This River is Super
Just maybe not in the way I thought
The Willamette River is high right now, all thick with flat greens and browns. Biking along the Eastbank Esplanade here in town, one drops down right upon the water, as the path turns into a floating walkway connecting to pedestrian and cycle lanes on the lower level of the Steel Bridge. As I rode through the other day, my skin grew prickly with concern, wary of some localized splash. I’d just been reading about the Gowanus Canal and its many shades of toxic green; there’s a long poem featuring it in Maggie Nelson’s Something Bright, Then Holes. I’ve also poked around the canal a bit myself, when in Brooklyn, and even watched a few of the brave souls racing its chemical soup in canoes. Something about the water only a few feet from my bike tires resonated with images of the canal in my mind. The Willamette is not the Gowanus, I told myself, scoffing at the comparison. But my skin remembered my one swimming venture in the river last summer, how I walked out far and then farther from the beach on Sauvie Island, waiting for the water to turn cool. It never did, and as I succumbed to swimming in its strangely warm bath, I kicked away long strands of jewel-green plant matter. That same week, a warning was issued and swimming in many locations discouraged, given the river’s high temperatures and the accompanying, unhealthy algal blooms.
Still, it’s not the Gowanus, right? After all, the Willamette is generally considered safe for swimming; the Gowanus is a Superfund site whose water you don’t want to touch, even if the canoe racers will tell you not to worry—just don’t swallow anything—and even if New York real estate agents will sell you pricey condos over the canal advertising “waterfront views.” But again, just to be clear, don’t, don’t drink the water. Reporters get a kick out of covering the canal; just take this Gothamist headline from a year ago: “Long-Overdue Dredging Of Gowanus Canal Turns Up 'Black Mayonnaise,' Sunken Cars, Evil Stench.” So, surely all these Northwest boosters who love to go on and on about the pristine nature to be found right in their backyard would not let the river right in the middle of town remain sick for so long? Would not allow my comparison of the Willamette to one of the more well-known examples of excessive industrial pollution make any sense whatsoever?
Can you tell where this is going? Yes, this is how I learned that the ten miles along Portland Harbor—that would be the entirety of the river from the lower half of Sauvie Island, right before the Willamette meets the Columbia, all the way through the northern part of the city and into downtown—is also, indeed, a Superfund site. My family moved away from the city in 1999; the Superfund status was designated a little over a year later, which might help explain why it felt new to me. Perhaps people talked about it at the time. I’ve not heard anyone mention the matter in conversation more recently, but then a cleanup involving a research and design process that is twenty years long and counting may not exactly stay top of one’s mind.
I still shouldn’t have been surprised, and almost feel a little embarrassed that I was. West Coast cities—really, most modern cities—have all, by and large, been built in partnership with heavy industries around waterways and coast lines to ship goods and all manner of materials that are made or processed right there upon the banks (for example). The Duwamish River, in Seattle, is also a Superfund site; one needs less imagination when looking at it to grasp this fact than when looking at the Willamette, given that various engineering schemes have diverted its tributaries and stolen most of its flow. The Duwamish is in good company, with a number of other Superfund sites sitting around the Salish Sea. The Columbia is a string of Superfund sites, the pollution perhaps less easily intuited given the water’s volume, but as I learned today, don’t eat the fish near Bonneville Dam—save for migratory fish, who by the luck of traveling through many polluted sites, don’t store up too much of any one chemical. The main such fish in these parts is, of course, salmon, of which there are dwindling numbers left, given the dam and all its dam cousins upstream. We really know how to back ourselves into a corner around here, it seems.
(If you’ve the stomach for fathoming just how much toxic waste we’ve created, the EPA’s Superfund map can be an intriguing tool to play with—for instance, take a look at Silicon Valley, and witness the toxic bed all those tech execs have made for themselves.)
This little set of learning experiences raised questions for me about whether or not most of us actually know what we’re looking at, when we look at the world around us. We talk lots about the damage humans do to other beings, but do we really know how to see it? Do we even know what a healthy, living river looks like? How many unpolluted, undammed rivers have you seen? Chances are not many; a 2019 study seeking to assess how many major rivers in the world (defined as those over 1000km) remained free flowing found that only about one-third did; on Turtle Island, it’s only a quarter. Yet even the researchers behind that study felt that it didn’t capture the picture adequately; as one said, “The [global] study grossly underestimates the extent of river fragmentation as [it] only considers very large dams. We believe free-flowing rivers simply don’t exist any more, at least in Europe.” That’s just the dams, and doesn’t even begin to address the reasons why 100-some businesses (the list reads like a Who’s Who of petroleum companies) plus the City of Portland, and the Oregon Department of Transportation, and others are under orders from the EPA to do their share of the $1 billion worth of remediation on just one single river.
What does it mean to restore, or repair, when we’ve little or no experience with what that whole or mended state looks like? I’d like to argue that there’s some older, wiser sense that we can tap into that is more truthful, that if we just pay attention to our senses, they’ll guide us. Like that other day on my bike, when I began to study the water more closely after it made me so jumpy, and concluded: there’s something wrong here. Yet I’ve become dubious of such claims. There I was, a week later on a walk with a friend, circling up Waterfront Park and then back around the east side again, exclaiming, “Oh, look at the sun on the water! How pretty!” Our senses are slippery. We like shiny, glittery things, and we’ve learned how to make lots of them, while ignoring their toxic tailings silted on the river bottom.
Perhaps there’s a different conclusion to be drawn, though, one that registers how my ability to recognize the water’s less than healthful state came from slowing down and pausing to reflect on patterns, which I then meshed with both my own personal experience and lessons from a piece of art, the results of another’s reflective act. All of these are quintessential human behaviors, existing right alongside our grabbing, greedy desires for sometimes destructive sensory delights.
Likewise, maybe we can read the ability to find beauty in that which is suffering or damaged not as a deficit but as necessary in a world that we have harmed nearly beyond recognition. We can still catch those glimpses of life in a river choked by petrochemical plants. It’s that glint of light on the water that hints at the vibrancy of what might be there, if we literally clean up the place.
What’s the story of the river where you are? Have you been down by it lately? There’s more to say about the Willamette than I’m including here, obviously. Government reports on pollution are, thankfully, not the full story. It’s an interesting reminder, though, of the way even easily available information gets left out of the images of places that we forge in our minds.
I’ll leave you with a view of the Willamette as it lives in my mind, sunset ripples and all.
Until next time,
Meg
I’m reading this after just stand up paddling through the Boca de Nosara, where two rivers are protected and kept clean by a mangrove forest. It was a beautiful paddle, and I’ll register it in my memory more intentionally after reading this post.