CARVING THE CAMPUS

Thirteen ways of looking at the University’s river — the great holy dirty ancient incredible Willamette.

By Peter Sleeth

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

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One 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.

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Jim 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.

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Trees 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.

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For decades the University treated the face of The Bluff as a barrier, a wall between the school and the river. Blackberries and ivy took over the native plants. Until the 1930s, local folks used the face of The Bluff as a dump — and still do on occasion, leaving tires, old refrigerators, garbage sacks. The University used to dump its yard wastes over the side, a mix of grass clippings, branches, and brush. Feral cats escaped from nearby neighborhoods to prowl the bluff and eat the small animals that old alumni remember as common on campus: rabbits, ground-squirrels, pheasant, quail. (And down below, in the Swan Island marsh, they remember mink and beaver, otter and deer, swans. The Union Pacific built a skirt of a railroad around the face of the bluff between 1909 and 1911, symbolically cutting off The University from The River. But Jim Haines and his crew have a vision: native species replanted (Oregon grape, madrone, pine), a network of trails to The River, native animals returning. And their project is underway: in recent years they’ve planted more than 300 Douglas firs, cedars, and madrones. They’ve worked hard to preserve native oak stands all around the bluff. “We’re going to win the bluff back,” he says. As he says this eagles float overhead, and herons and osprey and buzzards and redtailed hawks too, and juncos and song sparrows and towhees and scrub jays flitter and flutter through the native brush: red currant, Oregon grape, snowberry, elderberry, fern, vine maple, wild roses, grasses.

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If any one thing started the problems between the campus and the river, it was war. Swan Island lay low in the Willamette River before 1921, when the Port of Portland bought it. It was noteworthy as an impediment to navigation and a home to wood ducks, mallards, gadwalls, pintails, shovelers, teal. Ships coming downstream swept to the east side of the island, then corrected quickly to get around the bluff. By 1927, Portland’s first airport landed on the island. The Port built a land bridge to the mainland blocking the east channel of the river. Workmen leveled the island and filled the perimeter, raising its elevation against the floods. The airport operated until 1941, until the war demanded a shipyard. The Kaiser Company built and operated a military shipyard on Swan Island. Industry took over; the Willamette became a sink. Chemical stews of wood treatments, metal strippers, and petroleum were routinely swept or washed into the river. Today, sediment sampling — muck brought from the river bottom — all around Waud’s Bluff tells the story. Mixed in with the sand and small organisms that make up the chain of life are the poisons: paint, sand blast grit, petroleum hydro-carbons, PCBs, tributylin, arsenic, lead, cadmium. Some cause cancer in humans, some twist the genes of fish.

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In the river below the bluff: shad, crappie, chiselmouth, king and silver salmon, carp, pikeminnow, sculpin, starry flounder, smallmouth bass, sucker, walleye, yellow bullhead, yellow perch.

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Portland has taken a lot of blows in recent years: population run wild, water pollution worsening, the decline of forests and fish. Perhaps nothing hit the soul of Portland harder than the listing of the Willamette River as a federal Superfund site.
     I felt it. It is personal with me. My father used to play in the river below campus, on the banks, sending off homemade sailboats on great trips down the river; searching out Depression-era hobos in the camps that sprung up near the University; and fishing for bass and crappie and bullheads in the pre-industrial days of Portland, before the second World War, before the great changes to the river. Certainly the river was filthy even then, but it was not as filthy in pollutants that measured their half-lives in decades, in chemicals and metals that could twist the spines of fish and make them unsafe to eat, bringing new urgency to a catch-and-release fishery.
     I think of the river as a legacy, like my father’s shotguns or my great-great-grandfather’s diary. But it is such a fouled legacy.

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To become the worst of the worst in national pollution sites takes some work. The citizen-led cleanup of the river in the 1960s was in many ways only surface deep. Industries kept dumping the poisons now in the river bottom. In 1997, according to the nonprofit Willamette Riverkeepers, industrial sources reported sending 4.1 million pounds of toxic chemicals down the river. That compared to about 2 million pounds in 1995.
     Today we citizens own a five and one-half mile Superfund site in the Willamette River, stretching from Swan Island, past the bluff and almost down to the mouth. The basic problem is this: the poisons settled to the bottom, where they don’t just rest. Aquatic insects become poisoned. Then the fish that eat the insects. Then the birds and humans that eat the fish. Yet knowing the river is filthy is leagues away from knowing what should be done. The lower Willamette River will be cleaned up — once again — this time under federal order. Yet the depth of its pollution is far from clear. Some of the most lethal chemicals known to man rest on the river bottom, but experts have little knowledge of their long-term danger. Studies have been few. When The Oregonian ran its own tests on fish in the river recently, it came up with some chilling results: PCB levels in fish throughout the test area exceeded state and federal health standards, prompting the Oregon Health Div-ision to consider additional warnings about eating fish from the river.
     Fish from Sauvie Island to the St. Johns Bridge were the most polluted. Carp, black crappie, and smallmouth bass contained PCB levels, on average, four times higher than fish collected for reference purposes outside the 26-mile area. Five of nine fish caught in that same lower harbor stretch contained DDT-related contaminants at levels exceeding state health standards.
     What to do? If we dig up the muck on the bottom of the river it not only stirs up and spreads pollution, but where do we put the toxic waste? If we leave it, perhaps capping it with clay to keep it on the bottom, will that really contain the problem?
     Or just bury it for a little longer, until it erodes through the clay? No one knows for sure. No one even agrees on how the bill — estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars — will be paid for entirely. To top it off, the Willamette River’s wild salmon are now listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, throwing another level of complexity on the cleanup.

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It wasn’t like this when William Clark made his way up the Willamette. In 1806, when he and five companions mounted a high bluff on the river — perhaps the University campus — and named Mount Jefferson, the Indians called the river something like the Multnomah. Clean and fresh, the river sprang lively from its source in the central Cascade Mountains and ran down the valley, a lifeline for the people who lived along its banks.
     At present-day Oregon City, native peoples from miles around gathered and vied for the superlative fishing as great runs of salmon ran up against the basalt walls of the waterfalls. For the Chinookan-speaking bands that dominated the Lower Willamette, the river was a highway from the falls downstream to the swirling mouth of the Willamette where it met the Columbia River. Here tribes lived in permanent villages — by some accounts the largest year-round Indian settlement in the Americas. Those villages, built largely from cedar, would vanish quietly in the 1800s, as British and Hawaiian traders plied the river in their canoes and brought malaria and smallpox to the Chinooks. The Indians faded away; some 90 percent died in three years. By the time Archbishop Alexander Christie founded the University seven decades later, the Indians who had walked the University campus for thousands of years were long gone.

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Although the University is propped 175 feet in the air over the river, its themes are relentlessly riverine: the athletic teams are the Pilots, the student newspaper is The Beacon, the student yearbook is The Log, a late engineering journal was The Sextant. Indeed the University was born on the river, so to speak: it is said, probably apocryphally, that Archbishop Christie noticed the University’s signature building, West (now Waldschmidt) Hall from the river, and was inspired to inquire about the building and attendant land. Let us imagine the scene in 1900: Before the river was filled for rail yards, and truck warehouses and a road laid across the channel to Swan Island for an airport, the river curved in a great, graceful sweep just upstream from Swan Island, cut inland to form Mocks Bottom, then swept back out and around Waud’s Bluff, there about 1,000 feet wide and 52 feet deep. Mocks Bottom was then a glistening wetland full of herons, cranes, geese, woodpeckers, beavers, muskrats, river otters, deer. Across the river were lakes where industrial North Portland now stands, wetlands and woodlands where bear and cougar prowled. These slack waters were a wonderful fish hatchery where salmon smolts would linger in the pools left from the annual floods. Swan Island lay low in the river, a cottonwood-covered piece of sand that flooded annually. At the bluff, Archbishop Christie’s boat would have swept to the center of the river channel to miss all the log rafts tied up to the pilings at the waterline below his dream campus. Those pilings are all still there today, looming as navigation hazards to the unwary, roosts for osprey.

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For years wooden stairs descended from the bluff to a dock at the base of the bluff. Swimming in and boating on the river were the order of the day in the University’s early years. For the more adventurous, there was the Dark Passage, a trail down the gully behind the existing physical plant that led to a swimming beach. Like today, the riverbank was a place for courting and smoking, away from the prying eyes of campus.
     But the University yearned to connect itself more thoroughly to the river. One utopian design for campus drawn in the 1930s showed an elaborate elevator descending to a boathouse on the river. Another idea was a riverside restaurant. In the 1960s there were plans to build a road along the river around the face of the bluff. High-rise apartments were contemplated. Nothing was ever built — but the University still dreams of riverfront. Now it stares yearningly at the Reidel property, a 43-acre plot just below and downstream of The Bluff. Adjacent to “upper campus,” acres of riverfront, delightfully flat, it could be baseball fields, parking lots, residence halls, boathouses, a campus park, a track. It could be anything. But it is more polluted even than the river — fouled by decades of creosote and chemicals. With neighborhood groups that dream of a park, with developers who dream of riverfront condos, the University dreams cautiously, waiting for the city, state, and federal government to decide the plot’s fate, yearning for what would be the biggest campus addition in University history.

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Two years ago a remarkable group of people gathered to speak aloud a remarkable idea: rivers are holy. The group was composed of men and women of all sorts and stripes: priests, nuns, scholars, scientists, American Indians, economists, professors (three from the University of Portland), businessfolk, fisherfolk, citizens of every kind. Twelve of them were bishops from the United States and Canada. They had worked for years on the Columbia River Watershed Pastoral Letter, the first international pastoral letter in North American Catholic history, which began: “The Columbia River watershed [which includes the Willamette] is one of the most beautiful places on God’s earth. This magnificent network of rivers, the region’s lifeblood, is an extensive ecosystem that transcends national, state and provincial borders . . . living waters flowing from meadows and mountains to the ocean while providing for the needs of God’s creatures along the way . . . ”
     Where, of all the places in the vast Columbia River watershed, did the first meeting of the people who wrote the letter take place? On The Bluff, on the campus of the University of Portland, high over the great holy dirty ancient incredible Willamette River. Perhaps, just perhaps, that meeting was the first step in the University’s deeper relationship with the river that has so long been its companion.

Peter Sleeth is a reporter for The Oregonian newspaper in Portland.