Frances Hunter
blog of the author To the Ends of the Earth
Frances Hunter's Journal
November 2005
November 29, 2005: Big Announcement!
To the Ends of the Earth will be released in trade paperback in 2006. More details will follow, and we will certainly be keeping this page updated with all of our experiences as we begin our publication journey at last!
Voyageurs
Mark Greenhow is a young Quaker man who has lived in a small sheep-herding community in the Lake District of England all his life. He has no reason to think he will ever hear the call of adventure. But then, his family receives a letter from Canada. Mark's younger sister, Rachel, who left home to become a missionary to the Indians, has gone missing into the wilderness. Now Mark must travel to a strange and unimaginably wild land to try to find her. In the process he finds something unexpected--himself.
This is the story told in Margaret Elphinstone's interesting historical novel Voyageurs. Taking a storyline as familiar as The Searchers, Elphinstone makes it fresh with a fascinating setting and a strong and memorable central character. Instead of the Old West, Voyageurs takes us on a journey along the Canadian-U.S. border during the outbreak of the War of 1812, when a harsh and wild land was populated by British and American fur traders, French voyageurs (boatmen), and Indians. Mark is a devout Quaker and pacifist, but he's also a stubborn and red-blooded young man who's never really been tested. In the course of the story, he meets both exciting physical dangers and excruciating moral dilemmas. It's really enjoyable to see him learn and grow. The reader is a witness to the ways in which Mark changes and, just as importantly, the ways in which he remains constant.
Mark is the sole narrator of the story, which leads to some slow passages in which he simply listens to another character expound, sometimes for pages, to fill him in on background information. I wonder if adding another couple of points of view might have made for a more satisfying story structure.
Which brings me to the one major downside of the novel. Voyageurs is the second historical novel I have read recently that pretends that the narrative is a "memoir" written years later (The first was Gore Vidal's Burr). I found the device to be both unnecessary and distracting. Despite gimmicks such as intrusive footnotes, the book clearly isn't a memoir that someone found in an old attic; it's a first-person narrative and what's wrong with that? More seriously for the novel, the device injects an emotional distance into the narrative that robs it of much of the excitement and immediacy it might have had. To take one example:
Once I was called a bloody turncoat Quaker, and had mud flung at me, and other time a wild-looking fellow held the point of a bayonet at my throat, and ordered me to swear I was a Loyalist.
That would have made a dynamite "real-time" scene instead of a one-sentence memory.
As a reader, I enjoyed Voyageurs for its appealing characters and the wonderful depiction of a different place and time. As a writer, I learned that sometimes the best thing an author can do is get out of the way, tell their story, and trust the reader not to need hand-holding along the way.
November 23, 2005: Bunny update
Happy Thanksgiving!
A few weeks ago, I wrote about our new bunny, Lance, a refugee from Hurricane Rita. We were excited to become a foster home for this cute young bunny and try to get his life back on track.
By nature Lance seemed to be a fun, playful, and very smart little bunny. Unfortunately, he didn't like it at our home. He became obsessed with competing with Bear, our ancient mini-lop. At one point, although we had made it a point to keep them housed separately, Lance sought Bear out and picked a fight with him through the bars of Bear's enclosure. Bear grabbed Lance by the upper lip with his teeth and threw Lance over on his side. We were astonished. I think Lance's ego was pretty bruised by having his tail kicked by a 9 1/2 year old blind bunny!
We hoped the fight, as undesirable as it was, might settle the matter for Lance, but the opposite seemed to be true. Over the next week Lance became more combative every day. He was angry, growled at us, and refused to accept our overtures of friendship and companionship. Finally one night, he attacked both me and Mary when we were feeding him, trying to bite and scratch us. It was enough to make a bunny-lover cry.
We called the rescue group that had placed Lance with us for some advice. After talking it over, the rescue lady told us that he had probably made up his mind that he hated our house because he realized he could not be #1, and that he would never be happy as long as Bear was there. They decided to remove him from our home and try to place him elsewhere, maybe a home with a female bunny. We were sad and stunned to have encountered a bunny who would not accept our love and friendship.
The good news is that, since we still wanted to try to foster a homeless bunny, they brought over another rabbit to our house. They told us the bunny was a spayed female about two or three years old, in the shelter for several months. The rescue lady described her as a bit of a diva. She liked other bunnies, but did not seem to want a boyfriend, so she might be perfect for our home--willing to tolerate Bear but not expect much out of the old fellow.
Well, she's now been at our home about 10 days and we love her! She is a gorgeous dark tortoiseshell bunny with fur as soft and thick as a mink coat. On the first day at our house she let us pet her as much as we wanted, hung out with Bear in side-by-side cages, and watched TV with us. She is very cute, sweet, cuddly, and "plus-sized." (We promised the rescue group to keep her on a diet.)
I don't think she's a diva at all--she just expects things to be done right and to have a family who appreciates her greatness! She is a bit of a drama queen, especially when it comes to her food. We have named her Flower.
November 21, 2005: Forged in Conspiracy, Part III
The Man Without a Country
After the collapse of the Spanish conspiracy with George Rogers Clark, James Wilkinson found himself broke (as usual) and went back into the United States Army to make a living. In the 1790s, he was second-in-command to General "Mad Anthony" Wayne during Wayne's successful campaign to drive the Indians out of the Ohio country and secure the western frontier. William Clark and Meriwether Lewis were both young junior officers at this time (their early friendship is the subject of our current work-in-progress).
Just because he was now a high-ranking general in the army did not mean Wilkinson had abandoned his career as "Agent No. 13" for the Spanish crown. But as Wayne's peace, secured with the Treaty of Greeneville, settled over the frontier, Wilkinson found himself with little intelligence to peddle to the Spanish. For the inveterate schemer, it was time to move on to greener pastures.
The Spanish empire was getting poorer and weaker every day, and less able to defend its vast North American empire. Intrigues abounded, and Wilkinson was right in the thick of things. His protégé, Philip Nolan (later the inspiration for the famous story "The Man Without a Country"), posed as a horse trader and went all over Spanish territory to scout out routes to be used in a military expedition against Spain. Vice-president Thomas Jefferson, the leading booster of western expansion in the political world, encouraged the work of Wilkinson and Nolan.
Andrew Ellicott, the American boundary commissioner in Natchez, Mississippi, was suspicious of Wilkinson's motives and began to investigate his activities. He stopped a shipment of sugar bound for Spanish territory and discovered some correspondence hidden in the barrels. According to the letters Ellicott found, Wilkinson was still conspiring to separate Kentucky and Tennessee for the Spanish, and then lead Kentucky troops in the creation of a new empire with Mexico at its center. Wilkinson’s conspirators in this matter were Spanish officers plotting against their own crown!
Chances are that, as with the early conspiracy with GR Clark, that Wilkinson was never serious about actually putting the plot into action. Instead, he was probably creating the conspiracy in order to sell information about it to the Spanish authorities, then betray it and "save the day" in the eyes of Spain and the United States. When Ellicott exposed the letters, Wilkinson moved to destroy him the same way he had smeared Clark, accusing him of being a drunk and of bedding “Betsey the harlot,” a local washerwoman, in the same bed with his 19-year-old son. As a result, no one back east--Washington, Adams, or Jefferson--took Ellicott’s warnings seriously. It was a pattern that would be repeated again and again throughout the checkered career of America's most underrated traitor.
In 1801, the Spanish realized that Nolan was no simple horsetrader, but a filibuster acting at the center of a conspiracy to bring down their rule. Spanish troops caught and killed him near present-day Waco, cut off his ears, and sent them to the Spanish governor.
If James Wilkinson shed a tear for his young protégé, history did not record it. Once again, the unsinkable Wilkinson would embark on to new schemes. His knowledge of the frontier made him seem valuable to the politicians back east; he would soon rise to the rank of major-general of the United States Army.
As for the Spanish, they believed that the Americans were determined to get free access to the Mississippi one way or another, and would then inevitably press on to the Missouri Territory and Texas/Mexico. And they were right.
November 18, 2005: Forged in Conspiracy, Part II
The Spanish Conspiracy: James Wilkinson and George Rogers Clark
After the Spanish closed the Mississippi River in 1784, people in the western territories of the United States (western Pennsylvania and Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee) became increasingly disenchanted with the weakness of America under the Articles of Confederation. These westerners began to wonder why the Revolution had ever been fought. The crowning blow came in 1786, when Congress in secret session agreed to accept the Spanish closure of the Mississippi for 25 years in exchange for Atlantic trading privileges. The West had been hung out to dry.
In Kentucky, most people wanted to fight for Kentucky's rights by seceding from Virginia and having Kentucky admitted as a separate state in the Union. Virginia was willing, but it was by no means guaranteed at that point that the U.S. would admit states other than the original thirteen. Most Kentuckians thought it was worth a try.
Others were more disillusioned. They wanted to break the West off from the United States and set up an independent nation. One of these people was General George Rogers Clark. At that time Clark, still young at age 34, was known as the heroic general whose daring campaigns had secured the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois) for the fledgling United States. Clark was hurt and bitter with both American and Virginia for the shabby way he had been treated after the Revolution. He had recently been sacked from his position as head of the Kentucky militia after a disastrous campaign against the Indians. He was also the subject of a vicious whispering campaign that alleged him to be a drunk. Clark was desperate for money and a way to rehabilitate his reputation.
Clark entered into a conspiracy with a former Revolutionary war officer by the name of James Wilkinson. Wilkinson, who had already developed a reputation as a schemer, was now a merchant and one of the few Kentuckians with good contacts in Spanish New Orleans. Wilkinson told Clark that the Spanish were vulnerable and agreed to provide intelligence that would help with an invasion. At Wilkinson's urging, Clark and several other prominent Kentuckians began to raise a force of some 800 Kentucky riflemen to take New Orleans and the surrounding territory and open the river to American traffic.
(It's important to note that the Wilkinson-Clark conspiracy was only one of many that inflamed the west during the period between the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution. It happens to be the one directly related to our research, but the entire period teems with plots. For a good book on the subject, try Ark of Empire by Dale van Every.)
What Clark and the others didn't know is that they were being played by a master conspirator. Behind their backs, Wilkinson was selling information about the plot to the Spanish. Over the next several months, he took a loyalty oath to Spain and became known in Spanish files as "Agent No. 13." (The extent of Wilkinson's treachery, which will be explored further in later posts, was not known until the Spanish archives were captured in Cuba during the Spanish-American War a century later.)
In payment for his services, Wilkinson received rare trading privileges at the port of New Orleans. (Visit James Savage's great article for details.) Clark also had no idea that Wilkinson secretly saw him as a potential rival. It was Wilkinson who had been the driving force of the whispering campaign that had undermined Clark's good name.
The Clark scheme was not the only one with which Wilkinson was involved at this time. He also cultivated a British lord who offered him the command of 10,000 men to seize Louisiana for the British. Wilkinson sold this information to the Spanish. He assured the Spanish that he had sent an assassin after the man, who escaped death thanks to his armed escort (also provided by Wilkinson). It was all an enormous shell game.
Before Clark ever had the chance to come storming down the river, political developments overtook his plot. The United States adopted a new form of government under the Constitution, and most Westerners wanted to keep trying for statehood and give the new government a chance to deal with them more fairly. Sentiment for secession began to crumble.
For Wilkinson, it was less and less credible to continue mislead the Spanish into fearing an invasion from the north. He was forced to cut his losses and move on to new schemes. Clark and the other Kentuckians realized that they had been had royally. Wilkinson moved quickly, planting newspaper stories and writing libelous forged letters that destroyed what was left of Clark's reputation and made him appear to be a traitor to the United States.
A good modern biography of Clark remains to be written, but extensive documentation of Wilkinson's secret campaign to destroy Clark is found in the appendix of George Rogers Clark: His Life and Public Services, by Temple Bodley (1926).
November 16, 2005: Forged in Conspiracy, Part I
One of the fallacies that afflicts American history as it is taught in school is the concept of manifest destiny--that America's expansion west was inevitable. The Lewis & Clark Expedition is a lodestone of this misconception.
In reality, the way west only looks inevitable in retrospect. There were several great powers vying for control of the continent, and many points at which it all could have turned out differently. Many Americans, especially New Englanders, didn't even agree that it was desirable to expand west, and at various points official government policy was aimed at stopping pioneers from racing westward, not encouraging them. Lewis and Clark's Expedition, like the moon mission, was not only scientific and geographic--it was a deeply political move by the greatest of all western expansionists, Thomas Jefferson.
In early America, the West teemed not with destiny but with conspiracy. People like Jefferson plotted ways to gain western territory legally, but dozens of others, in schemes now forgotten, conspired to take the west to build their own private empires. One of these conspiracies is woven into the plot of our novel.
Today begins the first in a series of posts about these conspiracies, which form a surprising backdrop to the entire winning of the west and to the lives of Lewis & Clark.
Franco-Spanish Days on the Mississippi
In the 1600s and 1700s, the Spanish and French competed for the possession of the Mississippi River territory, while constantly looking over their shoulders at the Anglo-Americans along the Atlantic seaboard. Spanish explorers penetrated far into the continent, and the French established a firm control over the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans. Neither power was able to establish colonies in the American west. A few tiny outposts of empire scattered here and there in the west did not mean that they controlled their North American possessions in any meaningful sense.
By right of discovery, the French controlled the entire drainage basin of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which they called the Louisiana Territory. Louisiana seemed to have potential , but for the French it proved to be a white elephant that they could not settle, defend, or exploit economically. In 1762, the French fobbed the western portion of Louisiana off on Spain as payment for their help in the Seven Years' War (known in North America as the French and Indian War). The eastern portion was ceded to Great Britain.
The Spanish, already struggling to control a vast colonial empire from Mexico to South America, were well aware of their weakness in Louisiana. They were paranoid (justly) that the only power to have successfully colonized North America, the Anglo-Americans, might sweep into the Louisiana territory and take it away from them.
Fortunately for Spain, Britain wanted no parts of another war. The British planned to exploit their new territory only for the fur trade. But increasingly independent Americans had other ideas. In defiance of official British policy, they began to trek over the Alleghenies to settle in the wilderness of western Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and Kentucky.
The outbreak of the American Revolution stopped the immigration, but only temporarily. As soon as the war was over, Americans again began to stream west, willing to brave harsh conditions and outraged Indians to claim their own piece of the frontier. The land was rich, but making any money was problematic. Since transporting goods back over the mountains to the rest of the United States was prohibitively expensive, the Kentuckians and other westerners depended on floating their tobacco, hams, furs, flour, and other goods down the Mississippi to New Orleans and selling them there.
In 1784, in a bid to strangle the American west and force the Americans back to the territory of the old thirteen colonies, the Spanish closed the Mississippi River to almost all traffic from the United States. The Spanish blockade was economically devastating for the west. But rather than go crawling home, some Westerners decided they were going to do something about it.
November 14, 2005: Columbia and Snake River Journey
The complete account of our recent Columbia and Snake River journey is now up on its own page.
Whim to Kill
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Dell Shannon's police procedural Whim to Kill (1971) is an entry in the old Lieutenant Luis Mendoza series, which chronicled the adventures of a suave Hispanic detective in the Los Angeles Police Homicide Division. Shannon wrote a million of these in the 1960s and 1970s. In the course of only 200 pages, Mendoza and his men simultaneously investigate some half-dozen cases, the most compelling of which involves the kidnapping of a cop by a group of escaped convicts. This book doesn't have the emotional depth of those written by the modern L.A. crime writers like Michael Connelly or Robert Crais, but it holds up well as a diverting and sometimes even absorbing read.
Take a look at the cover. Cheesy, isn't it? Making fun of it is hardly worth the effort. I'm just barely old enough to remember when all mysteries looked like this, and you had to hide them inside of magazines if you didn't want people to think you were "low-brow" (now there's a concept that's gone out of style). But it's worth noting that this improbable image screams, "Buy This Book!" It's making a two-fisted attempt to compete for your entertainment dollar with movies and television. Today, the publishing industry is in full-scale rout on that front. Just last week, our agent told us that "the state of fiction is somewhat frightening."
Why? Among the many reasons is the discarding of distribution channels that enabled publishers to reach new readers, readers who might be persuaded to pick up a book by a fun and exciting cover just like this one. Perhaps no other branch of the entertainment industry has acted so willfully against its own self-interest. For more enlightenment, read this great essay by top agent Richard Curtis. I visited Curtis's website and noted that he is not even accepting queries for fiction books anymore--such is the crisis faced by agents and authors with popular fiction to sell.
But 1971--those were happier times. In the back of Whim to Kill, there are several pages touting other books available from this publisher (Belmont Tower). And man, did they know how to sell these things. Westerns "build to a climax of bloody horror" and Mafia stories are "brutal as an icepick in the spine." There is something to suit every reading taste. In the realm of non-fiction, we're offered two intriguing choices:
The Runaway Generation, by Bibi Wein - The author "rapped" with hundreds of teenagers from coast to coast. Here is the truth about how they feel about drugs, sex, music, education, religion, politics, and parents.
Bawdy Ballads and Sexy Songs, by Craig McGregor - The first complete, unexpurgated collection of the world's bawdiest songs and verses. Fascinating reading, even for those who can't carry a tune.
But maybe you were looking for a good fiction read. How about The Enforcer (originally Brain Guy, we're told). Or try these on for size:
Killer Boy Was Here, by George Bagby - A blood-spattered murder mystery. The New York Times calls it: "Solid work, appropriate to the current mood of senseless violence."
Trashing, by Ann Fettamen - A sensational modern novel about the long-haired, pot-smoking, free-loving youth movement of today. "Trashing makes Harold Robbins read like Homer." - Abbie Hoffman
Was that a compliment?
Perhaps you preferred to find a good series. The "Marksman" series by Frank Scarpetta delivers the multiple adventures of Philip Magellan, a man who "swore by the bodies of his wife and son to crush the mob that had murdered them, and to savor the taste of their blood." It looks like Magellan tracked the rats all over the country in titles such as Kill Them All and Death to the Mafia. Since our book is partially set in St. Louis, I was especially intrigued by the one called Slaughterhouse, which promises, "Magellan launched the most blistering attack the Mafia had ever seen, leaving the city of St. Louis trembling from shock."
The Sixth Precinct Thriller series by Jonathan Craig brings us the stories of Pete Selby and Stan Rayder, detectives in Greenwich Village, the "toughest corner of New York's jungle of crime." From reading the descriptions, it looks like the lesson to be learned is that if you are a beautiful young woman, stay away from Greenwich Village. Two examples:
The Case of the Village Tramp - The murdered teenager was locked in a medieval chastity belt -- and her body was covered with blood.
Morgue for Venus - When they fished her out of the river, all Selby and Rayder knew was that she was very young, very beautiful, and very dead.
Finally, we can follow the spy thriller Lady from L.U.S.T. series by Rod Gray. Eve Drum works for the League of Underground Spies and Terrorists under the code name Oh Oh Sex in titles such as Lust be a Lady Tonight, Lay Me Odds, The 69 Pleasures, Kiss My Assassin, and The Hot Mahatma. Check out these two:
5 Beds to Mecca - They handed Eve the toughest job of her career--stop a Holy War in the Mid East. As usual, Eve took the news lying down...
South of the Bordello - Eve infiltrates a gang of Mexican terrorists who are trying to change Uncle Sam's image from World Leader to Dirty Old Man.
Where is Eve now that we need her?
Am I making fun of these books? Sure. But these pages bristle with sex, violence, humor, and energy. Could you resist picking up these titles and seeing what was inside? I know I couldn't. The publishing industry would do well to look to its past to see how to sell a few books.
November 9, 2005: Fort Clatsop; Ocean in View!
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Fort Clatsop |
Our last day on the Columbia River. This morning we docked in Astoria, a neat old river port that was founded by John Jacob Astor for fur trading way back in 1811, just a few years after Lewis and Clark were here. The houses (mostly 1920s vintage) rise over the river on steep hills. Once Astoria was a center of salmon canning. Looking around town, it seems fair to say that Astoria's glory days are in the past.
We started off the day with a visit to the Columbia River Maritime Museum. This is a really fascinating place with first-class exhibits and a compelling orientation movie. I hadn't realized that the Columbia River and its "bar," where the river joins the ocean, is known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. There have been hundreds of shipwrecks here, not only in olden times but up to the present day. We learned about ships, lighthouses, how people navigated the river both before and after the construction of the dams, and the role of the Coast Guard in amazing rescues. The Coast Guard maintains a training facility near here because the conditions are so treacherous that they have plenty of opportunity to practice all the skills needed for rescue. I was impressed to learn about the river and bar pilots who specialize in bringing ships in to the Columbia. One of the most fun aspects of this trip has been learning about the Columbia and its history quite apart from Lewis and Clark's journey.
Next we eagerly boarded the bus for what for us would be a highlight of the trip, our visit to Fort Clatsop, where the Corps of Discovery spent the long rainy winter of 1805-06. Fort Clatsop lies in the heart of a coastal rain forest with tall mossy trees and cool misty floors. We had the incredible luck of visiting on a spectacular sunny day, a rare event in this part of Oregon. Poor Lewis and Clark had only twelve days the entire winter in which it didn't rain.
The place was packed with visitors, but we had a good chance to see and hang out at the recreated fort. The most striking feature of the fort for me was how tiny it was--about the size of two portable school classrooms with a small run between. It was amazing to think about how L&C, the men, and the Charbonneau family spent months living on top of each other in this place. We saw the enlisted men's barracks, the captains' room, the Charbonneaus' room, and the recreated smokehouse. We enjoyed visiting with a reenactor making tallow candles. Outside the walls of the fort, we enjoyed a stroll through the beautiful forest down to the spring that the Corps used.
As noted last month, Fort Clatsop burned down just two weeks after our visit. I feel fortunate that we got to see this recreation, built with loving care by the Jaycees back in 1955 for the sesquicentennial. As of this writing, archaeologists are getting a crack at the site, and a new and more accurate recreation of the fort is planned. In the meantime, the Bicentennial signature events are going on as scheduled.
In the afternoon, we visited the lightship Columbia, moored near the museum, and the Astoria Column, a striking tower built on the highest point in the city in the 1920s. The tower is painted with friezes depicting the city's history, and you can climb approximately one million steps to the top to see a stupendous view of the Columbia River bar and surrounding area. Some of our compadres flew tiny balsa wood airplanes from the observation deck into the swirling breezes.
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Mary and Liz at the top of |
The final event of this trip was an exciting venture into the Columbia River bar itself. Out on the deck of the Sea Lion, we watched as the wind grew ever more blustery and cold and the water more choppy. Some of the most moving words of the journals were penned by Clark as the Corps entered this area, known as Gray's Bay.
"Ocian in view!" Clark wrote. "O! The joy... Great joy in camp, we are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Ocean which we [have] been so long anxious to see."
In reality the Corps was still about 20 miles from the ocean. Seeing the area in person, I can understand Clark's mistake. The bay is enormous, with swelling whitecaps and tides. (In fact, Clark noted tidewater on this river as far east as Beacon Rock.) Seabirds, including my favorite of all birds, the pelican, flew and dived in the water. It sure looks like the ocean.
Being devout cowards, we almost died of fright when a big wave made a bang against the ship, especially after everything we had learned about the Columbia's fickle ways. When the ship turned broadside to the waves in its turn back for safer waters, I wondered if we were goners. But of course all was well and doubtless not nearly as adventuresome as it seemed to these farmers.
As usual with a vacation, we felt glad to be getting on home but bittersweet that we had to leave a beautiful land that we barely got to know. Looking back over another great trip, my primary feelings are love for this amazing country of ours and admiration for Lewis and Clark and all that they endured and accomplished.
November 7, 2005: The Columbia River Gorge, Horsetail Falls, and Multnomah Falls
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Liz and Mary at the Columbia River Gorge |
Today was our big day in the Columbia River Gorge!
We docked at The Dalles (rhymes with "pals"), a small river port, and began the day with a visit to the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center. This is an excellent museum devoted to the history and natural history of the area. We were lucky enough to be visiting during a wonderful special exhibit called "Cargo," which graphically displayed and explained all the types of things carried west by the Corps of Discovery: uniforms, weapons, medicine, Indian presents, portable soup, and much more. This exhibit goes on until September 2006 and is well worth a visit if you get the chance! Unfortunately, our visit here was all too brief, and we had to leave before getting a chance to explore the other exhibits.
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The overlook at Rowena Crest gave us a magnificent view of the craggy scenery of the Gorge. But the big event of the day was a very fun hike along a restored portion of the old Columbia Gorge Highway. We had sunny, crisp weather in which to take in some of the best scenery on the planet. We hiked up to and through a beautiful tunnel that showcased the attention to detail that was lavished on this famous parkway by its builders, Sam Hill and Samuel Lancaster. Hill and Lancaster were visionaries who wanted the Columbia Gorge Highway to provide not only a means of transportation, but a poetical uplift to the soul. The construction of the highway in the nineteen-teens could be considered either a milestone in public works design, or a wasteful boondoggle, or both, depending on your point of view.
The sad thing was that the highway was obsolete almost as soon as it was finished. Hill and Lancaster never anticipated the amount of traffic that the road would bear, nor did it occur to them that automobiles would evolve beyond the Model T. After only about ten years, the road began to fall into disuse and was eventually abandoned. Fortunately, sections of this awesome trail have been restored and are now open for hiking and biking and taking in the stupendous views, just as Hill and Lancaster intended.
After our hike, we got to spend a little time in Hood River, a really neat town with some great shopping and lots of dogs! Wish we could have hung out here a while, but all too soon it was time to return to the Sea Lion. I'd like to come back to this area on a future trip and spend several days exploring much more of what it has to offer.
What happened after lunch was actually one of the highlights of the entire trip. We went to the bow of the ship as we journeyed through the Gorge. Most of the time we quietly shared the space with only one or two other passengers. We watched wind and kite surfers plying their feats of incredible daring under beautiful cliffs, tall trees, and birds soaring over the blue river. I felt grateful to Lewis and Clark for bringing us to this amazing place.
Later in the day we tied up at the old Cascade Lock and took a bus into the Gorge to see Horsetail Falls and Multnomah Falls. Horsetail is a beautiful cascade of over 100 feet, but Multnomah is a two-tiered waterfall of 620 feet. A famous bridge, built by Hill and Lancaster, creates a cathedral effect. In addition to its wonder, Multnomah Falls is another amazing example of the powerful Missoula floods that made this area.
The final special event today was watching the sunset over Beacon Rock as the Sea Lion sailed through the Gorge. We felt just like Lewis and Clark. A great day.
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Sunset on the Columbia. Beacon Rock is on the right. |
November 4, 2005: The Mauritius Command
Just finished The Mauritius Command, the fourth entry in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. The opening of the novel brings us some changes, especially for Captain Jack Aubrey, who finds himself in the improbable role (for him) of husband and father of twins. Unsuccessful and hapless in his domestic life, he immediately jumps at the chance to leave England and take over a new command. Off the coast of Africa, Jack is promoted to commodore, putting him in command not just of his own ship but of a small fleet. In the course of the book, Jack stretches his abilities to the fullest as the British vie with the French for possession of several small islands crucial to controlling the India trade.
Of course, Dr. Stephen Maturin is on hand too. His facets as doctor, naturalist, and spy all come into play in the course of the novel. The previous novel, H.M.S. Surprise, involved incredible physical suffering, loss, and rejection for Stephen so it was nice to see him get a break in this installment. However, Stephen is still haunted by what has happened to him. A dark current runs through him that no doubt will resurface in future books.
The overriding issue explored in this novel is leadership and what it means to be a good leader. Jack has to deal with two very different captains serving under him, one of whom is a silly and vain man who is kind and familiar with his men and thus beloved by them. The other is a brave commander who exercises brutal tyranny with those under his rule. The weaknesses of both men lead to very different disasters.
In spite of the battles and some serious turns of event, The Mauritius Command involves more action and comedy and less angst than H.M.S. Surprise, making it a lighter read. A highly enjoyable entry in the series.
November 2, 2005: Kayaking on Drewyer's River and Palouse Falls
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Palouse Falls |
The incredible canyon of the Palouse River |
Another big day in Lewis & Clark country. Overnight we made our way to the Palouse River, a tributary of the Snake River that was named Drewyer's River by L&C after their indispensable hunter, George Drouillard. The big event of the morning was kayaking! We Zodiac'd up the river to a weedy launching spot splendid with purple wildflowers. We claimed a two-person kayak and soon we were off paddling through a beautiful canyon.
It was amazing to be at river level, seeing this wild spot the way that L&C saw it 200 years ago. The water was calm and glassy (a result of the damming of the river). We paddled beneath amazing tall cliffs. We discovered some mud swallow nests on the cliff walls and saw a blue heron and a buck mule deer. The silence and serenity were amazing. Of course we got tired, being more scholars than athletes, but I still wish this experience could have gone on forever.
We made our way back to the launching spot at the appointed time and made a short trip back to the Sea Lion to change into dry clothes and grab our cameras. Then we Zodiac'd to shore again, this time to board a schoolbus to Palouse Falls State Park.
Palouse Falls is a beautiful cascade that thunders over a towering cliff face. Nice--but the truly amazing thing about the falls and the craggy canyons that surround it is how they were formed. In most places, these kinds of formations are created over millennia, the natural process of water acting on rock. Here, the falls stand as a very tiny remnant of epic floods (called the Bretz or Missoula floods), that roared over the land repeatedly thousands of years ago. The canyons were carved not by the slow trickle of water, but by unimaginable cataclysms that would take place over a few hours.
There's a very interesting human story to go along with the understanding of how this area was created. Harlen Bretz, the man who first discovered and wrote about the geological origins of this area, was laughed at and derided by his fellow scientists for his theory, which was unorthodox at the time. Bretz was even invited to a conference once where he presented his ideas, and then had to endure speaker after speaker rising to debunk his claims. Fortunately, Bretz lived to be 97, long enough to see his theory proved right and accepted by the scientific establishment. He said he just wished his detractors had been as long-lived. I was interested to notice when I was looking around the internet for information about Bretz that he is a favorite of creationists. I wonder what he would have thought about that?
We went on an amazing (if very dry and dusty) hike and saw great views of the Falls, the Palouse River, and the stupendous canyons beyond. Here in this remote spot is something that rivals the Grand Canyon in magnificence. We also saw some B-52 fighter jets training overhead--also quite a thrill.
Back on the Sea Lion, we enjoyed a fun BBQ lunch and then napped in our cabin for a while. Took in another lecture by Tom and then just relaxed on deck, enjoying the fresh air, some more locking, and a beautiful sunset on the Snake River.
After an especially yummy dinner (squash soup, scallops, and cheescake), we finished off the day by watching a movie about the "Paradise Road," the Columbia Gorge highway that was built as a work of art back in 1914-16. More on this in the next trip post!