Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, won a 2010 PNBA Award.

View from above Metaline Falls on September 11, 2010 (river right)
photograph by Carol Mack

Boundaries October 2010

THE VIEW FROM WASHINGTON ROCK

Last month I drove the lower Pend Oreille River to see what was up to at Boundary Dam. True to its name, the dam lies just below the international border. Its bulk creates a narrow, deep reservoir that runs 12 miles south past the town of Metaline Falls, then trickles on toward the older Box Canyon Dam. As one of the last of the Columbia drainage’s many dozens of dams to go on line—its gates were closed in 1967--Boundary incorporates modern engineering with a narrow river reach and steep drop. Built and owned by the Seattle City Light utility, its six smooth turbines produce more than a million megawatts of electricity, supplying about half of the big city’s power needs.

This September Boundary Dam underwent some major long-term maintenance. The repair crew’s focus of attention was a single massive grate that slides on a huge rail along the base of the concrete on the reservoir side. As it travels, this grate protects the dam’s seven lower sluice gates during their annual maintenance regime. The plan was to remove the grate entirely, then barge it to a nearby pad. There, over the course of the coming year, it will be completely reconditioned.

Detatching the 312-ton grate required draining most of the upstream reservoir. The procedure dropped the lake level lower than it had been at any time during the past 27 years, and revealed part of the fabled Metaline Falls. It was those falls, and the look of the original river around them, that lured me to the bridge on Highway 31 that overlooks the site.

When Northwest Company fur agent David Thompson traveled down the Pend Oreille River in fall 1809, he met Kalispel people near the modern town of Cusick. There Thompson smoked tobacco with an elder he called Le Bon Vieux, received gifts of dried salmon and baked camas, and prodded the local elders for insights into what the river was like between Cusick and its confluence with the Columbia. “They say there is only another Fall to go to the Columbia of which they drew the Chart,” Thompson later wrote. There may have been some language confusion, because this was a different story than he had heard from several Kootenai informants, who described a gauntlet of heavy falls and dangerously fast water. Le Bon Vieux obligingly lent Thompson and his voyageur Joseph Beaulieu a sturgeon-nosed canoe plus a guide so he could see for himself, and soon the three men set off on a calm afternoon in placid water.
Kalispel people in the camp who bet against the odds of their first white visitors reaching that big falls would have won big; a shaken Thompson was back by the next afternoon, convinced that the Pend Oreille would never work as a trade route. He proved to be correct, and his later map contains the reasons, even though Thompson himself never actually saw them himself. “Carry [the canoe] 1 Mile” covers Box Canyon; “Carry 1 Mile” covers Metaline Falls; “Carry 2 Miles” covers Z Canyon; “Unnavigable” punctuates the last stretch of river as it bends around the 49th parallel to join the Columbia at Waneta.

Even today, all a person has to do to understand Thompson’s map is stand on the Metaline Falls bridge. Washington Rock is a massive buttress of limestone that looms above the river like an avenging titan, bare and gnarled with age. Any canoe portage on that side has to go up and over the giant. Any attempt on the opposite shore has to deal with Sullivan Creek, raging in from the mountain lake with authority. As for Metaline Falls itself, a reservoir level of any less than the full pool of 1290 feet above sea level reveals some slight turbulence around a gray pyramidal tip of rock just downstream from the bridge.

On the morning of September 11, with the sluice gates open and the lake lowered to around 1250 feet at the dam 12 miles downstream, that tip stood perhaps 20-25 feet above fast-rushing water. It was a glimpse of what pioneer fish biologists Charles Gilbert and Barton Evermann had witnessed on their tour of the Clark Fork/Pend Oreille system in 1887.

The falls are over a ledge of limestone, through which the river has cut, and are the largest and most important of any found in this river. The total fall is perhaps as much as 30 feet, but it is in a series of rapids, there being no vertical drop at all. The stream is here enclosed between high rocky walls and is very turbulent for some distance.

From my perch on the bridge, Gilbert and Evermann appeared to be masters of understatement.
That feeling was confirmed when I drove to Pend Oreille Village and followed a well-traveled trail to the river’s edge on the side opposite Washington Rock, right above the sharp-tipped pyramid. The bulk of that rock lay like an iceberg revealed, surrounded by a green mass of moving water that broke into white furls around the shoreline but poured over the limestone ledge like a single undulating sheet, bulged by rounded boulders. As the green crashed down white through a torrent of hydraulic figures, a delicious overpowering noise drowned all my senses. My simplest steps near the edge suddenly required sure handholds; vision wavered between water and Washington Rock’s wall; a friend shouting from 10 feet below my perch sounded like she was far above, and far away.

Amidst the turmoil, a single dark brown figure worked along the beige skirt of Washington Rock. It took a few moments to realize that it was a river otter, perhaps seeking refuge in a suddenly changed world. The otter moved patiently across the steep slope with its humped walk, reaching the wet border of 1290 feet and continuing on across lighter, drier scree until it found a cranny to its liking and disappeared. The thunder that framed the animal’s journey never stopped the water’s pulsating song. It was white noise that, since unlocked by the end of the last ice age, described the flow of every living river in the North Columbia country until frozen again by a mere century of electrical generation.

Downstream a few hundred yards, on a crescent beach carved by the eddy beneath the falls, the roar was pleasantly muffled but definitely present. Newly exposed detritus on the beach ranged from a rusted tricycle and ceramic stove door to lines of drill steel stuck in a sharp islet, where some dreamer had tried to widen the river’s course for a long-forgotten purpose. A square block powerplant dated 1937, tight on the water below the falls, testified to many layers of industry built around this fast water: the Acme Cement plant; rich veins of lead-zinc ore; giant logs floated down Sullivan Creek. This was a place where the scale of ambition matched both the daunting falls and the towering rock. And yet small things fit in here as well. Beyond the wasted drill steel and hundreds of empty unblasted holes, chunks of limestone supported yellow loosestrife. A stand of Indian hemp thrived in a pocket of blown sand, framed by purple waving asters. At water’s edge on the point of the peninsula, growing right out of the rocks, a couple of twisted juniper trees raised their branches toward the roaring falls of the reborn river. It looked like they had been listening to the water rage, and watching the otter swim, for a very long time.

Jack Nisbet Homepage