River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (70 page)

At the end of the third hour I started the motors to head back upstream. The Reporter, making note of my action, gave me an idea. Over the radio I said, We have aboard a staff writer from the
Kansas City Star
who’s doing a story on the river and locks. A pause. Then, from the tender, “Stand by,” and in the background we heard someone say, “We’ve got two pleasure boats going down. They’ll be a good test.” The lockman told us to form up, and the Reporter said, “You’re actually going to go through on a test?” There’s a rule of thumb about plans designated by letters: the farther you go into the alphabet, the more desperate they become.

We set up in front of the gates, a safe distance from the well-ginned party boat, then we answered the signal to heaven or hell and entered the lock. A day earlier, I’d spent time thinking of a bear called the Bar instead of a badger called Plan A, and now we were about to find out how much of a miscalculation such foresight was. We took our usual positions, Pilotis on the bow to handle the line to the bitt, I in the welldeck to use the boat hook against the lock ladder. The gates closed ever so slowly, and we began a prolonged descent, the sluggishness indicating the questionable conditions. I watched the wall for signs of our nearly imperceptible creep downward, worried not about the tons of water building behind us nor about some disastrous malfunction that could sweep us to destruction, but rather only that we might stop and be floated back up. Again and again I chanted to the swirling water, Go, go, go! Drain, drain, Drano! The Sirens of the North Pacific sang full in my head, and I thought how far we’d come to hear the melody of the Hesperian surf now playing not far beyond the steel gates, thought of weeks of travail to reach the country of the Golden Apples and other sweet fruits of destination.

Bonneville Lock has the shortest drop on the Columbia, sixty-four feet, but our descent was taking twice the time of one nearly two times deeper. From the bow: “This rate isn’t reassuring.” About then I realized I’d been staring at the same lump of algae on the wall for several minutes. “We’ve stopped.” Nothing happened. “What if they can’t open the gate and can’t get us back to the top?” A climb up the slimily treacherous ladder was not so fearful as the notion of
Nikawa
having to stay in that tomb for a day, a week, for a who-knows. We sat trapped behind the speedboat in a ringing hell of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law” and Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize”—we doing the latter, they, with the gin, the former.

Should I have portaged around? Had my insistence on keeping water beneath the hull finally vanquished us? Had I traded a couple of hundred yards of river passage for the chance to complete the voyage? Was the way open or wasn’t it? “Be glad this happened on the last lock instead of the first—then you would have had eighty-nine new worries.” No fervent Christian ever waited for the gates of heaven to open more intently than did we those dripping and tenebrous doors.

Nikawa
sat on the stilling water near the bottom in the dismal dank, and we did nothing but watch the front of the chamber. “Let there be light!” But there wasn’t. “They’re up there figuring on how the bejeezis to get us out of here.” Then: a rumbling, a deep and sonorous opening, clanking and grating, chains of the entombed, valves groaning a cold, dead misery. A long white crevice no thicker than a ray of hope slid down the gates, and at the speed glaciers move to the sea, the slit opened to the width of my wrist, then my shoulders, and the bright western horizon unrolled before us. Between
Nikawa
and the sea, between our pulpit rail and the Pacific, ran nothing but open water. I went to the helm, started the engines, and at the signal we proceeded on. I had not felt so free, so unencumbered since the morning I walked across the brow of the USS
Lake Champlain
, saluted the flag for the last time, and followed the ladder down to the shore of civilian life.

Beyond the lock we entered into the tidal Columbia, the sea-level river where it exchanges depth for width and forces a navigator to use a chart. On a waterway of grand pilot marks, the finest lay just ahead, Beacon Rock, a distinctive black monolith some eight hundred feet high and shaped like a bishop’s miter; it is a hardened clog caught in the throat of a volcano long ago washed away. I’ve read, although I don’t believe it, that Beacon is, after Gibraltar, the biggest rock in the world. I do believe it’s the finest coign of vantage on a river full of them, a view achieved by a steep trail that in places clings to the sheer sides by means of steel catwalks. Lewis and Clark named Beacon Rock, and that it still exists is the work of a descendant of the first editor of their journals. To prevent a company from blasting the huge thing into road gravel, Henry Biddle bought it in 1915 and built the cliffhanger of a trail to the summit; his heirs later gave the monolith to the state, a gift Washington initially declined but then accepted when Oregon said it would be happy to include the marvel in its park system.

A river traveler cannot see all the seventy high and slender falls that drop off the deeply green and precipitous edge of the Cascades on the Oregon side, but the several that are visible, delicate white tails and veils, caused Pilotis to say, “In six miles we’ve gone from whoa! to ahh! From woes to Oz.” The cascades are stunning enough to cast doubt on their authenticity, as did a child I once overheard, whose vision of natural America perhaps owed too much to Disney falsity, ask, “They’re not real, are they?” And her mother, “I
think
so, sugar.”

We went on, on past Phoca Rock stranded in the middle of the wide river like a pedestrian caught between streams of five o’clock traffic, and then to port another upthrust of once hot magma, a tall phallic rise today called Rooster Rock, but to the early rivermen it was Cock Rock. The later name, while making no topographical sense, may have come about not because of any urge for decency but rather by a mere preference for alliteration over rhyme—simply a matter of poetics, wasn’t it?

On the precipice above the Top of the Cock is the celebrated view from Crown Point, the cliffs there a kind of portal between the mouth of the Columbia Gorge and the broad Willamette Valley to the west. Soon we gained the outreaches of Portland. At the bend where the Sandy empties into the big river and has built up a delta, I tried to steer a straight course and ran
Nikawa
onto a gritty reef that we had to pole off of. It was here, wrote William Clark, that he “arrived at the enterance of a river which appeared to Scatter over a Sand bar, the bottom of which I could See quite across and did not appear to be 4 Inches deep in any part; I attempted to wade this Stream and to my astonishment found the bottom a quick Sand, and impassable.”

Free of another encounter with history, we went on to a good dock and stepped ashore to greet the Photographer waiting for us. Away we went to nearby Troutdale on the Sandy River and into the Edgefield Inn, perhaps the most merrily eccentric in America, a hostelry once the county poor farm but now well refurbished, its walls painted by artists with phantasmagoria from nature, history, and dreamlands of the drugged—doors done as windows, pipes as trees, six-foot pigeons beating against skylights, angels in wheelchairs riding the Milky Way and plucking stars as if they were daisies. I hoped such jolly lodgings would lift a tiring crew for our run to the sea. Like smolts, we were wearing down.

T
HAT NEXT MORNING
was my hundredth day of the voyage, eighty of them on the water, and when I woke I decided to leave the river for a Sunday on the old poorhouse porch so I could work on my logbook and sit rocking in a chair like a pilot retired from boats who spends his days just watching the water; down the long slope from the verandah I could see the Columbia making its way oceanward free of us. When I announced a holiday to the crew at breakfast, to my astonishment there were hats in the air, and it came to me that our recent difficulty in getting out of bed had more to do with exhaustion than apprehension of the Bar or anything else. But, as the day would reveal, I was only half right. Things unacknowledged were about to claw into the light like moles desperate in a flooding field.

A young friend, a writer for the
Los Angeles Times
, joined us for the push to the Pacific; having such a wordsmithing crew about, I offered to take them in the afternoon to downtown Portland and that Beulahland of bibliolatry called Powell’s City of Books. Despite my forewarnings, my sailors lost their bearings in the place and did not again heave into view until four hours later, whereupon I led them a couple of blocks away to a century-old seafood house, Jake’s Famous Crawfish, with an excellent menu and a bar that is one of the historical sights of the city. We took a table by a window blessedly free of any views of water, but I soon went to the brass rail to stand against such good bibulous history and mull over a voyage nearly done. Next to me was a couple, he reading
The New Yorker
and she a worn copy of
Fear of Flying.
Readers are to Portland as musicians to New Orleans—everywhere. The woman was winsome but wore a mute sorrow that seemed to admit no hope, an expression painted by Modigliani. She turned to me and without prologue or preamble began speaking openly about her life as if I’d been present on all but a few days of it. I grew uneasy and finally said, Your friend here may be missing your attention. He, who had not turned a page since she began talking, was deep into a Pisa-like lean toward the conversation, a tilt ready to topple him onto the floor. He said emphatically, “I’m not with her.” She: “Don’t you two guys talk over me. I’m too much of a bitch for that.” Her conversation, devoid of humor and wholly and relentlessly about her life, nevertheless compelled me as honest words usually do. She suggested we go someplace quieter, and I pointed to the crew and mentioned our long tour. “A hundred days?” she said. “I think they’ll understand.” I must admit I suddenly felt the deprivations of river travel as I hadn’t before and considered the invitation. After all, none of my jolly jack-tars, even Pilotis, had gone the entire five thousand miles; they had found respite, escaped the river, seen family, bussed a spouse, so maybe they really would understand.

I turned back to say something to her, I don’t remember what, and she threw her arms around my neck and pulled herself close and gave me a smashing, open-mouthed kiss. I had to pull hard to extract my agape face. She stepped back, stared angrily, and said for all to hear, “You’re a robot! A robot!” In that instant I was indeed an automaton incapable of speech, my machinery fully engaged in putting every ounce of internal propellant into a blush that even a hundred days of wind and sun couldn’t hide. Then it got worse. “You need a cure!” Now we had the attention of management. It was a moment to decide fast whether to treat this as conscious comedy or to dive for cover, so of course I did neither. “Get yourself a cure!” Can we drop the word “cure”? I whispered. The crew, figuring I’d provoked things, watched impassively. Before she could lash out again, I ordered her a drink, excused myself, and fumbled back to our table. I said, Let’s not any of us ever throw a frigging life ring to a drowning friend.

When we returned to the quondam poor farm, I found a quiet rocker in a dark corner of the porch, but there was no escape any longer from a certain unacknowledgment. The bar incident had nudged me, not for what happened but for what it shook free in me, something kept in restraints for the last months. The woman was unwittingly correct: I
had
become a robot, a robot of the river. What it commanded, I did to the exclusion of almost everything else. Seventeen years earlier, I’d passed through Portland on a long trip I’d set out on largely because my marriage had failed; here I was again, this time on a long trip that flattened another marriage. On that hundredth night I understood that I had gone and had entered a place, and I knew where I’d gone, but where I’d entered I had no idea. When our voyage was only memory, where would I wash up? Just where is the great delta of old river travelers? When the journey is done,
quo vadis?
That’s a question adventurers leave out of their accounts, and if you read of their later days you can be glad, because often their after-life seems to be aftermath. From the poor-farm porch, I couldn’t see the Columbia rolling on in the night, but I could feel it—and all the other waters—as if they ran in my veins. Why not? The backs of human hands are nothing if not pulsing river maps. It then came to me to read the writing on my own bulkhead: Proceed as the way opens.

The next morning we set out under fair skies over a course free of Sunday boaters. We followed the big bend past industrial tailings and then on north beyond the mouth of the Willamette, above which, ten miles up, lies downtown Portland. The city
on
the Columbia is Vancouver, a smaller town but older, the descendant of the Hudson’s Bay Company trading station and a later military post, a place in its earliest days once described as the New York of the Pacific. As we rolled northward up the forty-mile deviation the Columbia makes from its westering, the last we’d do, we could see four of the big Northwest volcanoes, an astounding view: behind us Mount Hood, and to starboard at various bearings Adams, Rainier, and St. Helens, the last still charry, its symmetry blown away fifteen years earlier, the result of things kept too long under restraint.

We passed docks with marine cranes swinging their cables and hooks through the August morning, passed broken pilings of dilapidated and dead industries, and we overtook freighters both under way and moored, the empty ships with Plimsoll lines far above our pilothouse, but
Nikawa
, a fingerling among leviathans, held her own in the deep-water lane and showed them a sassy stern. Against the Oregon shore lay the biggest island in the Columbia, Sauvie, fifteen miles long. Beyond, we entered into reaches of smaller islands, bosky and full of ponds and sloughs, each a lure to exploration. The Coast Range trailed down wooded hills and approached the river on one shore only to fall away on the other, then reverse itself to give an equality of ridgeland to both states, and along the riverbank here and about lay narrow beaches—one of them, Hewlett Point, the place where picnickers in 1980 turned up a decaying boodle of twenty-dollar bills, some of the two hundred thousand dollars stolen nine years before by the soi-disant D. B. Cooper who had parachuted from a hijacked airliner into the night only, according to one theory, to be swallowed by the black cold of the Columbia and flushed out to the Bar. On we went in a rising wind, on under the courthouse cupola of St. Helens, Oregon, high on a bluff, on past stick nests of herons, our approach sometimes stirring a bird from the shallows into a slow flap upstream; behind us, gulls dipped to inspect our wake for whatever gnawables it might thrum up.