The majestic westward-flowing river went without a name for millions of years, but for nearly four thousand years she was called Wimah, Big River, by the first immigrants to her shores. Since 113 years before Aino’s arrival, she has been called the Columbia.
She begins life in rills along the immense north-south crest of a complex chain of mountains starting with the Selkirks in British Columbia, which merge into the Bitterroots of Idaho and Montana and then turn into the Grand Tetons of Wyoming. The rills become rivulets that become creeks that push and flow through waterfalls and rapids, pulled on by inexorable gravity to form the Duncan, the Kootenay, the Pend Oreille, the Kettle, and the Spokane, all flowing to join her. From the eastern slopes of the Cascade mountains that divide Oregon and Washington and merge into the Sierra Nevada of California, she is met by the Okanogan, the Wenatchee, and the Yakima. The immense Snake River, formed by the Boise, the Owyhee, the Malheur, the Salmon, the Grande Ronde, and the Clearwater, merges with her from the south. From the highlands of eastern Oregon, the Umatilla, the John Day, and the Deschutes add to her strength. She cuts through the scarp lands of the great lava flood of millions of years ago forming deep canyons and passes the sunrise side of the great mountain called Klickitat by the Yakima Indians and Adams by American settlers. She alone of all rivers has the strength to force her way through the Cascade mountains, themselves pushed ever skyward by the vast power of the Pacific and Juan de Fuca Plates diving beneath the North American continent where former ocean floors are turned into hot liquid that makes the land groan and tremble with the strain, until the lava bursts forth, forming peak after snow-covered volcanic peak from Mount Silverthrone by the Straits of Georgia in British Columbia to horizon-filling Ta-koma of the Lushootseed speakers, the English-speakers’ Mount Rainier, which broods, waiting until it can again pour lava into the Salish Sea, all the way to translucent Shasta and dark-skinned Lassen, volcanoes deep into California. The river, cutting faster than these mountains rise, forms the majestic Columbia River gorge that separates the perfectly proportioned maiden Loowit and Klickitat’s angry rival for her hand, fierce Wyeast, named by the British navy, Mount Saint Helens, and Mount Hood.
Now, with the force of all her tributaries, she emerges alone from the western end of the great gorge to meet the broad north-flowing Willamette, giver of rich, black earth. Then, through forests so thick the sun does not reach their floors, flowing a mile wide, flowing two miles wide, flowing west, adding the rain-swollen waters of the Lewis and the Cowlitz Rivers, now flowing five miles wide, she reaches her mother the sea, bearing her salmon fry, depositing her silt and sand, the carved rock of her battles with the land, forming twenty-mile-long beaches on both sides of the ship-killing bar where the great river meets the surging tide, throwing up forty-foot standing waves as she shudders and bludgeons her way back to her origins, the sea, fecund with latent heat, cold to the human touch, but the source of enormous energy, feeding and growing the vast ocean storms that move ever eastward until they collide with the mountains and transform into the steady rain that nurses the rivulets, causing them to grow like sprawling children, until they are born again in the great river that cycles, cycles …
Where the great river reaches the Pacific, a vast temperate rain forest grows faster and denser than the Amazon jungle, producing trees inconceivable to Europeans and Asians before they saw for themselves. The first people to see these forests did not penetrate them. Moving ever south in the blink of time when the great glaciers sucked the shoreline thirty miles from their present position and formed a bridge for them to cross from Asia, they settled along the rising shorelines, rivers formed by the melting glaciers, taking only from the very edge of the vast forest the occasional cedar to make a canoe to help gather fish and whales from their mother, the sea, to help them build shelter against the rain and snow falling from their father, the sky. The ice passed from memory. The forest, sea, and rivers provided; time, like the salmon that every year returned without fail, cycled, cycled …
Strangers came in canoes large enough to hold small villages and took away the pelts of the sea otter and beaver, leaving iron axes, beads of wondrous color that glowed with light, and an overwhelming knowledge that those who came first had known only a tiny part of a vast world. New villages rose, made of the same cedar and fir, but the dwellings were stiff and angular and had eyes that allowed you to see through their walls. The strangers kept on cutting the cedar and fir, forming the logs into lumber and sending the lumber on the huge ships to that vast unknown world where the trees must not grow. So, too, these people without trees were a people without salmon, and the strangers caught the salmon, cut the salmon to put in metal containers, and shipped the containers, as they did the lumber, to the distant insatiable people who lived where the salmon did not. And the large ships came back for more and cycled, cycled …