Down the Columbia — A Reader’s Guide

_Through Surprise Rapids_

We pushed off from Beavermouth at three o'clock of the afternoon of September twenty-ninth. We had hoped for an early start, but the erratically running local freight, six or eight hours behind time, did not arrive with our boat until noon. The introductory shots had already been made. Made up momentarily as a gentleman--wearing an ankle length polished waterproof and a clean cap, that is,--I jumped the westbound Limited as it slowed down on entering the yard, dropping off presently at the platform with a "here-I-am" expression when Roos signalled that the focus was right. Then I shook hands with the waiting Blackmore, and together we strode to the door of the station and met the previously-rehearsed agent. (Roos had wanted me to shake hands with the agent as well as with Blackmore, but I overruled him by pointing out that I was a "gentleman-sportsman" not a "gentleman-politician," and served notice on him that pump-handling must henceforth be reduced to a minimum.) We tried to perfect the agent in a sweeping gesture that would say as plainly as words "The train with your boat is just around that next bend, sir," but somehow we couldn't prevent his trying to elevate his lowly part. His lips mumbled the words we had put on them all right, but the gesture was a grandiose thing such as a Chesterfieldian footman might have employed in announcing "My Lord, the carriage waits."

Roos, in all innocence, narrowly missed provoking a fight with a hot-tempered half-breed while he was setting up to shoot the incoming freight. He had an ingenious method of determining, without bending over his finder, just what his lens was going to "pick-up." This consisted of holding his arms at full length, with his thumbs placed tip to tip and the forefingers standing straight up. The right-angling digits then framed for his eye an approximation of his picture. To one not used to it this esoteric performance looked distinctly queer, especially if he chanced to be standing somewhere near the arch priest's line of vision. And that, as it happened, was exactly the place from which it was revealed to the choleric near-Shuswap section hand. I didn't need the breed's subsequent contrite explanation to know that, from where he had been standing, those twiddling thumbs and fingers, through the great fore-shortening of the arms, looked to be right on the end of the nose of the grimacing little man by the camera. Not even a self-respecting white man would have stood for what that twiddling connoted, let alone a man in whose veins flowed blood that must have been something like fifteen-sixteenths of the proudest of Canadian strains. Luckily, both Blackmore and his burly boatman were men of action. Even so, it was a near squeeze for both camera and cameraman. Roos emerged unscarred in anything but temperament. And, of course, as every one even on the fringes of the movies knows, the temperaments of both stars and directors are things that require frequent harrowing to keep them in good working order.

Roos' filming of the unloading of the boat was the best thing he did on the trip. Every available man in Beavermouth was requisitioned. This must have been something like twenty-five or thirty. A half dozen, with skids and rollers, could have taken the boat off without exerting themselves seriously, but could hardly have "made it snappy." And action was what the scene demanded. There was no time for a rehearsal. The agent simply told us where the car would be shunted to, Blackmore figured out the best line from there over the embankment and through the woods to the river, and Roos undertook to keep up with the procession with his camera. Blackmore was to superintend the technical operation and I was ordered to see that the men "acted natural." And thus we went to it. The big boat, which must have weighed close to half a ton, came off its flat car like a paper shallop, but the resounding thwack with which her bows hit a switch-frog awakened Blackmore's concern. "Easy! Easy! Don't bust her bottom," he began shouting; while I, on the other side, took up my refrain of "Don't look at the camera!--make it snappy." The consequence of these diametrically opposed orders was that the dozen or more men on my side did most of the work. But even so it was "snappy"--very.

Down the embankment we rushed like a speeding centipede, straight at the fine hog-proof wire fence of the C. P. R. right-of-way. That fence may have been hog-proof, but it was certainly not proof against the charge of a thirty-foot boat coming down a fifty per cent. grade pushed by twenty-five men. We had intended lifting over it, but our momentum was too great, especially after I had failed to desist from shouting "Make it snappy!" soon enough. The barrier gave way in two or three places, so that we were shedding trailing lengths of wire all the way to the river. On through the woods we juggernauted, Roos following in full cry. His city "news stuff" training was standing him in good stead, and he showed no less cleverness than agility in making successive "set-ups" without staying our progress. Only in the last fifty yards, where the going over the moss and pine needles was (comparatively speaking) lightning fast, did we distance him. Here, as there was plenty of time, he cut a hole in the trees and shot the launching through one of his favourite "sylvan frames." For the push-off shot he provided his customary heart throb by bringing down the station agent's three-year-old infant to wave farewell. That he didn't try to feature the mother prominently seemed to indicate that what I had said at Windermere on the subject had had some effect.

After the "farewell" had been filmed, we landed at the fire ranger's cabin to pick up Roos and his camera. The ranger told us that a couple of trappers who had been for some weeks engaged in portaging their winter supplies round Surprise Rapids would be waiting for us at the head of the first fall in the expectation of getting the job of packing our stuff down to the foot. "Nothing doing," Blackmore replied decisively; "going straight through." The ranger grinned and shook his grizzled head. "You're the man to do it," he said; "but jest the same, I'm glad it's you and not me that has the job."

The station agent came down with Roos, evidently with the cheering purpose of showing us the place where his predecessor and a couple of other men had been drowned in attempting to cross the river some months previously. "Only man in the boat to be picked up alive was a one-armed chap," he concluded impressively. "Too late now for operations on any of this crew," laughed Blackmore, pushing off with a pike-pole. "Besides, every man jack of us is going to have a two-arm job all the way." To the parting cheers of the mackinawed mob on the bank, he eased out into the current and headed her down the Bend.

Roos stationed himself in the bow, with camera set up on its shortened tripod, waiting to surprise any scenery caught lurking along the way. Blackmore steered from the stern with his seven-feet-long birch paddle. Andy Kitson and I, pulling starboard and port oars respectively, rubbed shoulders on the broad 'midship's thwart. Our outfit--a comparatively light load for so large a boat--was stowed pretty well aft. I saw Blackmore lean out to "con ship" as we got under way. "Good trim," he pronounced finally, with an approving nod. "Just load enough to steady her, and yet leave plenty of freeboard for the sloppy water. This ought to be a dryer run than some the old girl's had." I chuckled to myself over that "dryer." I hadn't told Blackmore yet what was hidden down Canoe River way. I had promised Captain Armstrong not to do so until I had ascertained that we had a teetotal crew--or one comparatively so.

Andy Kitson was a big husky North-of-Irelander, who had spent twenty years trapping, packing, hunting, lumbering and boating in western Canada. Like the best of his kind, he was deliberate and sparing of speech most of the time, but with a fine reserve vocabulary for emergency use. He was careful and cautious, as all good river boatmen should be, but decidedly "all there" in a pinch. He pulled a good round-armed thumping stroke with his big oar, and took to the water (as has to be done so frequently on a bad stretch of "lining down") like a beaver. Best of all, he had a temper which nothing from a leak in the tent dribbling down his neck to a half hour up to his waist in ice-cold water seemed equal to ruffling. I liked Andy the moment I set eyes on his shining red gill, and I liked him better and better every day I worked and camped with him.

As it was three-thirty when we finally pushed off, Blackmore announced that he would not try to make farther than "Eight-Mile" that afternoon. With comparatively good water all the way to the head of Surprise Rapids, we could have run right on through, he said; but that would force us to make camp after dark, and he disliked doing that unless he had to. In a current varying from three to eight miles an hour, we slid along down stream between banks golden-gay with the turning leaves of poplar, cottonwood and birch, the bright colours of which were strikingly accentuated by the sombre background of thick-growing spruce, hemlock, balsam and fir. Yellow, in a score of shades, was the prevailing colour, but here and there was a splash of glowing crimson from a patch of _chin-chinick_ or Indian tobacco, or a mass of dull maroon where a wild rose clambered over the thicket. Closely confined between the Rockies to the right and the Selkirks to the west, the river held undeviatingly to its general northwesterly course, with only the patchiest of flats on either side. And this was the openest part of the Bend, Blackmore volunteered; from the head of Surprise Rapids to the foot of Priest Rapids the Columbia was so steeply walled that we would not find room for a clearing large enough to support a single cow. "It's a dismal hole, and no mistake," he said.

We took about an hour to run to "Eight Mile," Andy and I pulling steadily all the way in the deep, smoothly-running current. We tied up in a quiet lagoon opening out to the west--evidently the mouth of a high-water channel. There was a magnificent stand of fir and spruce on a low bench running back from the river, not of great size on account of growing so thickly, but amazing lofty and straight. We camped in the shelter of the timber without pitching a tent, Andy and Blackmore sleeping in the open and Roos and I in a tumble-down trapper's cabin. Or rather we spread our blankets in the infernal hole. As the place was both damp and rat-infested, we did not sleep. Roos spent the night chopping wood and feeding the rust-eaten--and therefore smoky--sheet-iron stove. I divided my time between growling at Roos for enticing me into keeping him company in the cabin against Blackmore's advice, and throwing things at the prowling rodents. It did not make for increased cheerfulness when I hit him on the ear with a hob-nailed boot that I had intended for a pair of eyes gleaming vitreously on a line about six inches back of his gloomily bowed head. He argued--and with some reason I must admit--that I had no call to draw so fine a bead until I was surer of my aim. Largely as a point of repartee, I told him not to be too certain I was not sure of my aim. But I really had been trying to hit the rat....

I took the temperature of the air and the river water in the morning, finding the former to register thirty-eight degrees and the latter forty-one. There was a heavy mist resting on the river for a couple of hours after daybreak, but it was lifting by the time we were ready to push off. In running swift water good visibility is even more imperative than at sea, but as there was nothing immediately ahead to bother Blackmore did not wait for it to clear completely. The sun was shining brightly by nine-thirty, and Roos made several shots from the boat and one or two from the bank. One of the most remarkable sights unfolded to us was that of "Snag Town." Just what was responsible for this queer maze of upended trees it would be hard to say. It seems probable, however, that a series of heavy spring floods undermined a considerable flat at the bend of the river, carrying away the earth and leaving the trees still partially rooted. The broadening of the channel must have slowed down the current a good deal, and it appears never to have been strong enough to scour out below the tenaciously clinging roots. The former lords of the forest are all dead, of course, but still they keep their places, inclining down-stream perhaps twenty-degrees from their former proud perpendicular, and firmly anchored. It takes careful steering to thread the maze even in a small boat, but the current is hardly fast enough to make a collision of serious moment.

The current quickened for a while beyond "Snag Town" and then began slowing again, the river broadening and deepening meanwhile. I thought I read the signs aright and asked Blackmore. "Yes," he replied with a confirmatory nod; "it's the river backing up for its big jump. Stop pulling a minute and you can probably hear the rapid growling even here." Andy and I lay on our oars and listened. There it was surely enough, deep and distant but unmistakable--the old familiar drum-roll of a big river beating for the charge. It was tremendous music--heavy, air-quivering, earth-shaking; more the diapason of a great cataract than an ordinary rapid, it seemed to me. I was right. Surprise is anything but an ordinary rapid.

We pulled for a half hour or more down a broad stretch of slackening water that was more like a lake than a river. Out of the looming shadows of the banks for a space, mountain heights that had been cut off leaped boldly into view, and to left and right lifted a lofty sky-line notched with snowy peaks rising from corrugated fields of bottle-green glacier ice. Mt. Sanford, loftiest of the Selkirks, closed the end of the bosky perspective of Gold Creek, and the coldly chiselled pyramids of Lyell, Bryce and Columbia pricked out the high points on the Continental Divide of the Rockies. We held the vivid double panorama--or quadruple, really, for both ranges were reflected in the quiet water--for as long as it took us to pull to a beach at the narrowing lower end of the long lake-like stretch above the rapids, finally to lose it as suddenly as it had been opened to us behind the imminently-rearing river walls.

The two trappers of whom the fire-ranger at Beavermouth had spoken were waiting for us on the bank. They had permits for trapping on a couple of the creeks below Kinbasket Lake, and were getting down early in order to lay out their lines by the time the season opened a month or so hence. They had been packing their stuff over the three-mile portage to the foot of the rapids during the last three weeks, and now, with nothing left to go but their canoes, were free to give us a hand if we wanted them. Blackmore replied that he could save time and labour by running and lining the rapids. "Besides," he added with a grin, "I take it these movie people have come out to get pictures of a river trip, not an overland journey." The trappers took the dig in good part, but one of them riposted neatly. Since he was out for furs, he said, and was not taking pictures or boot-legging, time was not much of an object. The main thing with him was to reach his destination with his winter's outfit. If all the river was like Surprise Rapids he would be quite content to go overland all the way. Neither of them made any comments on the stage of the water or offered any suggestions in connection with the job we had ahead. That was one comfort of travelling with Blackmore. In all matters pertaining to river work his judgment appeared to be beyond criticism. If he was tackling a stunt with a considerable element of risk in it, that was his own business. No one else knew the dangers, and how to avoid them, so well as he.

Blackmore looked to the trim of the boat carefully before shoving off, putting her down a bit more by the stern it seemed to me. He cautioned me on only one point as we pulled across the quarter of mile to where the banks ran close together and the quiet water ended. "Don't never dip deep in the white water, and 'specially in the swirls," he said, stressing each word. "If you do, a whirlpool is more'n likely to carry your oar-blade under the boat and tear out half the side 'fore you can clear your oar-lock. That's the way that patched gunnel next you came to get smashed." As we were about at the point where it is well to confine all the talking done in the boat to one man, I refrained from replying that I had been told the same thing in a dozen or so languages, on four different continents, and by "skippers" with black, yellow and copper as well as white skins, at fairly frequent intervals during the last fifteen years. There were enough slips I might make, but that of dipping deep in rough water was hardly likely to be one of them.

The rumble of the rapid grew heavier as we proceeded, but only a single flickering white "eyelash" revealed the imminent ambush lurking beyond the black rocks. The current accelerated rapidly as the walls closed in, but ran easily, effortlessly, unripplingly, and with an almost uncanny absence of swirls and eddies. "Have plenty way on her 'fore she hits the suds," cautioned Blackmore, and Andy and I grunted in unison as we leaned a few more pounds of beef onto our bending spruces. That started our inside elbows to bumping, but without a word each of us sidled along an inch or two toward his gunwale to get well set while yet there was time.

With an easy bob--quick like a rowboat rides the bow wave of a steamer, but smoother, easier in its lift--we ran into the head of the rapid. There was a swift V-shaped chute of smooth jade-green water; then we slapped right into the "suds." High-headed waves slammed against the bows and threw spray all over the boat and far astern of it. But they lacked jolt. They had too much froth and not enough green water to make them really formidable. We were in rough but not really bad water. I tried to grin at Blackmore to show him I understood the situation and was enjoying it highly; but his eyes, pin-points of concentration under bent brows, were directed over my head and far in advance. Plainly, he was thinking as well as looking well ahead.

Reassured by the smart way we were slashing through that first riffle, I ventured to steal a look over my shoulder. In the immediate foreground Roos, with his waterproof buttoned close around his neck, was shaking the spray out of his hair and watching for a chance to snap with his kodak. Ahead there was perhaps another hundred yards of about the same sort of water as that in which we were running; then a yeasty welter of white where the river disappeared round a black cliff into what seemed a narrow gorge. Opposite the cliff the river wall sloped slightly and was thickly covered with a dense growth of evergreen. The heavy roar we had been hearing for hours was still muffled. Evidently the main disturbance was somewhere beyond the bend at the cliff.