ilently, 31,370 cubic feet per second, sliding past the Bluff, lapping gently.

ne morning, maybe 15,000 years ago, a rainy morning if our imaginations are to be believed, a deer, water dripping from its snout, ears high and listening for threats, would have had to barely lift a hoof to race away uphill away from The River to what would become The Bluff. Because back then The Bluff was but a dim desire of ice dams. The Bluff was little more than a bend of The River, flat as a pancake.
     But far up in present-day Idaho and Montana, the waning days of the ice age were preparing a remodel. Behind an enormous ice dam, the largest known to geologists, water built up. And up. And up. Creating a great lake that stretched for more than 200 miles and was up to 2,000 feet deep. It must have been a chill blue in color. Then, in a roar that can only be imagined, the dam burst. Geologists call what would follow the Missoula Floods — terse words for a 1,200-foot-high wall of water rushing at 65 miles per hour or more across eastern Washington, tearing into the Columbia River, racing down the gorge, carrying along the soils of the West.
     Near present-day Hood River the floods would have funneled into the Columbia River Gorge so powerfully that the water rushing through sliced open the basalt walls of the gorge. When the water burst out the western edge of the gorge, covering present-day Portland with 300 or more feet of water, the flood slowed down to 10 or 15 miles per hour, and down drifted millions of tons of silt and sand and boulders and rocks, settling down on what would be The Bluff.
     Maybe as much as 18 inches of sand at a time created the University campus as we know it. The River reasserting itself after each flood, regain-ing course, shaping the face of the bluff. At least 109 more floods just like it came in waves over 2,500 years, leaving vertical markers of silt here, telling the tall tale. Each time the river regained its place and defined the bluff’s western boundaries. And The Bluff grew and grew — to today’s 175 feet of gravel and sand. And then for some mysterious reason — the hand of God perhaps? suggests geology professor Father Ron Wasowski, C.S.C. — The River didn’t just eat the base of the sand pile away and wash it down river as gravity and common sense dictate it should have. It left it standing.

im Haines knows the river. A Hawaiian marooned on a lump of sand, armed with a degree in English literature from the University of Portland and a head groundskeeper’s passion for order, he heals and nurtures coaxes and demands the gardens of the University. The river’s secret connection to the campus is a wellhead in the center of the bluff, burrowed straight down through 247 feet of sand and rock. From it flows a gold-mine of water, on command, up to 875 gallons a minute, and 30 million gallons per year, sucked from the water table 167 feet below and delivered to the hundreds of species of plants that cover the campus. With this priceless water Merlo Field is watered daily in summer — a ridiculously expensive proposition if done with metered water drawn from the Bull Run reservoirs near Mount Hood. With free river water, however, the campus roses, camellias, rhododendrons, and azaleas thrive. The well was dug in 1965 and the University holds a water right in perpetuity, granted by the state of Oregon. Where other campus landscapes are designed around water scarcity, on The Bluff the design is built around plenty. Water is a given. Lawns stay green. The University is a mandatory stop for garden aficionados. The Oregonian rates the University one of the five most beautiful garden spots in Portland. Yet Jim Haines also sees something else coming up with river water: cadmium, lead, arsenic, mercury.

rees who live on the bluff between the campus and the river: Douglas fir, white oak, western red cedar, incense cedar, bigleaf maple, Pacific madrone, Pacific wax myrtle, staghorn sumac, silver poplar, lombardy poplar, Port Orford cedar, ponderosa pine, mountain redwood, coast redwood. Drinking the river.