My friends John and Helen and I toasted my departure with wild blackberries. Our farewells said, I climbed aboard KIMCHI, the 12′ Salt Bay skiff I’d built with John’s guidance. I pulled on the oars, slipping away from the dock into the John Day River near Astoria, Oregon. The sky was a gray sheet and the water like glass, murmuring softly as KIMCHI picked up speed.I’m really a sailor, not a rower. But that morning the weather decided that, like it or not, I was going to be a rower. I didn’t mind, since there was no sun to warm me and I wanted to work up an appetite. It was flood tide, and the John Day River, which feeds into the Columbia just 12 miles before that broad river reaches the Pacific, was flowing in reverse. Once I was on the Columbia itself, the tide would be in my favor as I headed east, but I had a mile to row against a nearly 2-knot current before I reached the John Day’s mouth at Cathlamet Bay. A derelict railroad bridge marked the gateway between the two, and with a final sprint I pushed through the narrow channel between its pylons and onto the edge of the estuary’s 5-mile-wide expanse.

Roger Siebert

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