Down the Columbia Part 16

Now that it was too late to line back, I saw why it was the old captain had advised working down the side of the island. The left bank of the cascade (which latter was tumbling close beside me now), was all but sheer. Only here and there were there footings close to the water, so that the man with the line would have to make his way for the most part along the top of the rocky wall. _He_ could get along all right, but there was no place where a man could follow the boat and keep it off with a pole. It might have been managed with a man poling-off from the boat itself, but I hardly felt like urging Roos to take the chance. It was out of the question trying to line back up the "intake" of the fall, but there _was_ one loop-hole which looked worth exploring before risking an almost certain mess-up in trying to work down the side of the cascade.

I have mentioned that I had expected to find a whirlpool under the big jutting rock. The only reason there wasn't one was because what at high water must have been a very considerable back channel took out at this point and acted as a sort of safety-valve. There was still a stream a few inches deep flowing out here, running off to the left into a dark cavernous-looking crack in the bedrock. That water had to come back to the river somewhere below, and there was just a chance that the boat could be squeezed through the same way. At any rate, there was not enough of a weight of water to do any harm, and it ought not to be hard to "back up" in the event it proved impossible to push on through.

Leaving Roos to set up and shoot a particularly villainous whirlpool he had discovered, I dragged the skiff through the shallow opening and launched it into a deep black pool beyond.

Poling from pool to pool, I entered a miniature gorge where I was presently so walled in by the rock that the raw roar of the cascade was m.u.f.fled to a heavy, earth-shaking rumble. This tiny canyonette opened up at the end of a hundred yards to a sheer-walled rock-bound pool, evidently scoured out by the action of a high-water whirlpool. This turned out to be an enormous "pot-hole," for I had to avoid the water-spun boulder, which had been the tool of the sculpturing River G.o.d, in pus.h.i.+ng into the outlet crack. The latter was so narrow and overhanging that I had to lie down and work the skiff along with my up-raised hands. Twenty yards of that brought me out to a winding little lake, less steeply walled than the gorge above, but apparently closed all the way round, even at the lower end. I was in a complete _cul de sac_. A gurgling whirlpool showed where the water escaped by a subterranean pa.s.sage, but that was plainly no place to take a lady, especially a lady of quality like _Imshallah_.

Tying _Imshallah_ up to a boulder to prevent her amiable weakness for rus.h.i.+ng to the embraces of whirlpools getting the better of her, I climbed up a steeply-sloping pitch of bedrock and looked down to the head of a long narrow arm of quiet water. The gay little waterfall breaking forth from the rock beneath my feet was leaping directly into the main stream of the Columbia--and below the cascade. A stiff thirty or forty-foot portage, and we were through. We might have to wait for the pump-man to help us lift the boat up that first pitch, but he ought to be along almost any time now.

Taking a short-cut back across the water-washed rock, I found Roos just completing his shots of the cascade. The sun was on the latter now, and its dazzling whiteness threw it into striking relief against the sinister walls between which it tumbled. Save the first two falls of Surprise Rapids, there is not a savager rush of water on the upper Columbia than this final three hundred yards of the left-hand channel of Rock Island. Roos was delighted with the way it showed up in his finder, and even more pleased when he learned that we were not going to have to line the boat down it. Then he had one of his confounded inspirations.

That portage over the reef of bedrock, with the little waterfall in the background, would photograph like a million dollars, he declared; but to get the full effect of it, and to preserve "continuity," the "farmer"

ought to do it alone. It wouldn't do to include the pump-man in the picture, now that the "farmer" was supposed to be travelling alone. If I _had_ to have his help, all right; only it wouldn't do to shoot while the other man was in the picture. But it _would_ really be the "Cat's ears" if the "farmer" could make it on his own. He wouldn't have to make that big pull-up without stopping; he could jerk the boat along a foot or two at a time, and then get his breath like the pursued villain did in the processional finales of knockabout comedies. Then he showed me how, by resuming the same grip on the boat and the same facial expression at each renewed attack, the action could be made to appear practically continuous.

Well, I fell for it. Tom Sawyer was not more adroit in getting out of white-was.h.i.+ng his fence than was Roos in getting out of that portage job. He wanted to preserve "continuity" by starting back at the head of the cascade, but we compromised by making it the "pot-hole." Emerging to the lakelet, I registered "extreme dejection" at finding my progress blocked, and "dull gloom" as I landed and climbed up for a look-see. But when I reached the top of the reef and discovered the quiet water below, like sunlight breaking through a cloud, I a.s.sumed as nearly as I knew how an exact imitation of an expression I had seen on the face of Balboa in a picture called "First Sight of the Pacific." "That's the 'Cat's ears,'" encouraged Roos; "now snake the boat over--and make it snappy!"

I made it snappy, all right; but it was my spine that did most of the snapping. And it wasn't a foot at a time that I snaked the boat over.

(Roos had been too optimistic on that score); it was by inches. Roos took infinite pains in coaching me as to "resuming grip and expression;"

but even so, I am afraid the finished film will display considerable jerkiness in its "continuous action." I gained some solace by calling Roos names all the time, and so must again beg "lip-readers" who see the picture to consider the provocation and not judge too harshly. Once tilted over the crest of the reef, the boat took more holding than hauling. Being pretty well gone in the back and knees, she got away from me and slid the last ten feet, giving her bottom a b.u.mping that it never did entirely recover from. I was caulking incipient leaks all the way to Portland as a consequence of that confounded "one man" portage.

Just as we had loaded up and were ready to push off, the pump-man breezed along and asked us to give him a pa.s.sage as far as Columbia River station, two or three miles below. He wanted to take an oar, but as the distance was short and the current swift, I told him it was not worth bothering with. So he laid the oar he had taken out along the starboard gunwale, and knelt just aft the after thwart, facing forward.

Roos always claimed that it was the loom of the pump-man's back cutting off his view ahead that was responsible for the little diversion that followed. A good part of the blame was doubtless my own for not keeping a sharper watch over my shoulder, as I certainly should have done had I been alone. In any event, _Imshallah's alibi_ was complete. She behaved through it all like a real thoroughbred.

There was a sinuous tangle of swirls where the right-hand and left-hand cascades flew at each other's throats at the lower end of the rock island, and then a gay stretch of sun-dazzled froth where the teeth of a long reef menaced all the way across the channel; then a stretch of lazily-coiling green-black water, flowing between lofty brown cliffs and broken here and there with the loom of house-like rocks of shattered basalt. The roar of Rock Island died down in m.u.f.fled _diminuendo_, and it seemed mighty good to have that diapason muttering in bafflement astern rather than growling in antic.i.p.ation ahead. There was only one little rapid between here and the siding, the pump-man said, and it wouldn't bother us much as there was plenty of room to get by. He was right--for the most part.

I took a good look at the riffle as we headed down to it. It was a short stretch of rough, noisy water, but nothing that would have had to be avoided except for a single big roller in the middle of it. As this was throwing a great dash of spray high in the air every now and then, I felt sure the rock responsible for it was very slightly submerged--perhaps not more than a few inches. As this was so obviously an obstacle to steer well clear of, it never occurred to me to give Roos any especial warning about it, especially as he continued standing and sizing up the situation for half a minute after I had resumed my oars. The main current ran straight across the riffle, but with fifty feet of clear water to the left there was no need of getting into any of the worst of it, let alone trying to hurdle that foam-throwing rock.

Leaning hard on my oars, I had good steerage-way on the skiff by the time she dipped over into the fast-running water. Roos was cuffing jauntily at the wave crests, and singing. Because of the sequel, I remember particularly it was "Dardanella" that was claiming his attention. Two or three times he had maintained that he was a "lucky fella" before I saw what seemed to me to be mingled dissent and perturbation gathering in the pump-man's steel-grey eyes. Then, all of a sudden, he gave vocal expression to his doubts. "You won't think you're a 'lucky fella' if you put her onta that rock," he yelled over his shoulder. Turning at the finish of my stroke, I saw that big spray-flipping comber about two lengths away, and _dead ahead_, looking savager than ever. Trailing my right oar, I pulled every ounce I could bring to bear upon my left, trying to throw her head toward the better water. The next instant I was all but falling over backwards as the oar snapped cleanly off in the oar-lock. I recall perfectly the gleam of the long copper nails which had weakened it, and the fresh fracture of the broken spruce.

The weight I put onto my right oar in saving myself from tumbling backward had the effect of throwing her head in just the opposite direction I had intended. Since she could hardly have avoided hitting the big roller anyhow, once she was so near, it is probably better that she hit it squarely than sidling. The crash was solid, almost shattering in its intensity, and yet I am not sure that she hit the rock at all. If she did, it was a glancing blow, for she could not possibly have survived anything heavier.

The pump-man, true to his sailor instincts, kept his head perfectly in the face of the deluge that had engulfed him. The spare oar was lying ready to hand, and he had it waiting for me in the oar-lock by the time I was on an even keel again. The second wave, which she rode on her own, threw _Imshallah's_ head off a bit, but by the time she was rising to the third I was helping her again with the oars. Seeing how well she was taking it, I did not try to pull out of the riffle now, but let her run right down through it to the end. Only the first wave put much green water into her, but even that had not filled her anywhere nearly so deep as she had been the evening before. When we beached her below Columbia River station we found her starboard bow heavily dented, but even that did not convince me that we had hit the big rock. I am rather inclined to think that denting was done when I did my lone-hand portage at Rock Island. I was dead sorry I couldn't persuade that pump-man to throw up his job and come along with us. He had the real stuff in him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PICTURE THAT COST ME A WETTING (_above_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WRECK OF THE "DOUGLAS" (_below_)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WE COOKED OUR BREAKFAST IN THE GALLEY OF THE WRECK OF THE "DOUGLAS"]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A ROCKY CLIFF ABOVE BEVERLY]

After having lunch in the railway men's eating house at Columbia River, we went down to push off again. Finding the local ferry-man examining the skiff, I asked him if he thought she would do to run Cabinet Rapids, which we could hear rumbling a mile below. "Not if you try to push them out of the river the way you did that riffle above here a while ago," he replied with a grin. He said he had been watching us through his gla.s.s, and that the boat had disappeared from sight for three or four seconds when she hit the big roller. He offered to bet his ferry-boat against the skiff that we couldn't do it again and come through right-side-up. No takers. Speaking seriously, he said that, by keeping well to the left, we could run Cabinet all right--if nothing went wrong. "But better not make a practice of breaking an oar just where you're going to need it most," he added with another grin; "there's nothing on the river that would live through the big riffle over against the right bank. You'll see what she did to the _Douglas_."

Landing from the slack water above a rocky point which juts out into the river at the head of Cabinet Rapids, we climbed a couple of hundred yards over water-scoured boulders to the brink of the gorge. It was a decidedly rough-looking rapid, but by no means so hopeless for running with a small boat as Rock Island. In that the main riffle was thrown against a sheer bank of the river, it reminded me a good deal of Death Rapids on the Big Bend. But this riffle, while appearing fully as rough as that of the dreaded _Dalles des Morts_, was not, like the latter, unavoidable. The chance of pa.s.sing it in only fairly broken water to the left looked quite good enough to try. The wreck of the _Douglas_, standing out white and stark against the black boulders a mile below, was a good warning against taking any unnecessary chances. I looked well to the oars and the trim of the boat before shoving off.

Once out into the river, I could see that the rapid was white from bank to bank, but still nothing that ought to trouble us seriously. I stood for a minute or two looking ahead from the vantage of one of the thwarts, and it was just as I was taking up my oars again in the quickening current that the corner of my eye glimpsed the narrow opening of a deep back-channel winding off between splintered walls of columnar basalt to the left. I wasn't looking for any more one-man portages, but this opening looked good enough to explore. It might lead through by an easy way, and there was hardly enough water to do much harm if it didn't. It took hard pulling to sheer off from the "intake" now we had drifted so close, but we finally made it and entered the dark back-channel. Narrowing and broadening, just as the other had done, it led on for a couple of hundred yards, finally to discharge over a six-foot fall into a deeply indented pool that opened out to the river about half way down the rapid. The wedge-shaped crack at the head of the little fall was narrower than the skiff at water-line, but by dint of a little lifting and tugging we worked her through and lowered her into the pool below. Pulling out through the opening, we headed her confidently into the current. There was a quarter-mile of white water yet, but we were far enough down now so that the loss of an oar or any other mishap wouldn't leave the skiff to run into those wallowing rollers over against the further cliff. A sharp, slas.h.i.+ng run carried us through to the foot of Cabinet Rapids, and a few minutes later we had hauled up into an eddy under the left bank opposite the wreck of the _Douglas_.

The little stern-wheeler had come to grief at high-water, so that we had to clamber all of three hundred yards over big, smooth, round boulders to reach the point where the wreck was lying. The latter was by no means in so bad a shape as I had expected to find it. The princ.i.p.al damage appeared to have been done to the wheel, which was clamped down tight over a huge boulder, and to the starboard bow, which was stove in. The rest of her hull and her upper works were intact; also the engines, though terribly rusty. There was not much from which one could reconstruct the story of the disaster; in fact, I have not learned to this day any authentic details. The chances are, however, that the wheel struck a rock somewhere in Cabinet Rapids, and, after that, drifting out of control, she had come in for the rest of the mauling. If her captain is like the rest of the Columbia River skippers I met, I have no doubt that she will be patched up again before next high-water and started off for Portland.

With towering cliffs on both sides and the great black boulders scattered all around, Roos felt that both subject and setting were highly favourable for an effective movie, and started to think out a way to work the wreck of the _Douglas_ into his "continuity." After some minutes of brown study, he declared that the best way to work it would be for the "farmer" to land, come clambering across the boulders registering "puzzled wonderment," and then to stand in silent contemplation of the wreck, registering "thankfulness." "Thankfulness for what?" I demanded; "it doesn't strike me as Christian to gloat over the wreck of a s.h.i.+p." "You don't get me at all," he expostulated. "I don't mean for him to show thankfulness because of the wreck of the steamer, but because his own boat has so far escaped a similar fate. He just stands here with his arms folded, casts his eyes upward, moves his lips as if...."

"Nothing doing," I cut in decisively. "If you'd been raising beans and hay and apricots as long as I have, you'd know that a farmer never registers thankfulness about anything but a rise in the market, and there ain't no such thing any more." While we were arguing that moot point, the sun dipped behind the loftily looming wall of brown-black cliff across the river and the trouble settled itself automatically.

Because there was no longer light, Roos thought it would be a good stunt to camp where we were until morning, and as a camp was always "continuity"--there we were!

There was plenty of cordwood left, and the galley stove was in good condition. As we had no candles, dinner was cooked by the mingled red and green gleams of the port and starboard lights, transferred to the galley for that purpose. I slept in the cook's cabin and Roos--with his bed made up on the wire springs from the Captain's cabin--on the deck of the galley. With water freezing half an inch thick in the coffee-pot on the galley stove, we had an insufferably cold night of it--one of the worst we spent on the river. In the morning Roos made his "camp shots,"

which consisted princ.i.p.ally of the farmer chopping cordwood on the main deck, building a fire in the galley stove and cooking breakfast. Out of deference to my esoteric knowledge of the way farmers feel about things, he consented to omit the "thankfulness stuff."

Shoving off into a steady six-mile current at nine-thirty, a few minutes brought us in sight of a striking basaltic island, which Symons had characterized as "one of the most perfect profile rocks in existence."

"Approaching it from the north," he wrote, "it presents a striking likeness to the profile of Queen Victoria.... Coming nearer to it and pa.s.sing it on the west, the profile changes and merges into a more Grecian and Sphinx-like face, whose placid immobility takes one's mind involuntarily to far-off Egypt. It rises from the surface of the water about a hundred feet, and a pair of eagles have selected it as their home, and upon its extreme top have built a nest, giving, as it were, a crown to this G.o.ddess of the Columbia."

Roos declared himself strong for that "Sphinx stuff," and had his camera set up in the bow ready for a close-up of every change of expression. He was doomed to disappointment. The first thing we discovered missing was the crowning eagles' nest, and then Victoria's nose, mouth and chin. Her brow and hair were there, but both considerably eroded and inroad-ed by the weather. The "Grecian-and-Sphinx-like face" we never did locate, although I pulled around the island twice in search of them. Roos declared her an "oil can," and packed up his camera in supreme disgust.

That was, I believe, the last time he had it set up on the Columbia.

As Lieutenant Symons had proved so invariably accurate in all of his topographical descriptions, I am strongly inclined to the belief that floods and the elements had conspired to wreak much havoc with "Victoria's" features in the forty years that had elapsed since he limned them so strikingly with pen and pencil. I have known fairly stonily-featured ladies to change almost as much in a good deal less than forty years.

Cabinet Rapids is the beginning of a somewhat irregular series of columnar basaltic cliffs which wall in the Columbia closely for the next thirty miles. They range in height from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet, and in colour from a rich blend of saffron-cinnamon, through all the shades of brown, to a dull black. The prevailing formation is that of upended cordwood, but there are endless weird stratifications and lamiations, with here and there queer nuclei that suggest sulphur crystallizations. Imbedded in the face of one of these cliffs not far from the tumultuous run of Gualquil Rapids, is a landmark that has been famous among Columbia _voyageurs_ for over a hundred years. This is huge log, barkless and weather-whitened, standing on end in the native basalt. Over a thousand feet above the river and almost an equal distance from the brink of the sheer wall of rock, there is no possible question of its having been set there by man. The descriptions written of it a hundred years ago might have been written to-day.

Whether it is petrified or not, there is no way of knowing. The only possible explanation of its presence is that it was lodged where it is at a time when the Columbia flowed a thousand feet higher than it does to-day, probably before it tore its great gorge through the Cascades and much of what is now eastern Was.h.i.+ngton was a vast lake.

On the suggestion of the ferry-man at Trinidad, we avoided the upper half of Gualquil Rapids by taking a straight, narrow channel to the right, which would probably have been dry in another week. There is a half mile of fast, white water here, ending with some heavy swirls against a sheer cliff, but nothing seriously to menace any well-handled open boat. The water was slack for a number of miles from the foot of Gualquil, but began quickening where the river spread out between long gravel bars below Vantage Ferry. They were shunting sheep across at the latter point, and the Portuguese herders crowded eagerly round our boat, making strange "high signs" and voicing cryptic utterances, evidently having something to do with a local bootleggers' code. At our failure to respond in kind, they became suspicious (doubtless the fact that Roos was wearing a second-hand Canadian officer's uniform he had bought in Revelstoke had something to do with it) that we were prohibition enforcement officials, and they were muttering darkly to each other and shaking their heads as we pushed off again.

The cliffs ran out not long after we left Vantage Ferry, and as we neared the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Bridge at Beverly rough patches of sandy desert began opening up on either side. Deprived of the shelter of the high river walls, we were at once exposed to a heavy easterly wind that had evidently been blowing all day on the desert. The sun dulled to a luminous blur behind the pall of the sand-filled air, and the wind, which headed us every now and then, about neutralized the impulse of the accelerating current. There was a forty-miles-an-hour sand-storm blowing when we beached the boat under the railway bridge at four-thirty. The brilliantly golden-yellow cars of the C. M. & St. P.

Limited rumbling across above behind their electric locomotive seemed strangely out-of-place in the desolate landscape.

The one sidewalk of the town's fragment of street was ankle-deep in sand as we buffetted our way to the hotel. "Have you ever been in Beverly before?" asked the sandy-haired (literally) girl who responded to the jangle of the cowbell on the counter. "But I should know better than that," she apologized with a blush as she blew off the grit on the register; "'cause if you had been here once, you'd sure never be here again. What's the game, anyhow? You haven't...?" A knowing twitch of a dusty eyelash finished the question.

"No, we haven't," growled Roos irritably. Somehow he was never able to extract half the amus.e.m.e.nt that I did over being taken for a boot-legger.

It was the sand-storm that broke Roos' heart, I think. He was non-committal at supper that night when I started to talk about Priest Rapids, and the next morning, after describing his shave as like rubbing his face with a brick, he announced that he was through with the Columbia for good. As there was a good deal to be said for his contention that, between the shortening days and the high cliffs walling in the river, there were only two or three hours of good shooting light even when the sun was out, I did not feel justified in urging him to go on unless he wanted to. In any event, light for filming the running and lining of Priest Rapids, now that the sand-storm was at its height, was out of the question for a day or two at least. And below Priest Rapids there would be nothing worth filming until the mouth of the Snake was pa.s.sed. I suggested, therefore, that he should go on to Pas...o...b.. train and await me there, finding out in the meantime by wire whether Chester cared to have him continue the "farmer" picture in the face of the adverse light conditions.

By this time I had fairly complete data on Priest Rapids. These, beginning at the end of a stretch of slack water several miles below Beverly, continue for eleven miles. In this distance there are seven major riffles, with considerable intervals of fairly quiet water between. It seemed probable that all of these, with the exception of the second and seventh, and possibly the sixth, could be run. The lining of the others, while not difficult, would require the help of another man.

All that morning I inhaled sand as I went over Beverly with a fine-toothed comb in a very earnest effort to find some one willing to give me a hand through Priest Rapids. The nearest I came to success was an ex-brakeman, who said he would go with me after the storm was over, provided a job hadn't turned up in the meantime. The only real river-man I found was an old chap who opined that the middle of November was too late in the year to be getting his feet--if nothing else--wet in the "Columby." He offered to haul the boat to the foot of the rapids by the road for twenty dollars, but as the down-river branch of the Milwaukee presented an opportunity to accomplish the same end in less time and discomfort, I decided to portage by the latter. As there was an auto-stage service from Hanford to Pasco, Roos accompanied me to the former point by train, and helped get the boat down to the river and into the water in the morning. Hanford was not the point on the line closest to the foot of Priest Rapids, but I took the boat through to there because the station was nearer the river than at White Bluffs, and launching, therefore, a simpler matter.

The stretch of seventy miles between the foot of Priest Rapids and the mouth of the Snake has the slowest current of any part of the Columbia above the Dalles. Mindful of the time we had been losing by stops for lunch, I now began putting into practice a plan which I followed right on to the end of my voyage. Taking a package of biscuit and a couple of bars of milk chocolate in my pocket, I kept the river right straight on through to my destination. Munching and resting for an hour at noon, I at least had the benefit of the current for this period. Eating a much lighter lunch, I also gained the advantage of no longer being troubled with that comfortable _siesta_-time drowsiness that inevitably follows a hearty meal and disinclines one strongly to heavy exertion for an hour or more.

For a dozen miles or more below Hanford the river, flanked on either side by rolling desert sand-dunes, winds in broad shallow reaches through a region desolate in the extreme. The only signs of life I saw for many miles were coyotes slinking through the hungry sage-brush and occasional flocks of geese, the latter forerunners of the countless myriads that were to keep me company below the Snake. At Richfield the results of irrigation became evident in young apple orchards and green fields of alfalfa, and these multiplied all the way down to Pasco. The country seemed very flat and monotonous after so many weeks among cliffs and mountains, but there was no question of its richness and productivity once water was brought to it. The low overflow flats about the mouth of the Yakima, which flows into the Columbia from the west a few miles above Pasco, gave little indication of the beauty of the famous apple country which owes so much to the waters diverted from that little river.

After pulling for an hour with the long Northern Pacific bridge in view, I landed just below the Pasco-Kennewick ferry at three o'clock. As I was beaching the boat and getting out the luggage to leave in the ferry-man's house-boat, a hail from the river attracted my attention. It was from Roos, in the front seat of an auto, on the approaching ferry-boat. His stage had been behind time in leaving Hanford, and as a consequence I had beaten him to the Pasco landing by ten minutes. After the speed with which we had moved on the upper river, however, mine had been rather a slow run. In spite of my steady pulling, it had taken me just under six hours to do the thirty-five miles.

After the exchange of a wire or two, Roos obtained permission from Chester to suspend the "farmer" picture, and was ordered on to New York to report. We were both a good deal disappointed not to have a pictorial record of the "farmer" actually seeing the sea; in fact, we did some hours of "location" scouting in the hope of finding a subst.i.tute Pacific in the vicinity of Pasco. If that Beverly sand-storm had only made itself felt seventy-five miles farther down river I honestly believe we would have accomplished our worthy end. There was a pretty bit of white beach below the N. P. bridge. _If_ the sand had been blowing thick enough to obscure the farther sh.o.r.e, and _if_ the wind had blown in the right direction to throw up a line or two of surf, I could have stood with one foot on that beach, the other on _Imshallah's_ bow, elbow on knee, chin in hand, and registered "fulfilment," and none could have told it from the real Pacific. Indeed, that bit of backwash from Pasco's outfall sewer, with the sand-barrage and surf I have postulated, would have "shot" _more_ like the Pacific than many spots I can think of looking off to the Columbia bar.

CHAPTER XIII

PASCO TO THE DALLES

The only lone-hand river voyage I had ever taken previous to the one on which I was about to embark was down the lower Colorado River, from Needles to the head of the Gulf of California. This had been in comparatively quiet water all the way, with nothing much to look out for save the tidal bore at the lower end. As I had never been above the Dalles on the lower Columbia, I had very little idea of what I would encounter in the way of rapids. I knew that there were locks by which the Dalles and Cascades could be pa.s.sed, but as the combined fall at these points accounted for only about a quarter of that between the Snake and tide-water, it was certain there must still be some very swift rapids to run. That there had at times been a steamer service maintained from the Snake down meant that there must be some sort of a rock-free channel through all of the riffles; but it did not necessarily mean that these were runnable in a small boat. A properly handled stern-wheeler can be drifted down and (by means of line and capstan) hauled up rapids where not even a high-powered launch can live. I had a list of about a score of the princ.i.p.al rapids between the Snake and Celilo Falls, with their distances from the Canadian Boundary by river. This would enable me to know approximately _where_ I was going to find them. That was all. Information on fall, channel and the best means of running them I would have to pick up as I went along.

I shoved off from Pasco Ferry at nine o'clock in the morning of Sunday, November fourteenth. With Roos and his blanket-roll, camera and tripod out of the stern, I found that the skiff trimmed better when I rowed from the after thwart. She pulled easier and handled a lot more smartly now. It was evident, however, that her increased freeboard was going to make her harder to hold to her course with head winds, but these I hoped to have little trouble with until I reached the gorge of the Cascades.