Part 11 (1/2)
We left Nelson by train for Castlegar, on the Columbia just below West Robson, the afternoon of October nineteenth. The track runs in sight of the Kootenay practically all of the way. There is a drop of three hundred and fifty feet in the twenty-eight miles of river between the outlet of the lake and the Columbia, with no considerable stretch that it would be safe to run with a boat. A large part of the drop occurs in two fine cataracts called Bonnington Falls, where there is an important hydro-electric plant, serving Nelson and Trail with power; but most of the rest of the way the river is one continuous series of foam-white cascades with short quiet stretches between. The last two or three miles to the river the railway runs through the remarkable colony of Russian Doukobours, with a station at Brilliant, where their big co-operative jam factory and administrative offices are located. We had a more intimate glimpse of this interesting colony from the river the following day.
We found the express car with the boat on the siding at West Robson, and the three of us--Armstrong, Roos and myself--had little difficulty in sliding her down the quay and launching her in the Columbia. Pulling a mile down the quiet current, we tied her up for the night at the Castlegar Ferry. Then we cut across the bend through the woods for a look at Kootenay Rapids, the first stretch of fast water we were to encounter. After the rough-and-rowdy rapids of the Big Bend, this quarter-mile of white riffle looked like comparatively easy running. It was a very different sort of a craft we had now, however, and Armstrong took the occasion to give the channel a careful study. There were a lot of big black rocks cropping up all the way across, but he thought that, by keeping well in toward the right bank, we could make it without much trouble.
On the way back to the hotel at Castlegar, the Captain was hailed from the doorway of a cabin set in the midst of a fresh bit of clearing. It turned out to be a boatman who had accompanied him and Mr. Forde, of the Canadian Department of Public Works, on a part of their voyage down the Columbia in 1915. They reminisced for half an hour in the gathering twilight, talking mostly of the occasion when a whirlpool had stood their Peterboro on end in the Little Dalles. I found this just a bit disturbing, for Armstrong had already confided to me that he intended running the Little Dalles.
The boat trimmed well when we came to stow the load the next morning, but when the three of us took our places she was rather lower in the water than we had expected she was going to be. She seemed very small after Blackmore's big thirty-footer, and the water uncomfortably close at hand. She was buoyant enough out in the current, however, and responded very smartly to paddle and oars when Armstrong and I tried a few practice manoeuvres. The Captain sat on his bedding roll in the stern, plying his long paddle, and I pulled a pair of oars from the forward thwart. Roos sat on the after thwart, facing Armstrong, with his tripod, camera and most of the luggage stowed between them. She was loaded to ride high by the head, as it was white water rather than whirlpools that was in immediate prospect. With a small boat and a consequent comparatively small margin of safety, one has to make his trim a sort of a compromise. For rough, sloppy rapids it is well to have the bows just about as high in the air as you can get them. On the other hand, it is likely to be fatal to get into a bad whirlpool with her too much down by the stern. As the one succeeds the other as a general rule, about the best you can do is to strike a comfortable mean based on what you know of the water ahead.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BONNINGTON FALLS OF THE KOOTENAY (_above_)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLASTERED LOG CABIN IN THE DOUKHOBOR VILLAGE (_below_)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: TRUCKING THE SKIFF THROUGH KETTLE FALLS]
[Ill.u.s.tration: TWILIGHT IN THE GORGE AT KETTLE FALLS]
I found it very awkward for a while pulling with two oars after having worked for so long with one, and this difficulty--especially in bad water--I never quite overcame. In a really rough rapid one oar is all a man can handle properly, and he does well if he manages that. Your stroke is largely determined by the sort of stuff the blade is going into, and--as on the verge of an eddy--with the water to port running in one direction, and that to starboard running another, it is obviously impossible for a man handling two oars to do full justice to the situation. He simply has to do the best he can and leave the rest to the man with the paddle in the stern. When the latter is an expert with the experience of Captain Armstrong there is little likelihood of serious trouble.
The matter of keeping a lookout is also much more difficult in a small boat. In a craft with only a few inches of freeboard it is obviously out of the question for a steersman to keep his feet through a rapid, as he may do without risk in a _batteau_ or canoe large enough to give him a chance to brace his knees against the sides. Armstrong effected the best compromise possible by standing and getting a good ”look-see” while he could, and then settling back into a securer position when the boat struck the rough water. The three or four feet less of vantage from which to con the channel imposes a good deal of a handicap, but there is no help for it.
We ran both pitches of Kootenay Rapids easily and smartly. Her bows slapped down pretty hard when she tumbled off the tops of some of the bigger rollers, but into not the softest of the souse-holes would she put her high-held head. We took in plenty of spray, but nothing green--nothing that couldn't be bailed without stopping. It was a lot better performance than one was ent.i.tled to expect of a lake boat running her maiden rapid.
”She'll do!” chuckled the Captain with a satisfied grin, resting on his paddle as we slid easily out of the final run of swirls; ”you ought to take her right through without a lot of trouble.” ”_Imshallah!_” I interjected piously, anxious not to offend the River G.o.d with a display of overmuch confidence. I began to call her ”_Imshallah_” in my mind from that time on, and ”_Imshallah_”--”G.o.d willing”--she remained until I tied her up for her well-earned rest in a Portland boat-house. It was in the course of the next day or two that I made a propitiatory offering to the River G.o.d in the form of the remnants of the _jodpurs_ he had tried so hard to s.n.a.t.c.h from me at Rock Slide Rapids. I've always had a sneaking feeling offerings of that kind are ”good medicine;” that the old Greeks knew what they were doing when they squared things with the G.o.ds in advance on venturing forth into unknown waters.
Big and Little Tin Cup Rapids, which are due to the obstruction caused by boulders washed down by the torrential Kootenay River, gave us little trouble. There is a channel of good depth right down the middle of both, and we splashed through this without getting into much besides flying foam. Just below we pulled up to the left bank and landed for a look at one of the Doukobour villages.
The Doukobours are a strange Russian religious sect, with beliefs and observances quite at variance with those of the Greek Church. Indeed, it was the persecutions of the Orthodox Russians that were responsible for driving considerable numbers of them to Canada. They are best known in America, not for their indefatigable industry and many other good traits, but for their highly original form of protesting when they have fancied that certain of their rights were being restricted by Canadian law. On repeated occasions of this kind whole colonies of them--men, women and children--have thrown aside their every rag of clothing and started off marching about the country. Perhaps it is not strange that more has been written about these strange pilgrimages than of the fact that the Doukobours have cleared and brought to a high state of productivity many square miles of land that, but for their unflagging energy, would still be worthless. In spite of their somewhat unconventional habits, these simple people have been an incalculably valuable economic a.s.set to western Canada.
On the off chance that there might be an incipient ”protest” brewing, Roos took his movie outfit ash.o.r.e with him. He met with no luck. Indeed, we found the women of the astonis.h.i.+ngly clean little village of plastered and whitewashed cabins extremely shy of even our hand cameras.
The Captain thought that this was probably due to the fact that they had been a good deal pestered by kodak fiends while G.o.divaing round the country on some of their protest marches. ”The people were very indignant about it,” he said; ”but I never heard of any one pulling down their blinds.” Coventry was really very ”Victorian” in its att.i.tude toward Lady G.o.diva's ”protest.”
There was good swift water all the way from Castlegar to Trail, and we averaged close to nine miles an hour during the time we were on the river. At China Bar the river was a good deal spread out, running in channels between low gravel islands. Any one of these was runnable for a small boat, and we did not need to keep to the main channel that had once been maintained for steamers. Sixteen miles below Castlegar, and about half a mile below the mouth of Sullivan Creek, there was a long black reef of basaltic rock stretching a third of the way across the river. We shot past it without difficulty by keeping near the left bank.
The sulphurous fumes of the big smelter blotching the southern sky with saffron and coppery red clouds indicated that we were nearing Trail. The stacks, with the town below and beyond, came into view just as we hit the head of a fast-running riffle. We ran the last half mile at a swift clip, pulling up into about the only place that looked like an eddy on the Trail side of the river. That this proved to be the slack water behind the crumbling city dump could not be helped. He who rides the running road cannot be too particular about his landing places.
We reached Trail before noon, and, so far as time was concerned, could just as well have run right on across the American line to Northport that afternoon. However, October twenty-first turned out to be a date of considerable importance to British Columbians, for it was the day of the election to determine whether that province should continue dry or, as the proponents of wetness euphemized it, return to ”moderation.” As there was a special provision by which voters absent from their place of registration could cast their ballots wherever they chanced to be, Captain Armstrong was anxious to stop over and do his bit for ”moderation.” Indeed, I was a bit worried at first for fear, by way of compensating in a measure for the injury we had done him in failing to come through with the treasure from the Big Bend, he would expect Roos and me to put in a few absentee ballots for ”moderation.” There was a rumour about that a vote for ”moderation” would be later redeemable--in case ”moderation” carried, of course--in the voter's weight of the old familiar juice. I never got further than a pencilled computation on the ”temperance” bar of the Crown Point Hotel that two hundred and thirty-five pounds (I was down to that by now) would work out to something like one hundred seventeen and a half quarts. This on the rule that ”A pint's a pound, the world round.” That was as far as I got, I say, for there seemed rather too much of a chance of international complications sooner or later. But I am still wondering just what _is_ the law covering the case of a man who sells his vote in a foreign country--and for his weight in whisky that he would probably never have delivered to him. I doubt very much if there is any precedent to go by.
Between votes--or rather before Captain Armstrong voted--we took the occasion to go over the smelter of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company. It is one of the most modern plants of its kind in the world, and treats ore from all over western Canada. We were greatly interested in the recently installed zinc-leaching plant for the handling of an especially refractory ore from the company's own mine in the Kootenays.
This ore had resisted for years every attempt to extract its zinc at a profit, and the perfection of the intricate process through which it is now put at Trail has made a mine, which would otherwise have remained practically valueless, worth untold millions. The two thousand and more employes of the smelter are the main factor in the prosperity of this live and by no means unattractive little town.
We had two very emphatic warnings before leaving Trail the next morning--one was on no account to attempt to take any drinkables across the line by the river, and the other was to keep a weather eye lifting in running the rapids at the Rock Islands, two miles below town. As we reached the latter before we did the International Boundary Line, we started 'wareing the rapids first. This was by no means as empty a warning as many I was to have later. The islands proved to be two enormous granite rocks, between which the river rushed with great velocity. The Captain headed the boat into the deep, swift channel to the right, avoiding by a couple of yards a walloping whale of a whirlpool that came spinning right past the bow. I didn't see it, of course, until it pa.s.sed astern; but it looked to me then as though its whirling centre was depressed a good three feet below the surface of the river, and with a black, bottomless funnel opening out of that. I was just about to register ”nonchalance” by getting off my ”all-day-sucker”
joke, when I suddenly felt the thwart beneath me begin to push upwards like the floor of a jerkily-started elevator, only with a rotary action.
Fanning empty air with both oars, I was saved from falling backwards by the forty-five degree up-tilt of the boat. Way beneath me--down below the surface of the river--Armstrong, pop-eyed, was leaning sharply forward to keep from being dumped out over the stern. Roos, with a death-grip on either gunwale, was trying to keep from falling into the Captain's lap. Round we went like a prancing horse, and just as the boat had completed the hundred and eighty degrees that headed her momentarily up-river, something seemed to drop away beneath her bottom, and as she sunk into the hole there came a great snorting ”ku-whouf!” and about a barrel of water came pouring its solid green flood over the stern and, incidentally, the Captain. A couple of seconds later the boat had completed her round and settled back on a comparatively even keel as hard-plied oars and paddle wrenched her out of the grip of the Thing that had held her in its clutch. I saw it plainly as it did its dervish dance of disappointment as we drew away. It looked to me not over half as large as that first one which the Captain had so cleverly avoided.
”That was about the way we got caught in the Little Dalles,” observed Armstrong when we were in quieter water again. ”Only it was a worse whirlpool than that one that did it. This square stern gives the water more of a grip than it can get on a canoe. We'll have to watch out for it.”
Save over a broad, shallow bar across the current at the mouth of the Salmon, there was deep, swift water all the way to Waneta, the Canadian Customs station. Here we landed Roos to await the morning train from Nelson to Spokane and go through to Northport to arrange the American Customs formalities. At a final conference we decided to heed the warning about not attempting to carry any drinkables openly into the United States. Stowing what little there was left where not the most lynx-eyed or ferret-nosed Customs Officer could ever get at it, we pushed off.
There is a fairly fast current all the way to Northport, but from the fact that we made the eleven miles in about three-quarters of an hour, it seems likely that, between paddle and oars, the boat was driven somewhat faster than the Columbia. Just below Waneta and immediately above the International Boundary Line, the Pend d'Oreille or Clark's Fork flows, or rather falls into the Columbia. This really magnificent stream comes tumbling down a sheer-walled gorge in fall after fall, several of which can be seen in narrowing perspective from the Columbia itself. Its final leap is over a ten-feet-high ledge which extends all the way across its two-hundred-feet-wide mouth. Above this fine cataract it is the Pend d'Oreille, below it, the Columbia. I know of no place where two such rivers come together with such fine spectacular effect, in a way so fitting to the character of each.
The Pend d'Oreille is generally rated as the princ.i.p.al tributary of the upper Columbia. Although the Kootenay--because it flows through a region of considerably greater annual rainfall--carries rather the more water of the two, the Pend d'Oreille is longer and drains a far more extensive watershed--that lying between the main chain of the Rockies and the Bitter Root and Coeur d'Alene ranges. Great as is the combined discharge of these two fine rivers, their effect on the Columbia is not apparent to the eye. If anything, the latter looks a bigger stream where it flows out of the lower Arrow Lake, above the Kootenay, than it does where it crosses the American Line below the Pend d'Oreille. As a matter of fact, its flow must be nearly doubled at the latter point, but the swifter current reduces its apparent volume. Nothing but the most careful computations, based on speed of current and area of cross-section, will give anything approximating the real discharge of a river.
I was a good deal interested in the Pend d'Oreille, because it was on one of its upper tributaries, the Flathead in Montana, that I had made my first timid effort at rapid-running a good many years previously. It hadn't been a brilliant success--for two logs tied together with ropes hardly make the ideal of a raft; but the glamour of the hare-brained stunt had survived the wetting. I should dearly have loved to explore that wonderful black-walled canyon, with its unending succession of cataracts and cascades, but lack of time forbade. The drizzling rain made it impossible even to get a good photograph of the fine frenzy of that final mad leap into the Columbia.