Voyage to the Pacific

They rode the tug through the lock at The Dalles Dam. On the rocky left shore, Indians were fishing. Rickety wooden platforms extended from the bank. Indians dropped fishing nets into the river for salmon.
"There's not much left of the Indians' traditional fishing grounds," said Shuv Nordquist. "But Indians have special fishing rights between John Day Dam and Bonneville. They can use nets and fish at night. They catch enough fish for their own food and ceremonies. Sport and commercial fishermen can't use these Indian fishing sites."

Leslie was getting restless on the tug. Riding down the river was a lot like cheating. Shuv Nordquist idled the tug. They lowered the canoe over the side.

Instead of paddling much more, however, LaFont aimed them ashore at a tiny cove near the industrial area of The Dalles. He marched Leslie to the office of Northwest Aluminum Co. and demanded to see Bernie Ribbetts. "Tell him Pierre LaFont is here," he said.

Ribbetts, it turned out, was head of the local aluminum workers' union. He and LaFont were old friends. Ribbetts found them hard hats and safety glasses. He showed them through the aluminum smelter. In row after row of electrical ovens - each the size of a two-car garage and too hot to get close to - raw aluminum was shot through with electricity. Huge ladles poured white-hot molten aluminum into molds. It cooled into ingots, stacked for delivery all over the U.S. All over the world.

"Each ingot," said Ribbetts, "is worth over $1,000." In one stack, Leslie counted 50 ingots before she gave up.

"Tell her about the electricity," said LaFont.

"Last month our power bill at this smelter was $3 million," said Ribbetts. ''Aluminum plants use as much electricity as whole cities about the size of Eugene, Oregon," he said. "We buy power straight over the government's main grid. The Columbia River makes it less expensive here than in most other places. Low-cost power is why we came here. But it has gotten more expensive in the last 10 years."

A stiff east wind whistled off the hot wheat-field country of Eastern Oregon and into the Columbia River Gorge. It was blowing the right way for LaFont and Leslie, but the wind raised a frothy white chop on Lake Bonneville. They paddled close to shore.

The land changed. Rounded hills gave way to steep cliffs as the river sliced the Cascade Mountain Range. Sagebrush and pine yielded to Douglas fir, alder and cottonwoods. The brown country turned green. Sailboarders rode the wind from shore to shore.

On Lake Bonneville was the site of Cascades, a series of rapids that used to stop river traffic. Now the site was smooth and navigable behind Bonneville Dam. They put ashore on Bradford Island, near Bonneville Dam's visitor center. There they watched a slide show about how the dam was built, in the mid-1930s. The dam was to provide electric power and to make the Cascades passable for river traffic.

"Another thing the dam did," said LaFont, "was it gave jobs. During the Great Depression, building Bonneville and Grand Coulee put a good many people, like my papa, to work."

In the basement of the visitor center, viewing windows opened onto a liquid cross-section of fish ladder. Leslie watched, below water level, as salmon made their way upstream past the dam. Fish traffic was slow. A fish counter fingered her recording machine as a coho salmon - then another - swam past the windows.

"Come late September, October," said LaFont, "it's rush-hour. Fall chinook. Coho," he said, "which are called silvers. And steelhead."

On the wall, charts showed the ups and downs of returning fish runs - chum, sockeye, steelhead, chinook - since 1940 Leslie was surprised to see some major ups as well as downs.

In the late 1980s, steelhead and fall chinook had done well. It surprised her. She had begun to think every man-made twist of the river was bad for fish.

"Fish are getting more help these days," said a fish counter, taking a coffee break. "Thanks to a law passed in 1980, more money from power goes back to protect fish runs. It helps compensate for damage the dams have done. Some runs are coming back," she said, "others are still small. We have a ways to go."

She explained how money from sales of power helps improve fish ladders. Power money is used to open up new upstream habitat. It helps pay for fish screens to keep young fish out of turbines as they migrate to sea. It supports hatcheries and research on fish diseases.

On the Oregon shore, near the visitor center, they visited the Bonneville Fish Hatchery. Opened in 1909, it is one of the oldest - and now the biggest - fish hatcheries in Oregon.

''I don't get it,' said Leslie. "The hatchery was here before the dam?"

"Oh, yes," said LaFont. "Fish runs were in trouble long before dams. Early in the century," he said, "people about fished the river to death. Early logging and farming, too, were very hard on salmon. Shoot," he said, "you got troubled fish runs around Puget Sound that have nothing to do with dams. But dams on the Columbia made it worse," he said.

At a row of rearing ponds, a worker tossed food-pellets onto the water. Each fistful brought thousands of fingerlings to the surface in a feed-ing frenzy. "What do we have here?" LaFont asked the worker.

"These are upriver brights," she said. "Fall chinook. We'll keep them here over the winter, and release them in May." In other rearing ponds were different kinds of chinook and coho, she explained. "We'll release some of these in Tanner Creek," he said. "Others we'll take up the river by tanker truck, so they'll know where to go back to."