Rafting with Rooster and Knife Man in search of the long-gone Columbia

By DAVID HORSEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL CARTOONIST

Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a seven-part series.

DISPATCH FROM THE WHITE SALMON RIVER, Sept. 24 — I’ve joined a crew of five strangers in a raft steered by a guy with a knife sheathed over his heart. We’ve passed several rapids and now are first in line to go over the falls.

Knife man orders us to paddle forward as he maneuvers from the stern. The drop-off approaches. Adrenaline kicks in.

“Hang on! Get down!” Knife Man shouts. I slide to the floor of the raft, grab a strap and wedge my legs against the forward seat. Over we go. A gush of 40-degree water envelops the boat. Then, in the next moment, we are spinning away from the 14-foot falls. It all happens in seconds and I’m thinking, “Dang, that was fun. Let’s do it again!”

Of course, when Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery traveled down the Columbia River, they went over falls far higher and took on rapids much wilder and did it in dugout canoes. And they wore buckskins, not the wetsuit, helmet, splash jacket and life jacket issued to me by the outfitters who are taking 30 of us thrill seekers down a tributary of the Columbia. Nevertheless, this three-hour tour is my modest attempt to get a feel for what the explorers experienced long before 20th century dams turned the Great River of the West into a series of wide, placid reservoirs.

The Columbia River as it once was is almost impossible to fully appreciate today. West of here, the Bonneville Dam plugs a narrow gap where the tumbling Cascades of the Columbia once rushed through. To the east at the Dalles there were falls that William Clark called “horrid” in appearance, an “agitated gut swelling water, boiling and whorling in every direction.” Farther east was the expanse of Celilo Falls, the river’s greatest fishery where an estimated 16 million salmon passed through annually. From the Pacific Ocean, some of those fish traveled 800 miles deep into the mountains, as far as Sacagewea’s homeland near the Continental Divide.

Now, where Celilo Falls once roared, there is only the sound of waves lapping at the shore of a river that looks more like a lake. The millions of salmon have been reduced to a struggling remnant of endangered runs that add up to a mere 1 percent of the numbers observed by Lewis and Clark. [...read more...]