Meander Scars: Reflections on Healing the Willamette River

Introduction

1 Introduction vvv I live by a river that flows through a broad valley between two mountain ranges, a river called the Willamette. Many times I’ve sat at its banks skipping stones, or strolled down a nearby footpath flanked by maple and ash trees. I’ve walked the riverside path with my family since I was a little girl. One of my earliest memories is of my father crossing an errant channel of the Willamette clutching two small girls, my sister in one arm and me in the other. It must have been winter. He and my mother had traversed a rivulet and headed home a different way before realizing they would have to ford a much deeper channel. Rather than turning back, my father told us to stay put as he draped my mother across his arms and waded the river. Then he came for us. With my father holding me tight, I felt the strange and dueling tug of terror and calm, the natural lure of water and simultaneous fear-spun repulsion of it. To a small child, the water was swift and deep, but as long as I felt the strong grip of my father’s hands and kept hold of my mother’s eyes looking from the opposite shore, I would be fine, I told myself. 2 Meander Scars “Weren’t you afraid?” I asked my father, almost twenty-five years after the incident. “Good god, I was in my thirties then,” he said. “I could swim like a sonofabitch.” And he could. Even now, sometimes, the fear and calm, the pull of alarm and wonder come back to me when I watch the Willamette slosh against sandy banks with brown water. Maybe those opposing emotions are what keep me coming back to this river, again and again, sitting and watching even as my rear gets soaked from damp gravel. Maybe the alluring complexity of that early experience is partly why I stay in the town where I was born. vvv Today I sit on a gravel bar and watch herons fly through cottonwoods and in between their knotted nests. The day is hazy and washed out, but the river surges. Its surface holds a light stronger than the sky. I am alone, but not lonely enough to believe I am the only person to have sat on this shore. I can imagine a Kalapuya boy fishing along this edge of rock and water. Near here, European settlers pressed their boots into the nearby soil—men like Joseph C. Avery and William F. Dixon. When they came, these settlers left more than boot prints. They left legacy and ecological disgrace, a tamed river, productive cities, livelihood, loss, and safety. And years later, we’re still following in their boot prints, hoping for a modicum of happiness and comfort. Yet that is not all I imagine while watching the river. I can picture nineteenth-century Oregon poet laureate Samuel Simpson sitting in this spot and composing his “Beautiful Willamette,” a pastoral poem about a river that threads across a valley floor before spilling into the Columbia and surging to the sea. Like me, Simpson must have felt his heart sing every time he watched the mighty Willamette and its marble surface. Today I can see the river just as Simpson wrote about it, “Waltzing, flashing / Tinkling, splashing … / Always hurried / To be 3 Introduction buried / In the bitter, moon-mad sea.” Somehow, the river carries light even when the world is grey. What Simpson didn’t write about was how we have wronged this river, those lapping shadows of progress. He didn’t write about the big eighteen-wheeler lugging gravel behind the heron rookery. He didn’t live long enough to write about the plume of steam and whatever else coming from the Evanite Fiber Corporation beside the river. When he sat here—pretending for a moment that he did—Simpson likely didn’t see a swath of sky filtering through the thin line of trees in front of me right now. Surely, the thick woods of his day let in only glints of daylight. Simpson didn’t live long enough to see city grids bury the river’s channels or the construction of Interstate 5. He never saw the twenty-foot rock wall that lines the Corvallis riverfront and keeps the Willamette from “waltzing.” What kind of poem would Simpson write today? Would...