A ROCKY CLIFF NEAR HEAD OF LAKE CHELAN (left)RAINBOW FALLS, 350 FEET HIGH, ABOVE HEAD OF LAKE CHELAN (right)
WENATCHEE UNDER THE DUST CLOUD OF ITS SPEEDING AUTOS (above)HEAD OF ROCK ISLAND RAPIDS (below)
We arrived back at the town of Chelan in time for lunch on the sixth of November, and a couple of hours later were down at the Columbia ready to push off again. I had been unable to get in touch with Captain McDermid by phone, but was confident that he would turn up in good time at Wenatchee. As there was nothing between that point and the mouth of the Chelan in the way of really bad water, I had no hesitation in making the run without a “pilot.” LaunchingImshallahbelow the old ferry-tower at two o’clock, we reached the little town of Entiat, just above the river and rapids of that name, at five. The skiff rode higher with Captain Armstrong and his luggage out, her increased buoyancy compensating in a measure for the less intelligent handling she had.Roos took the steering paddle in the stern, and I continued rowing from the forward thwart. All of the luggage was shifted well aft. The current was fairly swift all the way, but the two or three rapids encountered were not difficult to pass. Ribbon Cliff, two thousand feet high and streaked with strata of yellow, grey and black clays, was the most striking physical feature seen in the course of this easy afternoon’s run.
Entiat is a prosperous little apple-growing centre, and, with the packing season at its height, was jammed to the roof with workers. Rooms at the hotel were out of the question. Roos slept on a couch in the parlour, which room was also occupied by three drummers and two truck drivers. I had a shakedown on a canvased-in porch, on which were six beds and four cots. My room-mates kept me awake a good part of the night growling because their wages had just been cut to seven dollars a day, now that the rush was over. I would have been the more surprised that any one should complain about a wage like that had not a trio of farmettes—or rather packettes—at the big family dinner table been comparing notes of their takings. One twinkling-fingered blonde confessed to having averaged thirteen dollars a day for the last week packing apples, while a brown-bloomered brunette had done a bit better than twelve. The third one—attenuated, stoop-shouldered and spectacled—was in the dumps because sore fingers had scaled her average down to ten-fifty—“hardly worth coming out from Spokane for,” she sniffed. Roos tried to engage them in conversation, and started out auspiciously with a description of running Box Canyon. But the gimlet-eyed thin one asked him what he got for doing a thing like that, and promptly their interest faded. And whyshouldthey have cared to waste time over a mere seventy-five-dollar-a-week cameraman? But it was something even to have eaten pumpkin pie with the plutocracy.
The swift-flowing Entiat River has dumped a good many thousand tons of boulders into the Columbia, and most of these have lodged to form a broad, shallow bar a short distance below the mouth of the former. The Columbia hasn’t been able quite to make up its mind the best way to go here, and so has hit on a sort of a compromise by using three or four channels. Roos found himself in a good deal the same sort of dilemma when we came rolling along there on the morning of the seventh, but as a boat—if it is going to preserve its entity as such—cannot run down more than one channel at a time,Imshallahfound the attempt at a compromise to which she was committed only ended in butting her head against a low gravel island. It was impossible to make the main middle channel from there, but we poled off without much difficulty and went bumping off down a shallow channel to the extreme right. She kissed off a boulder once or twice before winning through to deeper water, but not hard enough to do her much harm. It was a distinctly messy piece of work, though, and I was glad that Ike or Captain Armstrong was not there to see their teachings put into practice.
The river cliffs became lower as we ran south, and after passing a commanding point on the right bankwe came suddenly upon the open valley of the Wenatchee, the nearest thing to a plain we had seen in all the hundreds of miles from the source of the Columbia. There are not over twenty to thirty square miles of land that is even comparatively level here, but to eyes which had been wont for two months to seek sky-line with a forty-five degree upward slant of gaze it was like coming out of an Andean pass upon the boundless Pampas of Argentina. Wenatchee was in sight for several miles before we reached it, an impressive water-front of mills, warehouses and tall buildings. Over all floated a dark pall, such as one sees above Pittsburgh, Birmingham, Essen or any other great factory city, but we looked in vain for the forest of chimneys it would have taken to produce that bituminous blanket. As we drew nearer we discovered that what we had taken to be smoke was a mighty dust-cloud. It was a Sunday at the height of the apple-packing season, and all the plutocratic packettes were joy-riding. There were, it is true, more Fords than Rolls-Royces in the solid double procession of cars that jammed the main street for a mile, but that was doubtless because the supply of the former had held out better. I can’t believe that the consideration of price had anything to do with it.
The hotel, of course, was full, even with the dining-room set thick with cots, but by admiring a haberdashery drummer’s line of neck-ties for an hour, I managed to get him to “will” me his room and bath when he departed that afternoon. Roos employed similar strategy with a jazz movie orchestra fiddler, but his train didn’t pull out until four-thirty in themorning. A young reporter from the local paper called for an interview in the afternoon, and told us the story of theDouglas, the steamer which Captain McDermid had mentioned as having been lost in trying to take her to Portland. Selig had gone along to write the story of the run through Rock Island Rapids, the first to be reached and the place which was reckoned as the most dangerous she would have to pass. When she had come out of that sinister gorge without mishap, he had them land him at the first convenient place in the quiet water below, from where he made his way to the railway and hurried back to Wenatchee with his story. That he had seen all the best of the excitement, he had no doubt. A quarter of an hour after Selig left her, theDouglaswas a total wreck on the rocks below Cabinet Rapids. He didn’t know just how it had happened, but said we would find what was left of her still where she had struck.
Wenatchee is the liveliest kind of a town, and claims to be the largest apple-shipping point in the United States. It also has a daily paper which claims to be the largest in the world in a city of under ten thousand population. I can easily believe this is true. I have seen many papers in cities of fifty or a hundred thousand that were not to be compared with it for both telegraphic and local news. Banks are on almost every corner for a half dozen blocks of the main street of Wenatchee, and every one seems to have a bank account. I saw stacks of check-books by the cashiers’ desks in restaurants and shops, andin one of the ice cream parlours I saw a young packette paying for her nut sundae with a check.
No word came from Captain McDermid during the day, and after endeavouring to reach him by phone all of the following forenoon, I reluctantly decided to push on without him. This was a good deal of a disappointment, not only because I felt that I was going to need his help mighty badly, but also because I was anxious to see more of him personally. A man who will take a steamer containing his wife and children down Rickey’s Rapids of the Columbia isn’t to be met with every day. Roos was anxious to get a picture of the “Farmer Who Would See the Sea” working his way down Rock Island Rapids, and as his machine was about the most valuable thing there was to lose in getting down there, it seemed up to me to do what I could. But for the first time since we pushed off to run the Big Bend, I unpacked and kept out my inflatable “Gieve” life-preserver waistcoat, which I had worn in the North Sea during the war, and which I had brought along on the “off chance.” Selig came down with his Graflex to get a photo of our departure for theWorld, but declined an invitation for another run through Rock Island Rapids.
There is a long and lofty highway bridge spanning the Columbia half a mile below Wenatchee, which fine structure also appears to be used on occasion as a city dump. That it was functioning in this capacity at the very moment we were about to pass under it between the two mid-stream piers did not become apparent until the swift current had carried us soclose that it was not safe to try to alter course either to left or right. There was nothing to do but run the gauntlet of the swervily swooping dust-tailed comets whose heads appeared to run the whole gamut of discard of a rather extravagant town of eight thousand people, all disdainful of “used” things. It would have been a rare chance to renew our outfit, only most of the contributions were speeding too rapidly at the end of their hundred-foot drop to make them entirely acceptable. “Low bridge!” I shouted to Roos, and swung hard onto my oars, yelling a lung-full at every stroke in the hope that the busy dumpers might stay their murderous hands at the last moment. Vain hope! My final frightened upward glance told me that the nauseous cataclysm was augmenting rather than lessening.
I putImshallahinto some mighty nasty looking rapids with a lot less apprehension than I drove her into that reeking second-hand barrage, that Niagara of things that people didn’t want. Doubtless it was the fact thatIwanted the stuff still less than they did that lent power to my arms and gave me a strength far transcending that of ordinary endeavour. Roos swore afterward that I lifted her right out of the water, just as a speeding hydroplane lifts at the top of its jump. This may have been so; but if it was, Roos sensed it rather than saw it, for his humped shoulders were folded tightly over his ducked head, like the wings of a newly hatched chicken. Anyhow, the little lady drove through safely, just as she always had. But where she had always emerged dewy-fresh and dancing jauntily on the tips of her toes from theroughest of rapids, here she oozed out upon an oil-slicked stream with the “Mark of the Beast” on her fore and aft. I mean that literally. That accursed little “White Wings” that sat up aloft to take toll of the life of poor Jack, must have had some kind of a slaughter-house dumping contract—andImshallahgot a smothering smear of the proceeds. Also a trailing length of burlap and a bag of cinders. As the latter burst when it kissed off my shoulder, Roos’ joke about my wearing sack-cloth-and-ashes was not entirely without point. The only article of value accruing was the shaving-brush which fell in Roos’ lap. He felt sure it must have been thrown away by mistake, for it had real camel’s-hair bristles, and he liked it better than his own—after the ashes had worked out of it. And yet it might have been a lot worse. I onlyheardthe splash of the wash-boiler that must have hit just ahead of her, but the sewing machine that grazed her stern jazzed right across my line of vision.
Up to that time Surprise Rapids of the Big Bend of Canada had stood as the superlative in the way of a really nasty hole to go through; from then on “Surprise Rapids of Wenatchee Bridge” claimed pride of place in this respect.
Swabbing down decks as best we could without landing, we pushed ahead. I was anxious to get down to Rock Island Rapids in time to look over the channels, if not to start through, before dark. We should have known better than to treat a dainty lady likeImshallahin that way. It was bad enough to have subjected her to the indignity of running the garbage barrage; not to give her a proper bath after it was unpardonable. At least that was the way she seemed to look at it, and so I never felt inclined to blame her for taking matters into her own hands. Wallowing through a sharp bit of rapid a mile below the bridge washed the outside of her bright and clean as ever, but it was the stain of that slaughter-house stuff on the inside that rankled. She was restive and cranky in the swirls and eddies all down a long stretch of slack water running between black basalt islands, and as the river narrowed and began to tumble over a boisterous rapid above the Great Northern Railway bridge, she began jumping about nervously, like a spirited horse watching his chance for a bolt.
It was Roos’ business, of course, to watch where she was going, but he made no claim of being a qualified steersman; so that there was really no excuse for my failing to watch our capricious lady’s symptoms and keep a steadying hand on her. Probably Ishouldhave done so had not a freight train run out on the bridge just as we neared the head of the rapid, throwing out so striking a smoke-smudge against a background of sun-silvered clouds that I needs must try for a hurried snapshot. That done, we were close to the “V” of the drop-off, and I had just time to see that there were three or four rather terrifying rollers tumbling right in the heart of the riffle, evidently thrown up by a jagged outcrop of bedrock very close to the surface. I would never have chanced putting even a bigbatteaudirectly into so wild a welter, but, with fairly good water to the left, there was no need of our passing within ten feet of the centre of disturbance. The course was so plain that I do not recall even calling any warning to Roos as I sat down and resumed my oars. Each of us claimed the other was responsible for what followed, but I think the real truth of it was thatImshallahhad made up her mind to have a bath without further delay, and couldn’t have been stopped anyhow.
I never did see just what hit us, nor how we were hit; for it all came with the suddenness of a sand-bagging. Roos was stroking away confidently, and appeared to be singing, from the movement of his lips. The words, if any, were drowned in the roar. All at once his eyes became wild and he lashed out with a frenzied paddle-pull that was evidently intended to throw her head to the left. The next instant the crash came—sudden, shattering, savage. I remember distinctly wondering why Roos’ eyes were shifted apprehensively upward, like those of a man who fancies he is backing away from a bombing airplane. And I think I recall spray dashing two or three lengths astern of us, before the solid battering ram of the water hit me on the back, and Roos in the face. And allImshallahdid was to stand straight up on her hind legs and let little demi-semi-quivers run up and down her back like a real lady exulting in the tickle of a shower-bath. Then she lay down and let the river run over her; then reared up on her hind legs again. Twice or thrice she repeated that routine, when, apparently satisfied that her ablutions were complete, she settled down and ran the rest of the rapid sedately and soberly, and, I am afraid, without much help from either oars or paddle. I have always thought Roos was particularly happy in hisdescription of how it looked for’ard just after that first big wave hit us. “The top of that comber was ten feet above your head,” he said, “and it came curving over you just like the ‘canopy’ of a ‘Jack-in-the-Pulpit.’”
WithImshallahrather more than half full of water, and consequently not a lot more freeboard for the moment than a good thick plank, it was just as well that no more rapids appeared before we found a patch of bank flat enough to allow us to land and dump her. Fresh as a daisy inside and out, she was as sweet and reasonable when we launched her again as any other lady of quality after she has had her own way. Not far below the bridge we tied up near the supply-pipe of a railway pumping station on the left bank. With the black gorge of Rock Island Rapids three-quarters of a mile below sending up an ominous growl, this appeared to be the proper place to stop and ask the way.
The engineer of the pumping-station said that he knew very little about the big rapid, as he had only been on his present job for a week. He had only seen the left-hand channel, and, as an old sailor, he was dead certain no open boat ever launched could live to run the lower end of it. He said he thought the safest way would be to put the skiff on his push-car, run it down the tracks a couple of miles, and launch it below the worst of the rapids. I told him we might be very glad to do this as a last resort, but, as it would involve a lot of time and labour, I would like to look at the rapid first. He told us to make free of his bunk-house in case we spent the night there, and suggested we call in at a farm house a couple of hundred yards down the track and talk with an old man there, who would probably know all about the rapid.
That proved to be a good tip. The farmer turned out to be an old-time stern-wheeler captain, who had navigated the upper Columbia for many years in the early days. He was greatly interested in our trip, and said that we ought to have no great trouble with the rapids ahead, that is, as long as we didn’t try to take undue liberties with them. The safest way to get through would be to land at the head of the big island that divided the channels and line right down the left side of it. It would be pretty hard work, but we ought not to get in wrong if we took our time. He was sorry he couldn’t go down and look the place over with us, but it happened that his youngest daughter was being married that evening, and things were sort of crowding for the rest of the day.Thatexplained why the yard was full of flivvers, and the numerous dressed-up men lounging around the porches. We decided that the groom was the lad, with an aggressively fresh-shaven gill, who was being made the butt of a joke every time he sauntered up to a new group, and that the bride was the buxom miss having her chestnut hair combed at a window, with at least half a dozen other girls looking on.
Roos was very keen to have the wedding postponed to the following morning, and changed to anal frescoaffair which he could shoot with good light. With a little study, he said, he was sure he could work it into his “continuity.” Perhaps, for instance, the “Farmer-Who-Would-See-the-Sea” might start them off ontheir honeymoon by taking them a few miles down river in his boat. That would lend “heart interest and....” I throttled that scheme in the bud before my impetuous companion could broach it to the principals. I wasn’t going to tempt the providence that had saved me whole from the wrath of Jock o’ Windermere by taking a chance with any more “bride stuff.”
The black-walled gorge of Rock Island is one of the grimmest-looking holes on the Columbia, and of all hours of the day sunset, when the deep shadows are banking thick above the roaring waters, is the least cheery time to pay it a visit. Somewhat as at Hell Gate, the river splits upon a long, rocky island, the broader, shallower channel being to the right, and the narrower, deeper one to the left. The upper end of the right-hand channel was quiet and straight; indeed, it was the one I would have been prompted to take had not the old river captain at the farm-house inclined to the opinion that the lining on the other would be easier. The former had been the course Symons had taken, and he mentioned that the lower end was very crooked and rocky. I decided, therefore, to brave the difficulties that I could see something of in advance rather than to blunder into those I knew not of. Although the left channel began to speed up right from the head, I saw enough of it to be sure that we could run at least the upper two-thirds of it without much risk, and that there was then a good eddy from which to land on the side next to the railroad. This was the head of the main fall—an extremely rough cascade having a drop of ten feet in four hundred yards. Down that we would have toline. I was quite in agreement with the pump-station man that no open boat would live in those wildly rolling waters. Fearful of complications, I restrained Roos from accepting an invitation to the wedding, and we turned in early for a good night’s sleep at the pump-station bunk-house.
The game old octogenarian had asked me especially to hail him from the river in the morning, so that he could go down and help us through the rapids. I should have been glad indeed of his advice in what I knew would be a mighty awkward operation, but had not the heart to disturb him when I saw there was no curl of smoke from the kitchen chimney when we drifted by at eight o’clock. The roar of fast and furious revelry had vied with the roar of the rapids pretty well all night, culminating with a crescendo leading up to the old shoe barrage at about daybreak. It didn’t seem quite human to keep the old boy lining down river all morning after lining up against that big barrel of “sweet cider” all night.... (No, I hadn’t missed that little detail; that was one of the reasons I had kept Roos away). So we drifted on down toward the big noise alone. The pump-man promised he would come down to help as soon as his tank was filled, but that wouldn’t be for an hour or more.
Rock Island Rapids are in a gorge within a gorge. The black water-scoured canyon with the foam-white river at the bottom of it is not over fifty feet deep in the sheer. Back of high-water mark there is a narrow strip of bench on either side, above which rises a thousand feet or more of brown bluff. The eastern wall still cast its shadow on the river, but thereflection of the straw-yellow band of broadening light creeping down the western bluff filled the gorge with a diffused golden glow that threw every rock and riffle into sharp relief. It was a dozen times better to see by than the blinding brilliance of direct light, and, knowing just what to expect for the next quarter-mile, I ran confidently into the head of the rapid. Early morning is the hour of confidence and optimism on the flowing road; evening the hour of doubt, indecision and apprehension.
A submerged rock at the entrance to the left channel, which I had marked mentally from the high bank the night before as an obstacle to be avoided, proved rather harder to locate from water level; but Roos spotted it in time to give it a comfortable berth in shooting by. Then the abrupt black walls closed in, and we ran for three hundred yards in fast but not dangerous water. The current took us straight into the eddy I had picked for a landing place, and the skiff slid quietly into a gentle swirling loop of back-water, with nothing but a huge jutting rock intervening between that secure haven and the brink of the fall. So far all had gone exactly as planned. Now we were to see how it looked for lining.
Roos set up on a shelf and cranked while I lined round the projecting rock, an operation which proved unexpectedly simple once it was started right. At my first attempt I failed to swing the boat out of the eddy, and as a consequence she was brought back against the rock and given rather a stiff bump. The next time I launched her higher up, and paying out plenty of scope, let her go right out into the maincurrent and over the “intake” of the fall. It took brisk following up to keep the line from fouling, and after that was cleared I didn’t have quite as much time as I needed to take in slack and brace myself for the coming jerk. The result wasImshallahgot such a way on in her hundred feet of run that, like alocoedbroncho pulling up and galloping off with its picket-pin, she took me right along over and off the big rock and into the water below. To my great surprise, where I was expecting to go straight into the whirlpool one usually finds behind a projecting rock, I landed in water that was both slack and comparatively shallow. Recovering quickly from my stumble, I braced against the easy current and checked the runaway with little trouble. Roos, who had missed the last part of the action, wanted me to do that jump and stumble over again, but the ten foot flop down onto the not very deeply submerged boulders was a bit too much a shake-up to sustain for art’s sake.
Now that it was too late to line back, I saw why it was the old captain had advised working down the side of the island. The left bank of the cascade (which latter was tumbling close beside me now), was all but sheer. Only here and there were there footings close to the water, so that the man with the line would have to make his way for the most part along the top of the rocky wall.Hecould get along all right, but there was no place where a man could follow the boat and keep it off with a pole. It might have been managed with a man poling-off from the boat itself, but I hardly felt like urging Roos to take the chance. It was out of the question trying to lineback up the “intake” of the fall, but therewasone loop-hole which looked worth exploring before risking an almost certain mess-up in trying to work down the side of the cascade.
I have mentioned that I had expected to find a whirlpool under the big jutting rock. The only reason there wasn’t one was because what at high water must have been a very considerable back channel took out at this point and acted as a sort of safety-valve. There was still a stream a few inches deep flowing out here, running off to the left into a dark cavernous-looking crack in the bedrock. That water had to come back to the river somewhere below, and there was just a chance that the boat could be squeezed through the same way. At any rate, there was not enough of a weight of water to do any harm, and it ought not to be hard to “back up” in the event it proved impossible to push on through. Leaving Roos to set up and shoot a particularly villainous whirlpool he had discovered, I dragged the skiff through the shallow opening and launched it into a deep black pool beyond.
Poling from pool to pool, I entered a miniature gorge where I was presently so walled in by the rock that the raw roar of the cascade was muffled to a heavy, earth-shaking rumble. This tiny canyonette opened up at the end of a hundred yards to a sheer-walled rock-bound pool, evidently scoured out by the action of a high-water whirlpool. This turned out to be an enormous “pot-hole,” for I had to avoid the water-spun boulder, which had been the tool of the sculpturing River God, in pushing into the outletcrack. The latter was so narrow and overhanging that I had to lie down and work the skiff along with my up-raised hands. Twenty yards of that brought me out to a winding little lake, less steeply walled than the gorge above, but apparently closed all the way round, even at the lower end. I was in a completecul de sac. A gurgling whirlpool showed where the water escaped by a subterranean passage, but that was plainly no place to take a lady, especially a lady of quality likeImshallah.
TyingImshallahup to a boulder to prevent her amiable weakness for rushing to the embraces of whirlpools getting the better of her, I climbed up a steeply-sloping pitch of bedrock and looked down to the head of a long narrow arm of quiet water. The gay little waterfall breaking forth from the rock beneath my feet was leaping directly into the main stream of the Columbia—and below the cascade. A stiff thirty or forty-foot portage, and we were through. We might have to wait for the pump-man to help us lift the boat up that first pitch, but he ought to be along almost any time now.
Taking a short-cut back across the water-washed rock, I found Roos just completing his shots of the cascade. The sun was on the latter now, and its dazzling whiteness threw it into striking relief against the sinister walls between which it tumbled. Save the first two falls of Surprise Rapids, there is not a savager rush of water on the upper Columbia than this final three hundred yards of the left-hand channel of Rock Island. Roos was delighted with the way it showed up in his finder, and even more pleased whenhe learned that we were not going to have to line the boat down it. Then he had one of his confounded inspirations. That portage over the reef of bedrock, with the little waterfall in the background, would photograph like a million dollars, he declared; but to get the full effect of it, and to preserve “continuity,” the “farmer” ought to do it alone. It wouldn’t do to include the pump-man in the picture, now that the “farmer” was supposed to be travelling alone. If Ihadto have his help, all right; only it wouldn’t do to shoot while the other man was in the picture. But itwouldreally be the “Cat’s ears” if the “farmer” could make it on his own. He wouldn’t have to make that big pull-up without stopping; he could jerk the boat along a foot or two at a time, and then get his breath like the pursued villain did in the processional finales of knockabout comedies. Then he showed me how, by resuming the same grip on the boat and the same facial expression at each renewed attack, the action could be made to appear practically continuous.
Well, I fell for it. Tom Sawyer was not more adroit in getting out of white-washing his fence than was Roos in getting out of that portage job. He wanted to preserve “continuity” by starting back at the head of the cascade, but we compromised by making it the “pot-hole.” Emerging to the lakelet, I registered “extreme dejection” at finding my progress blocked, and “dull gloom” as I landed and climbed up for a look-see. But when I reached the top of the reef and discovered the quiet water below, like sunlight breaking through a cloud, I assumed as nearly asI knew how an exact imitation of an expression I had seen on the face of Balboa in a picture called “First Sight of the Pacific.” “That’s the ‘Cat’s ears,’” encouraged Roos; “now snake the boat over—and make it snappy!”
I made it snappy, all right; but it was my spine that did most of the snapping. And it wasn’t a foot at a time that I snaked the boat over. (Roos had been too optimistic on that score); it was by inches. Roos took infinite pains in coaching me as to “resuming grip and expression;” but even so, I am afraid the finished film will display considerable jerkiness in its “continuous action.” I gained some solace by calling Roos names all the time, and so must again beg “lip-readers” who see the picture to consider the provocation and not judge too harshly. Once tilted over the crest of the reef, the boat took more holding than hauling. Being pretty well gone in the back and knees, she got away from me and slid the last ten feet, giving her bottom a bumping that it never did entirely recover from. I was caulking incipient leaks all the way to Portland as a consequence of that confounded “one man” portage.
Just as we had loaded up and were ready to push off, the pump-man breezed along and asked us to give him a passage as far as Columbia River station, two or three miles below. He wanted to take an oar, but as the distance was short and the current swift, I told him it was not worth bothering with. So he laid the oar he had taken out along the starboard gunwale, and knelt just aft the after thwart, facing forward. Roos always claimed that it was the loom ofthe pump-man’s back cutting off his view ahead that was responsible for the little diversion that followed. A good part of the blame was doubtless my own for not keeping a sharper watch over my shoulder, as I certainly should have done had I been alone. In any event,Imshallah’s alibiwas complete. She behaved through it all like a real thoroughbred.
There was a sinuous tangle of swirls where the right-hand and left-hand cascades flew at each other’s throats at the lower end of the rock island, and then a gay stretch of sun-dazzled froth where the teeth of a long reef menaced all the way across the channel; then a stretch of lazily-coiling green-black water, flowing between lofty brown cliffs and broken here and there with the loom of house-like rocks of shattered basalt. The roar of Rock Island died down in muffleddiminuendo, and it seemed mighty good to have that diapason muttering in bafflement astern rather than growling in anticipation ahead. There was only one little rapid between here and the siding, the pump-man said, and it wouldn’t bother us much as there was plenty of room to get by. He was right—for the most part.
I took a good look at the riffle as we headed down to it. It was a short stretch of rough, noisy water, but nothing that would have had to be avoided except for a single big roller in the middle of it. As this was throwing a great dash of spray high in the air every now and then, I felt sure the rock responsible for it was very slightly submerged—perhaps not more than a few inches. As this was so obviously an obstacle to steer well clear of, it never occurred to me to giveRoos any especial warning about it, especially as he continued standing and sizing up the situation for half a minute after I had resumed my oars. The main current ran straight across the riffle, but with fifty feet of clear water to the left there was no need of getting into any of the worst of it, let alone trying to hurdle that foam-throwing rock.
Leaning hard on my oars, I had good steerage-way on the skiff by the time she dipped over into the fast-running water. Roos was cuffing jauntily at the wave crests, and singing. Because of the sequel, I remember particularly it was “Dardanella” that was claiming his attention. Two or three times he had maintained that he was a “lucky fella” before I saw what seemed to me to be mingled dissent and perturbation gathering in the pump-man’s steel-grey eyes. Then, all of a sudden, he gave vocal expression to his doubts. “You won’t think you’re a ‘lucky fella’ if you put her onta that rock,” he yelled over his shoulder. Turning at the finish of my stroke, I saw that big spray-flipping comber about two lengths away, anddead ahead, looking savager than ever. Trailing my right oar, I pulled every ounce I could bring to bear upon my left, trying to throw her head toward the better water. The next instant I was all but falling over backwards as the oar snapped cleanly off in the oar-lock. I recall perfectly the gleam of the long copper nails which had weakened it, and the fresh fracture of the broken spruce.
The weight I put onto my right oar in saving myself from tumbling backward had the effect of throwing her head in just the opposite direction I had intended. Since she could hardly have avoided hitting the big roller anyhow, once she was so near, it is probably better that she hit it squarely than sidling. The crash was solid, almost shattering in its intensity, and yet I am not sure that she hit the rock at all. If she did, it was a glancing blow, for she could not possibly have survived anything heavier.
The pump-man, true to his sailor instincts, kept his head perfectly in the face of the deluge that had engulfed him. The spare oar was lying ready to hand, and he had it waiting for me in the oar-lock by the time I was on an even keel again. The second wave, which she rode on her own, threwImshallah’shead off a bit, but by the time she was rising to the third I was helping her again with the oars. Seeing how well she was taking it, I did not try to pull out of the riffle now, but let her run right down through it to the end. Only the first wave put much green water into her, but even that had not filled her anywhere nearly so deep as she had been the evening before. When we beached her below Columbia River station we found her starboard bow heavily dented, but even that did not convince me that we had hit the big rock. I am rather inclined to think that denting was done when I did my lone-hand portage at Rock Island. I was dead sorry I couldn’t persuade that pump-man to throw up his job and come along with us. He had the real stuff in him.
THE PICTURE THAT COST ME A WETTING (above)THE WRECK OF THE "DOUGLAS" (below)
WE COOKED OUR BREAKFAST IN THE GALLEY OF THE WRECK OF THE “DOUGLAS” (left)A ROCKY CLIFF ABOVE BEVERLY (right)
After having lunch in the railway men’s eating house at Columbia River, we went down to push off again. Finding the local ferry-man examining the skiff, I asked him if he thought she would do to runCabinet Rapids, which we could hear rumbling a mile below. “Not if you try to push them out of the river the way you did that riffle above here a while ago,” he replied with a grin. He said he had been watching us through his glass, and that the boat had disappeared from sight for three or four seconds when she hit the big roller. He offered to bet his ferry-boat against the skiff that we couldn’t do it again and come through right-side-up. No takers. Speaking seriously, he said that, by keeping well to the left, we could run Cabinet all right—if nothing went wrong. “But better not make a practice of breaking an oar just where you’re going to need it most,” he added with another grin; “there’s nothing on the river that would live through the big riffle over against the right bank. You’ll see what she did to theDouglas.”
Landing from the slack water above a rocky point which juts out into the river at the head of Cabinet Rapids, we climbed a couple of hundred yards over water-scoured boulders to the brink of the gorge. It was a decidedly rough-looking rapid, but by no means so hopeless for running with a small boat as Rock Island. In that the main riffle was thrown against a sheer bank of the river, it reminded me a good deal of Death Rapids on the Big Bend. But this riffle, while appearing fully as rough as that of the dreadedDalles des Morts, was not, like the latter, unavoidable. The chance of passing it in only fairly broken water to the left looked quite good enough to try. The wreck of theDouglas, standing out white and stark against the black boulders a mile below, was a good warning against taking any unnecessary chances. Ilooked well to the oars and the trim of the boat before shoving off.
Once out into the river, I could see that the rapid was white from bank to bank, but still nothing that ought to trouble us seriously. I stood for a minute or two looking ahead from the vantage of one of the thwarts, and it was just as I was taking up my oars again in the quickening current that the corner of my eye glimpsed the narrow opening of a deep back-channel winding off between splintered walls of columnar basalt to the left. I wasn’t looking for any more one-man portages, but this opening looked good enough to explore. It might lead through by an easy way, and there was hardly enough water to do much harm if it didn’t. It took hard pulling to sheer off from the “intake” now we had drifted so close, but we finally made it and entered the dark back-channel. Narrowing and broadening, just as the other had done, it led on for a couple of hundred yards, finally to discharge over a six-foot fall into a deeply indented pool that opened out to the river about half way down the rapid. The wedge-shaped crack at the head of the little fall was narrower than the skiff at water-line, but by dint of a little lifting and tugging we worked her through and lowered her into the pool below. Pulling out through the opening, we headed her confidently into the current. There was a quarter-mile of white water yet, but we were far enough down now so that the loss of an oar or any other mishap wouldn’t leave the skiff to run into those wallowing rollers over against the further cliff. A sharp, slashing run carried us through to the foot of Cabinet Rapids, and afew minutes later we had hauled up into an eddy under the left bank opposite the wreck of theDouglas.
The little stern-wheeler had come to grief at high-water, so that we had to clamber all of three hundred yards over big, smooth, round boulders to reach the point where the wreck was lying. The latter was by no means in so bad a shape as I had expected to find it. The principal damage appeared to have been done to the wheel, which was clamped down tight over a huge boulder, and to the starboard bow, which was stove in. The rest of her hull and her upper works were intact; also the engines, though terribly rusty. There was not much from which one could reconstruct the story of the disaster; in fact, I have not learned to this day any authentic details. The chances are, however, that the wheel struck a rock somewhere in Cabinet Rapids, and, after that, drifting out of control, she had come in for the rest of the mauling. If her captain is like the rest of the Columbia River skippers I met, I have no doubt that she will be patched up again before next high-water and started off for Portland.
With towering cliffs on both sides and the great black boulders scattered all around, Roos felt that both subject and setting were highly favourable for an effective movie, and started to think out a way to work the wreck of theDouglasinto his “continuity.” After some minutes of brown study, he declared that the best way to work it would be for the “farmer” to land, come clambering across the boulders registering “puzzled wonderment,” and then to stand in silent contemplation of the wreck, registering “thankfulness.” “Thankfulness for what?” I demanded; “it doesn’t strike me as Christian to gloat over the wreck of a ship.” “You don’t get me at all,” he expostulated. “I don’t mean for him to show thankfulness because of the wreck of the steamer, but because his own boat has so far escaped a similar fate. He just stands here with his arms folded, casts his eyes upward, moves his lips as if....”
“Nothing doing,” I cut in decisively. “If you’d been raising beans and hay and apricots as long as I have, you’d know that a farmer never registers thankfulness about anything but a rise in the market, and there ain’t no such thing any more.” While we were arguing that moot point, the sun dipped behind the loftily looming wall of brown-black cliff across the river and the trouble settled itself automatically. Because there was no longer light, Roos thought it would be a good stunt to camp where we were until morning, and as a camp was always “continuity”—there we were!
There was plenty of cordwood left, and the galley stove was in good condition. As we had no candles, dinner was cooked by the mingled red and green gleams of the port and starboard lights, transferred to the galley for that purpose. I slept in the cook’s cabin and Roos—with his bed made up on the wire springs from the Captain’s cabin—on the deck of the galley. With water freezing half an inch thick in the coffee-pot on the galley stove, we had an insufferably cold night of it—one of the worst we spent on the river. In the morning Roos made his “camp shots,” which consisted principally of the farmer chopping cordwood on the main deck, building a fire in the galley stove and cooking breakfast. Out of deference to my esoteric knowledge of the way farmers feel about things, he consented to omit the “thankfulness stuff.”
Shoving off into a steady six-mile current at nine-thirty, a few minutes brought us in sight of a striking basaltic island, which Symons had characterized as “one of the most perfect profile rocks in existence.” “Approaching it from the north,” he wrote, “it presents a striking likeness to the profile of Queen Victoria.... Coming nearer to it and passing it on the west, the profile changes and merges into a more Grecian and Sphinx-like face, whose placid immobility takes one’s mind involuntarily to far-off Egypt. It rises from the surface of the water about a hundred feet, and a pair of eagles have selected it as their home, and upon its extreme top have built a nest, giving, as it were, a crown to this goddess of the Columbia.”
Roos declared himself strong for that “Sphinx stuff,” and had his camera set up in the bow ready for a close-up of every change of expression. He was doomed to disappointment. The first thing we discovered missing was the crowning eagles’ nest, and then Victoria’s nose, mouth and chin. Her brow and hair were there, but both considerably eroded and inroad-ed by the weather. The “Grecian-and-Sphinx-like face” we never did locate, although I pulled around the island twice in search of them. Roos declared her an “oil can,” and packed up his camera in supreme disgust. That was, I believe, the last time he had it set up on the Columbia.
As Lieutenant Symons had proved so invariablyaccurate in all of his topographical descriptions, I am strongly inclined to the belief that floods and the elements had conspired to wreak much havoc with “Victoria’s” features in the forty years that had elapsed since he limned them so strikingly with pen and pencil. I have known fairly stonily-featured ladies to change almost as much in a good deal less than forty years.
Cabinet Rapids is the beginning of a somewhat irregular series of columnar basaltic cliffs which wall in the Columbia closely for the next thirty miles. They range in height from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet, and in colour from a rich blend of saffron-cinnamon, through all the shades of brown, to a dull black. The prevailing formation is that of upended cordwood, but there are endless weird stratifications and lamiations, with here and there queer nuclei that suggest sulphur crystallizations. Imbedded in the face of one of these cliffs not far from the tumultuous run of Gualquil Rapids, is a landmark that has been famous among Columbiavoyageursfor over a hundred years. This is huge log, barkless and weather-whitened, standing on end in the native basalt. Over a thousand feet above the river and almost an equal distance from the brink of the sheer wall of rock, there is no possible question of its having been set there by man. The descriptions written of it a hundred years ago might have been written to-day. Whether it is petrified or not, there is no way of knowing. The only possible explanation of its presence is that it was lodged where it is at a time when the Columbia flowed a thousand feethigher than it does to-day, probably before it tore its great gorge through the Cascades and much of what is now eastern Washington was a vast lake.
On the suggestion of the ferry-man at Trinidad, we avoided the upper half of Gualquil Rapids by taking a straight, narrow channel to the right, which would probably have been dry in another week. There is a half mile of fast, white water here, ending with some heavy swirls against a sheer cliff, but nothing seriously to menace any well-handled open boat. The water was slack for a number of miles from the foot of Gualquil, but began quickening where the river spread out between long gravel bars below Vantage Ferry. They were shunting sheep across at the latter point, and the Portuguese herders crowded eagerly round our boat, making strange “high signs” and voicing cryptic utterances, evidently having something to do with a local bootleggers’ code. At our failure to respond in kind, they became suspicious (doubtless the fact that Roos was wearing a second-hand Canadian officer’s uniform he had bought in Revelstoke had something to do with it) that we were prohibition enforcement officials, and they were muttering darkly to each other and shaking their heads as we pushed off again.
The cliffs ran out not long after we left Vantage Ferry, and as we neared the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Bridge at Beverly rough patches of sandy desert began opening up on either side. Deprived of the shelter of the high river walls, we were at once exposed to a heavy easterly wind that had evidently been blowing all day on the desert. The sun dulledto a luminous blur behind the pall of the sand-filled air, and the wind, which headed us every now and then, about neutralized the impulse of the accelerating current. There was a forty-miles-an-hour sand-storm blowing when we beached the boat under the railway bridge at four-thirty. The brilliantly golden-yellow cars of the C. M. & St. P. Limited rumbling across above behind their electric locomotive seemed strangely out-of-place in the desolate landscape.
The one sidewalk of the town’s fragment of street was ankle-deep in sand as we buffetted our way to the hotel. “Have you ever been in Beverly before?” asked the sandy-haired (literally) girl who responded to the jangle of the cowbell on the counter. “But I should know better than that,” she apologized with a blush as she blew off the grit on the register; “’cause if you had been here once, you’d sure never be here again. What’s the game, anyhow? You haven’t...?” A knowing twitch of a dusty eyelash finished the question.
“No, we haven’t,” growled Roos irritably. Somehow he was never able to extract half the amusement that I did over being taken for a boot-legger.
It was the sand-storm that broke Roos’ heart, I think. He was non-committal at supper that night when I started to talk about Priest Rapids, and the next morning, after describing his shave as like rubbing his face with a brick, he announced that he was through with the Columbia for good. As there was a good deal to be said for his contention that, between the shortening days and the high cliffs walling in theriver, there were only two or three hours of good shooting light even when the sun was out, I did not feel justified in urging him to go on unless he wanted to. In any event, light for filming the running and lining of Priest Rapids, now that the sand-storm was at its height, was out of the question for a day or two at least. And below Priest Rapids there would be nothing worth filming until the mouth of the Snake was passed. I suggested, therefore, that he should go on to Pasco by train and await me there, finding out in the meantime by wire whether Chester cared to have him continue the “farmer” picture in the face of the adverse light conditions.
By this time I had fairly complete data on Priest Rapids. These, beginning at the end of a stretch of slack water several miles below Beverly, continue for eleven miles. In this distance there are seven major riffles, with considerable intervals of fairly quiet water between. It seemed probable that all of these, with the exception of the second and seventh, and possibly the sixth, could be run. The lining of the others, while not difficult, would require the help of another man. All that morning I inhaled sand as I went over Beverly with a fine-toothed comb in a very earnest effort to find some one willing to give me a hand through Priest Rapids. The nearest I came to success was an ex-brakeman, who said he would go with me after the storm was over, provided a job hadn’t turned up in the meantime. The only real river-man I found was an old chap who opined that the middle of November was too late in the year to be getting his feet—if nothing else—wet in the “Columby.” He offered to haul the boat to the foot of the rapids by the road for twenty dollars, but as the down-river branch of the Milwaukee presented an opportunity to accomplish the same end in less time and discomfort, I decided to portage by the latter. As there was an auto-stage service from Hanford to Pasco, Roos accompanied me to the former point by train, and helped get the boat down to the river and into the water in the morning. Hanford was not the point on the line closest to the foot of Priest Rapids, but I took the boat through to there because the station was nearer the river than at White Bluffs, and launching, therefore, a simpler matter.
The stretch of seventy miles between the foot of Priest Rapids and the mouth of the Snake has the slowest current of any part of the Columbia above the Dalles. Mindful of the time we had been losing by stops for lunch, I now began putting into practice a plan which I followed right on to the end of my voyage. Taking a package of biscuit and a couple of bars of milk chocolate in my pocket, I kept the river right straight on through to my destination. Munching and resting for an hour at noon, I at least had the benefit of the current for this period. Eating a much lighter lunch, I also gained the advantage of no longer being troubled with that comfortablesiesta-time drowsiness that inevitably follows a hearty meal and disinclines one strongly to heavy exertion for an hour or more.
For a dozen miles or more below Hanford the river, flanked on either side by rolling desert sand-dunes, winds in broad shallow reaches through a region desolate in the extreme. The only signs of life I saw for many miles were coyotes slinking through the hungry sage-brush and occasional flocks of geese, the latter forerunners of the countless myriads that were to keep me company below the Snake. At Richfield the results of irrigation became evident in young apple orchards and green fields of alfalfa, and these multiplied all the way down to Pasco. The country seemed very flat and monotonous after so many weeks among cliffs and mountains, but there was no question of its richness and productivity once water was brought to it. The low overflow flats about the mouth of the Yakima, which flows into the Columbia from the west a few miles above Pasco, gave little indication of the beauty of the famous apple country which owes so much to the waters diverted from that little river.
After pulling for an hour with the long Northern Pacific bridge in view, I landed just below the Pasco-Kennewick ferry at three o’clock. As I was beaching the boat and getting out the luggage to leave in the ferry-man’s house-boat, a hail from the river attracted my attention. It was from Roos, in the front seat of an auto, on the approaching ferry-boat. His stage had been behind time in leaving Hanford, and as a consequence I had beaten him to the Pasco landing by ten minutes. After the speed with which we had moved on the upper river, however, mine had been rather a slow run. In spite of my steady pulling, it had taken me just under six hours to do the thirty-five miles.
After the exchange of a wire or two, Roos obtained permission from Chester to suspend the “farmer”picture, and was ordered on to New York to report. We were both a good deal disappointed not to have a pictorial record of the “farmer” actually seeing the sea; in fact, we did some hours of “location” scouting in the hope of finding a substitute Pacific in the vicinity of Pasco. If that Beverly sand-storm had only made itself felt seventy-five miles farther down river I honestly believe we would have accomplished our worthy end. There was a pretty bit of white beach below the N. P. bridge.Ifthe sand had been blowing thick enough to obscure the farther shore, andifthe wind had blown in the right direction to throw up a line or two of surf, I could have stood with one foot on that beach, the other onImshallah’sbow, elbow on knee, chin in hand, and registered “fulfilment,” and none could have told it from the real Pacific. Indeed, that bit of backwash from Pasco’s outfall sewer, with the sand-barrage and surf I have postulated, would have “shot”morelike the Pacific than many spots I can think of looking off to the Columbia bar.
The only lone-hand river voyage I had ever taken previous to the one on which I was about to embark was down the lower Colorado River, from Needles to the head of the Gulf of California. This had been in comparatively quiet water all the way, with nothing much to look out for save the tidal bore at the lower end. As I had never been above the Dalles on the lower Columbia, I had very little idea of what I would encounter in the way of rapids. I knew that there were locks by which the Dalles and Cascades could be passed, but as the combined fall at these points accounted for only about a quarter of that between the Snake and tide-water, it was certain there must still be some very swift rapids to run. That there had at times been a steamer service maintained from the Snake down meant that there must be some sort of a rock-free channel through all of the riffles; but it did not necessarily mean that these were runnable in a small boat. A properly handled stern-wheeler can be drifted down and (by means of line and capstan) hauled up rapids where not even a high-powered launch can live. I had a list of about a score of the principal rapids between the Snake and Celilo Falls, with their distances from the Canadian Boundary by river. This would enable me to know approximatelywhereI was going to find them. That was all.Information on fall, channel and the best means of running them I would have to pick up as I went along.
I shoved off from Pasco Ferry at nine o’clock in the morning of Sunday, November fourteenth. With Roos and his blanket-roll, camera and tripod out of the stern, I found that the skiff trimmed better when I rowed from the after thwart. She pulled easier and handled a lot more smartly now. It was evident, however, that her increased freeboard was going to make her harder to hold to her course with head winds, but these I hoped to have little trouble with until I reached the gorge of the Cascades. The ferry-man assured me that I would encounter no really bad water until I came to the last pitch of Umatilla Rapids, about thirty-five miles below. He advised me to take a good look at that before putting into it, as an unbroken reef ran almost directly across the current and the channel was not easy to locate. It was the most troublesome bar to navigation on the lower Columbia, and steamers were repeatedly getting in trouble there. I would see the latest wreck a couple of miles below the foot of the rapids.
I passed the mouth of the Snake about three miles below the ferry. Here was no such spectacular meeting of waters as occurs when the Pend d’Oreille and Columbia spring together, for the country is low and level, and the mouth of the Snake broad and shallow. The discharge was through two channels, and the water greenish-grey in colour; but where that blend in the swift tributaries of the upper river suggests the intense coldness of glacial origin, here the picture conjured up was of desert and alkali plains. Itsmouth is the least interesting part of the Snake. It has some magnificent canyons in its upper and middle waters—as have also its two fine tributaries, the Salmon and Clearwater,—and its Shoshone Falls are second only to Niagara on the North American continent.
Lieutenant Symons, who concluded his exploration of the upper Columbia at the Snake, characterizes the region as a “bleak, dreary waste, in which for many miles around sage-brush and sand predominate ... one of the most abominable places in the country to live in.” Alexander Ross, on the other hand, writing seventy years earlier, describes it as one of the loveliest lands imaginable. The fact that the one reached the Snake in the fall and the other in the spring may have had something to do with these diametrically opposed impressions. Irrigation and cultivation have gone far to redeem this land from the desert Symons found it, but it is still far from being quite the Paradise Ross seemed to think it was. As the only considerable plain touching the Columbia at any point in its course, this region of the Snake can never make the scenic appeal of the hundreds of miles of cliff-walled gorges above and below; but it is a land of great potential richness. With water and power available from the two greatest rivers of the West, there can be no question of its future, both agriculturally and industrially. Pasco will yet more than fulfil the promises made for that mushroom town in its early boom days. “KEEP YOUR EYE ON PASCO!” was a byword from one end of the country to the other in the nineties, and this hustling rail and agriculturalcentre at the junction of the Columbia and the Snake should not be lost sight of even to-day.
The lighter-hued water of the Snake was pretty well churned into the flood of the Columbia at the end of a mile, leaving a faint suggestion of cloudiness in the transparent green that the latter had preserved all the way from the Arrow Lakes. The long bridge of the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway spanned the Columbia just below the Snake, and from there on paralleled the river closely right down to the Willamette. After the Oregon-Washington Railway and Navigation Company tracks appeared on the south bank below the Walla Walla, it was only at rare intervals that I was out of sight of a grade, or out of sound of a train, for the remainder of my voyage. In a day or two the trainmen, running back and forth between divisional points, came to recognize the bright green skiff plugging on down the dark green river (mighty small she must have looked to them from the banks) and never failed to give her a hail or a wave in passing. On a certain memorable occasion one of them (doubtless in direct defiance of rules) ventured even further in the way of a warning ... but I will tell of that in its place.
Homley Rapids, seven miles below Pasco ferry, are formed by a rough reef of bedrock running half way across the river from the right bank. Approached from the right side of the long gravel island that divides the river just above them, one might get badly tangled up before he got through; by the left-hand channel the going is easy if one keeps an eye on the shallowing water at the bars. A sky-line of brownmountains, with a double-turreted butte as their most conspicuous feature, marks the point where the Columbia finally turns west for its assault on the Cascades and its plunge to the Pacific. That bend is the boundary of the fertile plains extending from the Yakima to the Walla Walla, and the beginning of a new series of gorges, in some respects the grandest of all. The matchless panorama of the Cascade gorges is a fitting finale to the stupendous scenic pageant that has been staged all the way from the glacial sources of the Columbia.
A low sandy beach just above the mouth of the rather insignificant Walla Walla comes pretty near to being the most historically important point on the Columbia. Here Lewis and Clark first came to the waters of the long-struggled-toward Oregon; here came Frémont, the “Pathfinder;” here Thompson planted his pious proclamation claiming all of the valley of the Columbia for the Northwest Company; and by here, sooner or later, passed and repassed practically every one of the trappers, missionaries, settlers and other pioneers who were finally to bring Oregon permanently under the Stars and Stripes.
The double-topped butte, an outstanding landmark forvoyageursfor a hundred years, has long been called “The Two Virgins.” The story is told locally of a Catholic priest who saved his life by taking refuge in a cave between the castellated turrets during an Indian massacre, but who got in rather serious trouble with the Church afterwards as a consequence of sending words of his deliverance by a French-Canadian half-breedvoyageur. The latter got thesalient details of the story straight, but neglected to explain that the two virgins were mountains. The result was that the unlucky priest narrowly missed excommunication for saving his life at the expense of breaking his vows. I got no affidavit with the story; but local “stock” yarns are always worth preserving on account of their colour.
There were a number of big black rocks where the river began its bend to the west, but the channel to the right was not hard to follow. Neither did Bull Run Rapids, a few miles farther down, offer any difficulties. I followed the steamer channel as having the swiftest current, but could have passed without trouble on either side of it in much quieter water. Brown and terra-cotta-tinged cliffs reared higher and higher to left and right, encroaching closely on the river. There was little room for cultivation at any point, and often the railways had had to resort to heavy cutting and tunnelling to find a way through some jutting rock buttress. There were no trees, and the general aspect of the country was desolate in the extreme.
It was toward the end of a grey afternoon that I headedImshallahinto the first pitch of Umatilla Rapids. The sun had dissolved into a slowly thickening mist about three o’clock, and from then on the whole landscape had been gradually neutralizing itself by taking on shade after shade of dull, inconspicuous grey. From the grey-white mistiness of the sky to the grey-green murkiness of the river there was nothing that contrasted with anything else; every object was blended, dissolved, all but quenched. The foam-ruffles above even the sharpest of the riffles blurred like the streaking of clouded marble at a hundred feet, and it took the livest kind of a lookout to avoid the ones with teeth in them. Neither the first nor the second riffle had any very bad water, but my neck was stiff from watching over my shoulder even as they were. I had rather intended avoiding this trouble by drifting down anything that looked very threatening stern first, but that would have involved retrimming the boat and greatly reducing her speed. If I was going to make Umatilla by dark, there was no time to lose.
From the head of the first riffle of Umatilla Rapids to the head of the third or main one is a mile and a half. There was a slight up-river breeze blowing in the mist, and the heavy rumble of the big fall came to my ears some distance above the opening riffle. The distant roar augmented steadily after that, and the sharper grind of the more imminent riffles was never loud enough to drown it out entirely. The fact that it had a certain “all pervasive” quality, seeming to fill the whole of the gorge with its heavy beat, told me that it was an unusually long rapid, as well as an unusually rough one. That, it seemed, was about all I was going to be able to find out. No one was in sight on the left bank, which I was skirting, and the right bank was masked with mist. With none to seek information from, and with not enough light to see for myself, the alternatives were very simple: I could either land, line as far as I could while light lasted and then seek Umatilla on foot for the night, or I could take my chance at running through. Itwas the delay and uncertainty sure to be attendant upon lining that was the principal factor in deciding me to try the latter course. Also, I knew that there was an open channel all the way through, and that the rapid was a comparatively broad and shallow one, rather than constricted and deep. This meant that it would be straight white water—a succession of broken waves—I was going into, rather than heavy swirls and whirlpools; just the water in which the skiff had already proved she was at her best. These points seemed to minimize the risk of going wrong to a point where the chance of running was worth taking for the time and trouble it would save. If I had not known these things in advance, I should never, of course, have risked going into so strong a rapid under such conditions of light.
I shall always have a very grateful feeling toward that Pasco ferry-man for those few words he dropped about the run of the reef and the set of the current at Umatilla Rapid. This is one of the few great rapids I have ever known on any river where the main drift of the current will not carry a boat to the deepest channel. This is due to the fact that the great reef of native rock which causes the rapid is sufficiently submerged even at middle water to permit a considerable flow directly across it. The consequence of this is that a boat, large or small, which follows the current and does not start soon enough working over toward the point where a channel has been blasted through the reef, is almost certain to be carried directly upon the latter. This has happened to a good many steamers, the latest having been wrecked not long before my voyage.
With a rough idea of the lay of things in my mind, I had edged a good deal farther out across the current than would have been the case had I been trusting to my own judgment of the way the rapidoughtto develop in the light of my past experience. The smooth but swiftly-flowing water to the left looked almost empty of threat, and it was not until I was within a hundred feet of the barrier that I saw it was flowing directly over the latter and went tumbling down the farther side in an almost straight fall. At the same instant I saw that I was still heading forty or fifty feet to the left of where the “intake” dipped through the break in the reef. Realizing that I could never make it by heading straight, I swung the skiff round and pulled quartering to the current with her head up-stream. Even then it was a nearer squeak than I like to think of. I missed the middle of the “V” by ten feet as I swung her head down-stream again, and as the racing current carried her up against the back-wave thrown off the end of the break in the reef she heeled heavily to starboard, like an auto turning on a steeply-banked track. Then she shot out into the big white combers in mid-channel and started slap-banging down through them. It looked beastly rough ahead, but in any event it was better than hanging up on the reef at the outset. We were going to have run for our money whatever happened.
The only precautions there had been time to take were slipping into my “Gieve” and throwing all myluggage aft. Half-inflated, the rubber-lined jacket was no handicap in rowing, and the tube hung ready to receive more air if necessity arose. As for the trim, it had been my snap judgment at the last moment that it would be better to give the skiff her head in the rollers that Iknewwere coming, and let her take her chance in being down by the stern in whirlpools that might never materialize. I still think that was the best thing to have done under the circumstances.
Not until I was right down into that wild wallow of rock-churned foam was there a chance to get an idea of the rather remarkable bedrock formation which is responsible for making Umatilla Rapids the worrisome problem they have always been for river skippers. After piercing the black basaltic barrier of the reef, the channel shoots to the left and runs for a quarter of a mile or more (I was too busy to judge distances accurately) right along the foot of it. With a considerable stream of water cascading over the reef at almost right angles to the channel, a queer sort of side-kick is thrown into the waves of the latter which make it one of the most “unrhythmic” rapids I ever ran.Imshallahpounded horribly, but gave not the savagest of the twisting combers a chance to put anything solid over her high held head. My erratic pecking strokes did not find green water often enough to give her much way over the current, but she responded instantly every time I dug deep to throw her head back after she had been buffeted sideways by an arrogant ruffian of a roller.
As soon as I saw the way she was riding the roughest of the water, I realized that the only chance of abad mess-up would come through my failure to keep her head to the enemy. Knowing this wasn’t likely to happen unless I broke an oar, I eased a bit on my pulling and gave just a quick short-arm jerk now and then to hold her steady. She was never near to broaching-to, and I’m mighty glad she wasn’t. Umatilla is the sort of a rapid that hasn’t quite the teeth to get the best of a carefully handled boat that is running in good luck, but which has the power, with a mile to spare, to grind to match-wood any craft that gets into trouble on its own account. It was an eerie run that—with the snarling cascade of the reef on one side, the ghostly dance of the rollers on the other, and the impenetrable grey curtain of the mist blanking everything beyond a radius of a hundred feet; butImshallahwent through it with her head in the air and came waltzing out into the swirls below as cocky as a partridge. Indeed, that was just the trouble. The pair of us were just a bittoococky over the way we had gone it blind and come through so smartly. It remained for a couple of lesser rapids to reduce both of us to a proper humility of spirit.
I had been prepared to make a quick shift to the forward thwart in case there was a bad run of whirlpools following the rapid, and so bring her up by the stern. This did not prove necessary, however, as the rapidly broadening river was too shallow for dangerous under-currents. A short run in slackening water brought me to the town of Umatilla just as the lights were beginning to twinkle in the windows. Landing in the quiet water below a short stone jetty, I left my stuff in a nearby shack and sought the hotel. Thepool-room “stove-decorators” refused to believe I had come through the rapid until I described it to them. Then they said it was better to be a lucky darnfool on the Columbia than an unlucky school-teacher. “School-teacher,” it appeared, was the local apotheosis of Wisdom, and stood at the opposite pole from “darnfool.” It seems that there had been two male school-teachers drowned in Umatilla that summer and only one darnfool, and they were rather put out at me for having failed to even up the score. Then they tried to spoil my evening by telling me all the things that had happened to people in Devil’s Run Rapids, which I would go into just below the mouth of the river the first thing in the morning. They had me rather fussed for a while, too—until they told one about a farmer who, after having had his launch upset on his way home from his wedding, swam out with his bride in his arms. I told them I’d try to get that lusty swimmer to tow me through Devil’s Run in the morning, and turned in for a good sleep.