A River, Rails and a Road

We headed for Portland, Oregon.  As we move from place to place, we have discovered generally you can travel one of two routes.  We have learned to choose the non-Interstate route when possible since we are the slowest vehicle on the road.  Additionally, the 18 wheelers own the Interstates, and when they travel in packs, it's pretty darn intimidating. The second route is usually the old two lane plodding farm road through every tiny town that survived the 19th and 20th centuries.  We plod right along with the old pick up trucks, tractors, and often some piece of baffling farm machinery lumbering down these roads.  

One of the things I have learned on this trip is the importance of a river.  People learned thousands of years ago if you want to go anywhere of significant distance west of the Mississippi, you'd better use a river, and you'd better find a pass over mountains that are thousands of feet high.  The power and importance of the Snake River and its tributaries, and the Columbia River and its tributaries still dominate the land.  Almost every significant road we have driven in the past month followed every curve of one river or another.  It doesn't take much imagination to visualize the canoes traveling the West.  This impression has been facilitated because we have followed a significant portion of the 200+ year old route of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Their mission as stated directly by Thomas Jefferson was to find a navigable water route across the continent to open trade with Asia.       

Land transportation routes in the West were laid down first by deer, elk and bears, widened by Native Americans, used by covered wagons, covered with railroad tracks by the Manifest Destiny crowd, and paved with concrete and asphalt in the first half of the 20th century to accommodate the gasoline powered engine.

As we drove along the north shore of the Columbia River on Highway 14, a dandy scenic two lane Washington state highway,  I realized that I was watching more than a thousand years of human history roll by.  Look at this picture:  There's the Columbia River on the left, and right beside it is a railroad track (just happened to catch a passing train), and you can see the road on the right side of the picture.  This history illustrating triumvirate rolled on mile after mile.

While the river is efficient for long stretches, you don't have to read too far in the Lewis/Clark journals to hear about the 'portages'.  For the unknowing, a portage is where you climb out of the canoe, shoulder everything you're carrying in the canoe, then pick up the canoe and carry it and everything else to the next section of navigable river.  This happened FREQUENTLY and portages could be a hop, skip and a jump, or long grueling miles.  The long and short of it is that for the purposes of major commerce traveling by river is limited and not very efficient. 

The land trails that usually ran beside the rivers were narrow strips of dirt.  Great for animals, OK for slow individual human progress, but again, you don't have to read many pioneer covered wagon journals before the horrors of crossing rivers and going over mountains is detailed often by counting the dead. 

The Hiawatha Bike Trail, with its tunnels and trestles made us realize the effort it took to carve a railroad over and through the mountains.  We got to see the "Golden Spike" area of Utah where the first rail line joining the East and West met.  WOW!  I finally understood not only the economic significance, but also the psychological impact two strips of steel laid over squared trees had on the commerce and psyche of America.  

This trip was a graphically visual lesson of transportation in America and its evolution.  The rivers introduced Europeans to the grandeur and almost unimaginable resources which must have seemed free for the taking.  The railroads decided which towns lived or died, rang the final death knell of the nomadic Plains Indian culture by facilitating killing off the buffalo, and standardized many elements of everyday life.  The time zones that we live by are a consequence of the railroads.  

The roads which followed the rails allowed everyman to move himself, his goods, his services and his family anywhere in this country.  Truckers criss cross this country on multi-lane high speed highways.  All this coordinated, accessible transportation would seem like magic to Lewis and Clark.  Those same roads are allowing us to have this marvelous adventure.  It's just plain ironic and humbling that these roads we whiz over are following so many footsteps before us.