskanie and hundreds of smaller waterways on its final ride to the Pacific. The river below me is far different in appearance from the river an idealistic Franklin D. Roosevelt stared at while he chugged through the Columbia Gorge on a train ride in 1920. Scribbling a speech on the back of his breakfast menu—this was well before handlers scripted every breath for politicians—the young vice-presidential candidate thought about the future of this wild country, picking up where earlier dreamers had left off. In 1813, Jefferson had envisioned “a great, free and independent empire on the Columbia,” the western edge of an America he called “Nature’s nation.” FDR saw a chance for the common man to live regally within the 250,000 square miles drained by the big river. He wasn’t sure how that would come about, but he wrote that it might have something to do with “all that water running down unchecked to the sea.”
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.
“Racked and battered crags stood disorderly over all that rough waste,” he wrote. “There were no trees, nor any masses of vegetation to soften the severities of landscape. All was harsh and desolate.” He left a passage for us prophet-checkers. “The Dalles of the Columbia, upon which I was now looking, must be studied by the Yankee Dante, whenever he comes, for imagery to construct his Purgatory, if not his Inferno.”
I find the place closer to limbo than hell. By harnessing the Columbia here to send power to Southern California, the Corps of Engineers ruined a place that has been called the greatest salmon fishery on earth. At Celilo Falls, the water used to crash down in a series of gradual drops, the stairs of a giant. Hurling themselves upstream, the fish would leap one section at a time, resting in little pools.
Long after the Indians were sent to reservations, tribal fishermen continued to catch salmon at Celilo Falls, holding out at what became a sort of aboriginal Alamo. When dam building began in earnest in the 1930s, Celilo Falls was spared, at first. Pictures from the early 1950s showed half-naked natives in cowboy hats tethered to ropes as they leaned out over the crashing water with their long nets. When somebody wanted to see what the West was like, they were shown these Real Life Indians who risked their lives at a place where the river narrowed and dropped, named Le Dalle (“The Trough”) by the French. Right up to the end, in 1957, the desert daredevils pulled fish from Celilo Falls. They protested construction of the dam, of course, but were told to step aside; this was before Northwest Indian fishing rights had been upheld by the Supreme Court.
In the evening, I head for an Indian village, planning to sit in on a salmon ritual which the dipnet fisherman had told me about. I turn off the interstate that follows the Columbia and drive on a dusty road a few miles upstream from the graveyard of Celilo Falls. The desert, about twenty miles east of the green Gorge, is still and cold. About a hundred Indians have gathered for a salmon feed. Flames leap from a large firepit. Despite a sign warning against drinking alcohol, two women stagger over each other—and then fall to the ground. About thirty fish are pulled out of ice and cut into strips by several heavyset women. The fish meat is bright orange-red, full of oil and taste. One woman pinches off about two fingers’ worth and holds it up in disgust: “You go to a restaurant and order salmon. This is what they give you.”
Following the ancient recipe, they stretch fillets flat around cedar sticks and then cook them upright on thin poles placed in the ground near the fire. This keeps the juices in, while slow-cooking the fish. Some venison is cut by the men and placed on a grill. While waiting for the meal, we all eat potato chips and drink Cokes. I talk to an elder about the dam and what it did to Celilo Falls, but after a few minutes he gets angry and clouded up and can’t go on. I leave before the food is cooked.
Early morning, threading through orchards in the hills above The Dalles, I’m dazzled by the late-season d’Anjou pears. Hitchcock-shaped, with a blush of pink, they are firm and sweet and full of juice which drips down your mouth when you take a bite. The cherries are long gone, most of them off to Japan, where they sell for ten times the price they retail for here, and the apples are all picked. Water from the Columbia, piped up from the reservoir of the dam that killed Celilo Falls, keeps these trees full of vigor. Without irrigation, nothing would grow. The desert here receives about six inches of rain a year—less than Phoenix—just an hour’s drive from the hundred-inch annual rainfall in the west Cascade forests. Irrigation brings life to 7.2 million acres in the four states of the Columbia Basin. In the spring the orchards are convulsive with color, rolling rows of blossoms perfuming the desert air. In the fall, the trees are Impressionistic, bordered by the volcanoes of Mount Adams and Mount Hood. The perfect picture is broken only by the hangover of sorrow from the night before. I’m troubled by a puzzle of economics: chinook salmon were native to this area, and they are selling for ten to twelve dollars a pound this year, when you can find them. The fruit trees were brought in, and at harvest the growers practically give the crop away. If billion-dollar dams can help fruit grow in the desert and light boulevards in Los Angeles, surely salmon, which require nothing more than a river channel free of obstacles, can get some help from the geo-technicians.
By midafternoon on the third day, I’m ready to leave The Dalles. Before I go, I spend considerable time looking for the place where Winthrop recovered from smallpox, the old Fort Dalles site. I find it high on a bluff above town that still looks almost exactly as he described it. I go to the spot where he stared north to Mount Adams, his outlook soured by the desolate land below. “My heart sank within me as the landscape compelled me to be gloomy like itself,” he wrote. “Nature harmonized discordantly with my feelings, and even forced her nobler aspects to grow sternly ominous.”
The land could chill the soul just as easily as it could enlighten. Eighteen fifty-three was one of the worst years of the smallpox epidemic, which killed as much as ninety percent of the native population along the Columbia. Winthrop, suffering through three weeks of chill and fever, had a recurring dream that he’d caused the smallpox epidemic among the Indians. He must have wondered why his Yankee constitution could take the illness and the Indians could not. He hinted at the passing of orders, from the indigenous population to the New England transplants. It was not the hand of God that was at work, he concluded, but the random swing of nature.
Farther upriver: the air is drier, drained of all humidity, the land more barren. Few orchards cling to the hills of the Columbia in the hottest part of the Northwest, the northern end of the Great Basin. Less than twenty-five miles east of The Dalles, the river is pinched by the John Day Dam, a mile-long blockade across the water, the third Corps dam in less than a hundred miles. Man stands out here like asphalt in an alfalfa field. Up on the Washington bluff, a distant castle pokes in and out of view. Closer, it appears to be a mirage, a four-story stone mansion with a perfectly manicured green lawn set against the bony hills. There is no population center for miles. And yet, here’s this castle, Sam Hill’s mansion, the lawns of which are crowded with peacocks. Hill was an inspired lunatic, somewhat of a premature answer to Winthrop’s prophecy. The son-in-law of railroad baron James J. Hill, Sam bought seven thousand acres of windswept scrubland above the Columbia in 1907, intending to erect a glorious home for his wife, Mary. After twenty years, it was still unfinished, but Hill, desperate to tie his life project to royalty, convinced Queen Marie of Rumania, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, to come to America and take a train out west to his mansion, which she dedicated in a formal, black-comedic ceremony. Over the years, the mansion on the hill remained unoccupied and unfinished. People wandering through the Columbia desert would see the enormous castle and wonder, What the Sam Hill? After Hill’s death, the mansion became Maryhill Museum, home for one of the most extensive collections of sculptures by Auguste Rodin. It’s the oddest place for such a museum, but oddly fitting—through a sputtering evolution, it brought the better works of man near one of the better works of nature.
Another hundred miles upstream is the Big Bend, where the Columbia does a ninety-degree turn, flowing south through the barren home of some of the nation’s darkest nuclear secrets before heading west. Here, the Columbia picks up the Snake River, which drains most of Idaho and parts of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and Oregon. Though stapled by thirteen dams from its headwaters near Yellowstone Park to the confluence here, the Snake still has some power of menace. By the time it enters the Columbia, the Snake has carved out Hells Canyon, a slit in the earth more than eight thousand feet deep at its lowest point. The outsized landscape has inspired man to take extreme alteration measures. Egged on by merchants in the wheat towns of the Palouse, the Corps of Engineers dredged and dammed the Snake to allow passage of barge traffic all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, a Pacific port in the arid plateau.
In the vast desert here, the federal government built an instant city of fifty-five thousand during the World War II campaign to manufacture the atomic bomb. The sage and jackrabbit country around Hanford was declared a nuclear weapons reservation, an island of intrigue sealed from public view for nearly half a century. During the war, only a handful of the factory hands knew what they’d been working on. Then American planes dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and a local paper screamed out the answer: IT’S ATOMIC BOMBS! PRESIDENT TRUMAN RELEASES SECRET OF HANFORD PRODUCT. After the war the area around the Snake and Columbia confluence, once a cluster of a few hundred subsistence farmers, caught atom fever. Nine primitive nuclear reactors were built, constructed virtually overnight. In just a few years’ time, the main product of the Big Bend country went from peaches and asparagus to weapons-grade plutonium.
The Cold War was particularly prosperous. But during one 1949 experiment, the largest radioactive emissions ever documented drifted over the land here. It was kept secret for nearly forty years, while cancer deaths among young farmers and their children chilled the families of the high plateau. When documents about the emissions were finally released, they showed that people who lived downwind from the Hanford nuclear plants received doses of radiation—about 5,500 curies—ten times higher than Soviet citizens living near the scene of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, and hundreds of times greater than the 15 to 24 curies released during the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island. Perhaps twenty thousand children—because of their age, they were particularly vulnerable—were exposed to deadly levels of radiation which cause healthy cells to mutate. One fourth of the people living near the hardest-hit area have died of cancer since the 1960s.
All nine reactors are closed now—skeletons in the desert, they are frozen memorials to the infant nuclear age. Hanford, weaned on the bomb and all its by-products, is in steep decline, uncertain how to proceed in an ambiguous world. Cancer victims on the farms downwind petition the government for help, while most of their neighbors in the cities of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick ask for more nuclear-bomb-building contracts to keep their “Miracle in the Desert” from crumbling. They wonder why the market for plutonium has gone flat. News of better relations with the Soviets is greeted with glum appraisals at Rotary lunches. Neighborhoods built along Leave-It-to-Beaver dreamlines are full of For Sale signs, many pasted over by foreclosure banners. The wagons have been circled; after some controversy, students at Richland High School have voted overwhelmingly to keep as their school logo a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb blast.
“You’ve heard of a family crest,” says Marcia Cillan, the student body vice president at Richland High. “Our crest is a nuclear bomb.” Once, years earlier, at commencement day ceremonies, the Army rigged a bomb of napalm and TNT and set off a mock atomic blast, a mushroomlike explosion which shattered the windows of nearby buildings.
Hanford boosters have placed one last hope in trying to get the government to convert a half-finished commercial nuclear reactor into a tritium producer. Warren Magnuson, the retired United States Senator who directed more government contracts to the state than any other man, said such a desperation move made no sense.
“The times have changed, and we must change with them,” said Magnuson, whose influence brought highways and health centers and dams and bridges and military stations to the young Northwest during his forty-four years in Congress. He died in 1989, but he spoke for history. There are three great treasures in the Pacific Northwest, he said: Puget Sound, the Cascade Mountains and the Columbia. Each deserves respect, bordering on reverence. The desert can produce many things when watered, but nuclear bombs should not be a permanent product of the land, Magnuson said. What would Winthrop make of this nuclear-crazed community on the Columbia? A detour on the way to the Promised Land? An aberration of nature, perhaps? If so, its cycle was remarkably short: up from the dust to the City of Tomorrow, then back to the dust as the world realized the City of Tomorrow could not be trusted.
I want to see the last wild stretch of the Columbia River—the Hanford Reach, fifty-seven miles of freedom. It’s a rumor I’ve never confirmed. Because this part of the river lies within the 560-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation, it has been shielded from most of society, including the dam builders, since World War II. But with Hanford closing down, the river is coming out. I turn off a couple of lonely roads, pass Keep Out signs and fences of diminished authority, angle toward the river, and there it is: the only free-flowing stretch of the Columbia. Full of renewal, the river races through the desert here, pulling water past rust-colored cliffs and mesas untouched by irrigation or cattle grazing or roads. From the steep, eastern bank of exposed geology, I see mule deer and jack-rabbits and the ever-circling hawks. A coyote dashes from the brush, startling me. I walk along a cliff, three hundred feet above the river, and stare into a canyon with a fresh pulse, the wind in my face.
Now, down on the shoreline, I look out at the only slice of the Columbia which in any way resembles the river seen by Winthrop, and Lewis and Clark. I toss a piece of wood into the water, and it quickly disappears. Unlike the rest of the backed-up Columbia, the river here has a current of mystery and strength. Several generations of history haunt this place. On level ground next to the river is a trio of aging willows, planted for shade by homesteaders who were chased off the land when the bomb builders took over, a rough collision of two eras. Across the river, in the foreground, is a tree with nine blue herons perched on its limbs; in the background is an abandoned nuclear reactor.
Arrowheads and chipped tools from the Wanapums, who have lived in the upper Columbia for centuries, are littered on the beach of a small island separated from the shore by a shallow stretch. Undisturbed, never buried by water from the dams, the island looks as if the natives left just yesterday. They built pit houses here during the salmon season and crafted bowls and weapons while drying fish for the winter. I can still see the shelters carved into the bank of the island, and rock flakes near their encampments. Later, when I talk to a few members of the Wanapum tribe—there are only a handful left, clustered in a village upstream—they say the Hanford Reach is sacred country, full of burial sites. “I wish they would just leave it alone,” says Patrick Wyena, as he sips beer with five other Wanapums.
The graveled river bottom here, unstirred by the earth-movers, is home to the biggest natural chinook spawning ground in continental America. About half a million fish a year return to the reach to spawn and die. There is no need for multi-million-dollar hatcheries; all that these big kings need to propagate is for the Hanford Reach to stay the way it’s been. Also lurking in these depths are sturgeon. An Ice Age survivor, prehistoric in appearance and size, Columbia River sturgeon can grow to two thousand pounds or more and live for a century. When they break the surface of the water, it is as if the Loch Ness monster had arrived from Scotland.
The Corps of Engineers is moving fast to kill the salmon run and lasso the last stretch of freedom. For years they have been trying to get permission to dam the Hanford Reach, but nobody wanted the project. With that plan on hold, they are now proceeding with a scheme to gouge the river shallows of the reach for several miles, at a cost of $200 million, to benefit a few commercial interests in the upriver town of Wenatchee. The Port of Chelan dreamed up this idea and presented it to the Corps, whose members have never met a river that couldn’t be dredged, dammed or rechanneled. Never mind that most of the apples grown around Wenatchee reach their markets in no time by trucks traveling the highways; the Corps thinks it would be nice for Wenatchee to have deep-water barge traffic. Typically, that’s the way the Corps works: find a few Chamber of Commerce locals to put forth a pipe dream, then send the bill to the rest of the nation. The Army engineers estimate a half-million cubic yards of river bottom would have to be dredged, producing enough sediment to fill a football field to three hundred feet deep. Of course, they recognize that chiseling the reach into an industrial waterway would kill the last great natural salmon spawning ground on the Columbia and forever alter the final wild stretch. But the Corps says the natural salmon run could be replaced by an artificial one, created by manmade spawning channels.
With the rest of the Columbia already shackled, the Corps is running out of projects; hundreds of engineers are sitting around offices in the Northwest with no rivers to dam. “We are in the business of building dams and dredging channels,” says Noel Gilbrough, the Corps project manager. “This is the last place on the Columbia where you could put a dam. But, we are having some trouble selling this project.”
Now, the sky turns on me; thunderheads collide and dump ice marbles of hail. I look for shelter, but there is no place to duck out of the squall. If I were across the river, I could huddle under the roof of the abandoned nuclear reactor, a frightening thought. I trudge back uphill, drenched, and then continue upriver again. As I head toward Grand Coulee Dam—passing Priest Rapids Dam, Wanapum Dam, Rock Island Dam, Rocky Reach Dam, Wells Dam, Chief Joseph Dam—the Corps is dealt a stunning blow by Congress. The news out of Washington, D.C., is that the Hanford Reach has been placed off limits to the earth-movers for a three-year period of study to determine if it should receive permanent protection under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. When I hear the news I stop my car near a place called Dry Falls, site of the biggest waterfall the world has ever known, a prehistoric cataract forty times mightier than Niagara. Today, no water drops from this red-tinged basalt wall, four hundred feet high and nearly four miles across. A former channel of the Columbia, it has been dry for nearly a thousand years. When an ice dam broke at Lake Missoula eighteen thousand years ago, a mountain of water was unleashed over the Columbia Plateau, cutting channels into the desert floor and flooding the lower Columbia valley from the Snake confluence to the ocean. The surging water of that flood comprised ten times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world today. When the water receded, the Columbia was a new river with at least three new arms: its main channel, the Moses Coulee, and the Grand Coulee, which included Dry Falls. In time, the water retreated to the original path of the river, leaving behind coulees up to 1,600 feet deep in parts.
Now the sky is heavy with darkness and fresh thunderheads. A wicked wind ricochets through the Dry Falls coulee. Alone as I stand with this trough of the ages, the narrative lines come through: without help, the earth can still tell a good story.
Like a tooth drilled clean and packed with silver, the Grand Coulee is full of water again, a twenty-seven-mile-long irrigation reservoir. But the Moses Coulee is empty. At the upper end of the old Indian hiding grounds, where Chief Moses sheltered his band from winter winds and marauding whites, I yell into the expanse; the sound bounces against the wrinkled walls and then falls away. Down below is a ranch of hay and alfalfa and cattle, where Bob Billingsley has been trying to scratch a living from the floor of the old Columbia River channel since 1928. He is the padrone of the Moses Coulee, a rancher of high humor and wind-buffed cheeks, eighty-five years old on the afternoon that I drop into his coulee. Bob’s father homesteaded in scrubland above the Columbia in 1908, went bust, took a series of odd jobs, and then settled on a patch of bottom land in this coulee with his family. Bob knew that a geological tug-of-war had been waged in this prehistoric ditch. He found bones from the joint of an elephant, including a ball joint as big as a watermelon. He found petrified wood and Indian arrowheads. He drilled for a well in the middle of the coulee, four feet, ten, thirty, eighty, a hundred feet, and never reached clay. As far down as he could go, the soil was thick, nutrient-rich river sediment, a gift from the Pleistocene flood that carried bits and pieces of British Columbia, Montana, Idaho and Washington topsoil to this hidden coulee. His spring would only provide enough water for a hundred acres, so he figured out a way to back up the late winter floods and save the water for release over the summer. He hired Indians to work the fields with him, including a stepson of Chief Moses. They became fast friends, the Indian telling Billingsley about the horse races they used to have in the coulee and Billingsley giving him tips on how to deal with the government.
The coulee is lifeless in the low end where it meets the Columbia—a deep, wide gorge that looks like a Martian roadside park. At the high end is the Billingsley ranch, alive with galloping horses and orchards and cattle and grandkids.
Every day, Billingsley rises with the sun, puts a pinch of tobacco in his cheek, and works outside till the lunch hour. Then he kicks back, plays with his grandkids, helps his wife, Helen. Reads. Life is good in the Moses Coulee. He has a satellite dish out back which brings him 127 channels of television; when that bores him, he goes to his library of memories. He remembers the Woody Guthrie anthems to the Columbia—the socialist folksinger wrote twenty-six songs in twenty-six days of work for the Bonneville Power Administration—and all the Dust Bowl farmers and teachers and laborers who came to the desert of Central Washington because land was nearly free and water was just as cheap. “Most of these guys, they lasted until their sock ran dry,” says Billingsley. For twenty-five years he went without power, and then came the Grand Coulee Dam.
“The farmer deserved electricity just the same as everybody else,” he says. “What the Grand Coulee did was to make us no longer second-class citizens.”
Deep inside the bowels of the dam, the walls shake and glass rattles. The noise is not from generators; they hum along in relatively quiet fashion, their turbines capable of producing 6.4 million kilowatts of power—enough juice to run most of New York City. The sound comes from the pumping action, water racing through pipes twelve feet in diameter, going three hundred feet uphill through bedrock to the formerly dry channel of the Grand Coulee. You stand inside this fortress and realize that nothing since that Ice Age flood has so reshaped the land; the Grand Coulee is the height of man’s attempt to play God. I’m nearly six hundred river miles from the Pacific, inside one of the manmade wonders of the world. Yet, I feel a vague uneasiness. The most extensive hydroelectric power system ever built is on the upper part of this river. Water from the dams painted the desert green, lit up the inside of Indian shacks on the Columbia Plateau and dirt-farmer cabins in the Okanogan. With runoff under control, the dams gave a degree of assurance that the floods of spring would no longer wipe whole towns off the map. But this triumph of technology marked a surrender for the laws of the earth.
Conceived in a populist flurry as the largest of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the Grand Coulee took eight years to build and provided a retort to a long-ago speech of Daniel Webster, who had said, “What do we want of this vast, worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or these great mountain ranges?” The idea for the dam was born in the coffee-table chit-chat of a country lawyer, Billy Clapp, and a young prospector, Paul Donaldson, who had just returned from a luckless reconnaissance in the dry coulee. Looking for news in the summer of 1918, a reporter from the Wenatchee World promoted their bull-session with an eight-column headline across the top of the front page, a description of the unharnessed power of the Columbia: TWO MILLION WILD HORSES. Following Roosevelt’s election in 1932, the project gained favor as The People’s Dam, an engine for agriculture and cheap power. In Murray Morgan’s book, The Dam, he remembers what a fellow student at the University of Washington had told him when Grand Coulee was under construction. “If our generation has anything good to offer history, it’s that dam. It’s going to be our working pyramid.”
Here on the Columbia Plateau, with the advent of the biggest public-works project ever undertaken, Roosevelt thought he had found the Dust Bowl solution. A half-million farmers would live near the lonely coulees within a generation’s time, he predicted. With the Columbia set to provide half as much electricity as was generated by the rest of the country, industrial leaders made plans to bring manufacturing plants to its banks. But Roosevelt said he wanted farmers, not factories; he worried that smokestacks would sprout from the nutrients of cheap electricity, making the West too much like the East.
“There are many sections of the country where land has run out or been put to the wrong kind of use,” he said during a trip to Grand Coulee in 1934. “Out here you have not just space, you have space that can be used by human beings—a wonderful land—a land of opportunity.”
In scale and audacity, the dam was astonishing; engineers were going to anchor a mile-long wall of concrete in bedrock at the bottom of a steep canyon in the Columbia. They would excavate 45 million cubic yards of dirt and rock, and pour 24 million tons of concrete. Among the few dams in the Northwest not built by the Corps of Engineers, the Grand Coulee was the work of the Bureau of Reclamation. When completed, it was a mile across at the top, forty-six stories high, and heralded as the biggest thing ever built by man. The dam backed up the river for 151 miles, creating a lake with 600 miles of shoreline.
At the dam’s dedication in 1941, Roosevelt said Grand Coulee would open the world to people who had been beat up by the elements, abused by the rich and plagued by poor luck. But a few months after it opened, Grand Coulee became the instrument of war. Suddenly, the country needed to build sixty thousand planes a year, made of aluminum, smelted by power from Columbia River water, and it needed to build ships—big ones—from the same power source. Near the end of the war, America needed to build an atomic bomb, whose plutonium was manufactured on the banks of the Columbia. Power from the Grand Coulee was used to break uranium into radioactive subelements to produce that plutonium. By war’s end, only a handful of farms were drawing water from the Columbia’s greatest dam. True, toasters in desert homes were warming bread with Grand Coulee juice, and Washington had the cheapest electrical rates of any state in the country, but most of that power for the people was being used by Reynolds Aluminum in Longview and Alcoa in Vancouver and Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane and Tacoma.
The Dust Bowl solution, the last gasp of agrarian idealism, had brought Industrial Age factories to the Northwest. Roosevelt didn’t fully anticipate the vast shift from country to city that was underway. A hundred years ago, forty-three percent of all Americans lived on farms; today, less than four percent do. In 1939, there was not a single aluminum plant in the Northwest; ten years later nearly half of all the nation’s aluminum was produced in an area served by two Columbia River dams. In 1935 there were eighty-five thousand individual farms in the state of Washington; thirty years later, there were only forty thousand. Many of the refugees from the fallow land of the interior ended up as factory hands.
Upstream, the Grand Coulee raised the river level more than three hundred feet, forcing the evacuation of three thousand people. Ten towns were buried by water. They were replaced by places with such names as Electric City and Elmore, futuristic villages that now look as dated as 1950s sci-fi films. The worst damage from the dam was to the upper Columbia River salmon. King salmon are among the most durable creatures of nature, strong-willed and singleminded when the spawning urge sends them upriver, but no fish can scale a five-hundred-foot-high dam. More than a thousand miles of spawning grounds were lost forever.
I’m looking for someone who can tell me what the upper Columbia used to be like before the Grand Coulee Dam changed the personality of this place where the desert gives way to gentle mountains and forests of tall ponderosa pine. Everybody says talk to Martin Louie. So I follow a road northeast of the dam until it dead-ends among rusted cars clustered in the “new” community of Inchelium. The old one is under water. I’m directed to the small, tattered trailer of Martin Louie. When I enter at midday, I find a tiny man lying on a cot, covered with flies. He wakes, lights a cigarette, and looks around as if he’s lost. He has no teeth, and his lungs can barely hold a breath. He lives in squalor, an outhouse-size home in the dust along the banks of Roosevelt Lake, the 151-mile reservoir that is the upper end of the Columbia in Washington.
Louie can’t remember how old he is; and that may be because he nips from a bottle more often than he should and is never without a cigarette. His dark face contrasts with the snow-white hair atop his head, a crew cut. Back issues of True Detective are piled up near his cot. On the wall is a brown picture of Inchelium before the flood. I introduce myself. Louie stares at me for a few minutes, silent.
“You’re not another one of those Mormons?” he says at last. “ ’Cause if you are, you can leave right now.”
“No, no, I’m not a missionary.”
“What d’you want, then?”
“I want to know what it was like.”
“You can’t know.”
Louie is a member of the Lakes Band of Indians, a small tribe which lived near the present Canadian border. In the summer and fall they pulled salmon from Kettle Falls, a Columbia River fishery second only to The Dalles in bounty. Twice in the last century, the Lakes people were decimated by smallpox. When Louie was born, sometime around the dawn of the twentieth century, they were recovering somewhat. They still had Kettle Falls, and as long as the water tumbled down those cliffs, the salmon would be easy to catch. Louie attended two schools, he says: white school and Indian. At white school, he learned about “the only two books you haven’t got a chance against: the Bible and the law book.” At Indian school, a classroom without walls, he learned about the land.
“The white creator lives up there. The Indian creator lives all around. You see the Indian creator every day, every night. You see him in the day, in the sun, and at night, in his brother the moon. But most of all you see him in that water. That river. It’s never emptied out yet. It controls all life. It controls everything. The Indians call that Father.”
Until the dam went up, Louie lived the life his ancestors had lived, a gentle routine on the upper Columbia. When the reservations were set up, the Indians were promised access to their salmon runs forever in a treaty backed by one of the two books which Louie is afraid of. At the dedication of the Grand Coulee Dam, much was made of the fact that the first electricity to go out was used to power the new washing machine of an Indian woman who lived not far from Louie. But she didn’t need a washing machine as much as she needed a free river. When the dam went up, the fish stopped returning, and Louie lost his livelihood and his independence. When the Columbia became Lake Roosevelt, he was a man who didn’t know his way around. He became a seasonal worker, a serf for somebody else. Now, in the last years of life, he is drowning in bitterness.
“When I want salmon now, you know what I have to do? I have to travel up to the Fraser River to buy it. And—here.…” He eases himself up, bites on the cigarette. “… I’ll show you what I can buy for twenty dollars.” He opens the door of a small refrigerator, the outside paint chipped away, and pulls out a small, heavily wrapped packet. He strips away the layers until he comes to a few pieces of smoked salmon. “This.”
Kettle Falls, the salmon mother lode south of the Canadian border not far from Louie’s home, is just another section of smooth water now. It stirs no sense of awe or aesthetic impulse unless the imagination goes to work. The Columbia used to fall thirty-three feet in less than half a mile here. I find an odd-looking rock on a bluff above the graveyard of the falls. It’s a boulder full of slash marks, apparently a whetstone used by generations of Indians to sharpen their spear points. I close my eyes and imagine healthy men pulling salmon from the falls. I open my eyes and see the glass of a reservoir and the dying face of Martin Louie. For ten thousand years or more, people lived with the wind-tossed pines and turbulent river and never went without. When the river was dammed, it brought prosperity to one band of humans while forcing another to go hungry. I’ve seen the grapes and apples and wheat that grow in the new desert, but I will never experience Celilo or Kettle falls. I paid for a year’s worth of college tuition by working the caldrons of the Kaiser Aluminum plant one summer, a factory powered by cheap hydroelectric energy, but my education about the once-free Columbia must come secondhand, from the soured memories of people like Martin Louie.
Standing above the Columbia today, the river that carries water from all parts of the Pacific Northwest to the ocean, uniting deserts and glaciers, forests and farmland, cities and sage country, I’m troubled by this paradox. Winthrop thought the land here would change a man, not the other way around; still, at the ebb of the twentieth century, we have yet to prove him entirely wrong.