![]() Lomax, the authority on American roots music, told Kahn he knew just the man. Stephen Kahn, the Bonneville Power Administration’s first public relations specialist, asked Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress if he knew anybody. They wanted a folk singer to write and perform songs for the movie, someone who could connect with the workadays of the region. They decided to make a movie, a bit of agitprop, that would champion dams for their power generation, and also for their ability to control the river’s floods and to irrigate the desert that lies east of the Cascades. In the spring of 1941, the newly formed Bonneville Power Administration was looking for ways to convince a skeptical public to buy into a system of publicly financed dams along the Columbia that would provide cheap electricity to the Northwest. Guthrie, improbably enough, played a prominent role in the shackling of the Columbia, even though he never poured a single bucket of concrete. I’m thinking of the American folk singer Woody Guthrie. ![]() But I’m thinking of another fellow, as well, someone who saw the wild Columbia for the first time just sixty-seven years ago - and was profoundly moved by the experience. Most chose the mountains.Īs I approach the dam, I’m thinking of the Indians, about those explorers and adventurers, about what the river has become. Later, Oregon Trail overlanders had to pick their poison: follow the river or cross the up-and-down Cascade Mountains that form a snowy hackle up the spine of Washington and Oregon. Lewis and Clark made arduous portages around Celilo and Cascade falls, as did the British and American trappers who followed them. Americans had a similar impression following the river from east to west meant reckoning with epic rapids, sheer walls, and withering winds. Those who attempted entry by sea had to grapple with a terrible maelstrom where Columbia waters push up against Pacific waves. They told of mammoth bridges and jealous mountain gods who hurled stones at each other from either side of the river’s walls.Įuropean explorers were frightened by the river, intimidated by its wildness. They told stories about its rapids and about the bounties of salmon that returned each year to sustain their culture. The river is thoroughly entwined with the region’s lore it has always occupied a central psychological space here. You’d be hard-pressed to overstate the importance of the Columbia River to the Pacific Northwest. Bonneville Dam, a strip of blond concrete that spans the river, is incongruous in this green land. I’m thirty miles upriver from Portland and just downstream from the first of fourteen dams that stop the river’s tumble. ![]() ![]() Outside my car window, massive evergreen mountainsides ascend to a flawless sky and the wide pewter river - the largest on the west coast of North America - rolls along. ON A CLEAR, COOL MORNING in early spring, I’m heading into the deepest cleft of the Columbia River Gorge, the only place where a river breaches the Cascades. ![]()
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