As a child I learned to love the river close up, my father bought a wood runabout, about 15 feet long.. he didn’t realize at the time the amount of upkeep needed.. it wasn’t long before I had a putty knife in my hand, scraping old paint with highly toxic paint remover from the hull of our boat…but that was just the cost of entry, and he soon replaced it with a fiberglass boat, requiring much less maintenance, and no scraping.
We launched our boat at Wallace Marine Park in Salem, though when I was a child.. it was just Wallace Park. In reality it was simply a concrete strip reaching into the swift running, northbound Willamette. Cold and swirling in the spring, full of water from high in the cascades, in spite of its long twisting course through its namesake valley heading north to meet the Columbia in Portland.
It was a beautiful river, bright and shiny, surrounded by lush north Oregon foliage, and as we loaded our coolers full of hotdogs, six packs of Olympia (“its the water”) and generic sodas into the boat, the kids amongst us were excited about the day of swimming, water skiing and maybe, if we were really lucky, boat driving that lay ahead.
When the river was running full and fast, it was hiding a growing problem. Chemical pollution, effluent, manufacturing discharge, were not as obvious as the things I began to experience, the cans and bottles and other trash floating by but they were growing at an alarming rate. When i began to see animal parts floating in the river, and dead fish drifting by, it became unquestionable that something was wrong. By the middle to early sixties the river in summer was dangerous, a far cry from the river my father tossed me into as an encouragement to learn to swim.
We stayed clear of the Willamette as the sixties moved on , while Governor Tom McCall led the effort to clean up the river, and get back one of the most beautiful rivers in the country.
By the seventies enough progress had been made that it was possible to get close to it again, and in the early seventies, along with three friends, I kayaked from Eugene to Salem, seeing much of the valley from the river for the first time.
The river was still polluted and we didn’t swim in it (intentionally, although under the foot bridge at the U of O in Eugene, I took an unexpected plunge as my boat was swamped and capsized).. but it was getting better, healthier.. Now, the river remains at about that level of pollution, still there are effluent and industrial discharges, and the encroachment of urban growth is threatening.
There’s no doubt in my mind that my love for the river and my personal experience in watching it deteriorate, helped to shape my early environmental radicalism, and stays with me now as I ponder the continuing destruction of our planet by rampant consumerism, commercial greed, governmental indifference and the infection of our world by fossil fuel waste. It may be true that we can never have that river back to its former glory, and in fact, I missed the true beauty of the river, because the destruction has been going on for nearly a hundred years. This is not to say, that it could not be done, but we need leadership that is aware of the problem and not complacent in its own little box.
