The River, The Road, and the Forest

I rode my motorcycle around the valley in the days after the storm.

Sandbars of brown silt still scarring local roads. Guardrails dented and mangled where trees had fallen across, now cleared away. 

One such tree had come down across State Route 4 just a few feet away from the house built by  Ole Dosland - a Norwegin immigrant who got a contract to use his team of horses to grade the road that would cut right through his farm. 

Clouds clung to the treetops along the steep slopes of the Willapa Hills, the field of the green flat land on either side of the Grays River, still obscured by trapped floodwater waiting to either drain down into saturated soils or evaporate into saturated air. 

A quarter mile from my house a sign warned of a road closure on KM mountain. A slide of rain-saturated earth liquified and oozed across the road January 23rd,  taking dozens of trees with it. 

The slide was so great - 55,000 cubic yards of earth and rock - stretching so far up the steep hill, that it was quickly determined that the cleanup would stretch weeks and months. Thus a major transportation route toward the outside world cut off for the foreseeable future. 

So tenuous are our roads this close to the end of the world that we do well not to take them for granted. 

Highways are latecomers to this part of southwest Washington.  Roads do not belong here in the rainforest -- the fact that they exist is a mark of human tenacity. 

For the first 100 years of European settlement the transportation pathways of choice utilized the many rivers to transport goods and people inland from the larger world. Steamers ran regular routes connecting farm communities at riverside landings. Railroads cut deep into woods to haul out lumber, only to dump the logs into the river.

Milk from early 20th century dairies was often taken by skiff to the local creamery. The “school bus” was a boat that delivered students to the steps up the riverbank before the bell rang. 

 Victorian tourists traveled down from Portland to their Seaview beach houses on the Columbia, meeting up with a clamshell railroad that “ran by the tides” from the Ilwaco docks. 

Rivers and creeks and bays -- such obvious natural highways predated European settlement. Well established and understood by the Chinook speaking people of the region - sophisticated traders that used the coastal waterways and Columbia River as their economic artery to barter with inland nations. 

Early settlers watched the native people navigate the rivers to maximum effect and conceived of a canal to connect the Puget Sound to the Columbia River -- a wild infrastructure dream that started in the 1860s and kicked around for 100 years. Private surveyors planned a canal route in early 1910. Two canals would cross relatively narrow stretches of land between Baker Bay and Willapa Bay and between Willapa Bay and Grays Harbor.  

Eventually, cranberry and oyster growers in Pacific and Grays Harbor counties put an end to the talk. Cranberry growers feared losing the high water tables needed to produce their crops while the oyster growers knew the freshwater pouring into the bays would change the salinity and ruin their industry. Fishermen worried about losing spawning grounds. 

Even so, the canal dream persisted until 1977 when lawmakers consolidated the state canal commission with other agencies into the Department of Transportation. 

These days the Department of Transportation is busy working to clean up that massive slide on KM -- restoring uninterrupted travel on State Route 4 while trying to repair other storm damage up and down the coast. 

We tend to think of these vital roadways as ever-present -- we take them for granted as our commute to and from work depend increasingly on jobs miles away from home. 

However,  State Route 4 is fairly new, and if you think creating a massive canal between Seattle and the Columbia river sounds far fetched, that idea becomes laughable when you realize how difficult it was just to cut a two lane road through the forest from Longview to Long Beach. 

At the turn of the 20th century regular steamship traffic on the rivers adjacent to the Columbia were kept busy serving the little farm and fishing and communities growing up in the valleys still mostly separated by the steep rain-soaked and forested Willapa Hills.  

Yet in those days, it was easier to go from Deep River to Astoria than travel the four miles as the crow flies over to Grays River. As the communities thrived with new settlers, demand for roads to connect these communities grew. 

Earliest roads were hand-cut through forest, sometimes with volunteer work crews from local towns taking on the job. These “volunteer roads” slowly connected communities. Bridges -- first of wood -- later of steel and concrete -- forded rivers and plank roads crossed marshy shifting soils. The ingenuity required by logging operations to erect railroad trestles deep into the forest was applied to grading and bridging the “Hungry Highway” from Naselle to Knapton as well as other gravel roads that -- at their best -- were still  seasonal and unreliable. 

Winter storms brought downed trees, landslides and washouts. Roads here have always been a battle between steep forested grades and flat flood-prone lowlands. 

As local roads were puzzle-pieced together through the woods and along the Columbia river -- the road across KM mountain was the missing link connecting the coast to the booming planned city of Longview.

The original State Route 19 wasn’t connected from Longview to Long Beach until 1933 and wasn’t fully paved all the way until 1939. 

State Route 4 hugs the Columbia river until it cuts inland at Skamokawa, choosing to climb up over KM rather than continue along the shoreline. 

Why this route was chosen dates back to an early Grays River entrepreneur William Meserve.  

To say Meserve had a store in Grays River is a bit of an understatement. Built in the 1890s to serve the river traffic on the Grays, Meserves’ store had a theater, bowling alley, barbershop and post office.  Daily steamship traffic brought goods to the store and hauled away goods from the surrounding farms. 

Meserve was a state lawmaker by the time the route for the highway was proposed. Early surveys planned to follow the river between Skamokawa and Megler -- the shortest route -- leaving the farms of the Grays River Valley isolated. As a state senator, Meserve lobbied for a route that would take it inland through the valley past his farm and his store, and continuing through to Deep River and Naselle. 

While the politics between a river route and KM route tussled in Olympia, early motorists took matters into their own hands with a caravan over KM. Lead by Longview resident Gus Hafenbrack, the August 1924 expedition required the motorists to put their cars on a logging railroad car to cross KM. The next year the logging company had pulled up the rails the expedition had to drive their cars on rail-tie trestles over 200 foot canyons with no guard rails. 

Yet each summer the  journey between Longview and Long Beach got a little easier. State contracts and money started flowing. Plank roads gave way to graded rock. Ferries were replaced by swing bridges and finally arcing concrete built high enough to allow commercial river traffic.

The story of State Route 4 isn’t of a single road, nor is it a single story, it is a hundred little roads, surveyed and abandoned, cut through forests by ambitious local volunteers and depression era works projects. It was built and moved and built again. 

It is still being built and rebuilt to this day. Frequent rockslides east of Cathlamet pound pavement into a pockmarked shambles each winter. Slides force commuters back to the ferries or to detours deep in the woods.  

All the roads in this temperate rainforest suffer winter’s rage of a thousand cuts. 

Vital roads seem so much more permanent now that we rely on them for our daily commute. 

Yet, that same battle rages on every winter, with state and county road crews fighting skirmishes with every soil-saturating Pineapple Express and tree-toppling windstorm. 

Winter rains here are brutal on roads, and the roads and bridges that we take for granted suffer as a result. It is easy for us to become impatient, and to second guess heroic efforts just to keep the way open. 

Yet floods and slides and broken roads are just a price we willingly pay to live where the rivers meet steep-sloped rainforest along an often un-Pacific ocean. 

On a summer day --or even a sunny day in February --it is easy to forget what it takes to make a road in the forest. 

-30-

Author’s note: photos and research for this essay are thanks to the amazing Appelo Archives in Naselle, where you can find a wealth of amazing photos and history about our region.

Missing the Rain

Guérin, Jules Vallée, Artist. Commuters With Umbrellas at Street Car Station. , 1906. [?] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010716471/

When I was a small boy — the year before we moved out West — I remember a summer when the Californians came to visit.

On a warm summer day, the New Jersey sky opened up in an angry cascade of warm rain. This is a common occurrence back East. The rain would crash down in torrents from the coal-gray skies, pounding the mown lawns and the tidy streets of our neighborhood. 

The Californians took off their shoes and ran out into the rain, dancing in their T-shirts, shorts and bare feet in the puddles that formed on hot sidewalks and concrete driveways. 

It was the late 1970s and California had been in the midst of an epic drought.
They had been missing the rain. 

In 1978 we moved with those same Californians to the hills above Lyle, Washington. East side of the Cascades, but where the scrub oak are like pebbles on the shore of the vast desert ocean.  

It is a place where the rain quits us in early may, never to return until late October. If you blink in that early spring, the green will be gone. Cloudless summer skies and blistering heat were the norm. Sun so bright it seemed to leap up from the ground to assault your eyes. Wind was oven-hot and gave no relief. It curled in dust devils a mile away. 

I remember one summer on High Prairie and I had a job pulling up fence posts along a property line with a boom truck. The metal of the barbed wire burned skin. We ate our lunches huddled in a sliver of thin shadow offered under the frying-pan hot truck. 
It was a magical thing then to even see a ghost of a cloud far off a mountain's shoulder, even so, there was no promise of rain in it.  

One summer we vacationed on the coast. I walked summer rain-soaked streets of Ilwaco, blue tarps rustling on hulls in the boatyard. Watercolor skies and swirling mists in late June when the grass back home had already dried to brown. 

I married a local Grays River girl that I met at college.  It was Amy that taught me the rhythms of the rainforest life. Past 30 years now, it has wrapped its ways around me like favored polar fleece and gortex. 

In my little home among the Willapa Hills, we average more than 110 inches of rain each year, with 192 days of measurable rainfall.  That is 30 inches a year more than the highest rainfall picked up in Portland and many surrounding communities. Indeed, the least amount of rain received at the Grays River hatchery — 75.9 inches in 1985 — was still higher than Portland’s average yearly rainfall. (data up to 2006) Astoria averages less than 70 inches a year.   

Yet Astoria has almost the same number of rainy days at 191. 

Thus the Grays River valley in particular lies in a perfect hydrophilic place for precipitation — inland just enough from the coast, tucked between the first ridges of hills that harvest the fresh clouds with their peaks.  

I never tire of it. 

It could rain 100 days in a row here — it often does — yet it can be different each day. This is a wild and dynamic meteorologic magic to which we are privileged. 
I will not go on about its practical benefits, yes it waters our gardens, grows our trees and feeds our river songs.  

It washes our streets, greens our fields.’ 

It calls our salmon back from the ocean. 

It hides our tears.  

I write best, and most often in the rain. Sitting in my recliner looking out my window or stomping through the wet fields and forest brings relentless words to mind. 
Conversely, I have been trained by my time on the wet side of the state to associate a rainless day with outdoor projects and work to be done. 

Seize the golden day between the storms. Make hay while the sun shines.
Comes now a year when a dry summer follows a dry spring, following a winter punctuated by an unusual number of sunny days. Good for motorcycles and horseback rides, for outdoor projects that usually would not even get started until mid-summer.  Not so good for quiet contemplation at the keyboard. 

So it was this summer that my grass dried to brittle yellow before June had even past. So it was that the cows and horses huddled in the shade rather than graze on the dwindling grass.  

Then came a hint of a rainstorm on the weather forecast. A summer storm at last. 

I found myself in a state of anticipation, dashing around cleaning up the yard, watching the clouds gather. I could smell the air thickening, I longed for a growl of thunder to herald the coming rain.  

When at last I awoke to that music on my metal roof I found strange joy in the pre-dawn hours knowing the rain had finally come. Later that morning, I went down and took up my book by the window. I smiled but did not read. I simply looked out at the gray.

I wanted to go out then, in the summer storm.

I wanted to take off my shoes

I had been missing the rain.

-30-

(This article was originally published in the Daily Astorian, 2015) 

Alma Mater: The Road to WSU for a Father and Daughter

Approaching from the West, you emerge from the rock scarred dessert of central Washington and slowly start seeing red-barned postcard farms. Soon you are surrounded by wheat ranches with steep rolling hills of the fertile soil that defines the area known as the Palouse. 

Alfalfa green and golden wheat, chickpeas, lentils and barley mark some of the richest farmland to be found anywhere.  Invisible settlements like Hooper, LaCrosse, Dusty, Almota, Starbuck and Hay are noted only by green signs pointing out over the hills.

Through it all is an undulating two-lane road that on a day mid-August is alive with a procession of cars. 

Crawl up the road from Colfax on the final climb to Pullman, and you realize that many in these cars have Washington State University license plates -- alumni like us, I suspect, returning to our Alma Mater. The term is Latin for “nourishing mother” for this university must have provided  each of us with something -- something that causes us to return now with our fresh faced sons and daughters, entrusting them to its care. 

My ride at WSU was a bit of a rough one, things weren’t always smooth and perfect, but I met some of the kindest people in my life, some of my best friends.

It was at WSU that I discovered that I could write -- a career that carried me for a dozen successful years. I bought my first motorcycle, made some of my biggest mistakes and learned that I loved learning.

It was at WSU that I met my wife -- which is the best thing that ever happened to me. 

People that know me, know I’m a fan of Washington State University.  Not just a fan for the football team -- for most of my life they have never been all that good -- and I worked on game days and missed most of the home games while I was up there. I’m a fan of the University and the generous camaraderie that came with attending the cow college on the far side of the state. A university that most Seattle city folks looked down upon. 

Things have changed in the past 30 years. 

On that long drive up to deliver my daughter to her dorm I wondered if it was the same welcoming place that could be trusted to nourish her mind and allow her to grow into her ambitions. I worried too, that I emphasized WSU too much. I told the girls that even if they decide to go to college someplace else, I wouldn’t mind. 

Yet, with Lindsay’s interest in agriculture and food science, it was hard to imagine a school better suited for her. She’s visited WSU several summers now for 4H conferences, so she is more familiar with its culture and campus than most Freshman arriving this week.

 I have nothing but confidence in her. 

Yet, I’m a dad, so I wonder and worry. 

My ride to WSU was a rough one.

Growing up in the tiny town of Lyle, we didn’t have much in the way to help deciding which school to attend. The school guidance counselor was out after a bad car accident, so I took it upon myself to research colleges for my classmates. As a high school senior, I organized tours of the University of Oregon, Western Washington University, University of Puget Sound and the University of Washington. 

I didn’t even know about WSU until the parents of one of my friends -- Bill and Wendy Hamm -- suggested I apply to the school where they had met. It had a good broadcast journalism program, they said. I was already working as a DJ in high school. So without much more research than that, I submitted an application.

Years ago, the old knock against WSU is that you only went there if you couldn’t get into a better school. However, I got accepted to Rutgers, Tulane and the University of Oregon.  By then, however, I realized how much private and out-of-state colleges would cost to attend. 

WSU was the least expensive and so I went there. 

I knew barely anything about WSU.

In this age of the internet, it is hard to emphasize how difficult information was to come by 30 years ago. Research amounted to reading the glossy brochures that arrived in the mail. I had to pick out my dorm based on a map and a written description.

I had never seen the Palouse before that hot summer day when I loaded up my car and drove out of the Gorge into the desert guided only by an atlas and driven by a desire to leave my little town behind. 

In the decades since, WSU has doubled in size and gained in academic prestige and subsequently, the costs have gone up exponentially as well.

When I attended, however, it seemed like a big small town. Unpretentious and friendly in the that Eastern Washington way.  I got lost and found my way. I got embarrassed, and learned that the only cure is to be the first one who laughs. I changed my major and changed it again. I dropped out for a semester and then found myself welcomed back with open arms. 

At 18, you are technically an adult but your head is heavy with unearned confidence.

I worked my way through -- sometimes three or four jobs -- but you could do that back then. One of my side jobs was writing articles about the history of the school for state centennial celebrations. Researching and writing stories of these early days at a tiny agricultural college cemented my appreciation for this school. 

A land grant school built on a cabbage patch, WSU’s earliest years were all plucky perseverance. The writings of the 13 students in that first class are infused with a can-do attitude and a spirit of “we are all in this together.” It was a spirit that still survived a century later when I was there. 

These days WSU has campuses all over the state and a brand new medical school that will be turning out its first class of doctors soon. You can be a city Coug and never set foot on the Palouse. 

Yet there is something about this landscape, this brick-built underdog campus far away from anything except endless examples of bountiful agriculture, that I love. It is a place that helped me become the person I am today. 

Each time I visit, I hate to leave it behind. 

It is the nexus point of my adult life.  

Alma Mater, I am entrusting you now with my eldest daughter. 

Don’t let me down. 

On the ride home, we stop to pick a few sunflowers growing on the side of the road, I ask Grace -- my 15 year old daughter -- if she thinks she’ll go to WSU too. 

“I don’t know Dad!” she said. “I just want someplace I can take my horse!” 

Go Cougs.

-30-

WE Came in Peace, for All Mankind

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. 

We choose to go to the moon. 

--John F. Kennedy, Rice University, 1962

We went to the moon 50 year ago.

When I say “we” that doesn’t mean you or I ever set foot on its dusty soil.

We as a species harnessed the powers of our minds and our might and spurned gravity’s ever-oppressive grip to leave Earth … to leave footprints on the second-brightest object in our sky.

We did this thing not because it was easy, but because it was hard. 

Just 35 years before JFK set us on a course for the moon, aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh entitled his autobiographical account of his solo flight across the Atlantic “We.” The title was meant to surprise readers. It had been a solo flight. 

Yet, Lindbergh understood the hands and minds of the many people who financed, designed and built it for that purpose. 

We is a word you’ll hear often as the world looks back on Apollo 11 this week. 

The quest to land a man on the moon started with an ambition beyond the reach of the possible technology at the time. We took the impossible and made it possible.  It was an accomplishment that required more than 400,000 Americans -- men and women, black and white, immigrants and refugees. It required the sweat and imagination of a nation to reach that far goal. 

My dad-John Hunt-was one of that army of peace and exploration -- that great mobilization of human resources challenged to design and build a machine that could take mankind to the moon and return them safely to Earth. I grew up with the echo of that accomplishment ringing in my ears, optimistic at what people can do when they come together focused on a single goal. 

My father first met Wernher von Braun while tending bar at the officers club in Huntsville, Alabama where the Army Missile Command and the Marshall Space Flight Center are located. 

Hunt -- a whiz kid from South Jersey just out of college -- had already been working for the army in Huntsville testing the Sergeant Missile system when he got drafted under the looming threat of war with the Soviet Union.  

“The Cuban Missile Crisis ended occupational deferments,” Hunt said. “I had a draft notice in my mailbox by the end of the week.” 

Yet, after basic training, Hunt found himself called right back down to Huntsville to finish the project he’d been working on. This time in an army uniform and getting paid “a lot less.” 

So he picked up a side job tending bar at the officers club, where he recalls Von Braun, charming the Congressmen and VIPs sent down to investigate his building program. 

“It was cigar smoking and hard drinking,” Hunt recalls. “He had them eating out of his hand.”

It was partly Von Braun’s charm and ambition and his cadre German rocket scientists and engineers that helped turn Huntsville into the of the major centers of the space race. When Navy Vanguard rockets repeatedly failed on the test stand. Von Braun said he could put a man in space with the Army’s Atlas rocket, Hunt explained. When Atlas succeeded, Von Braun proposed a bigger rocket - the Saturn 1B. 

“The test stand he built for it was massive,” Hunt remembers, “you couldn’t even see the 1B in it and we’d wondered why he built it so big. He was thinking ahead. He’d built it for the Saturn V.” The rocket that would eventually take men to the moon.

“You know when Kennedy said that we were going to the moon, nobody had a clue as to how we were going to do it,” Hunt says. “The guys at NASA were dumbstruck.”

Hunt was just about to get out of the army when Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. 

“I knew it wasn’t the end -- NASA was already ramping up,” Hunt said. “It was a beehive of activity and they were grabbing anybody with any talent or knowledge they could use.” 

Hunt found himself as one of hundreds of thousands of contractors working for NASA based on his work at Marshall.  This time Hunt was tasked with figuring out safe and effective equipment designs for the Astronauts to use when they had to work outside the spacecraft -- Extra Vehicular Activity. Working in space is difficult and Hunt helped develop the designs for boots and gloves and other equipment, including the lunar module as well as designs for the Apollo Telescope Mount and Skylab that would fly later.

Hunt spent a lot of time monitoring the Astronauts in the giant swimming pools used to simulate weightlessness -- testing critical equipment like boots and gloves, handholds and tools that needed to work in reduced gravity environments. They would also take astronauts up in a KC-135 plane on rollercoaster-like parabolic flights that provided a handfull of seconds of weightlessness at the top and bottom of the arc. 

“We were kind of figuring things out was we went along because no one had ever attempted, what we were trying to do,” Hunt said. “It was the greatest job in the world.”

Still in his 20s, Hunt remembers working side by side with Astronauts Michael Collins, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Jim Lovell as well as Skylab pioneer Owen Garriott. Hunt also became friends with future shuttle commander Joe Engle. 

“The thing to remember,” Hunt said.  “We were working with these guys -- the astronauts, traveling together, eating with them, we weren’t awestruct -- they were regular people. They were fun loving but very serious. It was life or death and the attitude was, we’ve got to get it right.” 

It is hard looking back to remember how much pressure there was to get it right -- that this was a life or death situation for those Astronauts. It is even harder to recall that half a million contractors from every part of the country had a hand in putting those footprints on the moon with the primitive technology of the day. Seamstresses skilled at sewing girdles and bras were stitching space suits. The computers -- which became overloaded in the last seconds before landing on the moon -- were hard wired -- their connections woven by hand. 

“We were working with nixie tubes, we weren’t even solid state,” Hunt added. “Your phone has thousands of times more computing power than they had on the flight. It was an amazing feat and nobody … everyone was holding their breath because we knew there were a million things that could have gone wrong. People today, I don’t think they realize what we accomplished.” 

The effort to put a man on the moon wasn’t without controversy, there were protests at the Kennedy Space Center the day before the launch. There were other demands for the money being spent on this one ambitious goal. Reaching for the moon drove innovation and created a wealth of knowledge far beyond what on the surface appeared to be a narrow competition between Cold War nations. 

 Yet, the race to the moon ended up providing dividends in knowledge and technology still paying off 50 years later. 

“It was the chance of a lifetime, a dream job,” Hunt said. “But once they landed on the moon, you could feel that the public and political support was going to die. I hope we go back, we’ve started to talk about that again,” he added. “We are starting to say hey, we did that.”

The lesson of Apollo is that we are bound only by our flagging ambitions and petty squabbles. “We can’t” is heard more often today, than “we can.” 

 Yet Apollo gave the lie to illusion that our reach extends no further than the end of our arms. We can accomplish great things. 

Should you forget, look up tonight and know, on the surface of the moon there is a plaque that says, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

-30-