CASCADE LOCKS, Ore. — As I stood on the edge of a sternwheeler about a mile out into the Columbia River last month, I might have started to question why I thought it would be a good idea to swim across this mighty river.
But with a countdown bearing down on me and a year of training behind me, I never had the chance.
“3, 2, 1 — cannonball,” boomed sternwheeler employee George “George of the Gorge” Torres.
I flashed to watching Torres provide that speech to last year’s cohort of swimmers, that time from the comfort of the ship’s top deck.
Then I jumped.
Accidental promise
I spent Labor Day last year on the 1850s sternwheeler replica to report the story of roughly 350 swimmers who — for reasons I could not understand at the time — had decided they would wake up before dawn, pile into the ship taking them into the Columbia and jump into the Great River of the West.
I was new to my Columbia River beat and, after a childhood spent fishing the river, I feared its power.
“About 150 river miles downriver, the Columbia emptied 265,000 cubic feet of water — or about three Olympic swimming pools — into the Pacific Ocean every second,” I wrote in last year’s story between tales of brave 11-year-olds, inflatable crocodiles from the 1980s and a trio donning faux-fur coats.
I’d set out for Cascade Locks, Oregon, that morning looking for characters with interesting stories to drive my dispatch about the event. Needless to say, I found them.
And over the course of the event, virtually all of those people encouraged me to take on the swim next year. I was told about its friendly, noncompetitive environment; that the river’s gentle current helps you along; the long list of safety precautions in place; and the sense of accomplishment it brings.
At some point during the roughly six hours of reporting conversations that day, my hedged answers of, “Well, I’m certainly interested, so we’ll see,” eroded into, “I’ll be seeing you next year!”
Queue ‘Rocky’ theme music
After the event last year, I headed with friends to the West Fork Hood River to get my start. I saw the difference between our swimming form and the cross-channel swimmers’, and knew I had my work ahead of me.
Training started in the Willamette River a few days a week after work. Then over the winter I took swim lessons at the same community center I’d first learned 20-something years earlier.
After that, I started swimming laps, working my way from resting after every lap to swimming 20 without pause. When this summer finally hit, I started swimming in the Washougal River after work on hot days. I’d found a spot where a rapid drained into a pool, allowing me to swim into the current for hours.
In a stroke of good luck, my girlfriend joined the plan, herself a longtime swimmer.
We bought the required safety gear — brightly colored swim caps and small inflatable buoys that connect to a strap around your waist so boats can see you — and were ready.
Anticipation
On the crowded sternwheeler early on Aug. 30, my girlfriend and I talked as our group’s number approached. Swimmers were divided into groups of 10 and jumped into the water in heats of five. The first 20 groups crept by.
But by the mid-20s the pace had dramatically sped up, or at least it felt that way. Our group, the second five-person squad of the 31st heat, met in the line.
“Remind me why I signed up for this again?” one woman joked to us as we all wondered the same thing.
Standing all of the sudden in front of the open door, a sternwheeler staffer took our numbers. I blinked and looked down to see my toes gripping the edge of the ship as George of the Gorge told our team to aim for the Bridge of the Gods, counted us down and sent us off.
1,243-mile-long bathtub
My first thought in the water was that the river felt like a bath.
Less than two months earlier, I’d written about how the Columbia’s increasingly hot temperatures were causing algae blooms and driving salmon to extinction.
But jumping from the sternwheeler, I still braced for glacial runoff because I knew about 60 percent of the river’s 63-trillion-gallon yearly output is from snowmelt in May, June and July alone. Much of that is from the Canadian Rockies.
What I found instead was 73-degree water that could pass for the tail end of a hot bath or the indoor community pool I trained for the swim at.
Studies show the main driver of that warmth is the hydroelectric dam system. It’s also what allows the river to move tens of billions of dollars in shipped goods, generate billions in hydropower and irrigate billions in crops each year.
On top of all that, the dams allow swimmers to comfortably swim in the river’s 1- to 3- mile-per-hour currents; the writhing, wild Columbia that salmon and Native nations’ lives were built upon has been relegated to a memory and a dream after it was engineered into temporary submission by dams.
Fears and views
After my moment of shock dissolved into the water’s warm embrace, my girlfriend and I started swimming, 1-2-3 breathe left, 1-2-3 breathe right.
In the lead-up to the event, my biggest fear had been staring down into the murky abyss of the river, which ranges between a couple feet deep and a couple hundred feet deep throughout its run.
But swimming alongside about 450 others and countless support staff on boats, paddleboards and kayaks, I felt calm. Instead, I thought about what I might write for this story, came up blank and let my mind drift.
Around the halfway point, I remembered a gem of advice I got last year from longtime participant Lynn Rasmussen: pause for just a moment out in the river to soak in the scenery of the Gorge.
Wedged between Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood, my girlfriend and I paused to take all it in and laughed giddily.
Roughly 5 million years earlier, the Cascade Range began to rise up from the earth as two tectonic plates collided, sending the Juan de Fuca Plate beneath the North American Plate.
The Columbia, which by then had been flowing across the region for tens of millions of years, quickly began its work cutting through the mountains. That project reached its crescendo with the Missoula Floods, leaving the Gorge we know today.
Having passed through that stretch of country dozens of times, I can say it has never looked so grand than from the middle of the river as we clung to our inflatable tow buoys with the sun taking its place above us.
The finish line
Contented beyond words, we continued toward the finish line as the sternwheeler let out a salvo of horn blasts and began heading back to shore, having released all of the day’s swimmers.
I thought of Oscar Hamilton, the 11-year-old who completed the swim last year and his advice to me: “Probably just jump in and do it,” then of his mom’s comment, “Jump in and do it, maybe train a little.”
The final 100 yards were my favorite. In the roughly 20-foot-deep waters closer to the shore, a forest of seaweed grew from the bottom up to just a few feet beneath the surface.
I watched as the long, grass-like strands danced in the sun-lit water when my hands passed over them and by my body with each stroke. It was the closest thing to a flying dream I think exists in waking life. I savored the moment while accepting its imminent end as cheers from the crowd back on shore grew louder.
When I could touch the bottom, I looked up and saw my girlfriend standing, felt the feeling of turning the final page of a great book to see blank white paper staring back at you and let my feet hit the bottom.
My girlfriend and I clumsily high-fived as we stumbled out of the water. She remarked how capable she felt. I said that was exactly the word for it, and we agreed we would be back next year.
