Alaska Airlines Magazine, September 2006

 

 

           

hen you negotiate the Columbia River in a 50-pound fiberglass banana, you do what the river tells you to do, and this morning it has kicked us out of our tents an hour before dawn, forced us to break camp and pack in the dark, skip breakfast and even the small luxury of coffee, and launch our kayaks into the chill, woolly fog just before first light. It is hard to put a cheerful spin on this.

 

We need to cover 30 miles today, and the reason for this preposterous hour is the day’s tidal cycle. Around noon the Pacific will begin pouring itself back into the Columbia, the river current will reverse, and if we’re still out there we will find ourselves paddling upstream. That would be even more demoralizing than launching  before dawn, so here we are. For seven days we’re retuning our lives to the Columbia’s circadian rhythms; we’d rather switch than fight.

 

A few moments later, Nature decides to reward this scrap of uncharacteristic human deference. Vermilion and orange fingers of light begin to knead the clouds, changing kaleidoscopically because we’re moving fast. When the light show dissolves into fall’s typical overcast, the river ahead seems to elide into sky and we have the giddy sensation of paddling into infinity. It’s serene and awesome in equal measure.

 

We are paddling the Lower Columbia River Water Trail, dedicated in 2002 to encourage non-motorized boaters to tackle the river’s last 146 miles, from Bonneville Dam to the Pacific. There’s no man-made “trail,” of course, just a website and  suggestions on where to camp and how to avoid trouble. Of which there’s plenty, potentially. It’s an excellent idea to approach the Columbia River with boundless preparation and even more respect.

 

My paddling companion is Howard Greene, a graphic designer from Taos, New Mexico. If you could fabricate the ideal hiking/kayaking/sailing buddy from spare molecules, Howard is exactly what you’d come up with: knows what he’s doing outdoors but doesn’t show off, has a vast range of interests with which to fashion good conversation, and—best of all—is utterly imperturbable. The morning we started, we’d talked through the conditions we could encounter on the river—headwinds, wind waves, rain, fog, shipping traffic. A thoughtful Washington State Parks ranger even informed us that bears could swim out to the islands where we planned to camp. “My philosophy is to expect the worst,” I said, “because then I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t happen.”

 

Howard said, “I try to avoid both optimism and pessimism—just deal with what comes.”

 

That first day we had to deal with a 20-knot headwind left over from summer. It kicked up chop big enough to slap our faces and bitterly resisted forward progress. We vectored to the middle of the channel in search of stronger current to help push us along, but the waves there were even steeper. We groaned past anchored fishing boats, whose occupants stared as if they were seeing Sasquatches  bobbing in bathtubs. Surprise: there were no other kayaks.

 

We earned just six miles in three hours and parked on a little alder-forested island to camp for the night. The wind died, the rain started. Ridiculous as it sounds now, I felt as though I should apologize—I’d worked out the schedule, so the lousy weather was clearly my fault. Just then occurred one of those intimate miracles of nature that makes it impossible for a bystanding human to wallow in his own self-absorption. A black boomerang of Canada geese swept out of the sky and carved a turn low over the river, its outline soft and fuzzed in the fading gray light and drizzle. The geometric swirl of life was uniquely beautiful because of the lousy weather. I suddenly felt very glad we were paddling the Columbia, and no longer guilty or scared.

 

There, I used the word.

 

I had been scared of this trip. I’m an experienced sea kayaker, but the second largest river in North America presented a new universe of issues. I knew almost nothing about the Columbia’s weather, currents, traffic or navigational hazards. But ever since I turned 50 a few years back, I’ve felt an insistent urge to try things I didn’t know how to do, most of them things that scared me silly. In 2003 I spent a month on the Utah-to-Mexico Arizona Trail, just a few weeks after buying my first backpack. The next year a travel magazine asked me, a certified acrophobe, to take a canyoneering course and write about it. There is something terribly, fundamentally wrong with the entire idea of a human being voluntarily walking backward off a sheer canyon wall and dangling from a scrawny rope over the rocky jaws of eternity. But I did it.

 

The evening after that course, the instructor told me he’d shepherded students from four to 85 years old through it with all kinds of results. Some, he said, would avidly rent gear and tackle a canyon on their own the next day. Some would never try canyoneering again. I didn’t admit it, but I was firmly in the latter camp. He said, “But you know what? I’ve never had anyone finish the course feeling less self esteem.” He was right.

 

The Columbia, happily, is proving to be less frightening and more engaging than canyon-dangling. Gliding under the I-205 bridge in Portland, I notice that at the south end it executes a delicious downward swoop that’s as gracious as the curve of a cougar’s tail—the legacy of a civil engineer with a subversive glimmer of poetry in his heart. We discover an exquisite waterfall that’s on no map, a silvery thread snaking through a hanging garden of moss and ferns. There’s no road or trail to it, not even a scrap of beach for our kayaks. But we hang there in an eddy for several minutes, glad that such an intimate natural spectacle survives on such a rigorously managed river.

 

Paddling the lower Columbia isn’t a wilderness experience. It’s as much water highway as river, with most of southern Washington’s and northern Oregon’s industry focused along it. This plays out in the form of noise pollution; few stretches of the river are truly quiet. The night we camp on an island facing St. Helens, Oregon, I list the machine music I can hear from my tent: train howling, jet whooshing, light plane purring, heavy trucks thunking, steel beams clanking—and the relentless hiss of street traffic. It’s 10 p.m., we’re 20 miles downstream from Portland, and St. Helens is a town of 11,000.

 

In Northwest Passage: the Great Columbia River, environmental writer William Dietrich warns: “The Columbia is as proud and complex and irreversible a piece of human environmental transformation as can be imagined, as magnificent in its new guise as in its old. Yet it is a magnificence with an emotional hollowness, a glory that has lost its ability to startle.” I sense some of that hollowness, but our Columbia is not altogether predictable: Dietrich didn’t experience it from a kayak cockpit.

 

On the last day we’re off at dawn again—the current is plotting to whack us again late in the morning, and we have 23 miles to go to Astoria. It’s utterly calm, no fog, and there are exquisite patterns in the clouds—cats’ pawprints stained red against the awakening sky. Something about that formation stirs an uneasy memory, but I don’t switch on the marine radio pocketed in my life jacket. The forecast last night was nothing unusual—light rain, moderate wind.

 

We paddle hard for three hours, the current turns, and there’s no place to take refuge except the uninviting sloughs that rake some mucky islands. We keep going. The midday sky darkens and then begins to droop like an army tarp. Shifting winds claw at us from assorted directions, probing for vulnerability. Astoria is six miles away, but conditions are looking increasingly ominous, and we see on the chart that we’ve got a bail-out option—a navigable creek that leads to a county park. We run for it.

 

The rain slams just after we drag the kayaks onto the grass. I switch on my cell phone and pick up three messages from my wife in Seattle, each with a more anxious edge. The marine forecast had changed radically overnight; Astoria weather now called for 30- to 40-knot winds and heavy rain. By the time we catch a ride into town, the Columbia is olive-green and sloshing like the bowl of a four-mile-wide Maytag.

 

“We just dodged a pretty big bullet,” Howard says.

 

We did indeed. I think back to a trio of duck hunters we’d encountered earlier at a riverbank shack. They were prepping for the season, outfitting their 75-horsepower skiff with shotguns, ammunition, and a week’s stash of beer. They peppered us with questions (“Whadd’ya do if they turn over—swim for shore?”) but seemed befuddled why anyone would want to navigate the Columbia in an engineless boat. “Doesn’t sound like fun to me,” one said.

 

I told him I’d had moments of doubt myself. And in truth, all the usual reasons for undertaking such a trip ring laughably flimsy when applied to this one. It wasn’t a pioneering adventure; Lewis and Clark paddled much more river under vastly more challenging conditions (no maps, Gore-Tex jackets, or dockside cafés). It wasn’t a great endurance test; any reasonably fit kayaker could do it.

 

The real reason may sound a little self-conscious and contrived on paper, but out there on the river it felt wholly real and vital: we wanted to understand more about humanity’s proper place in nature. The Columbia is an excellent venue, because it’s a river managed by engineers but also a natural ecosystem; and a kayak is the perfect vehicle, because it’s slow and quiet enough to encourage contemplation and small enough that it had better make its way with respect and humility—qualities we humans can always use more of. This contemplation also redirected the interior current, the voice that nags: keep your eye on the ball, don’t get distracted, avoid forays into things that might not work out. The river suggests another way to live. It meanders, backs up, forms islands that are of no immediate use. But it keeps moving, forming an essential part of the grand circulatory system of nature. As do we.