The Columbia River
Sometimes our life is enriched by adversity, and sometimes it is stimulated by unexpected events.
After several days of exciting travel on the river, coping with traffic and lock irregularities, hurrying to our desired destinations in time to complete what we have desired to do, it is pleasant to sit back and just follow the river in a more leisurely manner. Today dawned with a brilliant sunrise and a long stretch of smooth quiet water. As we stood on the bow, watching great blue herons, gulls, mergansers, and other water birds, we felt the promise of the new day.
Joining the Columbia River, after our time on the Snake, we enjoyed the tall cliffs to be found at Walulla Gap. We traced the basalt flows, frozen in time, as they made their way westward. This riverbed has seen many of these flood basalt events. It has seen the changing of the seasons, bringing springtime floods of snowmelt down from the high mountains. It has seen catastrophic events when at the end of the last ice age unimaginable quantities of meltwater rushed down to the sea. Now it is trapped between concrete dams that are expected to do our bidding. And today it is doing just that. The water is not stirred by the wind, but is mirror smooth, and we glide across it on the National Geographic Sea Bird.
But we remember the Corps of Discovery as their dugout canoes wallowed through one set of rapids after another on this stretch of river. From one day to the next the river has many faces, but what we know for sure is that it will flow down to the sea forever.
