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Adoration of a Hose

I was born in a hospital located on the flanks of a volcanic cone. This cone, named Mount Taber, looks as innocent as an overturned teacup as it rises over a densely populated section of Southeast Portland, Oregon. Decades before my birth, scientists had of course declared the cone to be unimpeachably extinct. The hospital, however, afforded a nice view of another cone, thirty-five miles away in the same volcanic system, also declared extinct in those days: Mount St. Helens. Forgive my suspicion of certain unimpeachable declarations of science.

My birth-cone's slopes were drained by tiny seasonal streams, which, like most of the creeks in that industrialized quadrant of Portland, were buried in underground pipes long before I arrived on the scene. There were also three small reservoirs on Mount Taber's slopes, containing the water that bathed me at birth, water I would drink for eighteen years, water that gave me life. But this water didn't come from Mount Taber, or from the surrounding hills, or even from the aquifer beneath: it came, via concrete and iron flumes, from the Bull Run River, which drains the slopes of the Cascade Mountains forty miles away.

I was born, then, without a watershed. On a planet held together by gravity and fed by rain, a planet whose every creature depends on water and whose every slope works full-time, for eternity, to create creeks and rivers, I was born with neither. The creeks of my birth-cone were invisible, the river from somewhere else entirely. Of course millions of Americans are now born this way. And many of them grow up without creeks, live lives lacking intimacy with rivers, andbecome well-adjusted, productive citizens even so.

Not me. The dehydrated suburbs of my boyhood felt as alien to me as Mars. The arid industrial life into which I was being prodded looked to me like the life of a Martian. What is a Martian? Does Mars support intelligent life? I had no idea. My early impression of the burgeoning burbs and urbs around me was of internally-combusting hordes of dehydrated beings manufacturing and moving unnecessary objects from one place to another in order to finance the rapid manufacture and transport of more unnecessary objects. Running water, on the other hand, felt as necessary to me as food, sleep, parents, and air. And on the cone of my birth, all such waters had been eliminated.

I didn't rebel against the situation. Little kids don't rebel. That comes later, along with the hormones. What I did was hand-build my own rivers-breaking all neighborhood records, in the process, for amount of time spent running a garden hose. In the beginning, in Southeast Portland, there was nothing much there at all. Dehydrated Martians seemed to cover the place completely. So I would fasten the family hose to an azalea bush at the uphill end of one of my mother's sloping flower beds, turn the faucet on as hard as Mom would allow, and watch hijacked Bull Run River water spring forth in an arc and start cutting a miniscule, audible river (ka) down through the bed. I'd then camp by this river all day.

As my river ran and ran, the thing my mother understandably hated and I understandably loved began to happen: creation. The flower-bed topsoil slowly washed away, and a streambed of tiny colored pebbles gradually appeared: a bed that soon looked just like that of a genuine river, complete with tiny point bars and cutbanks, meanders and eddies, fishy-looking riffles, slow pools. It was a nativity scene, really: the entire physics and fluvial genius of Gravity-Meets-Water-Meets-Earth incarnating in perfect miniature. I built matchbook-sized hazelnut rafts and cigarette-butt-sized elderberry canoes, launched them on my river, let them ride down to the gargantuan driveway puddle that served as my Pacific. I stole a three-inch-tall blue plastic cavalry soldier from my brother's Fort Apache set, cut the stock off his upraised rifle so that only the long, flexible barrel remained, tied a little thread to the end of the barrel to serve as fly line, and sent the soldier fishing. I'd then lie flat on my belly, cheek to the ground, and stare at this U.S. Cavalry dropout, thigh-deep in his tiny river, rifle-rod high in the air, line working in the current; stare till I became him; stare till, in the sunlit riffle, we actually hooked and landed tiny sun-glint fish. "Shut off that hose!" my mother would eventually shout out the kitchen window. "You've turned the whole driveway into a mudhole!"

Poor woman, I'd think. It's not a mudhole. It's a tide flat.

I'd gladly turn the hose off, though: that's how I got the tide to go out. I'd then march my river soldier out onto the flat, to dig for clams.

Celilo

One Sunday morning when I was five, my siblings, first cousins, and I were loaded into the two family wagons by our parents and driven up the Columbia River past The Dalles, Oregon, where, for hours, we watched the deceptively smooth, one-to-two-mile-wide flow of the lower Columbia squeeze into a single four-hundred-yard-wide basalt chute, and explode, in a long series of rapids and falls, toward the Pacific. The occasion of our coming was a familiar one in the Cold War Northwest: the falls before our eyes-one of the world's great natural wonders, and one of humanity's-home of the longest-inhabited village on the planet, and annually the largest "city," or tribal gathering place, west of the Mississippi for six hundred generations of Indian fishermen and traders-was doomed, in a few weeks, to be inundated by The Dalles Dam.

The first thing I remember, from the moment we sat, is that my big, usually noisy clan was engulfed by the sound and struck silent: Celilo was louder than thunder, more constant than storm surf. The second thing I recall is the way sound and smell, usually two things, were crushed by the falls into one: Celilo smelled, simultaneously, of ozone, intense life, and constant death. The third thing I remember is that the falls were far more complex than one mind or pair of eyes could take in. Rather than tumble, Niagara-style, over a photogenic cliff, Celilo smashed the river open for a mile and a half, charging the air with its energy and fragrance, telling your nose, ears, and skin a thousand-stranded story about the myriad lives those waters had touched, countless places and beings they'd seen and been, countless places and beings they would circle back, as vapor, cloud, and rainfall, to enliven and inhabit again. The Northwest's great river, Celilo Falls revealed, is a convection, not a collection; purest verb, not noun; an intensity that annihilates dispersion, diversion, coercion. A million cubic feet of exploding water per second may be a hydroelectric bonanza, but it is not a river. The Columbia at Celilo was no arithmetical sum. Rain + springs + snowbanks + rills + creeks do not equal River any more than cops + entrepreneurs + fashion designers + shoppers + junkies equal City. You can't part out a great river, because it is both greater and other than its parts: its constancy and immensity of flow are a union, the antithesis of parts. The Columbia's ocean-bound heart was utterly exposed at Celilo, and what I saw, smelled, and felt there was inhumanly joyous. The great river at Celilo was a boulevardier, not a pioneer: the grandstand-shaped cliffs from which we gulls, terns, and humans watched, the earthshaking drumroll, endless rainbows and prisms born of water's constant crushing, gave the place the aura, strange to say, of an H2O Manhattan or Paris on some fabulous holiday, a madcap downtown celebration of the multitudinous whole.

Awed to silence, both by Celilo's power and by its unimaginable doom, my family and I watched Indian men wait, with long-handled dip-nets, on preposterously frail platforms above the bone-crushing white, as they'd done since before the births of Pharoahs. But we expected to see salmon caught, or at least leaping. The fall chinook were running. One reason the Army Corps of Engineers was building these ColumbiaSnake system dams, they solemnly told us civilians, was to protect salmon from all those rapacious, dip-netting Indians.

We did not see a fish caught. We did not see one leap. And after a few hours we were exhausted by the brightness and thunder, the wait for nothing, the raging whole. We were then returned to the coffin-quiet of our cars and breezed the hundred miles home, to enjoy the fiercely mandated fruits of cheap hydropower: frozen dinners served on throwaway aluminum trays; pop from throwaway cans; snap-on lamps; a snapped-on TV, and-the detail that froze the day in memory as the strangest of my early life-Elvis the Pelvis on Ed Sullivan for the first time, singing "You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog" while he writhed like a salmon in its death throes.