ROBERT GRAY’S RIVERROBERT GRAY’S RIVER

The Columbia River spent a long time not being “discovered” by Europeans. Fabled for many years as the speculative River Oregon, its fierce tidal bar kept would-be penetrants at sea. In 1775 the Spanish mariner Bruno de Heceta sailed past, took one look at the bar, and decided to give it a miss. He called the southern bluff Cabo Frondoso for its lush vegetation; the northern, Cabo San Roque; and the forbidding river mouth, Entrada de Ezeda. Mapmakers in Madrid inferred a river from his charts but dropped his name, dubbing it Rio San Roque.

Next came Captain James Cook. Seeking a Northwest Passage at the sixty-fifth parallel or higher, he stuck to his orders not to detour into any bays or rivers south of there, and sailed right by in 1778. The next British seafarer in the region, Captain John Meares, was a skeptic regarding the putative St. Roc River. In 1788, he weighed anchor off the bar, examined it, and concluded there was no river. He renamed Cabo San Roque as Cape Disappointment and the estuary, Deception Bay.

George Vancouver, too, perhaps wishing to avoid disappointment and deception, sailed clear past the river mouth in Discovery in 1792. He reported that no safe harbor or major river existed between Cape Mendocino in northern California and Cape Flattery in northern Washington. Everyone knows Vancouver, the noted British explorer, for the great Canadian city and island in British Columbia that bear his name. Less well known is Vancouver, Washington—a twin city of Portland, Oregon, across the Columbia River from it. But if Vancouver ignored the Columbia, how came his name to be applied to a point, then a fort, finally a city some ninety miles upstream from the river’s mouth in Washington State?

It happened because Captain Vancouver had a change of mind and dispatched Lieutenant Broughton in HMS Chatham to chart and explore the Columbia. Broughton did so, naming many features along the lower stretches of the river, including Mount Hood and Point Vancouver. So it is that we might well have a Vancouver River to further confuse Northwest geography, already confounded by Vancouver, Canada, and Vancouver, U.S.A. In fact, had the Englishman Broughton been the first to sail up the Columbia, there might well be no Vancouver, U.S.A.—for Washington and Oregon and perhaps a good deal more might have become provinces of Canada.

But Vancouver’s man was not the first. In between Vancouver’s initial miss and second shot, one Robert Gray of New England slid over the bar and “discovered” the Columbia River, in May of 1792. Captain Robert Gray, a Rhode Islander, skippered the ship Columbia Rediviva for a Boston trading company owned by Messrs. Barrell and Bullfinch. He plied Northwest waters in search of sea-otter skins, for which he traded copper to the Indians. He took the furs to China to trade for goods to be returned to his employers in Boston, becoming along the way the first American mariner to circumnavigate the globe. On the way, he accepted the challenge of the thundering bar and found “a noble river,” which he named for his ship. Thus were George Vancouver’s hopes of first finding such a river and claiming its territories for the Crown frustrated by a Yankee fur trader.

As it happened, Columbia and Discovery met on the high seas off the north Washington coast after Gray’s initial failure to reach the river. His negative report to Vancouver reinforced the British captain’s skepticism. Nine days later, on May 11, 1792, Gray’s thirty-seventh birthday, he tried again and succeeded in crossing the treacherous bar. Eight or nine days elapsed as Gray traded and at one point clashed with the Indians of the Lower Columbia. The ship went aground in a muddy bay on the north shore, washed off with the tide, and sailed in stages back downstream. Dramatically, Gray encountered Vancouver again at the Spanish settlement on Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, the following September. He confided his discovery to the nonplussed Vancouver. Soon thereafter, Vancouver sailed to the mouth, armed with Gray’s crude chart. Unwilling to risk Discovery on the bar, he sent Broughton in the lighter Chatham across. Broughton proceeded to claim all the lands drained by the river for the King and later claims were made that Gray never really entered the river, having remained within the tidal mouth. But the commissions that decided imperial matters disallowed Vancouver’s priority, and the border was fixed at forty-nine degrees. An exception was made for Vancouver Island, the Canadian boundary swooping down and out the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca so as to include the big island in the Commonwealth. But if Vancouver got his island, Robert Gray kept his river.

So far, one might think that the title of this chapter refers to the Columbia. Indeed, for the crucial crossing into it Gray (had he been a less modest man) might well have named the big river after himself. As it happened, another river bears Captain Gray’s name, a much lesser stream yet one not without its charm and interest. For that shallow-water place where the Columbia temporarily went aground received the name Gray’s Bay; and subsequently, someone called the larger of two rivers flowing into it Gray’s River. This river’s outlet clearly shows on Gray’s rough chart, and it is here that the American captain seems to have gone ashore briefly during his adventure up the Columbia. So the name fits, and it sticks. It is that little river that I write about now.

One of its chief blessings for me is its obscurity; still it is a pity in a way that more people don’t know Robert Gray’s river. It is worth knowing. Headwaters lost in foggy canyons, outflow in an estuarine bay of the Columbia, Gray’s River furnishes a metaphor for the region. Its slopes and ravines logged, its riffles fished, its fertile floodplains farmed, and its tidal reaches once plied by tall ships and packet steamers, Gray’s River flows like the lifeblood of the community that bears its name, where I live.

From the village of Gray’s River, one looks northwesterly into the higher slopes of the Willapa Hills. There the stream arises, near the headwaters of the Chehalis and Willapa rivers. The hundred inches or so of rainfall allocated to the hills sorts itself into these three and other basins with the help of the Gray’s River Divide, Huckleberry Ridge, Long Ridge, and other landforms. You can’t reach the very sources without scrambling across acres of clearcuts well beyond the logging roads. But by driving up onto the Divide on a weekend, when the log trucks are idle, you can get a look at the upper stretches and see about where they come from. First, it is helpful to look at a map.

When I outline Gray’s River, its forks and tribs in yellow on a detailed map, I get a dendritic pattern. More than an elm, it resembles some hedgerow shrub left untended. A squiggly brier bush of a river, its branches bend at the least contortion of the land. I have made no attempt to calculate the length of the many watercourses making up the pattern of the whole. But in the Wahkiakum County Comprehensive Plan, I read that the Gray’s River basin incorporates 124 square miles of land, or 79,400 acres. A great deal of rain falls on that much land in a year, and it is the river’s job—and that of all its tributaries—to move the runoff down to the bay.

There seem to be three main trunks: a discrete, short West Fork, running up past a salmon hatchery to the high slopes of rugged K. O. Peak; an even more distinct South Fork, flowing out of the east and separated from the other rivers of Wahkiakum County by the southern arm of the Gray’s River Divide; and a main branch running more or less north-south through the center of the Willapa Hills. Long Ridge splits it into the East and North forks, while the northern Gray’s River Divide keeps it out of the Willapa River watershed. Once more I am struck by the chance nature of uplift and erosion in determining a water drop’s destination: at various points less than a mile separates the West Fork from the Naselle River; the North Fork from the Willapa; the East Fork from the Chehalis; and the South Fork from the Elochoman.

Since I have been living in Willapa, I have explored twigs, branches, and trunk of this scraggly water-tree, on foot, by canoe, and on logging roads by auto. The logging roads penetrate almost every stream’s upper parts, giving rough, rocky access to the backwoods, although often there are no woods when you get there. Let us begin at the crest of the Gray’s River Divide, northern version, and descend with the river to its languid outlet in Gray’s Bay.

Remember that the Willapas are a range of ridges and ravines. On the roof of the range, the rivers drop out of the heads of ravines as mere rivulets. Since the Divide supports no permanent or even winter-long snowcap, these rivulets arise from springs and swell with precipitation. But at their very outset, they are as likely to be quick, tiny waterfalls down the slopes of stony seeps as sluggish puddles issuing from mossy crotches way up the steep ravines. You would scarcely recognize a river in these high-level drips.

Surprisingly soon, real streams collect from the numerous streamlets, giving mapmakers something to call the river. These channels quickly gain a yard or two in width and a foot or two in depth (in the deeper holes, in winter) as they pierce the salmonberry thickets of the high, steep slopes. Then as they reach the greater folds they find one another and coalesce into creeks—Cabin Creek, Alder Creek, Blaney Creek, Beaver Creek—mostly permanent streams that tumble over their stones as if they can’t wait to reach the gathering stem of the river itself.

When they do, it’s already a river, ready to take on reinforcements. At a point just eight or ten miles downstream of the highest headwaters, after the North and East forks have met and decided to team up but before recruitment of the South and West forks, Gray’s River already spans twenty or thirty feet. Though broad, it runs fast and shallow like the upper Wye on the English-Welsh border, with a constant whooshing sound that reminds me of the before-storm voice of the wind on the High Line Canal in Colorado.

Making such comparisons, I am struck by how we—or I—always tend to do so: this place reminds me of that place, and that one of this. How, then, is one to appreciate a place on its own merits? Perhaps we do this out of a wish to combine all pretty-good places into a perfect place in our minds. For example, the Wye has charming villages and inns and a vast bookstore in a ruined castle, but lacks wildness, tangle, and bears. The High Line Canal possesses the sweet associations of youth when first on its own in the out-of-doors, and the sweeter scent of the gray willows and green cottonwoods, but its scene bears no relief, no up and down. And here is Gray’s River—wild, all up and down, the possibility of bears. But there is no soft human touch of hedgerow, stone wall, or village, as along the Wye; no innocence of view such as a seven-year-old might possess beside a prairie ditch in 1954. The human touch comes in clearcuts, which do away with any innocence at all.

The valley widens a little between the hills, and here the scene is one of beauty if you look at the river and its banksides alone. Alders and maples line the shores, grassy banks run between. A great mossy maple overhangs the broad, open river, dripping licorice ferns off its moss-furred branches in bright green plumes. In the stream, a pair of dippers bobs on mossy stones and jabs the eddies for food.

Then you look up and see the savaged steep mountains all around. Steep, steep slopes have all been clearcut and have eroded desperately. Some of the slopes have been replanted, and the winter huckleberry’s red contrasts nicely with the soft green of the ranks of young conifers. But you wonder, what chance for a big forest ever again on these slipping, eroded slopes? And what of the river life, as that soil rushes downstream? Without forgetting these things and their lessons, you must temporarily edit them, if you are to enjoy the remaining beauty of the basin.

Now the river passes its halfway point in terms of elevation. Beginning at around two thousand feet, ending at sea level, Gray’s never knows the three-mile drop of a Platte or the two-mile plummet of a Rainier glacial outpouring. The cutting power of a river is determined by its gradient. The Gray’s may not arise at great height, but it is also not very long. Its gradient, therefore, remains considerable until it reaches its floodplain. This river cuts out the hills’ features still.

Now the South Fork comes in from the east, and the collective river rounds the flank of the southern embodiment of the Gray’s River Divide. We cross a bridge deep in second-growth forest but still high above the river. The clear-cuts have retreated upslope and can be edited with less obvious effort. The river shows its gradient as it tumbles and roils over the moss-softened, river-rounded stones of its bed. Here the water runs black and green and white-black where it pulls deeply down its course, white where it strikes stones and flashes back on itself, green where emerald algae show through as streamers in the flow.

One imagines the powerful salmon working their way against that strong current, showering through the water-flashes, sliding off the seaweeds. Dark, deep pools hang on the lee sides of boulders, where slide-tired salmon might rest before the next upward plunge. Anglers know this and find their way somehow, down through alder brake and spruce fence to the rocky shores. The river here almost has a roof, made of branches hanging over the flow, all festooned with club mosses and long chartreuse lichens that sometimes reach the water and flow along with it. When I worked my way down into this true mountain gorge, I found splash-pools inhabited by newts and frogs, caddis flies and water striders. All was green wilderness and rushing water and whistling dippers, and the logging beyond could be forgotten.

I used to imagine that no one knew the looks of the whitewater stretch below, unless it were some intrepid kayaker. A naive, ironic assumption, that: it’s the very part the Public Utility District has proposed damming for hydro-power. The motives, to lower rates, gain local control over power production, and get out of the Bonneville Power Administration’s nuclear grid, are noble ones. But for a river to escape unimpounded this long only to be dammed in its best stretch at this late date would be more than regrettable. The politics, power surplus, conflicts with fisheries, and additional permit hurdles will probably prevent any dam on the Gray’s. I know I, for one, would fight it.

Each of the bigger rivers of these hills has wild miles of green gorge walls and blue water-scooped holes. On the Upper Naselle, I like to look down on a suspension foot-bridge between two old homesteads, where the river tumbles below in white splashes. A little farther up, turquoise trout-waters carve sandstone bedrock into shell shapes beneath miraculously uncut old-growth spruces. And farther up yet, a big, cool eddy known as the Lahti Hole boils darkly beneath a wall of ferns. Salmon Creek, between the Naselle and the Gray’s, has a hidden falls beside it that no one would see who did not prowl the hills for timber, game, or visions.

Anyone, however, can drive up the Fossil Creek Road to the bridge I speak of on the Gray’s and admire the surprising scene of a briefly wild river in the tame Willapa Hills. The new bridge is concrete, with low sides—evidently, log trucks don’t need guardrails. But the old bridge, or what is left of it, will leave an impression on the visitor as memorable as the river itself. The span itself is long gone. But its buttresses remain, and they are amazing: seven-layer log sandwiches of old-growth timber jammed into the bank so as to raise the crossing to the level of the canyon walls. Two huge logs lie perpendicular to the river, then three at right angles to the first layer, in a gargantuan crosshatch repeated again and again, with earth stuffed in between to make a solid foundation. Seventeen Brobdingnagian Lincoln Logs in all, Douglas-firs measuring up to five feet in diameter. They give the least hint of the size and abundance of the trees that once were. In their architectural entombment, these bridge abutments preserve some of the few logs from the first cut to survive anywhere. Perhaps they will be the petrified forests of the future.

From the road, below the bridge, the river comes into view from time to time. Without quite falling or cascading, it drops several hundred feet in a series of downhill swings. Fossil Creek pours in from the east. The name refers to a relative abundance of paleontological relics in the shaly outcrops broken by the road and its borrow pits. Denizens of quiet waters, these include clams and snails in shale beds and crabs in concretions. The shoreline orientation of these communities, some tens of millions of years old, shows up in the maplelike leaves interbedded with the marine invertebrates. If the presence of marine crabs and clams in the hills seems outrageous, consider that sea level lies today just a short distance down the road. And if maple leaves and sea snails seem strange fossil-bed fellows, carry on with me in this vicarious voyage downriver.

The road leaves the mountains and strikes the valley. Here we leave it and continue on the river itself. Having lost most of its elevation by the time it joins the West Fork, the river too leaves the road. It bubbles past a point where the water supply for the town of Gray’s River is drawn off, a well bored into the bedrock beneath the river. Then comes a big gravel bar known as Gorley’s Beach, the starting point for the annual event known as the “Gray’s River Not-Quite-White Water River Run.” Founded in 1969 by Phillip Raistakka, the race covers the final five miles of the river above its tidal reach. Classes include every sort of vessel from kayaks and canoes through inflatables and rowboats to anything that floats.

After years of watching from my veranda and knowing only bits of that stretch of river alongside of which I reside, I entered the one-man canoe class last June 16. Manhandling my eighteen-foot Oldtown fiberglass canoe, Ms. Wahkiakum, into the water at Gorley’s Beach, I took off among an armada of “Jaws” rafts, bathtubs, and innertube creations. The current, fresh from the rains of a gray month of May, took us away. Here is what I saw.

Bucolic in the extreme, the river passed first between soft green banks lined with alders trailing lichen tresses, buttercups speckling the meadows at their feet. Daisy-spattered pastures ran down to the river to drink along with the scattered herds of Holsteins they nourished. Such a scene dulled me into an unwatchful state when I noticed other craft going ashore and people portaging. The reason: an acute river curve with a proper rapid going into it and a great, swirling rush coming out—a patch of quite white water! A bystander positioned to pull out dunkees poised himself, as watchers shouted phrases of mixed encouragement and dire prediction of imminent capsize. I took the curve, cut hard into the eddy, and made it around right side up. None of the rest of the run proved quite so white as that, but I kept alert for further instances of false advertising just the same.

The river leveled and meandered now between family groups on the strand and lively watchers on the highway bridge before entering another quiet stretch that might have been drawn from any pastoral country in any century. A fisherman’s shack stood on the shore beneath ancient alders. A long rope hung from a moss-matted maple on the opposite shore, for a different kind of play. The rope indicated a deep hole for swingers and swimmers, but on my side I could see gravel and then dragged keel. I had to climb out and pull the canoe, and then I knew I’d been right never to attempt the river run during a normal low-water June.

Thankful for once for the rainy month of May just past, I shoved off into the current again and soon overtook my neighbor Joel Fitts. The big, jovial dairy farmer skippered a raft covered with 4-H kids as thick as mice on a mousetrap in a flooded basement. Evidently drinking beer and making people wet are as much a part of the river run as running the river. Joel’s was one of the few “dry” vessels on the run. But his frisky lot wouldn’t let me get by dry, and they splashed until I dripped. I swore revenge.

Again I had to tow the craft as I came in sight of the long, gray covered bridge—the last in Washington and a daily fixture in my life. Then there I was, afloat beneath it, and in sight of my own house on the hill above. How many times I had watched the water flow beneath that bridge, watched boaters, logs in flood, mergansers in the fall, or just the glitters of the river, from my porch or bedroom window! Now, for the first time, I was looking back up at the old white house, myself a part of the river flowing.

The next section, familiar to me on foot, I had to myself. Spotted sandpipers skittered and piped over the sandbars. A belted kingfisher cut across like a blue rattle thrown in anger. Out of a moss-capped stump sprouted a bouquet of spring beauty, and from the foot of a silted piling a particularly dense spray of goatsbeard grew, French vanilla against the green-black bank. Red, soft soil strata lay behind it, as poorly lithified as last week’s pancakes still on the platter. The thought that I was likely the only boater to notice all these features struck me as supercilious; then, on reflection, only realistic.

But the big groups of onlookers splayed on lawn chairs and football blankets on Torppa’s and Badger’s beaches—each few clustered around a cooler, more people together than one ever sees in Gray’s River or even supposes to reside there—hailed me in friendly fashion. They also roared when the wind came up, caught my unballasted bow like a sail, and swung me round 180 degrees from the finish line: the better to watch the wildflowers, I figured, but it was hard work getting pointed downstream again. Rounding a rich meadow bank beside old rotted pilings, I enjoyed the pleasant sensation of a delinquent pesticide odor being overwhelmed by the sweet scent of a copse of wild roses.

Now I swung around a section of loop that I’d frequently run, walked, cycled, or driven. It brought me to the last bridge of the course. A four-man canoe in front of me attracted most of a volley of water balloons launched from the high span, but I caught two between the shoulder blades. The river-run crowd drinks hard, plays hard, and aims to maim. Perhaps it had inflicted the damage that led to the floundering of a raft of Coast Guardsmen wearing bright red survival suits. I passed them pulling one another out of the last deep serpentine of the stream before it enters the hamlet of Gray’s River. Here the flow becomes tidal, and here the river run ends. The race was run in one hour and twenty-six minutes. I won my class, which I learned had been canceled for want of entries.

Loath to leave the river as the sea mist fled and the sun came out, I basked across the stern with my feet up on the gunnels and had my one beer, saved until now. One of the most abstemious men on the river, I watched in pleasurable repose as the motley flotilla, or word of its sinking, came in. As I floated in the boat basin, beneath banks once graced by stores, a hotel, and a whitewashed, steepled church, a noisy, beery crowd celebrated on the deck of the tavern above. Such changes this river has seen! A culture come and largely gone in the space of a century. Where once packet steamers arrived daily from Astoria and a hundred fine wooden craft might gather for a big event, rubber rafts and Bud are the best we can do today. There is life in the lowlands yet, but the heyday is done. The river silts up and could no more carry a steamer than a submarine, should steamers still exist and decide to call on the wharf once again. The river run is the only time that more than a boat or two might be seen together here any longer, except when the quirky smelt run up Gray’s River of a rare spring such as this just past.

Watching the brief ceremony, I thought about the mortality of towns and rivers. Here is a community where, I am often told, “there’s a heck of a lot of history.” It’s true; a century plus has passed since the first settler, a man named Walker, came. That time has seen a great richness of events, endeavors, and accomplishments in Gray’s River. But what is left now is mostly just that—a lot of history. The richness that remains lies in survivors, stories, and a soft acceptance of change. And in the river—which, though mortal like towns, may flow a good deal longer than any of us will be here to see.

At last Joel’s raft arrived. Eager to return the favor of the thorough wetting I’d received, I leapt onto the raft and attempted to shove Joel overboard. But my broadside failed: I merely bounced off the massive man into the river myself. Later I sneaked back with a bucket and evened the score. Bob Torppa, county commissioner, finish-line judge, and timer, ruled it a draw and we all repaired to the Grange Hall for awards.

So this is the peopled stretch of the river. Farms, barns, houses, bridges, a very small town consisting of a café, a boarded-up blacksmith shop, a church or two, the post office, gas station, fire station, a handful of homes, the Grange Hall, and the tavern busting out with river-run revelers—that’s about it. And this is downtown: downstream, the action thins out, and the shore shows many gray, old homesteads rotting down to nothing, in between pastures, woods, and the few still-occupied farmhouses.

Still, these last few miles of Gray’s River, as it rises and falls to the tidal moods of the Columbia, are among its most attractive. Unlike the river-run course, paddled just that once on my part, the waters of the lower reach have parted before my canoe many times. A mile or two below the Gray’s River townsite lies an even sparser village. Rosburg claims a store, an attractive brick-and-clapboard school, a cemetery, a tidy dairy farm, and a village hall. Its post office serves a small and dispersed population from Rosburg to Eden Valley to Pillar Rock. Here a gracefully arched white timber bridge, which carries the road to the abandoned canneries of Altoona, mirrors the curve of an old barn’s roofline. Just below the bridge may be found a convenient boat landing, and it is here that I like to put in to explore the lower Gray’s River.

Now much broader to accommodate the twice-daily overflow from below, it looks like a real river. For a while it lies like a basking blue snake looped across broad old bottoms farmed for their forage, silage, and hay. When I view such a generosity of grass, I think of some vegetarians’ argument for converting pasture to arable farmland. More protein can be made from millet or soybeans, goes the riff, than from stock fed on the same land. There may be some very sound arguments for vegetarianism, but this is not one of them—at least not for here.

I think of Britain in the Common Market, forced by the Gnomes of Brussels to convert old, flower-rich grasslands into sterile, blowing grainfields, ripping out hedgerows in the process to accommodate the big new metric combines. Loss of natural diversity and classic countryside result, and grain mountains simply replace the butter mountains. The fact is, Britain grows grass best. The same is true of these Wahkiakum valley farms—whether for burgers or milk shakes, cows grow well here on the rich green grass. The decline of the once-great local creameries cannot be blamed on the grass, that much is sure. The markets have moved. But they would not return for soybeans, that’s just as sure.

Floating downstream, we pass the doorsteps of elegant farmhouses, long since abandoned to the freshets and the mice. The backs of old barns break and ancient boats and Studebakers deliquesce into the fundament. Rot comes quick to the objects of neglect in the rain world. But not all here is death, by a long shot. We share the stream with other ripplemakers: otters, coypu, muskrats, and mink. The air overhead, almost always blue on days we choose to canoe, splits to admit the chittering forms of ospreys and eagles and gulls.

Now the ground grows waterlogged and swamps close in, and dikes appear to hold in the fields. Seal Slough glides off to the right like some mysterious bayou. Dense vegetation begins to crowd the riverbanks. Great, leaning Sitka spruces loom over the river, blue presences from some former age. The dairy cattle and their pastures came only recently to Gray’s River, but the spruces have loomed this way as long as we can imagine. Their needled branches shade the muddy recesses among tidestained roots, both holding dark secrets in nest and holt and shadow. A tatty fabric stuck up by steel pins, pale green skeins of lichen dangle from the boughs.

Beneath and between the massive spruces, native shrubbery binds the riverside rampart into a variegated wall. Lined with osier dogwood and ninebark, the banks change colors with the seasons. They snow the lush jungle with their white flower-clusters in June, then bloody the river margin with October reds. Tall orchids like white pillars clump around the landings, adding to the summer snowstorm. In the fall, their seedpods and those of irises punctuate the banks with their odd brown forms. Then next spring, the iris comes on in stacks of green spears and brilliant yellow clusters, rivaled in brightness only by the summer clumps of golden lotus that crowd the canary grass or crown the rotting old pilings, each a dense and unique island of life.

Here in the lower river, we have a feeling of great fecundity, as if we have suddenly paddled into Yucatán, or the Jurassic. I find it thrilling, this ragged prolificness, though some from tidier places see it as sinister.

Drifting with the tide or lolling against it, I wish I could spend forever in this way. But it cannot go on. Clear days often cost cool nights, and we feel like pulling out and hauling home. Or a squall comes up, whipping the river into an unwieldy waterslide and putting us ashore. Or we simply come to the end. Scarcely thirty winding miles from its sources, Gray’s River reaches Gray’s Bay. Here, the Columbia flows its broadest. Oregon rises on the other side, sandy shoals and islands sprawl in between. On the left as you enter the bay, stone-cropped cliffs run around to the cannery ghost towns upstream. On the right, a firred toe known as Miller Point separates the mouths of Gray’s and Deep rivers. Between them spreads a marshy broad of offshore shallows loosely vegetated with emergents.

Clumps of pale mauve asters daub September’s estuary, when red admirals are likely to be seen cutting over and touching down to drink. April brings a rare marsh marigold blooming yellow among the tide wrack, and another surprise—vegetating Veratrum, the lush corn lily, something (like marsh marigolds) that I expect to find in mountain heights. On one expedition, my family and I landed the canoe on a loggy point on the edge of the bay to picnic and peer behind the curtain of vegetation; the marigolds sprinkled grassy islets. Another time, my friend Fayette Krause and I kept to the canoe and crossed the reedy estuary. Two sora rails burst from their hideouts and shot across our bow, black pellets more running on water than flying and so stretched out that they clarified the idiom “thin as a rail.”

On the eastern shore of Gray’s Bay, a gray clay slope rises from the waterside road. Here, band-tailed pigeons come for minerals, giving it the name Pigeon Bluff. The dove-colored cliffs slough down onto the shore from time to time, stopping the school bus, bringing out road crews to clear the highway, and creating tomorrow’s bay-bottoms. Onto the clay fall maple leaves, which mix with mollusks in the tidal shallows. In the formation of these contemporary strata, we can imagine the fossils of the future: maples and snails together, as in the enigmatic deposits we passed upstream.

Toss in the terrestrial snails that frequent these bluffs and the alligator lizards that empty their shells, as well as a lurking sturgeon in the bay, and add an age’s uplift: you will have a mulligan stew of a fossil bed to challenge the paleontologists and delight the creationists, should their benighted numbers survive the epochs. And so, land and water creatures come together, as rivers mix, in Robert Gray’s bay. The centuries blend as well. Here it was that Gray himself came up and went aground on those same clays. The keel of Columbia scratched the mud where I pull my canoe ashore today.

A local tradition has it that Robert Gray took a lifeboat all the way up the tidal stream to the present-day townsite of Gray’s River. He would have seen no whitewashed church, no tavern, not even the great elms that today grace the lonely tidal basin. But it is pleasant to think that the town’s namesake first laid European eyes on the site of future settlement.

Available documents fail to confirm the story, nor do they quite dismiss it. They say nothing about Gray’s venturing so far upstream, but they leave the possibility open. In fact, the log of Columbia’s second voyage was lost, but the relevant portion (containing the “discovery” of the Columbia River) was copied and saved in Boston. It states only this, for the one day the Columbia lay anchored off Gray’s Bay: “May 15th. Light airs and pleasant weather; many natives from different tribes came alongside. At ten A.M., unmoored and dropped down with the tide to a better anchoring place; smiths and tradesmen constantly employed. In the afternoon, Captain Gray and Mr. Hoskins, in the jolly-boat, went on shore to take a short view of the country.”

A second, complete log of the voyage, kept by a sixteen-year-old fifth mate named John Boit, refers to a landing also: “I landed abrest the ship with Capt. Gray to view country . . . found much clear ground, fit for cultivation, with the woods mostly clear from underbrush.” Neither account records a five- or six-mile paddle upstream, so it remains conjectural whether the good Captain Gray ever graced our presumptive village with his presence after all.

We’ll probably never know for sure. But he did give us his name, and a good name it is. Some may find “Gray” a bland, or even off-putting, name with melancholic or drab connotations. Not I. I find it a soft, succoring word, pleasing to the eye and ear. It accords beautifully with the skies, waters, and mists of the region, and so has descriptive as well as historic connections. The estimable navigator even used my preferred spelling.

The Board of Geographic Names decided some time ago to omit apostrophes. The resulting “Grays River” makes no sense. “Gray River” might be best as a commemorative, since a person cannot in any case own a river; but it is less euphonious. Thus, when confronted with geographical patronyms, I stick to the classical possessive. I trust my editors will allow me this tic.

Robert Gray’s name decorates a number of other landforms and localities in the region, from Gray’s Point to Gray’s Harbor. In the case of Grayland, a coastal cranberry-growing village, who can say whether the name reflects the man or the prevailing hue of the days? I doubt that Robert relates at all to the prettiest of the Gray names, a hamlet still on the map called Gray Gables. I suspect this name came as much from the color of weathered cedar shakes as from some summer person’s love of alliteration.

The only problem with these graynames arises with Gray’s Harbor. Several days before she dared and beat the big river’s bar, the Columbia crossed a lesser bar and became the first modern craft to enter a large bay at the mouth of the Chehalis River. Here the men traded copper and nails for furs, and John Boit marveled at the nakedness of the Indians. When they left, the sailors insisted over their captain’s objections that the big bay be called Gray’s Harbor; and thus it has been ever since.

The problem is that Gray’s Harbor is much better known than Gray’s River; and although there is no post office by the name of Gray’s Harbor, mail intended for Gray’s River often finds itself misdirected to Gray’s Harbor and ends up in Aberdeen or Hoquiam. What is worse, I am often corrected about the name of my own town: “Where do you live?” “Gray’s River.” “Oh, you mean Gray’s Harbor!”

But such ignominy as we residents of Gray’s River must suffer should not be held against Robert Gray. After all, he wanted to name the feature after his employers—Bullfinch Bay would be a pleasant name, free of confusion. But I suppose Gray deserves his harbor as much as George Vancouver deserves his island and Peter Puget his Sound (which some think Gray discovered in any case). In fact, some hold that the Columbia River, Washington State, bears too much similarity to Washington, District of Columbia; and that we would be better off renaming the big river after Robert Gray.

More pertinent might be the fact that the Chinook Indians had been crossing the bar by canoe for centuries. If there were to be any other name for the Columbia, shouldn’t it be Chinookan? Besides, if the Columbia were renamed Gray’s River, what would we call this smaller stream that we have just navigated together?

Not that it would be a big issue. Gray’s Harbor or no, Gray’s River would still be mostly unknown to a great many people. There was a time when hundreds of Indian canoes ran with its advancing tide; a later time when steamers from Astoria called at the booming timber town, and the creamery cooperative served scores of dairies. Now the Indians and the boom are both gone. Only the occasional drift boat plies the Gray’s anymore, in search of steelhead, or writers in their canoes, angling for words. Except for one day a year, when the river race runs, Gray’s River flows quiet and mostly ignored.

So friends in Seattle will continue to correct me when I tell them where I live: “You mean Gray’s Harbor, surely.” And in interviews describing my home as overlooking the Gray’s River valley, copy editors will continue to change the name of my town to one that doesn’t even exist. That’s all right with me. Robert Gray’s river is worth knowing—but who needs a crowd?

In 1989, Washington State’s centennial will take place. For their part, the townspeople of Gray’s River are making a park by the river-shore and erecting a plaque to commemorate Captain Gray’s supposed visit. Three years later, we will observe the bicentenary of that storied arrival. Perhaps some small celebration will be in order. But if no one comes, that’s all right too. By all accounts a modest man, Robert Gray probably wouldn’t mind. And as for the river, I suspect it would pay little heed either way.