Silence of the Dams Lifted (Temporarily)

Emergence.

Recently, I walked what had been the bottom of a lake for the past 50 years. A crack had appeared in the dam plugging that stretch of the Columbia, and as a precaution, the lake had been mostly drained. The fat placid bullfrog of a lake became a snake, flaccid flow replaced by rapids.

Shallow soundings, deep sounds

With the water level dropped, rocks and riffles raise their voices.  The Big River (translation of many Tribes' names for the Columbia) sings its song for the first time in decades. Some say that there's a stretch just below the Priest Rapids dam where the river runs free, but for the most part, the Oregon/Washington part of the river (hundreds of miles) has lost its voice in the age of hydro-electric power and irrigation diversion. Hearing riffles and rapids amounts to time travel, and I was lucky enough to hear that past, now. 

One goose says to another...

With the Columbia back in it's channel, creatures from geese to archaeologists walk the flood plain again. Minus the muffling waters, footsteps echo, gravel slips and crunches. The old fords become visible again, instead of dark placid waters crossed only by bridges and damns. 

Threatening to fight, even in death.

On the other hand, dropping the level of a dam lake leaves a lot of creatures accustomed to the sodden past 50 years high and dry. What the photos don't convey is the smell of millions of mussels rotting in the Spring sun, the stench of crayfish turning to rotten goo in their exoskeletons. Weirdly, there was little evidence of gulls and crows Columbia Gorging themselves on this buffet. No wheeling and squawking birds, and the aquatic critters even more silent than usual.

Hopefully, I'll get back again before the dam is fixed, and waters rise again to swallow the roar of rapids, the rhythm of riffles.

It's the Watershed

Thanks to stevenl on olyblog for posting this down-Deschutes shot. He thinks the postcard dates to the mid-1970s, a time when the Olympia Brewing Company still ran strong, and was so proud of it's beige industrial sprawl they issued this image, rather than the charming old brick building.

Olympia's motto, of course, was "It's the Water," and we do have great water, our artesian wells are famous, delicious, and clean. But surface water is an other story, a sad one, as this shot illustrates.

In the foreground, the Deshutes River, in summertime flaccid flow. Could just be a dead-calm day, but I feel like there's an oil sheen. Maybe not.

As far as the river is visible, the brewery takes up the right bank. Since I'm too lazy to track it down, I don't know what they may have flushed into the river as part of normal operations, but up until about the date of this postcard, when Dick Nixon signed the Clean Water Act (what a liberal!), people and corporations did dump all kinds of things in the water. All this view shows is a treeless bank and acres of impervious surface, which when the rain kicks in will dump huge amounts of runoff compared to what the natural watershed would have, not to mention the sediment, railway grime, and other trappings of civilization.

Which the river then delivers to,...Wait, I cannot see. It disappears on the other side of the Capital Boulevard bridge, past more brewery buildings, over the spillway...I mean Falls, and finally past the old brew house, Olympia's most famous ruin. There's a park on the other bank now, and the old brewery is abandoned. You can kid yourself into thinking it's returning to nature as long as you deafen yourself to the I-5 din.

But really, the Deschutes is about to empty into Capitol Lake. Or, as stevenl calls it, the Fetid Lake Of Doom, or FLOD. Flotsam and sediment from the watershed settle out here. In fact, the muck contains the remains of Little Hollywood (Olympia's Depression-era Hoovertown), and before that a literally marginalized Chinese community, I think. The artificial lake relies on a dam that transformed the original estuary into a pond (yep, the reflection of capitol and trees sure is pretty) with a sluice being the only way out. So the estuary gets buried and eutrophies (yep, the low tides and summer algae blooms sure are ugly).

The postcard more or less hides The Isthmus, site of many a battle in this millenium. Positions on Isthmus development cause the city council to change, parts of it were Occupied, it is home to Olympia's second most famous ruin: the Mistake on the Lake. Walk around the lake, and you'll see signs explaining various positions in the Debate of the Lake: dredge it, restore the estuary, do nothing...There is no sign saying "Isthmus be Hell."

Meanwhile, the lake keeps filling with muck, and the water keeps flowing into Budd Inlet. The head of Budd is divided into West Bay, which is where the Deschutes comes in, and East Bay, which is where a culvert let's loose what's left of Indian and Moxlie Creeks. Most of the city between East and West is built on dredging spoils and fill.

West Bay is undergoing a transformation these days, as the buildings and piers of yesteryear's manufacturing concerns disappear. Some of it is undergoing restoration, as far as a railway embankment can be restored to a natural state. But people are not about to abandon the waterfront entirely, ceding it to nature. So pockets of "beach nourishment" gravel and chained-down "large woody debris" have to coexist with armored shorelines in a state that I will now call Percivaltory, after Percival's Landing on the waterfront.

In the postcard, it looks like there may be log booms in the bay. No more, although the POO (Port Of Olympia) is hopping, putting trucked-in logs on trans-Pacific ships. The watershed's wood (state timber excepted) flows all the way to China. 

Obliterative Persistence

Yon shot shows the floodzone of Scottsville, Virginia, on the River James. Once, it was called by King James' subjects the River of Powhatan, the name they used for the local leader Wahunsenacawh (father of the one they called Pocahontas), but this is upstream of his territory, where Monacan people no doubt had their own name. 

The photo is dominated by the most recent development along the north bank of the river, the massive dike clad in grass; it protects a town where people travel by pick-up and, increasingly, crossover SUVs and hybrids, none of which appreciate being flooded. Just to the right is the penultimate development, black rails on a bed of gravel where grass nor weeds nor even the most beautiful shrubbery are tolerated. Under that, and perhaps in the trees to the right, lies the canal that was obsolesced by the railroad; old timey as it may seem, the canal was no less a scheme to make money off of development and the transit of goods to markets. The red brick building handled the trade, but now it's cut off by dike and a pair of rails.

Further right, the brownwater of the James peeks between tree trunks. Once, people and their stuff moved on the river itself. Canoes, then batteaux. Way before that, there was a low spot in the terrain that water sought in it's quest to become saline. Now, cities pump out of the flow so the masses may drink, and a warming globe sucks it dryer and dryer every summer. 

Even when I canoed this part of the river in the early 1980's and had to hop out and tow it (downstream, no less) through massive algae blooms in tepid water, the James seemed like a hard place to move even a lightly loaded boat. The canal meant to bypass seasonal shallows and permanent outcrops was first damaged by federal troops before succumbing to rail-borne manifest destiny. Railroads still run, but mostly for the most massive of commodities such as Appalachian coal headed seaward, while diesel trucks carry the bulk of consumer goods. The town of Scottsville feels safe behind it's dike, but this too is momentary, as it was not planned for the climate changes facing the good townspeople and everyone else. 

The town exists because there a road crosses a river. One transportation system lays itself over the last. The stay the same even as they change. What we are used to will change, and what we build will fall, but the river still flows to the sea.

Skagit Air

 

Two pleasures make the thousand-plus miles of driving I do each month bearable, and occasionally sublime. Both come through the air to me, or any other driver with eyes and ears: photons bouncing off scenery and radio waves broadcasting from towery.

To round a bend and see snowy tors, trees towering as forests blanket, water racing to the Salish Sea, spring and fall foliage, and, and, and. To see any of those, especially on some blue highway where you can pull over or slow to landscape pace, is to experience anew wonder, which I guess is why I pity people who think epiphany is a rare thing.

The radio, it's more something to wile away the miles. Satellite radio remains in my future (and even then, only maybe), the tape deck in the truck beckons my past and finds that all the cassettes were dumped before last move (a collection ranging from Richmond hardcore punk bands to some Dead and Allmond Brothers foisted on me in college to, uh, memory grows dim now). I drive a government rig, so there ain't no fancy stuff like a CD player. 

So, it's radio, which suits me fine. I tend to go with community stations (KAOS near home, KBOO nearer Portland, KSER in Everett,...), or cherrypick from the wide array of public radio. Now and then, a college station comes in (like coming down toward CWU from Blewett Pass). In some places, classic rock is the only thing better than country or religious stations. The latter of which I sometimes listen to, believe it or not, because  it's good to understand what people hear, especially because Christians operate the most powerful transmitters in marginal areas and are the only thing to listen to.

But usually by that point, traffic has let up, scenery holds its own, and the radio is off. 

Last week, I found myself running north and downstream (mapheads may already have guessed that this is along the Sauk toward its marriage with the Skagit), already in shadow as the sun settled its way down past the islands. But the sky was clearer than smart people expect at this time of year, and as I hit the final stretch, the moonrise came into view. The photo above is from the Skagit River bridge, and cannot come close to capturing the beauty. Moonwash on fresh snow, the river sluicing the old snow seaward beneath me. River trees hugging leaves close, claiming a few more nights of their warmth before skeletonizing for the winter. I hung a U and drove back over to see it, stopped, rolled down the window, took some photos, breathed river air, rolled on and did another and idled leisurely back across before heading down-valley. 

The moon smiled in my mirror between the trees when they'd let her as I sped into the fading sunset. Then she rose above them, and the ridges and even the big peaks with names like Little Devil and Big Devil, Mount Torment and Forbidden Peak. Shining unshrouded, moonbeams free to play on rapids and pools, boughs and bergs,...and in my rearview mirror. 

Even though I was enjoying the scenery, it was getting dark, draining color and making it harder not just to look, but to drive safely on a road more traveled. Eyes on the road, ears took over, and I tuned to Skagit Valley Radio, KSVR 91.7. I'd heard them before, and besides my bias for community radio, had found that they possess a miraculous thing: a broadcast range that reaches way up-valley, farther than you'd expect for anything other than religious stations (and maybe some brute force commercial transmitters, but I don't get to that end of the dial much). It's always a joy to be way outside of town and hear something other than Christian radio or its more commercial colleague, Country.

Eventually, I got back to what passes for civilization these days and had to face I-5. As I climbed the on-ramp, a Seattle station played the cruel joke of starting a Fresh Air episode promising to blow the lid off everything we think we know about canine domestication, and then a minute replacing it with some lame-ass big-C culture thing. I know that they'd played the dog one the night before, but the radio spell was broken.

But the moon was still there, shining in my window, lighting a few wispy clouds. I stole some glances while trying not to crash or be crashed all the way home.

Garden 9: Simulated Anadromy

I spend a lot of time walking around in the woods and can confirm that yes, bears do poop there. Often enough, right in the middle of a trail. What do they care? They're moving on, and won't step in it.


But they don't poop so much in the burbs, or city lots. Nor do eagles and ospreys. Gulls save their payloads for cars or pile it on the pilings and docks. And cormorants, well, I've always been told that they are relentless autocoprophagists, but really I believe that they just don't mind shitting where they eat, right back in the water.


And that is how, gardeners of Olympia, we've been robbed of the bounty of the sea ever since settlers wrested the place from the gathering of bears who had held sway for so long. Without all these critters feasting on the fish runs (not to mention the sad depletion of the runs themselves), then dropping steaming piles of recycled ocean-dweller upon the land, we no longer get that special fertilizer. The salmon spends years in the Pacific gobbling oceanic energy, and dutifully brings it back to the land, fetching nutrients from that vast soup, concentrating them, and allowing a fair amount to make landfall. Nitrogen? Sure. Also some iron from the blood, calcium from the bones, and so on. Best of all, that plethora of trace elements so readily soaked up in the ocean, but spastically and stingily distributed on land. 


This cycle, bringing the riches of the sea back to the rivers, swimming deep into the landmass, was already recognized by the people who lived here since time immemorial. Recently, science has caught up, studying isotopes locked in old growth trees, recognizing the cycling by anadromous fish of nutrients into the terrestrial system, salmon making that one last leap, miraculously becoming part of the land. There is a growing awareness that the ecosystems of the northwest would be weak spindly things without the fish bringing surge after surge of fertility from the ocean. Reacting to these studies, descendants of the people who maintained an agreement with the salmon people for millenia commented,  "No shit."


One day, people will have extirpated themselves from most habitats, dams will crumble, and whatever salmon remain will be free to spawn and rebuild their finny tribes. Until then, I'm stuck buying jugs of fish emulsion, simulating the gift of anadromy. Smells horrific (worse than just a dead fish, I think, and way worse than bear poop), but my garden thanks me for a drink or two of this goo, liquefied diarrheatic Alaskan fish. I've tried to convince the family that I could feast on coho from time to time, then do my bear impression out in the garden where it would do some good, but they're unconvinced that the result would be less offensive than the ersatz gull-crap in a jug.

I've never been a fan of fertilizing, and yeah, I know that much wiser and more experienced gardeners have better approaches, but I'm too cheap and lazy to haul my ass over to Black Lake Organic and get the lovely blend of ground stone and stuff, or to make a total fertilizer a la Steve Solomon. Gangs of opposum and rats pillage my compost, so I don't really produce enough to make a difference. 


So it's ground up fish for my garden. Cannery waste..fins, guts, and bones made into fertilizer. I like that what would have been waste (or another Hormel product) is serving some useful purpose instead. I like the poetry of anadromy.

Undulationland

Earlier this week, I had occasion to cruise Palouse country. Or Palus if you prefer--it still sounds the same. It means the region and the Palus tribe to themselves and their neighbors in Sahaptin languages, and falls within frontier rules for spelling of "pelouse," the French word for greensward, which also makes sense in this land of grasses. This is but one way in which the Palouse is hard to pin down.

Palus Country

Driving the roads through Palus country--261, 127, Whoopem Up Hollow Road, and others--you experience the shifting lay of the land, the tricks or perception and perspective. Rolling hills cradle valleys flat with silt and sand and wiggling only sidewise, canyons reach deeper to find big rivers. The hills have a bag of tricks to hopelessly confuse the traveler who strays off the beaten path, and bewilder even those who don't. They come in all sizes, but the hilly region is vast, so you start to think they are all a little bit different, but mostly the same. Often, nothing else breaks the horizon to provide scale, and what appears to be another smallish hill may take much longer to drive up or around, prying loose your visual from temporal.


Even with my habitual crutches--maps of paper and ether, memories of the satellite view pored over early in the morning--I found it easy to get disoriented and to doubt myself. Though the terrain undulates wildly on the human scale, all but the most detailed topo cartography fails to capture it; maps flatten the country to a degree that they are nearly useless for recognizing any one hill. Only where there is a big butte or where water has sliced deep below the surrounding hills do the contour lines reveal much. Except for the Snake's coulee and canyon runs, the rivers and streams tend to be the only level terrain, serpentine as you fly over and look down, but generally with less vertical relief than the cottonwoods lining them as they meander through flat-bottomed valleys.

Rivers Snake Through It

It is possible to wander the hills without ever finding the waterways, though, especially before the roads pierced the region. On foot, you may think you are following a draw that will eventually lead to a rivulet to a creek to a river, but you are just as likely to run into another hill. Go ahead and climb it, and see the next hill, but not much more. Only a few buttes offer you enough height to view over the country, and they are much farther away than your eyes lead you to believe; you may succumb to dehydration or frustration before ever reaching them. Life sustaining rivers like the Snake, the Walla Walla, and the Touchet hide below the horizon (a little easier to find than the Giant Palouse Earthworm), and of course the Palouse with its magnificent falls.

Inscrutable vermiform script crawls across the sky. Maybe prophets can read it.

The good news for wayfaring strangers is that navigation by landmarks is not all that necessary. The sky is huge, and unlike here in Olympia, visible most of the time. The sun ans stars broadcast directions. Jet trails and clouds seem to hang forever in the same spot on some days.

But for the most part, no wanderers roam the hills. Small roads wind among them, bigger roads shoot straight through. The Palouse is mercifully free of truly big roads, though, and even the main throughways like Route 12 are two lanes most of the way. The summer heat coaxes tar from them, and when the sun hits it just right, it shines. Mile after mile of squiggly lines, like Arabic writing under my tires--the moving car reads, and having read, moves on. Or maybe Tibetan script, my truck rolling over with it's prayer wheels.

Gorge-ous

April along the Columbia is the time of blooms. Apples and cherries that were bare grey bones weeks before grow buds, the buds swell into pink and white balls, and then they start to reveal their inner selves as compact potential relaxes, opens its arms to the sun and bees, and reveals the actual flower. Before long, beehives filling with young and honey, fruit beginning to form, the petals will let go their grip on the mothership, fluttering in the spring breeze, snowing.


Just like snow, their beauty varies with perspective. With the sun at our back, or with dark at theirs, they gleam white or bright pink. Sunbeams traveling through their thinness can release a glow. Coming at you out of a bright sky, the same flower flakes can look dark. Look at the petals (still treebound) in this photo: the ones below look bright, while those above with sky behind are dark. Same petals, similar level of contrast, completely different perception. Color can be apparent, not absolute.


The intricacies of a single petal laying in the grass can pull in my eyes to orbit for a while, taking in tiny beauties. Sumptuous surfaces like only a fresh flower has, wavy edges, folds like tiny mountain ranges, subtle colors invisible even a few feet further away.

Or, the thousands. Dressing the wind, revealing it's body. Twinkles and constellations covering the ground. Drifts of nothing but flowers nestled in the roots of their mothers, soon to settle and melt back into her. 


This all unfolds over weeks, starting low and south, working its way higher and norther. Trees closest to the river's dammed valley start first not just because of the elevation, but the water moderating winter's last chilly breaths. Driving north from Wenatchee, past Orondo, toward the apple depots lining the river at all those other towns, turns into a trip back in time. Orchards adrift in spent flowers, trees adorned with open blossoms, crews on ladders thinning burgeoning buds, branches studded with buds just awakening, and further on, last winter holding on. The same thing happens, even more suddenly, as you head up a side valley, or even move from the south slope of a hill to its north.


Later, the trees will sculpt cherries and apples, fruit-forms manifold and delightful. Like the flowers, their beauty will be individual and collective, multiplied by perspective and nature's fractal variations.


I hope you have the time to appreciate it. Slowly; the blur from a car is nice in its way, but take the time to stop. Inhale. Take a bite and chew slowly like a cow with nowhere in particular to go. Stroke the petal gently, tug the fruit free. Gaze at the orchard, stare at the apple of your eye. Revel in this northwest beauty.

Blessed be the Falls

I escaped the Palouse the day before the winds whipped up.

Which is a good thing, as any veteran of the winds there can tell you. Me? I've only been there once, yet I now have the gall to write about it. 

Hills blown down round, no one of them anything big by northwest standards, but still dwarfing the hell out of any human, who can only clamber up to see another horizon, same but different. Outside of riverine unfurlings, the land in summer was hot and dry, in winter frozen solid. Many's the homestead begun well that has dried up, reduced to a smudge on the landscape, a rickety thicket of locust and boards.

The tribes knew when the time was to go dig roots or find a herd, and made their way through this land of loess on trails connecting hundreds of generations. A 160 acre homestead turned out not to be a going concern, but wheat farming on a massive scale seems to be working out, vineyards are moving in, and the land is tattooed with furrows and fencelines. This too shall pass, but it will take a while to completely erase.

The Palouse River cuts through this country, and there's a state park there where you can see a big waterfall, the whole volume of the river chuting through a deep notch near one bank. Coming up from the Columbia and Snake, it's a relief to see a river wild, flowing free, dropping over geology, not a spillway. The falls arc down in a white stream onto a pool hugged by cliffs, a hole in the landscape. Away from the froth, the water is shady and protected from whatever winds may be whipping about up top. Naturally, the pool has a uterine shape.

So of course I have this desire to go down there, but marmot warriors guard the place. Fiercer than the rabbit in Monty Python's Holy Grail. One charged up and gave me a good chattering. I backed down.

Even from behind the fence, the falls roar calls a smile to my face. Mist-fed ferns and mosses soft on walls, embracing falls surging into a ray of sun before thundering down deep in the shadow. Fecundity, guarded by marmots,...who I will eventually outsmart.

 

Backroads: 14 Gorge Power Maximum

 A couple of entries ago, I got us on the road, climbing 14 upriver past cascades, through the Cascades.

The range took its modern name from the falls of the Columbia. As a whole, not as high as it's iconic volcano peaks: Tahoma (and its many spellings, including Rainier), Baker, Adams, Hood, and pre-blast Saint Helens. But it's still thousands of feet higher than the river, a mile of basalt to cut through to get to the lowlands and taste that sea.

Ergo gorge. Gashing into one of the world's largest lava flows, the big river relentlessly seeks sea, beating through rock to reach that salty embrace.

Route 14, rails, and trails all use the river's path. It's the flattest route, the furthest inland. My mind's blown, hundreds of miles inland, the river is still only hundreds of feet above sea level. In the last century, people dammed most of it, drowning the cascades, but also allowing boat traffic. Barges haul immense loads up and down the aquatic path.

The dams also harvest electricity, scraping electrons, smiling over spilt water. It beats burning coal (though plans are afoot to start shipping our coal to Asia, which is upwind,...brilliant), but the damns were pretty bad for the salmon people.

Another thing that likes to travel the gorge is the air. Cold air sinking across the winter plateau drops into a creek, a river, and finally the river. Oceanic storms push wet air into that Cascadian gap. The winds are legendary. Chinook winds bring spring, thaw the land. Gorge winds suck in world-wide windsurfers, fill the sails of tourism entrepreneurs, and all manner of metaphoricity.



Meanwhile, back in the real world, people discovered that they could scrape electrons off the wind. Oh, and make money. Turbines have sprouted rapidly, lately, and scouts scour the land, anonemeters in hand, looking for the next place to plant a wind farm. The ones in the photo here were cranking. 130-foot blades, tips moving 200 feet per second. They do a number on unlucky birds, and it takes a lot of bulldozed roads to erect and service these things. No energy is pure green, but like hydro, this one doesn't require overseas warfare. 

Wind and water flowed through the gorge as long as it existed, flowed so it could exist. Tales of raven and the other animal people tell how long ago they deciedd that the river should only flow one way, but river road Route 14 lets you go either way. Not quite as fast as the windmill tip, but a heck of a lot faster than the first 15 millenia of human travel in this ancient path.

Backroads: 14 Fog on the Columbia

Route 14 follows the Columbia along its north bank from near the mouth on up to the first big bend. How is a road following the Columbia River, one of the major arteries of North America, a back road? A road about a century old in its current path, laid down aside major rail lines even older, paving trails used by tribes since, as they say, "time immemorial," and before then by all manner of megafauna for whom time ended.

How? The interstate across the river in Oregon. I-84 is the choice of people who want to think that they are getting upriver fast, who feel slowed down when denied a choice of lanes, who want their travel tableau to be blurred and interdicted by semi trailers. More than once, people have looked at me with concern or pity when I say I'm taking Route 14 instead, asking if I know about the real highway across the river.

Last week I headed upriver on 14 from Vancouver, not at the mouth of the river, but in the tide's grip. On that day, nearly strangled in a fog. Up through Camas and Washougal, its white blanket interwoven with tendrils of pulp mill stink. But soon enough, winding through oak, gnarling dendritic silhouettes grasping handfuls of a cleaner fog, holding it to the earth.

My feelings on this are fuzzy. The fog can be cold and dreary, obscurationist curtailer of vistas, curtain shutting out the sun. Or it can be a coccoon, silken pod in which to meditate, swallower of clatter. I wrote about this then.

So popping up out of this into the sun could go either way. Freed from the drabness, exposed to the glare. Whatever. Nature carries on, regardless of whatever metaphor little humans want to paint onto it.

Beacon Rock and its trail (1777 steps to the top, last time I checked), wrapped in fog, is beautiful. From I-84 you can look across the river and see the rock, unless it's foggy and then all you see is guardrail.

Further up the river and into the day, the fog began to burn off. I got to see the end of it, lifting off the river, pushed down from the sun on top, thinning to a tongue, lick receding back down river, not wetting the sere plateau.

Backroads: Blue Slough

Head west, Olympian, on the ever-narrowing free way up I-5, stay right and swing onto 101, veering off to 8, crossing the black firested hills. Coming down into flat fields and eventually you find yourself on a road called Route 12, advancing on the sprawl of Aberdeen. The city's welcome sign says "Come as You Are," Nirvana fans.

And then suddenly you're on 101 again. Somehow you skipped driving around the Olympic peninsula, which means you have gained a good part of a day. Thank me later.

South across the Chehalis, writhing through miles of mud. Alder and cedar swamp. But you cross a river filled and dredged, urbanized. The ancient salmon weirs and piles for piers, piles for booming, and piles for every other purpose you can think of become entombed in mud or rot and contribute to a cargo of wood from twig to buttswell that rides this river seaward.

And then when the tide shifts, the wood drifts back inland. Into the river, its branches and limbs, its sticks and twigs.

Crossing the river was a beginning toward leaving that, though before doing so you pass through a town with one of my favorite names: Cosmopolis.

Hang a left onto Blue Slough road. That rhymes, in case you're not  familiar with Middle English landscape terms. It refers to a mire, a muddy place, often a river inlet, sometimes tidal. Blue Slough and its ilk nearby meet all of these conditions. The road is a narrow two laner, alder thicketedly woven into the mudflats on one side, a coarse blanket that must ripple during earthquakes and maybe some storms.

The effect of driving through in winter is a smear of grey. (So was the urban part, come to think of it, but I like that as whole lot less.) The clouds either just dark or flirting with lighter, but often brightening no more than an overcast day's glare on the thinned of diesel-sheened mudflat. The alders, buds just starting their spring blush, closer up and whipping by in what still ends up more blur than color. In the occasional house, people warm themselves with woodfires, their smoke smudging further the already greyny picture.

Stop, though, and color has time to compose itself, to make a showing. Down in the bottomland, trees shredding the wind high above you, the ground air motionless. A red fisherman's bobber, dropped in the sedges by a high tide. Patches of shamrocks, dappled or spotlit as the canopy whim decides.

Several times I've made this drive. The road is the wrong way to experience the place. A canoe would be much better. Ride the tide up Blue Slough, or maybe Preachers Slough now that it's not blocked by a culvert. Twist through the floodplain, maybe see some swamp mystery and live to tell about it. Get watched by eagles above and who knows what below in the muddy water. Slow down, drift, lift the veil.

Cool Ease



Once were glaciers. There still are, for now, just not this low, not this south. But their tracks reach halfway down from the pole, evidence of past sprawl.

For a long time, "glacial" has meant slow. A glacial pace excruciates and frustrates, witholds fruition until long after you've lost interest. To some it's majestic, stately, an inspiring slow march across ages.

Of course we know that to be bullshit now, and although the concept of glaciers as slow may hang on among english majors and other metaphor junkies, scientists who've studied this kind of earth artistry now know just how fast a glacier can move. In our warmed atmosphere, they can break up quickly, mile after mile of what appeared to be a solid block of ice fracturing, sliding, turning into mush in a single summer. Beneath their stoic mantles, river rush and rage. And in the cores that remain solid (for now), strata of long-fallen snow tell about sudden onsets of ice ages, rapid accumulations, quick thaws.

Here in the northwest, especially in the sere interior, areas bare of towering forests and other rock-swallowing greenery, geology speaks of other glacial speed. Glaciers here once held enormous lakes, icy fastness damming inland seas. As the climate warmed, water sought the weak points, runnning off the top, tunneling through cracks and voids, shimmying beneath, pioneering trickles searching for opening to turn the vast potential energy of the impounded water kinetic and free. Lake Missoula, about 200 miles long and holding something like 500 cubic miles of water, let rip and carved out the canyons we call coulees. Rock formations downstream held back water for a time, but the lake drained in a couple of days, and rock cannot hold up to that forever, a couple hundred square kilometers of it gave way, turning the once broad expanses of the laval plateau into a tracery of coulees grand and miniscule.

The floods happened when people were still a new and naturalizing species in the new world. I can see them, living in a good spot along the river, enjoying the bounty of an unspoiled landscape, and then feeling the earth shake, hearing a roar, and then being wiped out by a wall of water. Throughout the Columbia watershed, the best human habitat was ripped apart. The archaeologist in me weeps not just for the people who were swept away, crushed by boulders, and drowned, but also for the earliest sites, obliterated. (Of course, there must also be some sites, located in a lucky lee or a high bench that only got a blanket of sand and silt, where entire Pleistocene camps must have been buried intact.)

But once the ice sheets ceded the lower latitudes and no ice dams held more potential cataclysms, the coulees remained. Over time, the interior dried out, and the canyons became oases, protecting streams and ponds from wind and sun, collecting mountain snowmelt, thunderstorm runoff, percolating rain of yore. 

Above, scabland lava, sagebrush, fields of glacial till. Deer instead of mastodons, solitary sage grouse instead of sky-darkening flights of fowl.  Beautiful in its way, and far short of desolation, but plenty of dessication to go around. People traversed this country, hunted some, found patches of roots to eat, but it was sunburnt and windswept.

Far better to retreat to the protection of a coulee. Here there was water, and waterfowl, and all the critters who come to drink...and feed the people. Here grew moisture loving plants that could not survive up top: food, medicine, fiber, mats, and so many materials vital to the organic age. Here was escape from the relentless wind, a place where fire can be tamed and live in a hearth and that had more wood to burn in the first place. Here, flood-ripped canyon walls exposed tool rock, flood deposits made easy picking for cooking and sweatlodge rocks. Here, labyrinths well known to locals afforded escape from marauders, ambushes for hunting, secret and secluded spots for communing with the spirits. The great coulees, Grand and Moses and others, became highways as bipeds grew in number and eventually reintroduced horses.

Cool. Ease.

River James

I started this blog a couple of years ago starting upstream against the James, and there is always part of me that will live there, or at least in the Tuckahoe swamp feeding its flow. The headwaters, frigid eddies and snow-rafts heading downstream under dim-winter grey, were the last I’ve seen of that river where I once canoed, swam, waded, and kept a wary eye out for snakes.

Lately, though, as I followed a blog (http://300songs.com/2010/09/28/55-james-river-cracker-and-camper-van-beethoven-richmond-virginia/) by the songwriter and adoptive Richmonder David Lowery, the river has flooded back into my consciousness. That blog started as a way to explain his 300 songs, give them some context spin and stories, but it has spawned some interesting essays on cultural geography, on the natural and man-made material underpinnings of music and lifeways. “James River” is one of those songs.

James as in Jamestown, as in centuries of arterial flow (rum and sickle cells upstream, moonshine and tobacco downstream), as in a city’s flusher, as in a swath of wild through so-called civilization. Lowery recognizes in its neglected banks and muddy water the “elegant decay” of a defeated Southern capital. For all the talk of rednecks and junkies and that, you can tell he loves the place. Sometimes, at least.

Richmond is where it is because of the Falls; it lies on the toe of the Piedmont foot, or if you want to look at it another way, the promontory above Tidewater’s swampy expanse. Just like Alexandria (DC being a modern invention by Virginia standards) and Fredericksburg. All these Falls cities had their ports, and it’s tempting to thing that’s the end of it, cities just automatically spring up at the point where merchant ships had to stop and unload.

That probably explains why the settlement lasted, but not why it appeared. The English set up near the falls because that’s where Wahunsenacawh held court. The Spaniards who didn’t stay too long called him Carlos, I think, and the new batch of Europeans took to calling him Powhatan. His homeland was to the north on a smaller river, but once he’d fought, married, and politicked his way to the apex of a large confederation, he headed to the James. What he called it, I have no idea, but the first English just called it Powhatan’s River before they came up with the original idea of naming it for their bible-revising king.

Wahunsenacawh wasn’t there because he had deep draft merchant ships, although the logic of stopping at the falls holds true for canoes. Maybe he didn’t want to be too far from the Chickahominy just downstream, a tribe who stood out in the region for their democratic system of government and widely feared warriors—double threat to a guy like W. Probably he wanted to control the flow of trade between coast and interior. Definitely he did not want to live way downriver at some hellhole like Jamestown Island, with its bad water and malarial swamps.

Oh, and the precondition to all that commerce and politics: a river spawning huge runs of fish. I won’t quote the 16^thcentury shamster bit about walking across the river on their backs. That’s frickin’ ridiculous, and it saddens me to see so-called historians repeat false claims intended to trick people into putting money or themselves into the Virginia venture. But there were unimaginably more fish than now, and of course a bunch of them would run into the falls, creating a major harvest locus.

Anadromous fish excel in excess capacity, and so large annual harvests are possible without killing them off. The humans coming to get the fish would have swelled the population during certain months, and would have had some impact on water quality, especially if a downpour came after they’d done a big burn eroded gullies and caused a pulse of ash and mud. So was the river in its pristine pre-human state when English colonists set foot on the river their progeny would one day dump kepone into? No, but it was likely in an evolutionary, ecological balance.

The river in those days could be a boundary, but nowhere near as much as when Europeans came along. The great chief’s influence didn’t go north of the Potomac, and of course there have always been beefs between left and right bankers on any river, but all it takes is a look at the names of Tribes to know that they saw rivers as centers more than as edges: Chickahominy, Mattaponi, Pamunkey,…

Now, rivers divide counties, states, nations. The James separates Henrico (no Spanish pronunciation in this honorific for Henry, you either say hen-RYE-co, or if you are old and local enough, Hen-RUKkah) and Chesterfield. The line it wrought on maps and in minds of Euro-Americans was frought with various worries and prejudices. Although the City of Richmond annexed part of the south long ago, the power and money generally stick to the north. Long before there were railroads and wrong sides of tracks, ‘South Side’ was a slur.

Maybe this stemmed from racism, the south bank of the James near Richmond being one of the few places where free blacks could live. Or maybe it’s geography, south of the river being the ever-broader coastal plain, lots of creeks and swamps (culminating in the great Dismal Swamp) but not enough rivers to connect with the wide world. In time, Southside sprouted manufacturing and chemical plants, refineries, and neighborhoods for the workers. The owners of these concerns settled in a way that reflected US history: labor and resources extracted from the south fed opulence in the north, which kept expanding westward. Just as Southside brings forth visions of smoke and white trash, a Richmonder understands that West End means wealth (and pretensnobbery).

I grew up in that westward expansion. I knew that as a recently fatherless girl, during the Depression, my grandmother had helped run a boarding house in Richmond, but the truth is that neither of my parents grew up there; they arrived in the late-1960s and decided that the West End had better schools, so I ended up growing up in suburbia. I remember no other place before.

Yet, still in reach of the river. We’d hear the trains on the James, played there from time to time. My dad’s work was not far from one of the bridges. On rare but indelible days, winds from the southeast would waft the warm sweet spice of curing tobacco from Shockoe Slip right up to my nose.

A nose that knew the stink of swamp and the danks of copses. Across the street from our house, there was another row if identical houses, and then Tuckahoe, the James trib separating Henrico from Goochland Counties. The placename refers to an aquatic plant whose tubers formed a crucial foundation in whatever Food Pyramid was promulgated by Wahusenacawh’s Department of Health. One of those taro-like plants that occurs in every tributary of the James, in sloughs and swamps everywhere through that country. And before a succession of tobacco, corn, coal mining, and real estate development took over, I imagine some patches were cultivated, others were half-wild reserves, and a few went feral. Our swamplands were once breadbaskets.

But all those things did happen, and the woods I walked were thick with greenbriar and honeysuckle vines, mostly under thick hardwood canopy. Step in the wrong place, and the mud would suck off your shoe, poison ivy would baste you with time-delayed blistery misery, cottonmouth or copperhead would strike, or worse. A few times it froze hard enough to venture off the trails and onto the ice, but always with the fear of falling through. When it finally did happen, someone got a boot-full of water and muck, but nothing worse, and we grew out of some fear.

One time me and my friend were walking through these woods when we came upon something worse: 4 boys coming the other way. At their head was a guy who was fairly big and thought of himself as a strong guy, being just bright enough to know he’d never be the smart guy. We’d met at a log crossing The Ditch, a mucky gash dumping the neighborhood storm drains into Tuckahoe swamp. I stepped on and so did he, and in the middle he grabbed my walking stick and tried to twist it from my grip or me from the log. Neither succeeded, and I don’t even remember who got to cross first. Just the rush of adrenalin, a stalemate, and then cracking up when he solemnly uttered, “You’re strong. I admire that.” Like in some old melodrama about days of chivalry or some such crap delivered in a fake English accent.

Meanwhile, I was thinking, “You’re a fatass.”

Turns out the guy’s family were Southsiders.

And so this entry ends with no summary, no pith. Just me taking a break.

Backroads: 142

Riding river roads north from the Columbia's southern swing is to fight a flow of beauty washing into your every sense, inviting you to stop and gaze, dazed and amazed. Climbing the Klickitat on Washington 142 from Lyle to Goldendale on a green May day, especially with almost no other cars around to hurry you, can take a while.

The river ran hard that day, swollen with silt, foaming at the mouth of each eddy. Late wet snow feeding a good flow, lupines a-blooming and the hillsides not yet be-browned, summer's scorch safely at bay for a while yet. The oaks of Klickitat at that fleeting delicacy when the leaves are full but still soft and the bugs haven't really punched in.

Right of of Lyle, the valley gets pretty tight, and the lack of easy bottomland cut off sprawl before it could crawl upstream. 142 swoops along the bank. Meanwhile, and old rail grade has been reborn as the Klickitat Trail, which I  now yearn to walk, downhill like the river, but at an even slower pace to enjoy the bird and water songs, gaze at landscapes and pollinated bees.

The valley never becomes an expanse, but it does open up a bit about 10 miles in. The town of Klickitat is here, but I didn't stop. Wahkiacus gets a name on the map, but I don't remember a town--one of the great things about this road is that so much of it is unbuilt upon. 142 zigs and zags up through the kind of torn and shorn landscape you get when tectonics are at fault, and comes out addled enough to careen eastly when the main river heads north.

Somewhere around here, the road narrows to one lane, which is harrowing only on the frequent blind curves. If I hadn't been so blissful from the ride, I'd have worried that maybe I'd misread the map (or it had mislead me), and I was on a road that pinched out in the hills somewhere, but nah, there was no need for that. As with the rest of the run, the road remained smooth and solid, unfouled and practically untravelled.

The last big uphill run, a line skewing up and across, an engineer's straight edge mocking slope and contour alike, signals the end of the river road. Once you pop over the rim, the road spreads back out into two lanes and sticks to the grid laid down over a century ago in the aftermath of the Indian Wars by men moving to consolidate their Cartesian way. On the flats, the roads run north-south or east-west, maybe cutting corners where it suits. Blockhouse Butte (oddly enough, a hill with a strategic view of the plain) is the only natural feature that causes a ripple in this grid that continues to Goldendale.

Route 142 ends in that town, where it T's out at 97. After the thrill of running the gauntlet under the guns of Blockhouse (I've since learned, much to my disappointment, that the Butte no longer has gun emplacements, there is no Corporal Agar up there making frontier warfare hilarious), 142's magic kinda fades, and it just becomes the seam between fields that ends up in Goldendale. By that time, I was already fondly reminiscing on the banks of the Klickitat, under rustle of oakleaves and scent of Ponderosa.

Backroads: 23 and 141

Last time I was talking about Skate Creek, but what I didn't say was that getting there took a while. From Olympia you can go through Yelm and up the Nisqually to the flanks of Rainier, then turn down Skate Creek Road (aka Road 52) to reach the Cowlitz at Packwood. Or at least you can when it's open, and this year that happened a week or so after I traveled, so it was back-track and waste an hour.

No prob, though, since I got to see more land. I like to vary my routes to avoid monotony, traverse more terrain, and keep the terrorists guessing.

Not long after I had to go to Trout Lake, which normally means hopping on the freeway down south and following the Columbia up to Bingen before hooking back north. But I figured it would be more fun to abandon the interstate (the governor wouldn't want me going into Oregon anyway, even if the up-river trip is faster on that side), so I hightailed it east on route 12.

Not soothed enough on this beefy two-laner, it was south on 131, where the soothing embrace of a conifer canopy closed in. Then Forest Road 23 beckoned, narrowing further and further until pavement petered out into gravel. Washboard and some loose gravel, but not ever bad, no back-tracking. Two other vehicles in an hour of driving. I got out and played solitare in the road for a while, but eventually the stakes got too high for my cheap self, and I moved on.

And even though it was too cloudy to see Mt Adams, I could feel it. A mass to the left, glacial waftings from time to time.

Then after a while there was a bridge, and pavement, and before I could adjust, I was in the rat-race of downtown Trout Lake. Then it was time to work. 9AM and 4 hours driving already behind me.

Uneventful as the drive down had been, after work it seemed like a good idea to take 141 from its Trout Lake headwaters down to the Columbia, maybe get something to eat. Pushing 5PM and 12 hours of driving and struggling to beat the machine drill already behind me.

141 takes you down the White Salmon, a beautiful river. Not a narrow valley, enough room for cows and orchards. In the north, there are lava outcrops, a treat for pahoehoe lovers like myself. Locals probably feel beset by outsiders sometimes, but there are places with far worse infestations of urban vacationers and second homers. Cheap gas in BZ Corners, where transportation signage designers have decided a hamlet should be labeled "Congested Area," as if it were a phlegmy bronchial tube, like Newark.

Right above Husum, there is a very cool optical effect. You see some trees along the road and a mountain behind them. As you continue and the trees get closer, the mountain rapidly shrinks.

And then as you approach White Salmon, the Columbia Valley comes into view, and Mt Hood on the other side. Exquisite. Which may explain why most of the rich people live up there, and the riverside town a stone's throw down (not that rich people literally throw rocks at the proletariat anymore) has a different name (Bingen), a different sewer system, and has cornered the local market on abandoned and industrial real estate.

And that is the end of 141. Taking 14 along the Columbia is a fine trip, but that's another post yet to be born.