Among the Nations
Don Hynes
The trees will sort it out,
along big rivers and creeks
running down from the mountain,
in forests along the coast
where elk and bear ramble.
Salmon know the water
as wolves know the herd.
We manage from sentiment
but the earth is precise,
her exact measure disguised
by great abundance.
All our old stories
feature pride and vanity;
that’s how we got here
while coyotes work the brush,
deer browse the dense green.
The plum trees push up
against layers of cement
cracking them like child’s play.
It will get sorted and I hope to be there
when the Columbia rolls free
and we again take a humble seat
among the tribes and nations.
The River's Interest
William Dietrich
Northwest Passage
from the Epilogue
Perhaps the assumptions were wrong. I talked of this book once to a former college professor of mine named Robert Keller, and he in turn revealed his intended approach to the Columbia for an upcoming history class he was teaching. During a mountain climb, Keller recounted, he discussed the river's development with Jonathan Karpoff, an economist at the University of Washington. Karpoff was asked to tick off the various interest groups embroiled in the Columbia's future and duly listed fishermen, Native American tribes, farmers, the aluminum industry, utilities, environmentalists, barge companies, recreationists, ranchers, and so on. Keller nodded, thought for a while, and then said, “You forgot one interest. Do you know what it is?”
No, Karpoff replied, thinking his tally pretty complete.
“The river's interest,” Keller said.
As my former teacher recounted this, I'm sure I looked puzzled. “The river's interest,” he patiently repeated. “What is the interest of the river in staying a river? What is the right of a river to remain a river?” All the other values were based on humans and our competing needs. None suggested that nature—the natural Columbia—might have a value outside the immediate interests of our own species. Or that such a value was perhaps as important, even more important, than the others.
Karpoff, an avid hiker and outdoor enthusiast, does not buy this idea. Humans have interests and humans have rights, he told me, but to argue that a river has a right “is a semantic game.” It is simply a means, he thinks, to empower a view that people have of how a river should be used. “There is no other way to weigh value than through human benefits and costs,” he said. “To pretend not is like arguing against gravity. It just is.” Environmentalists may believe that the cost of developing the Columbia is too steep for its benefits, but they cannot escape the fact that the argument is about human values, not some intrinsic natural one: rights are something we assign, not something that salmon or rivers or rocks acquire by the mere fact of their existence.
Karpoff, in fact, used the development of the Columbia as a lesson in cost-benefit analysis for his business administration students. Most agreed with his analysis. His experience has been that even though students don't necessarily like damming the Columbia, they usually conclude that hydropower representatives have the stronger argument. Not all, however. Some students sense a river's interest after all: that the fabric of existence no more revolves around humans than the sun revolves around the earth. One woman accepted the economic analysis until she visited Bonneville Dam, Karpoff recalled. “She was so struck with the incongruity of the dam on the river that she couldn't deal with the analysis,” he said. “She told me her policy position would be based on her emotional reaction to that dam, across that river.”
In the summer of 1993 I accompanied Keller and his class down the route of the Columbia, a tumultuous, exhausting journey in which the students and the people they met were by turns proud of, angry at, wistful about, and awed by what has been done to the river. We talked of an untamed Columbia none of us will ever see. We tried to imagine the world our ancestors willingly traded for this one.
In his celebratory book Columbia, author Earl Roberge, who canoed some of its wild Canadian stretches shortly before their damming, predicted that future generations would not lament the loss. “The fact that it is a controlled river, with much of its scenic wilderness subdued, may cause a few twinges of nostalgia for the beauty that was, but weighed against the manifold benefits provided by the controlled river it must be admitted that the changes have been beneficial to the great majority of the people whose lives it affects,” he wrote. In the comfort of a city lit by regimented water pulsing through dams a hundred miles away, it is hard to deny Roberge’s argument. The Columbia is as proud and complex and irreversible a piece of human environmental transformation as can be imagined, as magnificent in its new guise as in its old. Yet it is a magnificence with an emotional hollowness, a glory that has lost its ability to startle. With our computer programs that pace the river we are like omniscient river gods, so much in control of our creation that we become bored with its predictability.
In the aboriginal dawn of the river country some early native apparently dreamed of dams, set the future in the past, and wove a story about its destruction. This Coyote story, or the hundreds or perhaps thousands told in the American West, resonates with modern power. It is a story of how Coyote brought salmon to the river people—how he outwitted the Swallow Sisters who had blocked Nch-I'Wana [Big River] with a dam.
The people were starving because the fish could not ascend the Columbia and they appealed to their hero for help. Coyote was too well known to approach directly, so he craftily turned himself into a baby, was strapped onto a cradle board, and set adrift down the river. Eventually he bumped up against the dam. “Oh, look at the poor baby!” the Sisters cried, taking the infant home with them. The next day the Swallow Sisters decided to leave the child while they went to the mountains to dig roots, and as soon as they disappeared Coyote turned back to his real form and set to work attacking the dam. When the Sisters returned he once more became a cooing baby and they did not suspect anything was awry. This went on for four days.
On the fifth day the root digging stick of the youngest sister broke, an ill omen suggesting something must be wrong. When the Sisters rushed back unexpectedly early, there was Coyote, prying away at their dam! The Swallow Sisters attacked. Again and again they darted in angrily as Coyote dug, but he warded them off until the dam was critically weakened. Finally the barrier gave way with a roar. Its debris formed the rocks and rapids of Celilo Falls, and the cradle board a nearby outcrop. The salmon could swim by to feed the people.
The swallows still build today, but only mud nests. Their return each spring signals the return of the salmon.
No magic babies bump up against the spill gates of modern concrete dams. They are so monumental as to seem immovable, so permanent as to make us prisoners of our own logic. Talk to engineers, farmers, biologists, or fishermen, and most will sooner or later remark, with pride or wistfulness or resignation, “Well, I don't think they're ever going to take out those dams.”
Some natives hold a different view. The dams may last centuries, true, but to the Columbia's tribes that is a blink of time. Sooner or later dams will fail, or become silted up, or their power will prove unnecessary. When that happens the old river will come back, and the River People will still be there to welcome the return of the Salmon People.
The irreversibility with which the Columbia River dams are regarded by the rest of us is intriguing. All were constructed in just half a century, eight of the fourteen in the 1950s and 1960s. They are hardly impregnable to change. One end of Grand Coulee has been blown off to add its Third Powerhouse. The dams are immovable in our imagination, however.
Should anything have been done differently? The dams are of undeniable benefit, producing energy, food, navigation, and flood control. Yet it is unlikely that the present complex would pass environmental and economic review today. Would Grand Coulee and Hells Canyon dams be allowed to choke off thousands of miles of salmon habitat without either better mitigation or modification? I doubt it. Would the Columbia Basin Project pass economic muster? To date, its second, uncompleted half has not. Would a new dam be allowed today without better provision for fish passage facilities? Certainly not. Would the Columbia be used today to lure energy-consumptive industries such as aluminum smelting and to promote electric heat? Not with quite the same enthusiasm, at least. If done over, the damming of the river would, with the benefit of today's perspective, proceed much more slowly, with greater attention to fish and water conservation. We would exhibit more caution.
Certainly the three uppermost dams on the lower Snake River, for all their value in power and navigation, would be unlikely to be built again. They proved decisive in destroying Idaho salmon runs that once represented nearly half the Columbia's total fish resource. Yes, their average power contribution of six hundred and forty-eight megawatts is significant, nearly enough to light Portland. But their generation is almost equaled by what Northwest consumers have managed to conserve in recent years, and is dwarfed by a river system generating twenty-five times as much average hydroelectric energy. “I don't think we could build those dams today,” said Ted Bottiger, the Northwest Power Planning Council member.
No serious proposal has yet been made for dismantling dams of this scale. With no agency in charge of the river, none has been bold enough to even study if some of the engineering should be reversed, even though that is one of the most obvious options. Nor has any agency ever considered seriously the second most obvious solution: conceding that the Columbia has been fundamentally changed, that salmon can never thrive in an ecosystem so drastically altered, and that the huge sums being spent on Columbia salmon in what has so far seemed a futile rescue attempt would be better applied to coastal streams elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest or Alaska where fish have a realistic chance of thriving.
Ask environmentalists and biologists where to start revamping the Columbia system, however, and it is usually on the lower Snake. While deconstruction is the most drastic option, far more likely in years to come is continued tinkering with the dams and reservoirs to get salmon past them. The exact kind of tinkering remains unclear. If given billions of dollars to fix the dams, “I'm not sure what I would do next,” confessed Don Bevan, head of the recovery team trying to rescue Snake River salmon.
On the Columbia River itself. Grand Coulee Dam remains too high, its power and irrigation too vital, and its reservoir too long to entertain serious thought of returning fish back to the upper watershed. Kettle Falls is drowned as effectively as the Titanic. Of the fourteen dams on the main river, only John Day has been closely scrutinized. Its sixty-mile reservoir is the longest that salmon still traverse, so proposals have been made to lower the water level six feet in hope its currents would quicken, urging young salmon to the sea. Yet even many fish biologists are skeptical that such a drawdown would noticeably increase the return of adult fish.
Recognizing today's second thoughts, the federal government has launched a System Operations Review of the Columbia that includes eleven federal agencies, four states, several utilities, seven tribes, twenty citizens' interest groups, a score of private individuals, and several universities. Its task is to review the conflicting uses of the river and reconcile them. No radical changes are anticipated.
And that is about the limit of our modern imagination. The dreams of natives notwithstanding, the Columbia is perceived as beyond the reach of Coyote, a necessary sacrifice to technology and civilization. “It's never going to be the way it used to be,” I was told by Dick Nason, the fish and wildlife operations manager for Chelan PUD. "The environmentalists say let’s put the river back the way it was. You can't. It's a people problem. There's too damn many people. They need the resource.”
Yet what truly intrigues us about the Great River of the West? It is the voice of regret that permeates the expressions of human pride. It is the dream of the Columbia once again as a river, bucking and roaring and steaming with muscle, thrashing salmon leaping against its foaming tide. So if I can dream Coyote dreams for a moment, it would be about the disappearance of a different dam. The Dalles: the one that silenced Celilo Falls.
During that long, wearying classroom journey down the length of the Columbia, we stopped on a high bluff above Celilo Falls, gaining a grand view. Below was a river that has become a broad lake, flat and silent as the lid of a tomb. A Tidewater tug and barge slid past the point where the falls had been. Allowing such cargo to pass is one of the proudest achievements of American engineering. “This is really depressing,” whispered student Teresa Mitchell.
That night we sat around a campfire at Beacon Rock. Bob Keller recalled the disorienting sensation of taking one of his classes in a single day from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the nighttime desert blaze of Las Vegas. The students traded observations of what we had seen and felt and thought, some of the women revealing they had dreamed of Coyote. We waited with amused anticipation for a comment from Jim Smith, a teacher who worked with troubled kids on the Swinomish Indian Reservation. He was perhaps the quietest person in our group and the least predictable, the oldest but the one with the most childlike ability to look at things with innocent clarity. Smith kept a certain wry equanimity toward all we saw. He talked to farmer Grady Auvil about how to cut an apple to find the star pattern inside. After a Hanford tour guide pointed to two buck deer with impressive racks of antlers resting in the shade of a tree at the nuclear reservation, he suggested, “Maybe it was one deer with two heads.”
That night by the campfire Jim Smith remarked that the overlook at Celilo made him wonder what the falls must have sounded like. It made him wonder how high mist from the rapids must have climbed. “It might have reached all the way up that bluff,” he said. “I wonder if it would have been moist and cool up there.”
I wonder, too.
