American Voyage

[世岩 최삼송]

Looking Backward and Ahead at Continent"s End
The architect Maya Lin is constructing at least four memorials to Lewis and Clark"s journey along the Columbia River. One of the memorial pieces will be sited in this park in Ridgefield, Wash.

A commercial fishing boat was left to rot near the mouth of the Columbia River.


An abandoned Bumble Bee tuna plant in Astoria, Ore.


Arthur Brickwood tries netting salmon and trout in the Columbia River.


The Columbia River Gorge is a National Scenic Area, which gives it protection from development excess, and the elements provide a year-round tourism industry.

Tourists watch for salmon swimming up the fish ladder in the Booneville Dam on the Columbia River.


Multnomah Falls in the Columbia Gorge in Oregon.





Keith Meyers/The New York Times


"I think the real history of Lewis and Clark will be written not by academics, but by thousands of people who live along the route and say, `Hey, wait a minute," " said Rex Ziak, who has just published a book about Lewis and Clark.



Cape Disappointment, Wash., was named in 1788 by a British sea captain who was looking for the River of the West ?the Columbia ?but could not find it behind the wall of breakers at its mouth.



August 4, 2003
By TIMOTHY EGAN

CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT, Wash. - The currents at the mouth of
the Columbia River swallow ships, sailors and time itself
in regular gulps. To leave a lasting mark here requires
something that can withstand the forces of a river that
drains an area the size of France where it collides with
the big-fisted edge of the world"s largest ocean.

Maya Lin has walked this surf-cuffed rock at land"s end,
trying to find a way to use the Lewis and Clark
bicentennial to look 200 years ahead. More than two decades
after she created one of the nation"s best-known pieces of
public art, the black granite panels of the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington, she is devising a lasting
tribute to the most celebrated of American adventures.

Nothing is left from Lewis and Clark"s winter on the
Pacific in 1805-6. For nearly four months, 31 men, a
teenage girl and a baby hunkered down at continent"s edge,
on the other side of the river, in a fort no bigger than
the average new American house.

When Ms. Lin was first asked to commemorate this odyssey,
she was puzzled, she said.

"I said: `Lewis and Clark? That"s the last thing I would
ever think of doing something on," " she said in an
interview.

But she said she was drawn into the many ironies - the
layers of two centuries - that the story of the 8,000-mile
journey evokes. Particularly here, where the United States
runs out of continent, and where Lewis and Clark reached
the ocean, people say they are prone to look backward and
forward, to try to touch some piece of this history.

"Lewis and Clark summon in us a moment in time," Ms. Lin
said. "And looking 200 years ahead, I"m trying to be
optimistic. But I am exceedingly saddened by what we have
done to these rivers."

Ms. Lin is constructing at least four memorials along the
Columbia, marking places where cultures and rivers
converged and nations forever changed course. Relying on
the elements - stone, wind and water - her artwork, called
the Confluence Project after the private nonprofit group
that is financing it, is scheduled for completion in 2006,
and will be designed to last 200 years, she said.

"A big part of it is going to be about water, what these
rivers mean," Ms. Lin said.

Two centuries ago, it was monumental enough to send an
expedition overland to view the Pacific. Now, swimmers,
artists, historians and legions of casually curious follow
the same route and still discover something - about the
land, themselves or the course of a young nation"s history.


Every generation reinterprets Lewis and Clark, the Corps of
Volunteers for North Western Discovery, as Lewis called the
expedition. And the Columbia River, holding the relics of
prior ambitions, is where many of those thoughts are born.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was chugging along beside this river
in a train in 1920, wondering whether some use could be
made of "all the water running down unchecked to the sea."

Later, as president, Roosevelt ushered in the era of big
dams, which buried Lewis and Clark campsites upriver and
changed a way of life from the Continental Crest to the
sea.

But even with most of the river shackled, the pilgrims keep
coming, especially to the last 200 miles of the route. In
the desert of eastern Washington State, where the Snake
River meets the Columbia, people drive past one of the
biggest nuclear cleanup sites in the world and a tangle of
industrial clutter to arrive at a little state park where
the corps camped in October 1805. In 100-degree heat, they
stare at the flat water covering the campsite, and they
imagine.

"The river is remarkably clear and crowded with salmon in
maney places," Clark wrote. It was swift, carrying the
corps to the ocean at a clip of 30 miles a day.

Now the Columbia River is clouded, a sluggish reservoir.
"People are surprised at how different everything is than
how it was when Lewis and Clark camped here," said Ken
Maki, a volunteer guide at the state park near Pasco, Wash.


Mr. Maki, at least, got to see one of the most powerful
sites of the Columbia, Celilo Falls, where the river
narrowed and dropped through steep canyons. A major Indian
trading center and fishing site for thousands of years, the
falls were buried by a dam in 1957.

"It was the first thing I saw when I came to Oregon," he
said. "I will never forget it."

There was talk among the Indian tribes along the Columbia
of asking the government to draw down the water behind one
of the dams and let Celilo Falls reappear for a brief time
in the Lewis and Clark bicentennial. But many Indians said
it would be like seeing a lost loved one, leading only to
renewed grief.

While passing near the falls, Clark counted what he said
were 107 baskets containing about 10,000 pounds of dried
salmon, prepared by Indians.

Indians still fish the Columbia, reaching into the water
with dip nets from wobbly wooden platforms. For the last 25
years or so, the river has seemed nearly barren, but of
late more salmon are returning; biologists attribute their
return to good ocean conditions and better management of
fish ladders at the dams.

"I don"t know what"s happened, but we"ve been praying,
doing our ceremonies, and all of a sudden the fish seem to
be coming back," said Wilbur Slockish Jr., a Klickitat
Indian. For the first time in 38 years, enough fish have
come up the river to allow the Indians to have a brief
season of gill net fishing in the Columbia River Gorge.

Mr. Slockish was selling chinook salmon to tourists for $3
a pound. When they asked about Lewis and Clark, he was
blunt. "They were trespassers," he said. "They came here
without a passport and no invitation."

The Pacific Northwest was not part of the Louisiana
Purchase. England, Russia and Spain were exploring the
coast, but no country had claimed absolute sovereignty. The
United States gained control of what is now the Pacific
Northwest after a treaty with Britain in 1846 established
the boundaries.

Now the years force new perspectives.

The Indians who loomed so large in Jefferson"s projections
and Lewis and Clark"s encounters have been erased from the
start and the finish of the route the explorers took to the
Pacific. The Osage were removed from their home in Missouri
shortly after the expedition ended in 1806, and the
Chinook, a maritime trading nation whose members still live
here at the Columbia"s mouth, were turned down by the Bush
administration in their most recent effort to be formally
recognized as a tribe.

Today there is a town of Chinook, a river named Chinook, a
helicopter, a type of wind, the biggest of salmon and a
dialect, all named Chinook. But here where the Chinook
live, scattered in small communities on each side of the
lower Columbia River, there is no Chinook nation, or
reservation.

Trespassers or not, Lewis and Clark were impressed by the
slot in the Cascade Mountains, the river gorge where the
Columbia broke through the mountains long ago. It is desert
on one side, now stocked with wineries and orchards, misty
forest on the other.

The long-vanished rapids of the Columbia frightened and
amazed the explorers. Near The Dalles, on what is now the
Oregon side of the river, Clark described a river "boiling
& whorling in every direction." The corps prepared to run
the rapids in their dugout canoes. The Indians lined the
river to watch the spectacle - what could have been a mass
suicide.

They made it through what would be considered Class V
rapids - which only the most daring of canoeists would try
today - without injury.

Now the Columbia River Gorge is a National Scenic Area,
which gives it protection from development excess, and the
elements provide a year-round tourism industry in a place
that calls itself the windsurfing capital of the world.
Where the corps shot rapids in canoes, people now ride big
kites attached to boards.

It took Lewis and Clark barely three weeks to scoot down
the Columbia from the desert to the coast. But once they
came within sight of the river"s mouth, the expedition
slowed. The rain came in sheets. The tidal currents made
river travel dangerous. On Nov. 7, 1805, Clark made his
famous sighting of "Ocien in View." For decades now,
historians have said he was wrong; he could not have seen
the ocean because a narrow peninsula at the mouth of the
river blocks the view.

But by superimposing maps of the lower Columbia over
Clark"s sight line, a logger"s son, Rex Ziak, said he found
that Clark had not been wrong. The land changed, not the
event. He said a jetty, created more than 100 years ago,
altered ocean and river currents, and moved the mouth of
the Columbia.

On such epiphanies, the story refuses to fade. "I think the
real history of Lewis and Clark will be written not by
academics, but by thousands of people who live along the
route and say, `Hey, wait a minute," " said Mr. Ziak, who
has just published a book, "In Full View" (Moffitt House
Press), on the cold and chaotic November that Lewis and
Clark spent on the lower Columbia before building a fort.

One day Mr. Ziak stood on the beach on the north side of
the Columbia, at the spot that has taken on high-toned
significance. It is where a vote on where to spend the
winter was taken. In that vote, Clark"s slave York and the
Indian girl Sacagawea were given equal say. It was, say
many historians, the first time in American history that a
black slave or an Indian was given the vote.

Northwesterners interpret the vote as a fate of geography.
Free of the restraints of the East Coast, the corps became
more egalitarian, the thinking goes. If so, they reverted
to their old ways once they headed back to America. Clark
kept York as his slave, and he joined Lewis in furthering
the cause of Indian removal. He referred to Sacagawea as
"Janey" or sometimes just "the squar."

The corps of discovery failed at its basic mission: to find
an all-water route across the continent. But in setting a
standard for government-sponsored wanderings, detailing a
part of the continent that seemed to be nature"s perfect
work, the expedition continues to fire the imagination -
with the corps journals, all 1.5 million words, as a guide.


After dissecting the journals as a monk would parse
scripture, Mr. Ziak says the explorers were like castaways
by the time they finally reached the ocean.

Mr. Ziak is inspired by the stoicism of men who slept in
log hollows, suffered through interminable rain, and still
found time to sketch a map and make botanical observations
that have held up after two centuries.

"I"m just some local guy trying to understand my history,"
he said. "But I don"t see many examples where we have
learned from our past. Lewis and Clark can become a great
moment of enlightenment for us. There is so much there. Or
it can become like a Super Bowl, with a bunch of guys going
down river rapids and drinking beer."

Here at a land"s end, the years have healed some of the
route. Old pilings mark the places were nearly three dozen
canneries processed salmon, which were slaughtered at a
rate that could not be sustained. Now much of the lower
Columbia looks more as it did 200 years ago. At the river"s
mouth is another monument, the Lewis and Clark National
Wildlife Refuge.

The name Cape Disappointment has nothing to do with Lewis
and Clark. The cape was named in 1788 by a British sea
captain who was looking for the River of the West - the
Columbia - but could not find it behind the wall of
breakers at its mouth.

When members of the corps of discovery first walked up to
the bluff at Cape Disappointment, there was finally a sense
of triumph. "The men appear much Satisfied with their trip,
beholding with astonishment the high waves dashing against
the rocks & this emence Ocian" Clark wrote.

As Ms. Lin has wandered up the same rock, looking upriver
and then west to the setting sun, she says one question
keeps returning: "Will any of this be here in 200 years?"