How to Love a River

"How to say something fresh about the Great River of the West?  When you stack up the literature of the Columbia, it seems it must all have been uttered already."

Yet, in the following essay, Robert Michael Pyle adds his eloquent voice to our collective imagery and understanding of loving the Columbia River.

How to Love a River
Robert Michael Pyle
Gray's River, Washington

(Note: This essay was written for a public river-reading in Astoria, and subsequently published in Hipfish in April, 2005.  It refers specifically to the LNG facility proposed for Warrenton/Skipanon, but it applies equally to the Bradwood site proposal.)

         When I was a kid, another kid named Sam Hart lived down the block.  Sam Hart was famous for a special talent he possessed.  I knew several boys who could burp on demand, some even to a melody.  But Sam Hart was the only one I knew who could fart on demand.  Hart the Fart, as he was inevitably known, made a party trick of passing gas at a lit match, launching an impressive blue jet.
I don't know how much this skill helped Sam get girls; not much, I'd guess. But Patty Vido once attended a make-out party at his house, to which I was not invited; I could hear the music from my bedroom, and it drove me crazy, as I had a mammoth crush on Patty Vido.  Someone, everyone, was in there kissing Patty Vido, and all I had was the scent of the snow through my window screen and the beat of the stereo on the night air.  But I took comfort in the fact that at least I wasn't famous for my flatulence.  For Sam's part, maybe some kind of popularity was better than none.  In any case, I couldn't help but think of Hart the Fart when I learned of the Calpine liquefied natural gas scam proposed for the Skipanon Peninsula.

How to say something fresh about the Great River of the West?  When you stack up the literature of the Columbia, it seems it must all have been uttered already.  There are the logs kept by Haswell, Boit, and Hoskins on Captain  Robert Gray's Columbia Redeviva, followed by Vancouver's logs and Richard Nokes's Columbia's River.  There are the economical effusions of Lewis, Clark, and their interpreters from DeVoto through Ambrose, Botkin, and Ziak.  Washington Irving's Fur Traders of the Columbia River, Woody Guthrie's Roll On, Columbia, and Chuck Williams's Bridge of the Gods, Mountains of Fire.  Thomas Nelson Strong's Cathlamet on the Columbia, Julia Butler Hansen's Singing Paddles, and Keith McCoy's Melodic Whistles in the Columbia Gorge.  Archie Satterfield's Moods of the Columbia, Archie Binns's You Rolling River, and Murray Morgan's The Dam.  More recently a great spate of Columbia books has flowed forth, including Richard White's The Organic Machine, Bill Dietrich's Northwest Passage, Blaine Holden's A River Lost, and Susan Zwinger's The Hanford Reach.  And don't forget Sam McKinney's Reach of Tide, Ring of History, Robin Cody's Voyage of a Summer Sun, Craig Lesley's Riversong, and even Pyle's "Ring of Rivers" in Wintergreen.

And yet, there is more to say.  Maybe no one has recorded the exact way the current shifted in the lee of Tenasillahe Island yesterday when a raft of common mergansers took wing.  Perhaps the scent of cottonwood balsam when the wind from the Gorge shifts away from Camas has never yet been captured.  I don't suppose any writer has plumbed the depth of black in the sunken shadow of Beacon Rock, or taken down the dialogue where the Willamette and the Columbia finally meet, again and again and again.

Nor has the river's capacity for insults been fully recorded.  We suffer no lack of documentation of dams, no gaps in the catalogue of cataclysm, no dearth of dope on dioxins.  I have sacrificed a perfectly good butterfly net to catching an oil-soaked murre from a spill spit out the river's mouth; I have tugged invasive loosestrife from wapato beds, and written letters about dredging and dumping the spoils of this particular water war.  You'd think the Columbia had already taken our best shot at screwing it up, from Hermiston's nerve gas to Hanford's nuclear waste.  Apparently not.  Now comes the Calpine LNG juggernaut, mainlining toward Warrenton and Hammond like a blue flame for the ages.  And this is why Sam Hart, famous in Hoffman Heights, Colorado, in 1960, comes to mind when I contemplate this new enormity shuffling on our doorstep.  If it makes its way in, get ready for a Sam Hart Special, and I don't mean a party trick.

With an accidental incineration radius of a thousand yards and a burn-zone of a mile or more, this is a new neighbor that can kill--a lethal genie that can't be stoppered, once out of its acrid canister.  The epic shortcomings and monumental risks of the LNG misadventure are well known and described by other writers more knowledgeable than I.  But this wickedness cuts beyond the immediate mischief of eviscerating a pleasant peninsula, endangering its populace, and placing a critical estuary and its uses in immense jeopardy. The knavery extends into territory so near the wild heart of the entire region that many cannot even conceive how persons of right mind could contemplate such an outrage with a straight face and a whole heart. 

Our big river--second biggest on the continent--has suffered clots, stents, bypasses, and all manner of noxious plaque; has weathered dilution, pollution, and solution with every kind of foul infusion; has labored under logging silt and rip-rap, isotope and nucleotide, squawfish and sewage sludge, while watching its salmon slip like so many silverfish down the bathtub drain. But this big river--this aorta of Cascadia--has never before invited full-scale thrombosis with open arms.

Maybe I'm all wet.  Maybe, in this sublimely mercantile age, this is just the ticket.  After all, the Upright Apes of North America, Second Coming, have enflamed the Cuyahoga, oiled the Ohio, quicksilvered the Quebec, hog-tied the Tennessee, PCB'd the Hudson, slimed the Potomac, DMZ'd the Rio Grande, outright stolen the Colorado, leaded the St. Lawrence, sacrificed the Sacramento, laked the Snake, petered out the San Pedro, cemented the L.A., reversed the Labrador, radiated the Savannah, massacred the Missouri, and just plain mo' fo'd  the Mississippi.  Why shouldn't we all get behind this one grand chance, the very best yet, for first-rate, top-flight, full-scale Calamity on the Columbia?  Why should the Cuyahoga be the only watercourse that gets to burn?

Of course, it wasn't, not really.  There was also Whatcom Creek, in Bellingham.

When Olympic Pipeline Company's pipe ruptured, and a bombing wall of gasoline spewed down the streambed, then ignited, three boys were vaporized or worse, and an ecosystem baked beyond function.  Have the Port of Astoria Commissioners forgotten this event?  Did they even notice?  Perhaps they should be required to study the tragedy of Whatcom Creek in all its grim detail, for this is what happens when a gassy new neighbor goes bad.  And with LNG on the Skipanon, the losses would be many more than those three unutterably unlucky lads.

Americans are not alone in their river-blindness, nor even very special; consider the sad Danube, the wretched Rhine, the ruined Nile, the disgorged Yangtze.  But we have been particularly energetic at the task, seldom missing an opportunity to show heroic contempt for rivers.  That's been the easy part: the hydraulic-placered canyons of Colorado and California, the diverted flumes that gave rise to Denver and Las Vegas, the entire Southeast stripped of the richest fauna of pearly mussels in the world.  Hurting rivers takes no great imagination.  Chemical plants and concrete have made easy work of that part of what often resembles a hate-hate relationship.  Want to endear a river to its people?  Slap a freeway along its shore--hey presto!  No, the real challenge is the one taken up by the few who would love our rivers.

Not so few, really; in fact, maybe most, if they only knew it.  Anyone who has ever dunked a worm or cast a fly, raised a topsail or stoked a stinkpot, sailed a board or dipped a paddle; anybody who has set a net from bowpicker or sternpicker, walked the deck of a tug or barge as sunrise breaks free from heavy fog, soaked a toe at the shore or wished to be an otter while flailing away at a mediocre breaststroke--any such a one must know in at least a rudimentary, brain-stem sort of way what it is to love a river.  Maybe everybody loves rivers.  But will we ever learn how to show it?

To love a river well, like a person or a place or anything else, means to attend.  To pay extraordinary attention.  All the time.  To dive deep into the flow of water, time, and land that together lay this river down where it is and not somewhere else, flowing some other direction.  It takes fingering the bits of shell and crayfish carapace and mayfly exuvium that wash ashore; following the ripples downstream as they race, then spend themselves on the beach; watching the rafts of western grebes and tundra swans, the canvasbacks that collect for a few days a year in Young's Bay, the scoters and the scaups and the sea lion nuggets known as buffleheads.  And there is more to it than that.

You have to imagine the pilots climbing the sides of ships in storm; drop the sneer for the folks on the paddlewheelers long enough to realize that this may be their first time on a big river; and consider what it once meant to sleek the current in a canoe beside sea otters, beneath condors.  If you can do all this, and then take it into your heart in a thousand other ways, you can say that you are beginning to love the river in a way that its own giant heart might recognize.  And if, doing all this, you can still imagine casting a vote for Calpine, then you need professional help--maybe a heart transplant, for starters; then a brain.  For the soul, I'm afraid there's no help; or hope. Because it can only be this that led our elected officials to sign such a devil's deal: a deep and abiding inability to love the very entity they are sworn to manage, to nurture, to protect, for all of us who huddle here in the Columbia's lap.  And so it falls to the rest of us, who have chosen to live (not die) along these damaged (but not yet dead) waters, to embrace what's left of the Great River of the West as our home.  Just because a water- course has been sorely compromised does not mean it is no longer worth revering.  Indians still wash their dead in the tepid but living Ganges.  Athabascans yet fish the Yukon between the banks of melting permafrost.  Visiting Philadelphia, near the mouth of its besmirched river, I was struck to see the gray water lit up by thousands of flowers and fruits.  As black children skipped stones on my shore, residents of South Philly on the other side dressed the river in a summer festival transcending all sludge and chemicals. 

For all of its burdens, the Columbia yet retains its essential character--especially our share, the tidal reach.  Despite the jetties and the dredges, never mind the spoils and the wakes, the big river carries on in a state worth embracing--and saving.  When I say it is up to those of us who dwell
here, we voluntary riparians, to love the river enough in the absence of any such impulse from the commissioners, I mean we must exercise that embrace.  And in doing so, one collective utterance must issue from our love-struck throats: NO, we must say.  No, we won't have this.  It shan't happen, not here, not on this river that we love.  We must send them packing, wishing them all bad luck elsewhere.  And when we've done that, we must go out, onto the water, along the shore, or into the hills above; look this river over, breathe in the estuarine air, and say "Yes.  That's how."