Voyage of a Summer Sun: Canoeing the Columbia River

13. East Gorge: Still in the Brown Country

13 (nSl GOHG( Still in the Brown Country On the third day at the Walla Walla River, the wind still howled and trees swayed. An eighty-one-year-old small-motor repairman brought his wheelchair to water's edge, caught and kept bluegills and threw back small perch. Meincke came by, bearing ice, and I visited with four retirees from Lewiston who were not catching channel catfish. Late in the afternoon, the wind eased. I struck camp, bagged the gear, and headed out of the Walla WaHa estuary, prepared to turn back if open water was too rough. It was not. As I turned the corner into Wallula Gap, no whitecaps ripped the Columbia. The river lost its chop and lay calmer as I paddled on. It was a very fine thing, for a change, to reach for a bladeful ofwater, pull it back strong, and feel that jumpahead glide of canoe over smooth water. Because I'd started late in the day, the sun was falling as Wallula Gap gave way to a widening Columbia. Ahead, the river lined up with a pile of pinking cotton clouds where I understood Mount Hood to be, and when the sun peeked around them it purpled harsh cliffs and threw deep warm shadows toward the river. Shirtless, wearing only cutoffs and the straw hat, I paddled into sundown 230 VOYAGE OF A SUMMER SUN like the end of a tearjerker movie. Camp, when it came, was a gentle slope of coarse black sand under cottonwoods. For the first time on the river--not the last-I pitched the tent by starlight and cooked in the dark. Campbell's mushroom soup and freeze-dried beef bourguignon. A shooting star scratched the eastern sky, and it was one of those evenings that make a river worth its trouble. At daybreak a breeze stirred the cottonwoods. The wind huffed the flame to sputtering under my breakfast soup, and blew out the fire. I loaded up and put the canoe into a rising westerly and the staccato slap ofwater against the bow. The goal today was to reach McNary Dam and get through the locks, just twelve miles away, and hole up in Umatilla for resupply. I was down to my backup canister ofcooking gas. Soup and granola bars were gone, and I was low on sandwich fixings. A restaurant meal and a motel in Umatilla, I thought, would do just fine. But the gorge isn't a place for schedule. With the wind rising, I should have pulled offwhen a wide cove showed up on the shore. But the Northwest Guild of White Pelicans was convening there, and it would have been rude to barge in on them. When it became clear I would not make it to McNary Dam, I scaled down my expectations. Hat Rock State Park was just a couple miles farther on. The slap-sLap-slap against the bow changed to rolling swells. I placed stones in the canoe to settle it, but the stones shifted and the canoe took water. I put ashore and dumped the water, and the stones. When I got back on the river, wind caught the bow each time it swung more than a couple of degrees off head-on. Short, quick-and-heavy strokes on the paddle, always on the left, kept me offthe rocks, but there was no glide, no rest. Whenever I could-not often-I dragged the canoe ashore and took a breather. In eight hours, I moved only three miles. Close to where the map showed Hat Rock State Park, I East Gorge 231 hiked up the rocks to scout: Was the park wind-protected and worth reaching? It was. Now I had to put the canoe on the river one more time and turn this last corner. Hunger, not courage, was the deciding factor as I timed the waves, pushed off, and surfed around the point into a narrow flat-water bay. NO CAMPING, the sign said. DAY USE AREA. I walked a quarter mile up the road, looking for the camping area, before I decided this was too far to haul my stuff. Back at the canoe, cross and tired, I swept a willow flat free of goose poop. When I opened the food bag, the whiff of white gas knocked me back. I hadn't properly corked the gas canister that morning, and the gas soaked...