Posts: Currents

The Tidal River

The Willamette River flows past Milwaukie, Oregon, more than one hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean. It flows north for twenty miles to Kelley Point, where it joins the Columbia for a raucous ride to the ocean. The Columbia Bar where the river and the Pacific meet is renowned for being one of the most treacherous waterways on the planet.

I love to watch the changes in the water near my home in Milwaukie. I walk by the waterfall where Kellogg Creek meets the Willamette River to see whether the water is pouring like a torrent or trickling amid the grassy moss, reaching the concrete overhang of the dam that has blocked Kellogg Creek for 167 years (and will soon be removed).

The river’s current flows north, and the tide from the Pacific flows south, so there is a point when the flows meet one another with equal force, and I can’t tell which way the water is going, and the waves are crosshatched. Or a piece of flotsam might flow north and an old, time-weathered log flow south, more in the middle of the river, and I recognize that the incoming tide and outgoing current have divided the river into near-shore and near-middle.

Occasionally I see a seal and laugh at her journey from the ocean to chomp at the all-you-can-eat seafood buffet below Willamette Falls by Oregon City. Seals are a protected species and are caught and trucked back to the ocean. Then they show up again, here in the Willamette, to fish for protected Chinook salmon. 

A pair of ospreys nests along this stretch, and their screeches hang above the traffic. Each spring I watch the parents fledge little ospreys and teach them how to fish. I consider it a score when an osprey swoops up from the Willamette, fish in talons.

I’ve watched the humans fish too, the boaters lining up across the river farther downstream. I stopped to watch an old man play a jumping steelhead, and a knot of us applauded when the nice-sized fish was in the net. 

Humans practice rowing in crew boats or play on WaveRunners, paddleboards, kayaks. The large tour boat, the Portland Spirit, comes down this far and turns around by Elk Rock Island, and I wave to the passengers if I am walking along the shore. It seems like a friendly thing to do. 

Sharon Johnson, Milwaukie

Searching for Kingsbury

The first time we went looking for the spring, October’s gold spread over the hills, and the water had receded from the shores of Emigrant Lake to reveal long, fissured plains of mud. My father’s terse conjecture of the spring’s supposed whereabouts went like this:

“It’s somewhere in the lake.”

There were very few sources of information about Kingsbury Soda Spring: a brief mention here or there in old newspaper clippings, an unelucidated entry in a list of springs of the Rogue Valley. We had next to nothing to go on. 

We spent hours that day combing the parched lake bottom, searching for any signs of a spring. Emigrant Creek cut through the deep sediment that had accumulated since the dam was built in 1924, carving ravines that sometimes snaked along ten feet below the cracked surface where we walked. Where the sediment wasn’t as thick, small fountains of water emerged a few feet from the main channel, leading to excited queries and unsatisfactory resolutions. The process was painstakingly slowgoing, and our boots accrued so much caked mud that we had to pause every few feet to shake ourselves out of the stodgy quicksand. The search that first day yielded nothing. 

“Apparently it was near a place called Klamath Junction,” my dad revealed several days later. This was a town I’d never heard of—some lost crossroads that took people into Ashland after they’d come over the mountains from California or traveled through the Klamath Basin. Our task became more exciting: Find this drowned crossroads, and we’d be closer to finding Kingsbury. We returned to the lake with renewed hope. 

It was still autumn, and the rains hadn’t come to fill the reservoir yet. The lake bed reflected the general state of the valley—brown, parched, in need of a deluge. We parked near the shore at a point where, when the water was high, a crumbling concrete road descended into the depths. This was our lead. We followed its faint outline straight to the center of the basin, and just above the stream channel, sure enough, our ghost road intersected another line running a perpendicular course. Any signs of a town had long ago succumbed to the seasonal cycle of drought and flood, but surely this was the crossroads that once held the service station at Klamath Junction. In the silence of rumination, I heard the faint babble of running water. 

Nur Shelton, Ashland

Against the Flow

“If I wade into a fast-moving stream and at the end of the day, I can step out where I stepped in, that’s the best I can expect.”

My brother told me this. I was in my thirties at the time; David was eight years older. He was admonishing me for thinking I could swim against the current, for believing my involvement in the movement for peace and justice could create change. I was naive, too idealistic; I should grow up.

David had tried to swim against the current years earlier, as a child of about nine. It hadn’t worked out well for him. My brother was born in India, then spent his early childhood in Canada. When our family moved to the US in 1938, it was his third country of residence. The other two had been part of the British Empire. In 1939–40, we lived in Palisades Park, New Jersey, in a neighborhood of Italian and German immigrant families. I was an infant, and my mother, busy with me and her household duties, regularly sent my brother out to play with the neighborhood kids. War had begun in Europe, and although the US was still officially neutral, the Palisades Park neighborhood was not. Those neighborhood kids were avid proponents of the fascist regimes that their parents had called home. My brother stuck up for Great Britain, and for that he was bullied. 

For the rest of his life, David harbored a deep resentment toward my mother for failing to protect him from the bullies. He never felt he could really trust her or that he could rely on her to love him wisely. My sister and I talked about this more than once. We speculated that David never really told Mom and Dad what was happening to him out on the street. That’s what I still believe. It still makes me sad.

My brother learned early on that there was a price to be paid for swimming against the current.

The eight years between David’s birth and my own amounted to a generation. My childhood was very different from his. The world and our family situation were different. I grew up with stability and plenty of affirmation. I never had reason to fear I would pay a high cost for speaking up, for speaking out. For me, swimming against the current came easy. 

Marion Malcolm, Eugene

Coastal Currents of Memory

What are all those wooden pilings poking up through coastal currents along Oregon’s rivers, bays, estuaries? This question perennially pops up on social media as visitors reflect on Oregon’s spectacular coastal wonders. The quick answer—that they once supported lumber mills and fish canneries—is true but incomplete, leaving out the traumatic currents of history and memory swirling round those stumps.

These pilings instantiate the ruins of the recent industrial era at the coast. They are remnants left after a tsunami of transition that vanquished over a century of the coastal region’s foundational economy. Unlike in the Northeast, where stark reminders of the industrial age linger in the form of hulking ruins of factories, steel mills, coal mines, and other evocative settings for 1980s dystopian sci-fi movies (see The Terminator, RoboCop), the ruins of the Northwest’s extractive industries are ephemeral. 

The wooden pilings are all that remain of piers and docks where frenzied activity once animated legions of canneries, fisheries, lumber mills, log-sorting guides, wharves, and warehouses. Precious few have been repurposed—in Astoria, Pier 39 is home to a brewpub, a coffee shop, and a hotel in a former cannery. Local museums often display historical photographs depicting these industries in vibrant operation, reactivating lost worlds. 

Remembrance of the workers and families displaced from those once-busy waterfronts also persists in a curious form of nostalgia for that bygone era. Through an evasive displacement of the complex causes of industrial demise, this nostalgia often fuels hyperidealized, regressive efforts to fight for a no-longer-sustainable way of life in Oregon’s “natural resource industries.” One such effort is Timber Unity, a supposed grassroots organization actually initiated by the timber industry. Timber still drives Oregon politics, albeit in a shifting sea of real estate investment trusts and private equity firms. But nostalgia aims to reinvigorate that lost era’s “family wage jobs” (by no means were wages so grand!), the workers’ virile patriarchal masculinity (by no means were all workers men, nor would women likely lament the lost violence of patriarchal familism!), and the unquestioned supremacy of White owners and workers over everyone else—a racist legacy that even now seethes barely beneath the surface of the state’s still overwhelmingly White coastal communities. 

The pilings of the dismantled piers found along former industrial waterfronts from Astoria to Brookings are, in essence, the ruins of vanquished worlds, reminders of loss. It usually goes without saying that these coastal currents of memory were colonially superimposed upon an even more ephemeral but far longer-lasting cultural economy, developed and sustained over thousands of years by Indigenous peoples.

Kristin Koptiuch, Rockaway Beach

How a Fight Led to a Festival

In the mid-1980s, my family lived outside Roseburg, not far from River Forks Park, a beautiful spot at the confluence of the North and South Umpqua Rivers. We had a small group of friends who would gather at River Forks and other spots along the river to enjoy the waters, beaches, and bounty of the Umpqua. 

Like many citizens at that time, we didn’t give much thought to the river’s care or who might be responsible for it. Then, in 1986, the Roseburg Urban Sanitary Authority spent $12 million to bring its sewage treatment plant up to modern standards. With such a significant investment, the community continued to trust that the well-being of the river was in good hands. 

We were wrong. When power was interrupted for any reason, sewage began flowing into the river. This happened repeatedly and with increasing regularity during the summer, when so many in our community were recreating in and on the Umpqua. Our small group of friends responded by taking out guitars and protest signs, asking the city to do better. We marched in front of the county courthouse, wrote letters to local media, and engaged other groups like the Steamboaters and Umpqua Fishermen to apply pressure on the agency. After considerable effort by our group and considerable resistance from the city, the agency found a generator at a military service auction for $150,000 instead of the $1 million price tag they had estimated. The generator was installed, and the river flowed clean again, as it still does today.

Some members of our group wanted to hold on to the love of the Umpqua that had brought us together in protest, but in service of celebrating our river instead. We suggested having a festive get-together at River Forks Park. We set up a stage with a flatbed truck, organized a volunteer band, and arranged a sound system. We called the event the River Appreciation Day Festival. 

We invited our state senator, John Kitzhaber, a local ER doctor and white-water paddler, to be our keynote speaker. He gave a rousing speech to a robust and enthusiastic crowd.

The gathering was such a success that we decided to hold the festival annually, choosing the third Saturday in July to avoid conflicting with the Oregon Country Fair, held on the Long Tom River near Veneta. At our request, Senator Kitzhaber presented a bill to the legislature designating the third Saturday in July as River Appreciation Day in Oregon. The bill passed, and since then we have held the event in various towns and locations in Douglas County, including Elkton, Canyonville, Glide, downtown Roseburg, Whistler’s Bend Park, River Forks Park, and even Black Rock Creek, high in the Cascades Wilderness. At the event in 2000, violinist Kim Angelis played melodies in the wilderness of Black Rock Meadow as the full moon rose through the
trees. It was unforgettable.

Our group of volunteers, now the River Appreciation Day Committee, was encouraged by the festival’s publicity and legislative recognition. The success of Measure 7, a state initiative passed in 1988 that added 500 miles of protection to scenic waterways, motivated us to organize an all-day conference at Umpqua Community College in 1990 titled “Shaping Our Future.” Major questions included the rights of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to sell woodland and old-growth forests to timber companies. We believed legal action and compromise were necessary to prevent the loss of species like the spotted owl and salmon.

We joined other conservation and natural resource groups to form a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization called Umpqua Watersheds. Building on our conference experience, we tackled the rights and responsibilities of river property owners and communities in Oregon. Today, Umpqua Watersheds owns an office building in downtown Roseburg, provides space for Umpqua Valley Audubon, rents to several businesses, and operates a radio station, KQUA 99.7 FM. Over the years, we have built a relationship with Crater Lake National Park staff and revised a wildflower guide for the park. We are currently constructing a stage for events and performances in our back lot. We never gave up playing music.

We remain grateful to the Roseburg Urban Sanitary Authority, whose mistake helped us forge new friendships, raise awareness of the importance of protecting and celebrating our rivers, and appreciate what dedicated volunteers can accomplish. We are committed to using peaceful public processes and persuasion to achieve our goals. The thirty-eighth annual River Appreciation Day in Oregon was celebrated at Douglas County’s River Forks Park on the third Saturday of July in 2024. The Umpqua River made its usual and welcome appearance.

Robert Allen, Milwaukie

A Fish Story

The cutthroat, a silver quiver in a weave of pebbles and current ripples, is not scared off by my shadow. I toss it breadcrumbs from the creek bank below the log cabin I built, which supports me like this fish’s backbone supports it.

For half a century I’ve been squatting beside this creek, and for just as long I’ve been flicking pinhead-sized bits of bread into this Canyon Mountain glacial-fed pool. Every morsel flung upstream floats and wavers, then bam!—a trout strikes the baited fare. Aging has not diminished my aim. 

Today’s bread is from a two-dollar gluten-free loaf I bought at the discount bread store. It’s ten dollars less than the last loaf I bought, from the boutique bakery that has since closed. I don’t know if this trout would prefer whole wheat. I am also not privy to its gender. I name it Kilgore, the same name I’ve given to every trout I’ve hand-fed from this creek bank for fifty years. 

Kilgore’s no longer than the distance from my middle finger to the stem of my Timex wristwatch. Its elongated form is a shimmering range of hues: earthy amber, eggshell gray, the palette of sedimentary rock. A bright slit of salmon pink in its gills flashes amid the rocky streambed.

With each piece Kilgore grows more accustomed to—even expectant of—my feeding. “Hey, Kilgore. Take a breather,” I say as I toss morsels. I’m careful not to give it enough to bloat its belly. 

Navigating the John Day River, irrigation ditches, logjams, hairy predatory snouts, and clawing paws is testament to this fish’s perseverance and pure luck. This pool is a place of feasting rest. 

Watching Kilgore waver, I ponder dropping a little rubber ducky in the pool and charting its reverse migration. I know from channel observations that the ducky would soon get stuck in the downstream obstacles Kilgore passed in its upstream struggle.

I wrap the remaining bread between two Oregon grape leaves. Uphill at the woodshed I split logs in the shadow of my log cabin, a place I migrate to feed on my senses and recall the twisting journey that landed me here.

Back at the creek, bald-faced hornets make off with the last bite of bread. I strip and submerge in the pool, anchor my hands to rocks, face upstream. Kilgore is nowhere in sight. No one throws me a crumb. 

Yvonne Pepin-Wakefield, The Dalles

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