It’s hard to take my eyes off this powerful and slow-moving river. I’m on the Willamette (actually its the Multnomah Channel but I like to think of this water as belonging to the Willamette), as it lumbers along nearing its confluence to the mighty Columbia. From here the waters roll on to the Pacific ninety miles downstream. Watching the flowing water is like watching a fire. It’s hard to get much done…. Lazy river, lazy man.
This summer we are living on a house boat, or more accurately, a floating home, just outside Portland, Oregon. We’ve house-swapped our desert home in Virgin, Utah with friends who wanted to dry out after an unusually rainy spring, even in Portland. Conversely, we needed to soak up some green and rehydrate. It has been a trade made in heaven.
We sleep on the top floor of the house, with windows on three sides. The river surrounds us. During the day, patterned by the backwash of everything from a lonely rower in a single scull to a five-story tugboat pushing a huge gravel barge, the water is textured and alive. Days are long in the Northwest but when dark comes the water turns silky calm, mirrored like a lake, the moon and stars reflected from its inky depths. Our view is stunning and mysterious, and sometimes I just want to lie awake and watch it.
There is a slight rocking but only when a big gravel barge passes by. Mostly It’s calm, so calm.
Green is life, Sky is change
It’s been colder and wetter than normal this past month and we’ve soaked it in. At first the green hurt my eyes. During the day, even the river is green, as green as the verdant shores…. Green is life, sky is change. It’s sunny one minute, then goes grey and the sky opens. One friend suggested a phone app that tells you by the minute when the rain will stop or start. It helps us plan when to take the dog on the trails in Forest Park. Back home in the desert, the sky is blue almost every day, summer and winter.
A river of a very different nature dominates our desert life. Although we can’t see it from our house, the Virgin River is only a few hundred yards away. Compared to the Willamette or the Columbia, it doesn’t seem like much, but it carved Zion Canyon and can still re-arrange the landscape when its in flood.
Each day, when I’m home in Virgin, our dog Chaco and his friend Henry run to the river. Their humans, Steve and I, follow behind. After descending a bank, we meet a near-impenetrable line of willows and brush that lines the river. We walk downstream and come to a place called Falls Park where the Virgin turns up the volume as it churns over rocks through a steep stretch. Here we sit on boulders and breathe deep, taking in the extra oxygen in the slightly misted air. It is the highlight of my day, this dose of river.
What is it about flowing water? So mysterious, sometimes lazy, sometimes raging. A whole world of unseen things exists under the surface. As rivers and lakes drop with climate change, new things are being exposed daily: battle ships, mastodon tusks, skeletons in rusty barrels. Then there are all the things we’ve dumped in those sacred flowing waters, thinking they were forever hidden, forever gone. When we analyze the water, is there still enough H2 and O to call it water or has it become some other amalgam of awfulness? Let’s not go there.
In the summer of 1966, I swam in the Willamette during what might have been its most toxic state. It was summer and our high school choir traveled by bus from Salt Lake City to perform at the International Kiwanis Convention. University of Portland offered us housing, high above the river. One day, a few of us scrambled down the steep and treacherous bank and dove in. Later, they said we were crazy to have gotten in that water. Thankfully, the river is cleaner these days and people swim in it once more. I haven’t braved it yet, but I’ve made a vow to dive in.
A Visitor
As I spent the day contemplating moving water, I found myself thinking of a line from a cowboy poem I had collected almost forty years ago titled “The Blizzard,” written by Eugene Ware in the 1860s. It paints a scene of a lonely old cowboy or sheepherder sheltered from a storm in a remote saloon dug into a hillside. He contemplates his wasted life as he sits alone while everyone else gambles and drinks the night away. In the morning, they find that the old herder, still seated on his bench, had died during the night
They filled in the grave and each herder said goodbye till the judgement day.
But the fiddler stayed and he sang and played as the herders walked away.
A requiem in a lonesome land in a mournful minor key,
No matter how long the river, the river will reach the sea.
As I wrote, I was looking forward to a visit from our Utah neighbor and friend Rob Perkins who lives in an isolated valley on the edge of Zion National Park. He was dropping by for the night en route to the Canadian arctic where he will spend, the next five weeks navigating wilderness rivers in a solo canoe. Rob is one of the most respected wilderness canoeists in North America. That night after dinner, I asked him to write down just where he was headed:
I am driving north to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. That is comparable to driving from New York to LA ….. but going vertical. From there I’ll fly northeast to the headwaters of the Baillie River, a tributary to the Back River. There’s no one there and the rivers flow unimpeded. I’ll be on the Baillie and the Back for five weeks, ending my trip on an esker island in Upper Garry Lake at an abandoned Catholic missionary’s cabin. I’ll be on my own….
There are three words: alone, lonely, and solitude. Solitude is communion…. with yourself …. with nature. Alone is isolated and lonely is in between. If you are in solitude, you’re neither lonely nor alone.
I envy Rob and yet we are not young men any longer. I’m not sure I could muster the courage to do what he is about to do. And yet, the river still calls, adventure calls, solitude calls. I made that poem, “The Blizzard,” into a song just so I could sing the refrain, again and again, “No matter how long the river, the river will reach the sea.”
Hello Hal and Teresa. R&M
Love your song of the river and inevitability!