by Shaun Hunter
The charts and markings can’t be trusted.
We made pizza and crossed the river into Washington to eat it. Walking from the shoulder of the road beneath the decommissioned military fort that once stood sentry over the mouth of the Columbia River, and winding beneath the grove of trees that rustled gently in the weighted atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest night, before emerging on the beach that is waves of salt water at the sea’s high tide and quiet conduit of fresh water at the ocean’s ebb. Then we climbed, pizza in hand, through the pirate’s cove and up onto the rocky promontory.
Here the last of the day’s orange light stretched in a single uneven horizontal ray between the clouds and sea. Across the river were the clusters of lights – Astoria, Warrenton, Hammond, then nothing.
It was winter, 1856, when Captain Francis Williams guided the wooden barque, Desdemona, on a route up the Pacific Coast from San Francisco bound for Astoria. The Desdemona was familiar to the coast route, and Williams made good time despite the heavy load of cargo. Just before midnight, December 31, Williams anchored the ship off the mouth of the Columbia River, choosing to wait until morning to cross the river bar.
‘No matter where else I go, it just doesn’t seem to compare,’ she told me.
I was enamored with how well she knew the town. Every question or observation I had brought to the surface a luggage of memories. Mapping the Desdemona Sands as the tide came in and reduced the sometimes-island to a tiny circle. The hidden forest trails that, as a kid, had concealed the ropeswings and dancefloors that she and her friends spent hours at, those afternoons held in scars and stories of youthful romances.
She liked to tell stories, each one evoking another, until it seemed as if her memory was anchor to her runaway train of thought, and she would often conclude a thought only to jump into two more; a narrative in hydra heads.
‘My favorite image of this city is late at night, from the projection room window of the Columbian Theatre. You can see everything. The Flavel House is lit up really creepy, and the traffic lights blink red, like the city’s heartbeat.’
It was several years ago on a bicycle trip that took me from the Olympic Peninsula to the bay of San Francisco that brought me to the two lane bridge that spans the Columbia River from Washington state to Oregon near the coast. The river is four miles wide at this point, and the nonexistent shoulder of the bridge was filled with tree bark, tire scraps and battered sea gull remains that had made their way there from the stream of RV’s and logging trucks that raced past, many of them so close that I struggled against the wind pull the cars created while trying not to veer into the solid cement wall on the opposite side. Sunken drain grates lay at regular intervals, and would jar my bike beneath the weight of all my possessions strapped to the rear rack. Three miles onto the bridge, the flat road began to lift from just above water level to a height tall enough to allow clearance of the ship traffic that crossed the river beneath.
Several years later, I still regard this crossing as the scariest event of my life.
On the Oregon side I rode to the river’s edge to let me nerves rest. Astoria’s waterfront was a palette of atrophy and collapse. Here the river lapped against the splintering trestles and wooden pilings that once supported piers and canneries, but that over time had fallen and been carried away by the river’s tides. The once-thriving past of the town lay crumbling into the river, or swallowed beneath the brush that had overgrown the riverbanks.
A couple years later, I would decide to make that city my home.
New Year’s Day, 1857. Just after daybreak, the Desdemona raised the flag signaling her desire for a bar pilot. When none came, Williams decided to take her across the bar himself. He had crossed the bar before and used his charts as he rode in on the flood tide with a fair wind. But the ship, carrying 331 tons, ran deep, and she struggled against a rough swell.
Then she hit.
Astoria: a geographic siren’s song. An ecology of loss. Suspended between eras of devil-may-care decadence and disintegration. Beautifully elegiac in the way one encounters, every so often, a person who it seems in prone to tragedy.
The mouth of the Columbia River has been called the deadliest area of water on the Pacific Coast. It has been the ruin of over 2000 vessels, over 200 ships. This is a town where the memory of disaster is as forceful a presence as the offshore storms that funnel up the river channel, burying the town in gloom and rain the vast majority of the year.
Sitting on a boulder at the river’s side I wondered how the ocean appears to those aboard the ships leaving the Columbia, who pass the opalescent town, the decaying ports, passing beneath the bridge’s arch that rises like a command and curving around the shipping channel in what seems an exaggerated slowness and likely isn’t too much faster than when the Desdemona awaited a favorable wind to be carried across these waters. I wondered how the ocean appears when you come to the edge of land, facing the sea’s uncertainty and expanse. There is no more land, no more illusion of control, and scale is no longer anchored to the shores visible from the ship’s deck, there is only you, heavens and sea, and uncertainty.
The pizza and the light ran out, and we felt our way to the other side of the rock. The moon came out in shadows behind the clouds and the city skyline made the town appear so deceivingly immense.
Driving home, on the Astoria-Megler Bridge, she turned off the car lights. Passing over the Desdemona Sands, dead black somewhere in the middle of the Columbia River.
In disaster heartbeat quickens, and for a time, in the moment that precedes the collision, a moment that makes the consequences inevitable but when those consequences are not yet known, all boundaries are void. A span of time a single heartbeat in length, after which the world has been reconfigured and everything must be learnt again, anew.
Disaster is the crack in time in which our humanity still shows, the instinctual reactions – the selflessness or selfishness, the flaws in judgement, the impulsiveness that is window through our disguises. Regardless of the armor built to protect against it, we still challenge disaster. For if mere survival were enough, what reason would there be to gamble for more. If Scott knew that the mapping of Antarctica would be his death, would he have chosen to remain a ship’s officer in England? If Zelda knew that loving F. Scott would be her undoing, would she have turned him away?
The examples are available and numerous, and still people climb Everest or the challenge the Sonora desert. It is the risk of madness and asphyxiation that is incendiary to lovers, the daring the sufferable consequences that makes the story worth telling. Rarely is it the well-behaved who make history.
Astoria has been where those sentenced to be lost are sent. Following World War II, the Navy docked hundreds of decommissioned battleships in Astoria to be stripped, a fleet of ghosts becoming more formless with time. As recently as the 1980’s and the Reaganomics era of mental asylum closures, it is rumored that Portland’s newly-homeless insane were given one-way bus tickets to Astoria. Near the height of its logging industry’s output, the town built its streets, sidewalks and docks of the timber that was so abundant in the surrounding forests. On two occasions the bulk of the town was lost to fire – the second fire destroyed thirty downtown blocks and was the costliest disaster in the state’s history. Then the logging industry itself disappeared. At around the same time fewer and fewer fish were returning to the river each year and the canneries along the riverfront became ruins.
On occasion, people would disappear from the town. Men who had visited the bars and brothels would be drugged and come to as forced labor aboard ships bound for foreign ports.
Disaster is as present in the tapestry of this town today as before. In its recent history, a bar pilot, whose job it is to guide the passing ships through the Columbia River’s narrow shipping channel, died when he lost hold of the ship’s ladder he was climbing, his body later found off the Washington coast. Recent storms have caused landslides that have buried roads and uprooted building foundations, and a mudslide that buried a section of the railroad track that runs the 100 miles along the river to Portland have cut off any chance of train traffic into town – no plans have been made to uncover the track.
The charts had shown deep water.
A Coast Guard cutter tried for hours to pull the ship from the shoal that held her, but gave up after several hawsers had broken. The Desdemona began to take on water and the crew set to work removing her cargo onto scows. Nearly complete, the final scow was overloaded to hasten the process. The river currents tossed the barge, causing it to capsize, throwing the cargo and several of the ship’s crew to the water. George Cartland, one of the ship’s crew, was trapped beneath the overturned barge and drowned.
At auction in Astoria, the wrecked ship was sold for $215. The buyer stripped her of everything removable an abandoned her frame to the shoal. The wreck of the Desdemona remained visible for years, her frame sticking out from her spot near the Oregon shoreline until one particularly stormy winter left her buried for good. She was no longer visible except as an island of sand exposed at the ocean’s ebb.
Someone once told me that the purpose of the conscious mind is to rationalize the subconscious.
Imagine it. All the words and the sensations for which there are none, the tastes and smells and the places that they can transport us that lay dormant in the memory’s recesses, the desires and scars, the people who walk into our lives and the memories that disappear, every perceived object and sensation in the world around you turned into a tiny electrical impulse and translated into an arrangement we tell ourselves we can understand.
This is a trick of the human mind – to fill in the blank areas. The way that one can overlook an error in the body of a text, or find an object in an inkblot, or the way that one may create explanations and scenarios to explain the reason that a person they may be waiting for has failed to show up. Sometimes we see what we expect to see rather than what actually is.
But the mind is limited by the boundaries of the familiar – taking comfort in the familiar, and registering the unfamiliar as fear.
Somewhere between what we’re told and what we fear lies what is.
Disaster comes from the feeling of the unknown being beneath one’s grasp. The belief that the storm fronts and wild mood swings can be accurately forecast, the tides and shoals lie contained in the maps and charts, the unknown safely behind fences and locks.
The conscious mind leads one to rationalize that these assurances are possible.
But what good are these assurances to someone suffering a bruised body. Or a broken heart.
In risk she saw beauty. In danger she saw a challenge.
Hers was a creativity that some might dismiss as whimsical, but, like disaster, she had a way of making the boundaries disappear.
And I remember nights we spent riding bikes across bridges where she would sing so loudly the words would drown the noise of the passing cars beside us, or her spinning in circles in the sand with arms outstretched beneath the stars, or sitting and watching the lights of the ships drifting down the river from atop one of the ruins at the water’s edge.
Our lives, we must navigate around the invisible shoals, doing the best we can with what we have and what we know. But occasionally the charts fail us. The tides shift the sands and we must wake up and run these strange new geographies. Disaster isn’t what threatens us, it is what keeps us from switching to autopilot. Disaster is what keeps us human.
The Desdemona – the story has run through my head countless times. Her name adorns street signs and bar marquee neon, but record of her is harder to find. Regardless, her bones remain somewhere beneath the sand bar that entrapped her a century and a half ago. Around the turn of the century, a lighthouse was built upon the sand, then destroyed about thirty years later, leaving a cluster of wooden pilings which remain to this day in the river.
At a hearing after the wreck, Captain Francis Williams testified that the lower buoy had been adrift.
Sometimes the most seemingly insignificant factors can alter one’s entire geography.
Her music played eerily as we approached the climb to the peak of the bridge. It’s red lights made it appear a vertical wall from the approach, until we passed between the steel trusses as if through the skeleton of a dormant animal. When we reached the top of the bridge, she stopped the car, and we sat still, quiet, except for the music. She looked down at the lights of Astoria, the streets empty and the traffic lights blinking its heartbeat in red, and the two of us suspended somewhere above this tiny emerald of a town.