Columbia Chronicles Parting Shots Writer And Photographer Spend Four Weeks Learning About The River, Leave With More Questions

Green Douglas firs where the waters cut through.

Down her wild mountains and canyons she flew.

Canadian Northwest to the ocean so blue, Roll on, Columbia, roll on!

-Woody Guthrie

An interviewer once asked undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau how he manages to remain upbeat when much of the sea is exploited, polluted or dead.

We have lost much that is wonderful and great, Cousteau acknowledged. Yet what is left is still wonderful.

So it is with the Columbia River. Much of what has drawn people for 10,000 years is gone from the river. What remains is a beautiful, hardworking waterway that defines the Northwest as a powerhouse, a breadbasket, a playground.

For four weeks, staff photographer Steve Thompson and I followed the great, green river 420 miles, from the Canadian border to its confluence with the Snake River.

A month seemed a luxuriously long time when we put our inflatable boat in the water. Enough time, we thought, to read the river like a novel, exploring its subplots and characters.

Instead, it was little more than an introduction to a river so large it is overwhelming. We skimmed the pages of its story, but could not linger over the text.

What remains from our journey are images that are crisp but incomplete, like notes in a journal or photographs on a wall. Some visions we could only imagine, being latecomers to the river.

We saw no salmon outside of hatcheries. The fish were there, a tour guide assured us at Rocky Reach Dam near Wenatchee; 12 salmon came over the fish ladder the day before.

Twelve salmon in a river that once came alive with fish each June. The runs were so big they fed nations of native people at Kettle Falls.

We could not see the thundering falls; they were buried under 90 feet of placid water when Grand Coulee Dam backed up the river in 1941 and created Lake Roosevelt.

We saw no beavers, whose fur drew the first white trappers to the region.

But we saw a great variety of other wildlife: pelicans, loons, eagles, turkeys, bighorn sheep and black bear.

We caught fish, even if they weren’t native species and even if anglers are warned not to make fish the staple of their diets - a precaution necessary because of toxins in the water and the silt.

We saw landscapes unchanged since the great Ice Age floods: crumbling basalt walls, natural arches and clay cliffs dotted with swallows’ nests.

We started our trip where the riverbanks are lined with forests. As we moved south, we saw them change to sage, to green orchards, to cities, to factories.

Seven times we saw the river turn from swift and narrow to wide and imposing as we approached seven dams: Grand Coulee, Chief Joseph, Wells, Rocky Reach, Rock Island, Wanapum and Priest Rapids.

And we met people drawn to the Columbia for their livelihoods or inner renewal, the same reasons people always have come to the river.

We met the Boscos from Yakima, an extended family of 28 enjoying its annual vacation in two rented house boats.

We met Eric Weatherman of Kettle Falls, who earns a living harvesting stray logs that ride down the Columbia, and Bryan Stockdale, who keeps alive the family dream of turning tiny Vantage into a tourist mecca.

We met a single mother from upstate New York, raising daughters and peacocks from her remote home overlooking Lake Roosevelt. Her exhusband led her to the river; she’s determined to stay.

We joined the wedding party for Aaron Belt and Kim Schiller, whose union started with a four-minute ceremony amid the flowers at Rocky Reach Dam.

We passed through three cultures, from Indian reservations to mostly white cities like Wenatchee to towns such as Brewster where Spanish flows as frequently from the tongue as English.

We heard racial slurs and noted tension between the three. Yet, we also noticed a growing respect.

Tourists drop dollars into the donation box after learning about ancient ways at the Native American museum in Coulee Dam. Portfirio Covarrubias, an orchardist in Orondo, and other Hispanic landowners are earning acceptance among their neighbors.

At the end of the trip, we could look back at days when wind and rain and waves made river travel cheerless or downright dangerous.

We could remember times when the sun shined and the river glistened and travel was glorious.

We could recall camps where coyotes sang at night and pheasants screeched in the morning.

We saw nothing that had not been seen before, but we saw everything for the first time. Every bend held promise of a fresh discovery.

That is the gift of the Columbia, which makes explorers of all visitors.

The river cast that spell since 1792, when Capt. Robert Gray, a Bostonian, crossed a treacherous bar and named the Northwest’s great river after his ship.

“So ends,” Gray wrote in his journal after a brief description of the river.

So ends.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Six Color Photos