Columbia Chronicle Moses Lake Native And Washington Post Reporter Blaine Harden Combines His Personal Interest And Reporting Skills For Columbia River Story

“A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia” By Blaine Harden (W.W. Norton, 271 pages, $25)

Maybe it’s just an unfortunate example of the groupthink of modern publishing. Or perhaps it’s the new rite of passage for socially conscious authors. Whatever the reason, the 1990s already has seen more than two dozen highly touted books about the Columbia River and the Columbia River Gorge.

There is some logic behind it all. Not only does the Columbia wend its way through some of the most scenic landscape in North America as it flows from the Canadian Rockies to the Oregon/Washington coastline, but it is also a river beset by a virtual compendium of modern-day woes, all committed in the name of progress.

Sixty-five years ago, the Columbia was a pristine masterpiece of nature, a fish-rich paradise largely untouched by civilization, native or European. But in the rush to expand the west into the modern marvel it is today, the Columbia has been dammed, diverted and become home to the continent’s most potent radioactive dump site, the Hanford Atomic Works.

It has also become a cause celebre. Armed with sheaves of reports and surveys and scientific “proof,” one group after another has stepped forward, claiming to be the true voice of the Columbia. They’re all there: environmentalists, farmers, politicians, Indian tribes, hydroelectric suppliers, river transport companies - even the windsurfers, for whom one stretch of the river has become the Holy Grail of windsurfing.

The latest volume in the growing Columbia River library is Blaine Harden’s “A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia.” Harden grew up in tiny Moses Lake, Wash., then went on to write for the Washington Post, covering both eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, which provided the fodder for 1990’s excellent “Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent.”

But after 20 years of covering other people’s lives, Harden came home to explore the world that shaped him. Harden’s father had come to eastern Washington in 1932. In the depths of the Great Depression, the federal government had launched two of the greatest public works projects in history: the Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project. Both enterprises were blessed. Not only did the dam create thousands of jobs, but it also generated untold electricity for fledgling industries and the populations that would follow them. Using water diverted by the dam, the irrigation project reclaimed more than 500,000 acres of desert land and turned it into one of the world’s most fertile farming regions. It was heaven on earth, even after the Hanford Site was opened to process plutonium for atomic bombs.

But in time, problems developed. The dams and the greatly slowed river currents that made commercial river traffic possible were decimating the salmon population. The urban population on the west side of the Cascade mountains was increasingly edgy about the highly subsidized water and power that made industry and farming possible on the dry side of the mountains. Add to that discoveries of leaks at Hanford and the woes of the Native Americans whose lives had been disrupted, and the perfect plan of the 1930s was quickly unraveling.

Harden hurls himself into the midst of this morass, riding the barges that ply the Columbia, revisiting the sites and memories of those who built the dams and farms, as well as those who were displaced by them.

But for all the verbiage, the only one who ends up having much of a voice is Harden. And it’s not a very pleasant voice, at that.

Here, he displays disdain for nearly everyone he talks to. Big city folks are the “cappuccino cognoscenti” who regard the Columbia as a plaything. The farmers are greedy and dishonest. The Hanford engineers are naive - how could they believe that atomic bombs might end the war or keep the Soviets at bay?

He saves his worst treatment for those who work on the tugs. Harden finds it more interesting to talk about the skippers’ waistlines - big - and their bad habits - they eat meat and potatoes and chew tobacco - than to address the regional economic impact of commercial river traffic, which Harden virtually ignores.

The only one unscathed is Harden himself. But amidst all this bullying, his conscience must have given him a little tug, as he offers this rationale in the first chapter.

“As quickly as I could, I assured them (the tug crews) that they need not worry about me. I explained I was like them. I was a beneficiary of dammed-up rivers, Arno Harden’s boy, clearly no fancy-pants, fishloving yuppie. It was true what I said, as true as anything that journalists say to ingratiate themselves, making friendships of convenience to wheedle out information. In any case, I repeated this autobiographical wheeze to every pilot and deckhand I met sailing west on the Snake and Columbia, and it worked like a passkey.”

What Harden forgot to add was how he would betray that trust at every turn.

None of this, of course, lessens the problems faced by the Columbia. And Harden has done his homework here, offering up scads of statistics and history. But instead of using his reportorial skills to reveal more about the complexities that bedevil the issues, Harden is consumed by them, becoming just another indignant finger-pointer, less interested in solutions than in a show of power.