Columbia River Farewell

A Transcendent History of the Mighty River

Our Summer Vacation: or maybe I was the only one on vacation

One of Teresa and my final outings, after living on the Willamette River in Oregon for three months, was driving across the Columbia River to Vancouver’s Riverfront Park. A few years ago, the inimitable Larry Kirkland was commissioned to create two major components for the project. The park was created to honor the Columbia River and all its tributaries and Larry commissioned Teresa to write the text for the monolith that features a topographical map of the massive watershed. Teresa had attended the dedication, and now we wanted to experience it together.

As we approached the park, we encountered an amazing engineered platform that juts 90 feet out over the river to allow salmon to swim under unimpeded. This pier is supported like a modern bridge with all the engineering details etched, as if on scrimshaw, on the supports. Then we walked past a splash pool with the major drainages on the Columbia carved into stacked stone inscribed with the names of tributaries and featuring quotations about rivers and water from writers as various as Leonardo de Vinci and Jane Austin. We ended up at the large granite monolith. As we drew close, we saw a couple intensely engaged in reading the panel. As they finished, I heard the woman exclaim to her partner, “Wow, that was amazing.” I couldn’t help myself -- I butted in, “My wife wrote that.”

Now that we are back home on our own river drainage, the Virgin, a river which flows to the Colorado then (ideally) to the Sea of Cortez, I want to thank our friends and all those who make their home around Portland and the Columbia River. Teresa trained this summer  as a chaplain at Legacy Emanual Hospital. Without exception, our friends and all we met along our path were wonderful and hospitable to us desert dwellers.

As a way to thank the Columbia, the Willamette, Portland and all our friends I offer Teresa’s short essay on the history of the Columbia River. Also, today Teresa and I celebrate 31 years of marriage. What a grand ride down the river of life.

Words Etched in Stone

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. — Naturalist John Muir

The Columbia carries more water than any other river in the American West. Born in Columbia Lake in the Canadian Rockies, it travels 200 miles north before turning abruptly around. It drains south through British Columbia, crosses Washington State, and then turns west to define a major portion of the Washington-Oregon border before it churns out into the Pacific Ocean. In the course of some 1200 miles it absorbs more than a thousand waterways–including the Kootenay, the Pend Oreille, the Snake, and the Willamette–and drains an area as large as France. This map reveals nature’s calligraphy, the trace of water’s complicated dance with gravity on its downward journey to the sea.

Water from the Columbia flows at your feet. Lean down and dip in; it’s gentle and cool. The river itself, however, is quite literally a powerhouse, its network of hydroelectric dams supplying much of the electricity used in the Pacific Northwest. Long before humans knew how to harness the river, Mother Nature did, letting its power build up behind massive ice dams and then releasing it at the end of the last ice age in monumental floods that carved Grand Coulee and the Columbia River Gorge.

In between the great floods and the river’s industrialization, the Columbia supported millions upon millions of fish, fighting their way up the current to spawn. Salmon and other fish fortified indigenous cultures and allowed them to flourish for over 10,000 years, with Celilo Falls and Kettle Falls among the oldest continuously used sites in North America. But the dams devastated the fish runs, a loss for Native people that haunts the Columbia River Basin to this day.

Geographers define the source of a river as the place where its headwaters rise. This is something that can be plotted in three dimensions: longitude, latitude, and altitude. How to locate the origin of the Columbia in time, however, is a metaphysical task. The earth and its atmosphere make up a closed system. Water changes form but is neither created nor destroyed. Every molecule of water in the Columbia River was once in the oceans, was once in the sky.

Every molecule of water in our own bodies has a similar history. The water that quenches our thirst today was already ancient when the dinosaurs bent down to drink. We may count our age in decades, but when we consider that over half of our adult body weight is water, we realize that we have existed for eons.

We are conduits of water. Water connects us to all the life that has ever been, to all the life that ever will be. We are this river. This river is us.

Teresa Jordan, author

Biking along the Columbia

A couple weeks earlier I had gone biking with my friend Brendan Doyle, longtime partner to Larry Kirkland. Brendan told me about Larry’s project including the fact that the pier was awarded the 2019 Engineering Excellence, Project of the Year Award.

This is what I wrote Larry  upon our return.

“Larry, I wanted to tell you how moved I was to explore your installation on the waterfront in Vancouver. Approaching, I thought, oh this is much smaller than I envisioned. Then I got close and started to take in the details. The first were the schematics of the engineering that made that great platform possible. Then I watched as other people were drawn to this place. It was beautiful but so much of the beauty was in all the meaning that was thoughtfully designed into the space.

I know all the kids playing in the shallows may not have been aware that they were traversing the drainages of the Columbia. I doubt the two women stationed near Teresa’s carved words giving-out Watchtower Magazines knew that they were drawn there, not only because there were people congregated for easy proselytizing, but that they had been guided to that spot because it is a place of meaning. Oh, Larry, this space you created is brilliant. I’m so glad I got to be there, and it was fun to bicycle and get a few side stories from Brendan while we wheeled around the place. Thank you.”

In reply Larry wrote,  “Thank you Hal for being so attuned to that place. It has transformed that city and effected the citizens and visitors. It was the magical collaboration of talented people.”

Let’s hear it for the power of art….

Here are a few good links about the project as well as photos:
Larry Kirklands website

Public Art Services website

information on Waterfront Park