Part 18 (2/2)

I had intended, by making an early start from The Dalles, to endeavour to cover the forty odd miles to the head of the Cascades before dark of the same day. Two things conspired to defeat this ambitious plan: first, some unexpected mail which had to be answered, and, second, my equally unexpected booking of a pa.s.senger--a way pa.s.senger who had to be landed well short of the Cascades. Just as I was cleaning up the last of my letters, the hotel clerk introduced me to the ”Society Editor” of The Dalles _Chronicle_, who wanted an interview. I told her that I was already two hours behind schedule, but that if she cared to ride the running road with me for a while, she could have the interview, with lunch thrown in, on the river. She accepted with alacrity, but begged for half an hour to clean up her desk at the _Chronicle_ office and change to out-door togs. Well within that limit, she was back again at the hotel, flushed, pant-ing and pant-ed, and announced that she was ready. Picking up a few odds and ends of food at the nearest grocery, we went down to the dock, where I launched and loaded up _Imshallah_ in time to push off at ten o'clock. I had, of course, given up all idea of making the Cascades that day, and reckoned that Hood River, about twenty-five miles, would be a comfortable and convenient halting place for the night. And so it would have been....

[Ill.u.s.tration: PALISADE ROCK, LOWER COLUMBIA RIVER]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MULTNOMAH FALLS COLUMBIA RIVER HIGHWAY, NEAR PORTLAND]

I don't remember whether or not we ever got very far with the ”interview,” but I do recall that Miss S---- talked very interestingly of Johan Bojer and his work, and that she was in the midst of a keenly a.n.a.lytical review of ”The Great Hunger” when a sudden darkening of what up to then had been only a slightly overcast sky reminded me that I had been extremely remiss in the matter of keeping an eye on the weather.

Indeed, up to that moment the menace of storms on the river had been of such small moment as compared to that of rapids that I had come to rate it as no more than negligible. Now, however, heading into the heart of the Cascades, I was approaching a series of gorges long notorious among river _voyageurs_ as a veritable ”wind factory”--a ”storm-breeder” of the worst description. After all that I had read of the way in which the early pioneers had been held up for weeks by head winds between the Dalles and the Cascades, there was no excuse for my failure to keep a weather eye lifting at so treacherous a point. The only _alibi_ I can think of is Adam's: ”The woman did it.” Nor is there any ungallantry in that plea. Quite the contrary, in fact; for I am quite ready to confess that I should probably fail to watch the clouds again under similar circ.u.mstances.

There were a few stray mavericks of suns.h.i.+ne shafts trying to struggle down to the inky pit of the river as I turned to give the weather a once-over, but they were quenched by the sinister cloud-pall even as I looked. The whole gorge of the river-riven Cascades was heaped full of wallowing nimbus which, driven by a fierce wind, was rolling up over the water like an advancing smoke-barrage. The forefront of the wind was marked by a wild welter of foam-white water, while a half mile behind a streaming curtain of gray-black indicated the position of the advancing wall of the rain. It would have been a vile-looking squall even in the open sea; here the sinister threat of it was considerably accentuated by the towering cliffs and the imminent outcrops of black rock studding the surface of the river. I had no serious doubt that _Imshallah_, after all the experience she had had in rough water, would find any great difficulty in riding out the blow where she was, but since it hardly seemed hospitable to subject my lady guest to any more of a wetting than could be avoided, I turned and headed for the lee sh.o.r.e. Miss S---- was only about half m.u.f.fled in the rubber saddle _poncho_ and the light ”shed” tent I tossed to her before resuming my oars when the wall of the wind--hard and solid as the side of a flying barn--struck us full on the starboard beam. It was rather careless of me, not heading up to meet that squall before it struck; but the fact was that I simply couldn't take seriously anything that it seemed possible _could_ happen on such a deep, quiet stretch of river. The consequence of taking that buffet on the beam was quite a merry bit of a mix-up. The shower-bath of blown spray and the dipping under of the lee rail were rather the least of my troubles. What did have me guessing for a minute, though, was the result of the fact that that confounded fifty-miles-an-hour zephyr got under the corners of the tent and, billowing it monstrously, carried about half of it overboard; also a somewhat lesser amount of Miss S----, who was just wrapping herself in it. I had to drop my oars to effect adequate salvage operations, and so leave the skiff with her port gunwale pretty nearly hove under. As soon as I got around to swing her head up into the teeth of the wind things eased off a bit.

The river was about a mile wide at this point--ten miles below The Dalles and about opposite the station of Rowena--and, save for occasional outcroppings of black bedrock, fairly deep. The north sh.o.r.e was rocky all the way along, but that to the south (which was also the more protected on account of a jutting point ahead) was a broad sandy beach. That beach seemed to offer a comparatively good landing, and, as it extended up-stream for half a mile, it appeared that I ought to have no great difficulty in fetching it. The first intimation I had that this might not be as easy as I had reckoned came when, in spite of the fact that I was pulling down-stream in a three or four-mile current, the wind backed the skiff up-stream past a long rock island at a rate of five or six miles an hour. That was one of the queerest sensations I experienced on the whole voyage--having to avoid b.u.mping the _lower_ end of a rock the while I could see the riffle where a strong current was flowing around the _upper_ end.

I settled down to pulling in good earnest after that rather startling revelation, trying to hold the head of the skiff just enough to the left of the eye of the wind to give her a good shoot across the current.

Luckily, I had been pretty well over toward the south bank when the wind struck. There was only about a quarter of a mile to go, but I was blown back just about the whole length of that half mile of sandy beach in making it. The last hundred yards I was rowing ”all out,” and it was touch-and-go as to whether the skiff was going to nose into soft sand or the lower end of a long stretch of half-submerged rocks. I was a good deal relieved when it proved to be the beach--by about twenty feet. We would have made some kind of a landing on the rocks without doubt, but hardly without giving the bottom of the boat an awful banging.

The sand proved unexpectedly soft when I jumped out upon it, but I struck firm bottom before I had sunk more than an inch or two above my boot tops and managed to drag the skiff up far enough to escape the heaviest of the wash of the waves. It was rather a sodden bundle of wet canvas that I carried out and deposited under a pine tree beyond high-water mark, but the core of it displayed considerable life after it had been extracted and set up to dry before the fire of pitchy cones that I finally succeeded in teasing into a blaze. To show Miss S---- that the storm hadn't affected my equanimity, I asked her to go on with her review of ”The Great Hunger;” but she replied her own was more insistent, and reminded me that I hadn't served lunch yet. Well, rain-soaked biscuit and milk chocolate are rather difficult to take without a spoon; but a pound of California seedless raisins, if munched slowly, go quite a way with two people.

The worst of the squall was over in half an hour, and, anxious to make hay while the sun shone, I pushed off again in an endeavor to get on as far as I could before the next broadside opened up. Miss S---- and I landed at the Rowena Ferry, to catch the afternoon train back to The Dalles. She was a good s.h.i.+p-mate, and I greatly regret she had the bad luck to be my pa.s.senger on the only day I encountered a really hard blow in all of my voyage.

There was another threatening turret of black cloud beginning to train its guns as I pulled out into the stream beyond Rowena, and it opened with all the big stuff it had before I had gone a mile. While it lasted, the bombardment was as fierce as the first one. Fortunately, its ammunition ran out sooner. I kept the middle of the current this time, pulling as hard as I could against the wind. I got a thorough raking, fore-and-aft, for my temerity, but, except at the height of the wind, I managed to avoid the ignominy of being forced back against the stream.

The third squall, which opened up about three-thirty, was a better organized a.s.sault, and gave me a pretty splashy session of it. When that blow got the range of me I was just pulling along to the left of a desolate tongue of black basalt called Memaloose Island. For many centuries this rocky isle was used by the Klickatats as a burial place, which fact induced a certain Indian-loving pioneer of The Dalles, Victor Trevett by name, to order his own grave dug there. A tall marble shaft near the lower end of the island marks the spot. Now I have no objection to marble shafts in general, nor even to this one in particular--as a shaft. I just got tired of seeing it, that was all. If any skipper on the Columbia ever pa.s.sed Vic Trevett's monument as many times in a year as I did in an hour, I should like to know what run he was on.

Swathed in oilskins, my potential speed was cut down both by the resistance my augmented bulk offered to the wind and the increased difficulty of pulling with so much on. Down past the monument I would go in the lulls, and up past the monument I would go before the gusts.

There, relentless as the _Flying Dutchman_, that white shaft hung for the best part of an hour. I only hope what I said to the wind didn't disturb old Vic Trevett's sleep. Finally, a quarter of an hour's easing of the blow let me double the next point; and then it turned loose with all its guns again. Quite gone in the back and legs, I gave up the unequal fight and started to shoot off quartering toward the sh.o.r.e.

Glancing over my shoulder in an endeavour to get some kind of an idea of where, and against what, I might count on striking, an astounding sight met my eyes, a picture so weird and infernal that I had to pause (mentally) and a.s.sure myself that those raisins I had for lunch had not been ”processed.”

Of all the sinister landscapes I ever saw--including the lava fields of a good many volcanoes and a number of the world's most repulsive ”bad lands”--that which opened up to me as I tried to head in beyond that hard-striven-for point stands alone in my memory for sheer awesomeness.

The early winter twilight had already begun to settle upon the gloomy gorge, the duskiness greatly accentuating the all-pervading murk cast upon the river by the pall of the sooty clouds. All round loomed walls of black basalt, reflecting darkly in water whose green had been completely quenched by the brooding purple shadows. The very pines on the cliffs merged in the solid opacity behind their scraggly forms, and even the fringe of willows above high-water-mark looped round the crescent of beach below like a fragment of mourning band. And that stretch of silver sand--the one thing in the whole infernal landscape whose whiteness the gloom alone could not drown: how shall I describe the jolt it gave me when I discovered that six or seven black devils were engaged in systematically spraying it with an inky liquid that left it as dark and dead to the eye as a Stygian strand of anthracite? It was a lucky thing those raisins had _not_ been ”processed;” else I might not have remembered readily what I had heard of the way the ”South-Bank”

railway had been keeping the sand from drifting over its tracks by spraying with crude oil the bars uncovered at low water.

With that infernal mystery cleared up, my mind was free to note and take advantage of a rather remarkable incidental phenomenon. The effect of oil on troubled waters was no new thing to me, for on a number of occasions I had helped to rig a bag of kerosene-soaked oak.u.m over the bows of a schooner hove-to in a gale; but to find a stretch of water already oiled for me at just the time and place I was in the sorest need of it--well, I couldn't see where those manna-fed Children of Israel wandering in the desert found their advance arrangements looked to any better than that. The savage wind-whipped white-caps that were buffeting me in mid-stream dissolved into foam-streaked ripples the moment they impinged upon the broadening oil-sleeked belt where the petroleum had seeped riverward from the sprayed beach. A solid jetty of stone could not have broken the rollers more effectually. On one side was a wild wallow of tossing water; on the other--as far as the surface of the river was concerned--an almost complete calm.

It was a horrible indignity to heap upon _Imshallah_ (and, after the way she had displayed her resentment following her garbage shower under the Wenatchee bridge, I knew that spirited lady would make me pay dear for it if ever she had the chance); still--dead beat as I was--there was nothing else to do but to head into that oleaginous belt of calm and make the best of it. The wind still took a deal of bucking, but with the banging of the waves at an end my progress was greatly accelerated.

Hailing the black devils on the bank, I asked where the nearest village was concealed, to learn that Moosier was a couple of miles below, but well back from the river. They rather doubted that I could find my way to the town across the mudflats, but thought it might be worth trying in preference to pus.h.i.+ng on in the dark to Hood River.

Those imps of darkness were right about the difficulty of reaching Moosier after nightfall. A small river coming in at that point seemed to have deposited a huge bar of quicksand all along the left bank, and I would never have been able to make a landing at all had not a belated duck-hunter given me a hand. After tying up to an oar, he very courteously undertook to pilot me to the town through the half-overflowed willow and alder flats. As a consequence of taking the lead, it was the native rather than the visitor who went off the caving path into the waist-deep little river. Coming out of the woods, a hundred-yards of slus.h.i.+ng across a flooded potato-patch brought us to the railway embankment, and from there it was comparatively good going to the hotel. Luckily, the latter had a new porcelain tub and running hot water, luxuries one cannot always be sure of in the smaller Columbia River towns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CITY OF PORTLAND WITH MT. HOOD IN THE DISTANCE]

It was just at the close of the local apple season, and I found the hotel br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with departing packers. Most of the latter were girls from Southern California orange-packing houses, imported for the season. Several of them came from Anaheim, and a.s.sured me that they had packed Valencias from a small grove of mine in that district. They were a good deal puzzled to account for the fact that a man with a Valencia grove should be ”hobo-ing” round the country like I was, and seemed hardly to take me seriously when I a.s.sured them it was only a matter of a year or two before all farmers would be hobos. It's funny how apple-packing seems to bring out all the innate sn.o.bbery in a lady engaging in that lucrative calling; they didn't seem to think tramping was quite respectable. I slept on the parlour couch until three in the morning, when I ”inherited” the room occupied by a couple of packettes departing by the Portland train. As they seem to have been addicted to ”_attar of edelweiss_,” or something of the kind, and there hadn't been time for fumigation, I rather regretted making the s.h.i.+ft.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRIDGE ON COLUMBIA HIGHWAY NEAR PORTLAND, OREGON]

When I had splashed back to the river in the morning, I found that _Imshallah_ anxious to hide the shame of that oil-bath, had spent the night trying to bury herself in the quicksand. Dumping her was out of the question, and I sank mid-thigh deep two or three times myself before I could persuade the sulking minx even to take the water. I knew she would take the first chance that offered to rid herself of the filth, just as she had before; but, with no swift water above the Cascades, there seemed small likelihood of her getting out-of-hand. Knowing that she was quite equal to making a bolt over the top of that terrible cataract if she hadn't managed to effect some sort of purification before reaching there, I made an honest attempt at conciliation by landing at the first solid beach I came to and giving her oily sides a good swabbing down with a piece of carpet. That seemed to mollify the temperamental lady a good deal, but just the same I knew her too well to take any chances.

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