18th
Excerpt from “Voyage of a Summer Sun”
I was twelve, maybe thirteen, when my mother packed the family in the green Chevy and Dad drove us to Celilo Falls. We took the cliff-snaking old gorge highway out of the Willamette Valley, past The Dalles, to this hard-baked treeless land where the Columbia thundered into rocky chutes and broken islands, cascading over crooked flat steps in the riverbed. The river frothed and boiled at the foot of each step, throwing spray to the sky.
The air was thick with smoke, too, and we walked down from the road into a knock-you-back smell of pink salmon on drying racks, salmon smoking, and piles of rotting fish heads, tails, and guts. Gulls screamed. It was chaotic. Dogs and brown kids had the run of the place, and the dwellings — made of scrap lumber, tar paper, plywood, corrugated tin — might have been thrown together only to last until spring flood. Truck and car parts littered the village, but the village was not poor. Many of the shacks had TV antennas, a new thing, and of the cars that were complete there were Cadillacs and Chryslers, caked with dust.
Rickety wood platforms reached over steps of the falls. Indian men, roped at the waist, stood on these platforms and dipped hoop nets on long wood poles. The best of the salmon leapers moved quickly and got through, taking ten-foot vertical jumps to the next-highest ledge of river. Catches were in the pools and on the rebound. A salmon jumped into the falls and then slipped backward, the force of falling water canceling his leap. The fish ended up tail first, thrashing, in the waiting net. The man swung the pole and its net to shore, where a woman, waiting, thunked the fish on the skull with a club. She dumped the salmon from the net and passed it to a row of other women, who sliced and gutted it on the rocks. The women had round brown faces and flat noses and muddy eyes. If one looked up, you took a step back.
On the bank below a platform, Indian boys my age threw harpoon-tipped spears, tethered with chord. I thought they were goofing around, but one speared a salmon square behind the gills. Two boys, struggling, bent to the tether and dragged a fall Chinook onto the rocks.
We stayed and watched until the sun dropped and the Indians quit the river. Mom knew Celilo was soon to be inundated, gone forever. That’s why we were there. But I don’t remember any discomfort in our family about the idea that Celilo Falls was soon to go, or any great sadness about it. Progress was the way of the world. We watched this famous fishing grounds the way you might feel privileged to see the last performance of a very good play. I knew I’d seen something huge, but I couldn’t have said what it was.
Reprinted with permission of author Robin Cody.
