Part 14 (2/2)
”The Indians make their preparations for the struggle by stripping off all their superfluous clothing, removing their gloves, and each ties a bright-coloured handkerchief tightly about his head; poles and extra oars are laid ready in convenient places to reach should they become necessary, and then with a shout the Indians seize their oars and commence laying to them with all their strength. We are rus.h.i.+ng forward at a fearful rate, owing to the combined exertions of the Indians and the racing current, and we shudder at the thought of striking any of the huge black rocks near which we glide. Now we are fairly in the rapids, and our boat is rus.h.i.+ng madly through the foam and billows; the Indians are shouting at every stroke in their wild, savage glee; it is infectious; we shout too, and feel the wild exultation which comes to men in moments of great excitement and danger. Ugly ma.s.ses of rocks show their heads above the troubled waters on every side, and sunken rocks are discernible by the action of the surf. Great billows strike us fore and aft, some falling squarely over the bows and drenching us to the waist.
This is bad enough, but the worst is yet to come as we draw near with great velocity to a huge rock which appears dead ahead.
”Has old Pierre seen it? The water looks terribly cold as we think of his failing eyesight. Then an order, a shout, backing on one side and pulling on the other, and a quick stroke of the steering oar, and the rock appears on our right hand. Another command, and answering shout, and the oars bend like willows as the Indians struggle to get the boat out of the strong eddy into which Pierre had thrown her. Finally she shoots ahead and pa.s.ses the rock like a flash, within less than an oar's length of it, and we shout for joy and breathe freely again....
”For half a mile the river is comparatively good, and our staunch crew rest on their oars preparatory to the next struggle, which soon comes, as some more rocky, foamy rapids are reached. Here the swells are very high and grand, and our boat at one time seems to stand almost perpendicularly.” (”Them's Eagle Rapids,”
Ike interrupted; ”sloppier 'n 'ell, but straight.”)
”For about nine miles further the river continues studded with rocks and swift, with ripples every mile or so, until we reach Foster Creek Rapids. Here the rocks become thicker ... and the water fierce and wild. For a mile more we plunge and toss through the foaming, roaring water, amid wild yells from our Indian friends, and we emerge from Foster Creek Rapids, which appear to be as rough and dangerous a place as any we have yet encountered.
We are now out of Nespilem Canyon and through all the Nespilem Rapids, and we certainly feel greatly relieved....”
Ike, renewing his quid, observed that they didn't call it Nespilem Canyon any more, for the reason that that sounded too much like ”Let's spill 'em!” and there was enough chance of that without asking for it.
Roos, in bravado, asked Ike if he was going to strip down like Symons'
Indians did. The old Roman replied by pulling on a heavy mackinaw over his ”toga,” saying that he'd rather have warmth than action once he was out in the ”Columby.” That led me to ask him--with a touch of bravado on my own account--how long it would take him to ”submarine” from Box Canyon to Kettle Falls. He grinned a bit sourly at that, and started slacking the las.h.i.+ngs on the sweeps and pike-poles. Roos was just tying a red handkerchief round his head when Earl beckoned him forward to take the wheel while he gave the engine a final hurried tuning. Ike, saying that we would be hitting ”White Cap” just round the next bend, gave me brief but pointed instructions in the use of sweep and pike-pole in case the engine went wrong. He had spat forth his quid again, just as at h.e.l.l Gate, and his unm.u.f.fled voice had a strange and penetrating _timbre_.
White Cap Rapids are well named. Two rocky points converge at the head and force all the conflicting currents of the river into a straight, steep channel, heavily littered with boulders and fanged with outcropping bedrock. In that currents from opposite sides of the river are thrown together in one mad tumble of wallowing waters, it is much like Gordon Rapids, on the Big Bend. If anything, it is the rougher of the two, making up in volume what it lacks in drop. It is a rapid that would be particularly mean for a small boat, from the fact that there would be no way of keeping out of the middle of it, and that is a wet place--very. The launch had the power to hold a course just on the outer right edge of the rough water, and so made a fairly comfortable pa.s.sage of it.
With the ”intake” above Kalichen Falls full in view a half mile distant, Earl went back to his engine as we shot out at the foot of ”White Cap”
and gave it a few little ”jiggering” caresses--much as a rider pats the neck of his hunter as he comes to a jump--before the final test. Then he covered it carefully with a double canvas and went back to the wheel.
Roos he kept forward, standing-by to take the wheel or tinker the engine in case of emergency. The lad, though quite without ”river sense,” was a first-cla.s.s mechanic and fairly dependable at the steering wheel providing he was told what to do.
The sounding board of the rocky walls gave a deep pulsating resonance to the heavy roar ahead, but it was not until we dipped over the ”intake”
that the full volume of it a.s.sailed us. Then it came with a rush, a palpable avalanche of sound that impacted on the ear-drums with the raw, grinding roar of a pa.s.sing freight train. It was not from the huge rollers the launch was skirting so smartly that this tearing, rending roar came, but from an enormous black rock almost dead ahead. It was trying to do the same thing that big island in the middle of h.e.l.l Gate had tried to do, and was succeeding rather better. The latter had been able to do no more than split the river down the middle; this one was forcing the whole stream to do a side-step, and pretty nearly a somersault--hence Kalichen Falls and Whirlpool. Collision Rock was distinctly impressive, even from a launch.
The sun was just dipping behind the southern wall of Box Canyon (how funky I became later, when I was alone, about going into a rapid in that slanting, deceptive evening light!) as the launch hit the rough water.
There was dancing iridescence in the flung foam-spurts above the combers, and at the right of Collision Bock the beginning of a rainbow which I knew would grow almost to a full circle when we looked back from below the fall. I snapped once with my kodak into the reeling tops of the waves that raced beside us, and then started to wind up to have a fresh film for the rock and the crowning rainbow. That highly artistic exposure was never made.
Earl, instead of shutting off his engine as he did in running Spokane Rapids, opened up all the wider as he neared the barrier and its refluent wave. This was because the danger of striking submerged rocks was less than that of b.u.t.ting into that one outcrop of ragged reef that was coming so near to throwing the river over on its back. If the launch was to avoid telescoping on Collision Rock as the Columbia was doing, it must get enough way on to shoot across the current into the eddy on the left. That was what Earl was preparing for when he opened up the engine.
With both boat and current doing well over twenty miles an hour, we were literally rus.h.i.+ng down at the rocky barrier with the speed of an express train when Earl spun the wheel hard over and drove her sharply to the left. That was when I stopped kodaking.
In spite of the rough water, the launch had been remarkably dry until her course was altered. Then she made up for lost time. The next ten or fifteen seconds was an unbroken deluge. With a great up-toss of wake, she heeled all of forty-five degrees to starboard at the turn, seeing which, the river forthwith began piling over her port or up-stream side and making an astonis.h.i.+ngly single-minded attempt to push her on the rest of the way under. Failing in that (for her draught was too great and her engine set too low to make her easily capsizable), the river tried to accomplish the same end by swamping her. Fore and aft the water came pouring over in a solid green flood, and kept right on pouring until Earl, having driven through to the point he wanted, turned her head down stream again and let her right herself.
The water was swis.h.i.+ng about my knees for a few moments in the c.o.c.kpit, and it must have been worse than that forward. Then it drained down into the bilge without, apparently, greatly affecting her buoyancy. The higher-keyed staccato of the engine cut sharply through the heavier roar of the falls. It was still popping like a machine-gun, without a break.
Rea.s.sured by that welcome sound, Earl orientated quickly as he shook the water from his eyes, and then put her full at the head of the falls.
Just how much of a pitch there was at this stage of water I couldn't quite make out. Nothing in comparison with the cataract there at high water (when the river rushes right over the top of Collision Rock) certainly; and yet it was a dizzy bit of a drop, with rather too deliberate a recovery to leave one quite comfortable. For a few seconds the launch's head was deeply buried in the soft stuff of the souse-hole into which she took her header; the next her bows were high in the air as the up-boil caught her. Then her propellers began striking into something solider than air-charged suds, and she shot jerkily away in a current so torn with swirls that it looked like a great length of twisted green-and-white rope. We had missed Collision Rock by thirty feet, and given the dreaded whirlpool behind it an even wider berth.
The next thirteen miles we did at a rate that Ike figured must have been about the fastest travelling ever done on the Columbia. The current runs at from ten to twenty miles an hour all the way from the head of Box Canyon to Bridgeport, and Earl, racing to reach Foster Creek Rapids before it was dark, ran just about wide open nearly the whole distance.
It was real train speed at which we sped down the darkening gorge--possibly over forty miles an hour at times. Earl knew the channel like a book, and said there was nothing to bother about in the way of rocks as long as he could see. We were out of the closely-walled part of the canyon at Eagle Rapids, and the sunset glow was bright upon the water ahead. There is a series of short, steep riffles here, extending for a mile and a half, and Earl slammed right down the lot of them on the high. Ike was right about their being sloppy, but the beacon of the afterglow gave the bearing straight through. Two miles further on the river appeared suddenly to be filled with swimming hippos--round-topped black rocks just showing above the water; but each one was silhouetted against a surface that glinted rose and gold, and so was as easy to miss as in broad daylight.
It was all but full night as the roar of Foster Creek Rapids began to drown the rattle of the engine, with only a luminous lilac mist floating above the south-western mountains to mark where the sun had set; but it was enough--just enough--to throw a glow of pale amethyst on the frothy tops of the white-caps, leaving the untorn water to roll on in fluid anthracite. Earl barely eased her at the head, and then plunged her down a path of polished ebony, with the blank blur of rocks looming close on the right and an apparitional line of half-guessed rollers booming boisterously to the left. For three-quarters of a mile we raced that ghostly Ku-Klux-Klan procession, and Roos, who was timing with his radium-faced watch, announced that we had made the distance in something like seventy seconds. Then there was quieter water, and presently the lights of Bridgeport. Earl put us off opposite the town, and ran down a quarter of a mile farther to get out of the still swiftly-running current and berth the launch in a quiet eddy below the sawmill.
Bridgeport, for a town a score of miles from the railway, proved unexpectedly metropolitan, with electric lights, banks, movie theatres, and a sign at the main crossing prohibiting ”Left Hand Turns.” The people, for a country town, showed very diverting evidences of sophistication. At the movies that night (where we went to get the election returns), they continually laughed at the villain and snickered at the heroine's plat.i.tudinous sub-t.i.tles; and finally, when word came that it was Harding beyond all doubt, they forgot the picture completely and gave their undivided attention to jos.h.i.+ng the town's only avowed Democrat. The victim bore up fairly well as long as his baiters stuck to ”straight politics,” but when they accused him of wearing an imitation leather coat made of brown oil-cloth, the shaft got under his armour. With a ruddy blush that was the plainest kind of a confession of guilt, he pushed out to the aisle and beat a disorderly retreat.
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