A Badger Called Plan A

WHETHER IT’S TRUE that Dan’l Boone when living along the lower Missouri River actually said something on the order of “A durn badger at yore feet is worser than a big ol bar off yonder,” I don’t know, but based on our experience soon after leaving Hood River, I can testify to the validity of the proposition, something I ended up proving through my casualness in getting under way. When we set out, the wind was up, gusts to forty miles an hour, maybe higher when chucking through the gorge which provides such strong, steady blowing it has become a premier location for windsurfers. Because I knew the air was usually calmer beyond the narrows, we entered the river anyway and made a jolting course among weekend boaters and darting sailboards (“barge bait”) and went down a reach too removed for the “boardheads,” but we were soon on water free of everything but funneled wind. Measured from the summits there, the forested mountains rise three to four thousand feet above the Columbia, and we beat along past places like Wind Mountain and Viento Creek, and a fine little cove now closed off by a railroad embankment and turned into misleadingly and maybe mischievously named Lake Drano, as in pioneer William Drano.

About five miles beyond it, the gorge opens to allow the river to spread out to a mile or so until it reaches another narrows just below old Cascade Lock, an artifact today but once the means of circumventing the severe rapids Bonneville Dam and its pool now cover. Nearby local toponymy goes from the waggish unflattery of Drano to, at first glance, the reckless grandiosity of Bridge of the Gods, a name surely not befitting a truss bridge, handsome as it is; but its moniker is true to Indian legend which holds that a great span of stone once ran from shore to shore, the only foot-crossing on the Columbia until the arrival of technicians. Given the landslides that occur here, some geologists believe such a bridge may have existed. Just beyond the splendid trusses, a traveler comes upon the Eyesore of the Gods, Bonneville Dam, which crosses the river in three sections separated and anchored by two islands. Recently designated a national scenic area, the gorge gets a good mocking from the heap of concrete and steel of the old spillway that appears to have been simply dragged in and stacked up like a beaver dam.

 

The Columbia, Hood River to Pacific Ocean, 178 river miles

 

Nevertheless, we were happy to see the infernal thing because it was the remaining engineered barrier between us and the Pacific. In our five thousand and some miles of crossing, we had locked through or portaged around eighty-nine major dams (and one fallen bridge), and now only a single final plug stood in our way. At last, Nikawa was about to enter a river running freely to the sea. We were a jovial lot.

I radioed our request for passage, the lockman answered we would have to wait for an upriver tow, so we went to the shore of Bradford Island and rafted beside a docked speedboat a third longer than Nikawa and capable of producing power on the order of Bonneville itself; hook up that boat engine to a transformer and you could light Portland. Still, such wasn’t enough for its skipper, a fellow not yet into his third decade, who told Pilotis that next year he would buy a bigger one. He and his two pals had broken the windshield the day before by ramming the boat through swells at a speed truckers would find almost satisfactory for a trooper-free four-lane, and he boasted of the damage as if it were a hit from a kamikaze. Said he, wearing a T-shirt imprinted up yours, “I’m going to get a boat that’ll eat this river.” He hated the dams because the runs between them were not long enough, to which I said, Without these dams your boat wouldn’t be here. He shook his head: “They oughta take them down and dredge this river all the way into Canada.”

After an hour the upstream gate opened, and out came a string of barges pushed by the Maverick, a name unlike any I’d ever seen on the towboats of the Mississippi or the Ohio where the nomenclature runs along the lines of Emily P. or Miss June Watson. As a long-time believer that names tend to become self-fulfilling, I was about to encounter further evidence. When the last barge was nearly out of the lock and the chamber almost cleared for our final descent, we heard a terrific crash and a tortured screaming of steel against steel. The tow came to a halt between the gates, and a distinct odor of putrescent garbage wafted up to us.

After some time I radioed the lockman who snapped, “We’re out of commission here!” I said to my mates, The single accident in a lock occurs at the last one, just when the salt spray of the Pacific is practically off our bow. The Reporter chided: “If only we’d been here a couple of hours earlier.” From the radio, although not addressed to us, we overheard, “Go to Plan A.” Any procedure requiring a letter designation sounded grave indeed, and we settled in for a tiresome wait, the lockman refusing to tell us any more. We sat long enough for the party boat to run out of beer; the three boys shifted to gin and, in the blast of heavy metal, began dancing on their bow and stern as they held up docking lines and strummed them like electric guitars, making lyrics of the situation:

 

We’re tied down, we’re tied up,

Locked out of Heaven and nowhere to go

’Cause we ain’t got the Power,

The Power of the Gate!

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Only the Man’s got the Power,

The Power of the Gate!

 

Our condition thus expressed by a trinity of drunken whelps who would dredge the whole Columbia, we sat, we waited, we grumbled, and wondered whether to yield and head back upriver until tomorrow, or until the day after, or until the unthinkable. Practically truckling to the lockman, I finally pried out that the Maverick, now happily on its way, had smashed loose a piece of steel that seemed to prevent the upriver gate from closing properly. I did what all pilot manuals instruct the prudent mariner to do under those circumstances: mutter and cuss. Pilotis looked, in a needlessly obvious manner, at the aft plaque: AVOID IRRITATION. It isn’t irritation, I said, it’s frustration, and that the Code of Cross-Country Pilots allows. A mere 145 miles from the ocean, we suddenly were blocked off by a blunderhead who couldn’t steer a garbage scow straight.

At the end of the third hour I started the motors to head back upstream. The Reporter, making note of my action, gave me an idea. Over the radio I said, We have aboard a staff writer from the Kansas City Star who’s doing a story on the river and locks. A pause. Then, from the tender, “Stand by,” and in the background we heard someone say, “We’ve got two pleasure boats going down. They’ll be a good test.” The lockman told us to form up, and the Reporter said, “You’re actually going to go through on a test?” There’s a rule of thumb about plans designated by letters: the farther you go into the alphabet, the more desperate they become.

We set up in front of the gates, a safe distance from the well-ginned party boat, then we answered the signal to heaven or hell and entered the lock. A day earlier, I’d spent time thinking of a bear called the Bar instead of a badger called Plan A, and now we were about to find out how much of a miscalculation such foresight was. We took our usual positions, Pilotis on the bow to handle the line to the bitt, I in the welldeck to use the boat hook against the lock ladder. The gates closed ever so slowly, and we began a prolonged descent, the sluggishness indicating the questionable conditions. I watched the wall for signs of our nearly imperceptible creep downward, worried not about the tons of water building behind us nor about some disastrous malfunction that could sweep us to destruction, but rather only that we might stop and be floated back up. Again and again I chanted to the swirling water, Go, go, go! Drain, drain, Drano! The Sirens of the North Pacific sang full in my head, and I thought how far we’d come to hear the melody of the Hesperian surf now playing not far beyond the steel gates, thought of weeks of travail to reach the country of the Golden Apples and other sweet fruits of destination.

Bonneville Lock has the shortest drop on the Columbia, sixty-four feet, but our descent was taking twice the time of one nearly two times deeper. From the bow: “This rate isn’t reassuring.” About then I realized I’d been staring at the same lump of algae on the wall for several minutes. “We’ve stopped.” Nothing happened. “What if they can’t open the gate and can’t get us back to the top?” A climb up the slimily treacherous ladder was not so fearful as the notion of Nikawa having to stay in that tomb for a day, a week, for a who-knows. We sat trapped behind the speedboat in a ringing hell of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law” and Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize”—we doing the latter, they, with the gin, the former.

Should I have portaged around? Had my insistence on keeping water beneath the hull finally vanquished us? Had I traded a couple of hundred yards of river passage for the chance to complete the voyage? Was the way open or wasn’t it? “Be glad this happened on the last lock instead of the first—then you would have had eighty-nine new worries.” No fervent Christian ever waited for the gates of heaven to open more intently than did we those dripping and tenebrous doors.

Nikawa sat on the stilling water near the bottom in the dismal dank, and we did nothing but watch the front of the chamber. “Let there be light!” But there wasn’t. “They’re up there figuring on how the bejeezis to get us out of here.” Then: a rumbling, a deep and sonorous opening, clanking and grating, chains of the entombed, valves groaning a cold, dead misery. A long white crevice no thicker than a ray of hope slid down the gates, and at the speed glaciers move to the sea, the slit opened to the width of my wrist, then my shoulders, and the bright western horizon unrolled before us. Between Nikawa and the sea, between our pulpit rail and the Pacific, ran nothing but open water. I went to the helm, started the engines, and at the signal we proceeded on. I had not felt so free, so unencumbered since the morning I walked across the brow of the USS Lake Champlain, saluted the flag for the last time, and followed the ladder down to the shore of civilian life.

Beyond the lock we entered into the tidal Columbia, the sea-level river where it exchanges depth for width and forces a navigator to use a chart. On a waterway of grand pilot marks, the finest lay just ahead, Beacon Rock, a distinctive black monolith some eight hundred feet high and shaped like a bishop’s miter; it is a hardened clog caught in the throat of a volcano long ago washed away. I’ve read, although I don’t believe it, that Beacon is, after Gibraltar, the biggest rock in the world. I do believe it’s the finest coign of vantage on a river full of them, a view achieved by a steep trail that in places clings to the sheer sides by means of steel catwalks. Lewis and Clark named Beacon Rock, and that it still exists is the work of a descendant of the first editor of their journals. To prevent a company from blasting the huge thing into road gravel, Henry Biddle bought it in 1915 and built the cliffhanger of a trail to the summit; his heirs later gave the monolith to the state, a gift Washington initially declined but then accepted when Oregon said it would be happy to include the marvel in its park system.

A river traveler cannot see all the seventy high and slender falls that drop off the deeply green and precipitous edge of the Cascades on the Oregon side, but the several that are visible, delicate white tails and veils, caused Pilotis to say, “In six miles we’ve gone from whoa! to ahh! From woes to Oz.” The cascades are stunning enough to cast doubt on their authenticity, as did a child I once overheard, whose vision of natural America perhaps owed too much to Disney falsity, ask, “They’re not real, are they?” And her mother, “I think so, sugar.”

We went on, on past Phoca Rock stranded in the middle of the wide river like a pedestrian caught between streams of five o’clock traffic, and then to port another upthrust of once hot magma, a tall phallic rise today called Rooster Rock, but to the early rivermen it was Cock Rock. The later name, while making no topographical sense, may have come about not because of any urge for decency but rather by a mere preference for alliteration over rhyme—simply a matter of poetics, wasn’t it?

On the precipice above the Top of the Cock is the celebrated view from Crown Point, the cliffs there a kind of portal between the mouth of the Columbia Gorge and the broad Willamette Valley to the west. Soon we gained the outreaches of Portland. At the bend where the Sandy empties into the big river and has built up a delta, I tried to steer a straight course and ran Nikawa onto a gritty reef that we had to pole off of. It was here, wrote William Clark, that he “arrived at the enterance of a river which appeared to Scatter over a Sand bar, the bottom of which I could See quite across and did not appear to be 4 Inches deep in any part; I attempted to wade this Stream and to my astonishment found the bottom a quick Sand, and impassable.”

Free of another encounter with history, we went on to a good dock and stepped ashore to greet the Photographer waiting for us. Away we went to nearby Troutdale on the Sandy River and into the Edgefield Inn, perhaps the most merrily eccentric in America, a hostelry once the county poor farm but now well refurbished, its walls painted by artists with phantasmagoria from nature, history, and dreamlands of the drugged—doors done as windows, pipes as trees, six-foot pigeons beating against skylights, angels in wheelchairs riding the Milky Way and plucking stars as if they were daisies. I hoped such jolly lodgings would lift a tiring crew for our run to the sea. Like smolts, we were wearing down.