Embracing the Columbia |
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Inventory of Columbia River crossings Not
counting railway bridges and dams, there are 45 established opportunities
to pass over the Columbia River: 38 bridges and 8 ferries, the Cathlamet-Westport
crossing requiring both a bridge and a ferry. |
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 The Bridge of the Gods is most memorable in the Gorge. Motorists may first think of a graceful bridge that flies high above the Columbia, carrying gods to and from Washington and Oregon on their various missions. Yet the design is incongruous with the legend that named it, which tells of a rock arch across the river. The trusses overhead are constructed with heavy and complex steel latticework, as if the gods need to be transported in a cage . . . Alex Whitman---excerpt from the manuscript of a book in progress about Columbia River crossings. |
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| AMAZING LIVES / Alex Whitman: Walking the Walk Columbia River Crossings / Excerpts from a Book in Progress (by Alex Whitman) |
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| As a resident of Washington State, I have a special fondness
for the Columbia River. My affection extends beyond mere appreciation
for its visual beauty; I feel connected to the river as if it were
a divine being casting a spell over all who gaze on its waters. The
river is alive; borne out of the eternal force of gravity, it moves
despite our attempts to restrain it, accepting water, soil, living
organisms, and refuse from twenty-two major rivers and countless minor
tributaries over its 1,200-mile journey to its place of origin, the
Pacific Ocean, where the American fur trader Robert Gray named it
in 1792. The Columbia continually alters the landscape and, in one
way or another, affects all the people in the region of its vast
watershed and beyond. I am part of this complex system, dependent on
the power and service of the river and well aware of its presence in
my life. I had passed over the river many times, each time pausing to note the event. I had often aspired to cross at every opportunity—to drive or walk across every bridge and ride every ferry available to the general public. I wanted to perform a personal inventory, starting at the headwaters in British Columbia and ending where the river rushes up against the tide at Ilwaco. It would be a kind of pilgrimage, a way to pay tribute to this magnificent being, the second largest river system in the United States, the river whose geologic history is marked by every imaginable natural phenomenon. Artists have reproduced the Columbia’s loveliness with cameras and brushes; poets and journalists have expressed its subliminal essence with the pen; historians have related its significance in the development of the West; geographers and agriculturists have studied its complex role in the evolution of the entire region; economists and environmentalists have analyzed the consequences of its 14 dams, and Woodie Guthrie has immortalized it with folk ballads. In light of these most valuable endeavors, my task would be perfunctory. I simply wanted to travel the length of the river and systematically cross at every point where someone had decided it was worth an investment to get to the other side. In 2002, I conducted the inventory.  For most of my adult life, I have lived near the Columbia River in Washington State. For 15 years I lived in the Upper Columbia region near Gifford, a small community on Highway 25, which traces the Stevens County side of upper Lake Roosevelt. Here the river’s sunlit water is an atmospheric blue that deepens with the day and turns syrupy black at midnight, the only lights emanating from heavenly bodies or distant campfires on the opposite bank. In winter the forested mountains on either side of this long, narrow lake bear snow of varying depths and characteristics. The wind here can be fierce, in January bitter cold. I have seen ice form on the surface as far offshore as a hundred yards. I left Stevens County in the mid-1980s and moved to Ellensburg, 27 miles from Vantage, heart of the Middle Columbia region. This location, where the river flows deliberately despite being  delayed by its six lower dams, provides one
of the most dramatic Columbia River crossings of all, for its awesome geography
and the sheer nakedness of the river. Atop the noble basalt columns and silhouetted
against the horizon are Dave Govedare’s rusted steel sculptures, “Grandfather
Turns Loose the Ponies.” From several points of observation, these cimarones
appear to be live, their manes catching the wind as they gallop across the edge
of the canyon in wild freedom.After leaving the Middle Columbia region, I landed once again near the river at Longview, 75 miles from the Pacific Ocean and 50 northwest of Portland, Oregon. Within an hour’s drive from my home is the western end of the Columbia River Gorge, which yields the most spectacular scenery to be found anywhere on the planet. Four dams and heavy barge traffic give the river plenty of work to do in this segment. From Umatilla to Astoria, the Columbia serves as a state boundary; northern Oregonians claim a prideful ownership of the river nearly equaling that of Washington residents. Longview, with its timber and paper industries and deep water port, marks the end of the Columbia’s working identity. On the final segment of its journey, the river seems to relax. It widens once again and makes its way gracefully through the mountains of the Coast Range, taking contributions from numerous streams and the heavy rainfall that makes for a vigorous umbrella industry in western Washington and Oregon. This segment of the Columbia is also the region of history: Here Native Americans netted salmon, Robert Gray claimed the great river for America, Lewis and Clark succeeded in reaching the Pacific Ocean, and John Jacob Astor became the wealthiest man in the young country as a fur trader. Over the past century, politicians, entrepreneurs, engineers, ferry operators, bridge architects, and builders of dams and locks and dikes and jetties and fish ladders have given the Columbia innumerable tasks. The Lower Columbia enables transportation for industry and recreation. In the central basin the river irrigates fields, where its water is eventually transformed into wheat, potatoes, corn, and wine. For most of its length, the river pushes turbines to light our computer screens, power the Internet and, in reality, propel an entire society, a human society that, according to its nature, maintains an equilibrium between impulsiveness and discipline, and thereby perpetuates the intellectual achievement that is America. We and the river are controlled by the same physical forces; as water seeks its own level, eventually so do people. To embrace the Columbia River is to embrace the land it nourishes and from which it extracts nourishment. ••• Alex Whitman lives in Kelso and is a Lower Columbia College instructor. |
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ollowing
the completion of her meticulously-written inventory of its 45
crossings and 14 dams — a
documentary laced with romance, awe and reverence – she
resolved to walk the Columbia River’s entire 1264-mile length.