Part 19 (2/2)
The ca.n.a.l and locks avoided that first heavy fall of the Cascades completely, but the swift tumble of waters below was quite rough enough to make a preliminary survey well worth while. The steamer channel was on the Was.h.i.+ngton side, so that it was necessary for a boat to head directly across the current immediately on emerging from the lower lock chamber. The Oregon side of the river was thick with rocks right away round the bend, with not enough clear water to permit the pa.s.sage of even a skiff. My course, therefore, would have to be the same as that of the steamer--just as sharply across to the opposite side as oars would take me. I had put _Imshallah_ through worse water than that a score of times, and, while it wasn't the sort of a place where one would want to break an oar or even catch a ”crab,” there was no reason to believe that we should have the least trouble in pulling across the hard-running swirls. Of course, if _Imshallah_ really was still smarting under the indignity of that oil-bath.... But no--I honestly think there was nothing of distrust of my well-tried little skiff behind my sudden change of plans. Rather, I should say, it was due to the fact that a remark of the lock-master had brought me to a sudden realization that I now arrived at what I had always reckoned as my ultimate objective--tide-water.
I had been planning to run on four miles farther to Bonneville that afternoon, in the hope of being able to pull through the forty miles of slackening water to Vancouver the following day. There I would get a tug to take the skiff up the Willamette to Portland, where I intended to leave her. As some of the finest scenery on the Columbia is pa.s.sed in the twenty miles below the Cascades, this promised me another memorable day on the river--provided that there was only an occasional decent interval between showers. It was the lock-master's forecast of another rainy day, together with his a.s.surance that the foot of the locks was generally rated as the head of tide-water, that prompted me to change my mind a few moments before I was due to pull out again to the river, and book through to Portland on the _Teal_.
With the idea of avoiding the wash of the steamer, I pulled down to the extreme lower end of the locks before she entered, taking advantage of the interval of waiting to trim carefully and look to my oars for the pull across the foot of the Cascades. I was intending to let the _Teal_ lock out ahead of me, and then pull as closely as possible in her wake, so as to have her below me to pick up the pieces in case anything went wrong. It was close to twilight now, with the sodden west darkening early under the blank grey cloud-ma.s.s of another storm blowing up-river from the sea. If that impetuous squall could have curbed its impatience and held off a couple of minutes longer, it might have had the satisfaction of treating me to a good soaking, if nothing more. As it was, I flung up my hands and _kamerad-ed_ at the opening pelt of the big rain-drops. Speaking as one Columbia River skipper to another, I hailed the Captain of the _J. N. Teal_ and asked him if he would take me and my boat aboard.
”Where bound?” he bawled back.
”Portland,” I replied.
”Aw right. Pull up sta'bo'd bow lively--'fore gate open!”
A dozen husky roustabouts, urged on by an impatient Mate, scrambled to catch the painter and give us a hand-up. I swung over the side all right, but _Imshallah_, hanging back a bit, came in for some pretty rough pulling and hauling before they got her on deck. The two or three of her planks that were started in the melee const.i.tuted about the worst injury the little lady received on the whole voyage.
And so _Imshallah_ and I came aboard the _J. N. Teal_ to make the last leg of our voyage as pa.s.sengers. The gates were turning back before I had reached the upper deck, and a few minutes later the powerfully-engined old stern-wheeler went floundering across the foam-streaked tail of the Cascades and off down the river. Castle Rock--nine hundred feet high and sheer-walled all around--was no more than a ghostly blur in the darkness as we slipped by in the still rapidly moving current. Multnomah's majesty was blanked behind the curtain of night and a driving rain, and only a distant roar on the port beam told where one of the loveliest of American waterfalls took its six-hundred-foot leap from the brink of the southern wall of the river.
Cape Horn and Rooster Rock were swathed to their foundations in streaming clouds.
Once the _Teal_ was out on the comparatively open waters of the lower river, the Captain came down for a yarn with me--as one Columbia skipper to another. He had spent most of his life on the Snake and lower Columbia, but he seemed to know the rapids and canyons below the Canadian line almost reef by reef, and all of the old skippers I had met by reputation. He said that he had never heard of any one's ever having deliberately attempted to run the Cascades in anything smaller than a steamer, although an endless lot of craft had come to grief by getting in there by accident. The only time a man ever went through in a small boat and came out alive was about ten years ago. That lucky navigator, after drinking most of a Sat.u.r.day night in the town, came down to the river in the dim grey dawn of a Sunday, got into his boat and pushed off. It was along toward church-time that a ferry-man, thirty miles or more down river, picked up a half filled skiff. Quietly sleeping in the stern-sheets, with nothing but his nose above water, was the only man that ever came through the Cascades in a small boat.
The Captain looked at me with a queer smile after he told that story. ”I don't suppose you were heeled to tackle the Cascades just like that?” he asked finally.
And so, for the last time, I was taken for a boot-legger. But no--not quite the last. I believe it was the porter at Hotel Portland who asked me if--ahem!--if I had got away with anything from Canada. And for all of that incessant trail of smoke, no fire--or practically none.
The day of my arrival in Portland I delivered _Imshallah_ up to the kindest-faced boat-house proprietor on the Willamette and told him to take his time about finding her a home with some sport-loving Oregonian who knew how to treat a lady right and wouldn't give her any kind of menial work to do. I told him I didn't want to have her work for a living under any conditions, as I felt she had earned a rest; and to impress upon whoever bought her that she was high-spirited and not to be taken liberties with, such as subjecting her to garbage shower-baths and similar indignities. He asked me if she had a name, and I told him that she hadn't--any more; that the one she had been carrying had ceased to be in point now her voyage was over. It had been a very appropriate name for a boat on the Columbia, though, I a.s.sured him, and I was going to keep it to use if I ever made the voyage again.
Portland, although it is not directly upon the Columbia, has always made that river distinctively its own. I had realized that in a vague way for many years, but it came home to me again with renewed force now that I had arrived in Portland after having had some glimpse of every town and village from the Selkirks to the sea. (Astoria and the lower river I had known from many steamer voyages in the past.) Of all the thousands living on or near the Columbia, those of Portland still struck me as being the ones who held this most strikingly individual of all the world's rivers at most nearly its true value. With Portlanders, I should perhaps include all of those living on the river from Astoria to The Dalles. These, too, take a mighty pride in their great river, and regard it with little of that distrustful reproach one remarks so often on the upper Columbia, where the settlers see it bearing past their parched fields the water and the power that would mean the difference to them between success and disaster. When this stigma has been wiped out by reclamation (as it soon will be), without a doubt the plucky pioneers of the upper Columbia will see in their river many beauties that escape their troubled eyes to-day.
The early Romans made some attempt to give expression to their love of the Tiber in monuments and bridges. It would be hard indeed to conceive of anything in marble or bronze, or yet in soaring spans of steel, that would give adequate expression to the pride of the people of the lower Columbia in their river; and so it is a matter of felicitation that they have sought to pay their tribute in another way. There was inspiration behind the conception of the idea of the Columbia Highway, just as there was genius and rare imagination in the carrying out of that idea. I have said that the Cascade Gorge of the Columbia is a scenic wonder apart from all others; that it stands without a rival of its kind. Perhaps the greatest compliment that I can pay to the Columbia Highway is to say that it is worthy of the river by which it runs.
(THE END)
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