It’s easy to sum up the view of two new books on the
Columbia River, the Nchi-Wana in a native tongue: It was wild,
dammed, polluted and mutilated.
Pulitzer Prize
winner William Dietrich tells a fascinating tale in Northwest
Passage: The Great Columbia River as he leaves no aspect of the
river untouched. Beginning with the geological wonders of its
birth, he describes the natives who respected it and the developers
who changed it.
Blaine Harden’s A River Lost: The
Life and Death of the Columbia, is less historical and half the
length of Dietrich’s book. His is a personal story and it meanders
like the river, but both he and Dietrich tell us that 14 major dams
and more than 250 dams on tributaries have reduced the river to a
series of computer-controlled pools. Imagine 14 Lake Powells
back-to-back.
While fish are the key indicators
of the Columbia’s decline, some things are just gone: the
magnificent Celilo Falls and the Marmes Man rockshelter are buried
beneath backwater. Salmon in the upper Columbia and Snake rivers
are no more.
Both writers note bizarre solutions
proposed by “experts,” including a canal hundreds of miles long so
fish can swim to and from the ocean unobstructed by
dams.
All the while, air conditioners from as far
away as Tucson and Phoenix whir as power is sent across the West,
and apples and lumber travel across the
seas.
These are not happy books, but they are
provoking and compelling. Like Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee or
Desert Solitaire, they should be mandatory reading for every high
school student, public employee and elected official in the
Northwest.
Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia
River by William Dietrich, Simon & Schuster, $26, 448 pages; A
River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia by Blaine Harden,
Norton, $25, 271 pages.
* Christopher Van
Tilburg
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Roll on, Columbia.
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