S . MacLaren Splendor sine occasu Salvaging Boat Encampment1 Driving a rented car 150 kilometres up the Columbia River valley north from Revelstoke, I was in search of B o a t Encampment, a rendezvous point on the transcontinental fur t r a d e route of t h e early nineteenth century. Few know of t h i s place today or r e a l i z e its symbolic value. Canada could never have extended from sea to sea if a canoe route across northern North America had not been opened, and Boat Encampment marks the place on the Columbia River that could be reached by six days of p o r t a g i n g from the eastern slopes of the Rockies. Many North Americans think of t h e Columbia as a U S A m e r i c a n River—roughly two-thirds of i t s length lies below the forty-ninth parallel—but it is b o r n in B r i t i s h Columbia, gather- ing itself from the meltwater of the Canadian Rockies before hurtling into Washington state 725 kilometres from its headwaters. Two of i t s ten major tributaries—Kootenay and Okanagan rivers—lie mainly in Canada, while the other eight—Wenatchee, Spokane, Yakima, Snake, Deschutes, Willamette, Cowlitz, and Lewis rivers—drain parts of s e v e n states— Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, and Utah. Its basin covers about 67.3 trillion square kilometres. This is t h e most hyrdo- electrically developed watershed in t h e world, with more than 400 dams and many other structures, all working to h a r n e s s the estimated twenty-one million kilowatts of generating capacity. Searching for Boat Encampment was going to b e an o d d experience, for I knew that I wouldn't see the place, but Highway 23 (Fig. 1) takes you t o I62 Canadian Literature 170/171 /Autumn/Winter2001 Fig. i. Present-Day Map of the northernmost Extent of the Columbia River, Kinbasket Lake, Athabasca Portage, and Environs. 163 Canadian Literature 170/171 /Autumn/Winter 2001 Boat Encampment where it wa s and it d o e sn ' t go anywhere else. As I d r o ve , I l i s t e n e d to Bill Frisell's cd, gone, just like a train, a n d bathed in a s t r o n g, late April sun, th e road almost entirely to myself. It seemed an effortless mechanical experi ence, and nothing feels quite so effortless as the first 30,000 kilometres in a North American mid size on a t r a ffi c fr e e highway—the consummate illusion conjured up in television ads. But I w o n d e r e d why Frisell's bluesy guitar seemed so apposite in the Columbia valley. One tune, "Nature's Symphony," has a n a s t y edge to it, while the title song ranges through a dose of d i s c o r d s , punctuated by shot gun like reports that frighten motor ing listeners into thinking something has hit the car, or vice versa. Those sheer white parallelograms of c l e a r c u t start getting to you after a while. The Columbia River valley was never so populated as it wa s three decades ago, when the dams above Revelstoke were being built, but now i t feels eerily abandoned. The hydro lines and clear cuts prove that h u m a n s are consuming it, but we are absentee consumers. The valley itself yields utilities, but they are not consumed there and few people make their h om e in that stretch of the valley. N o deeper irony exists on Hwy 23 than the sign warning travellers that "no services" are available. Splendor sin e o c c a su is t h e motto of t h e province of B r i t i s h Columbia. It is su p p o se d to be translated as "Radiance wit h o u t setting." But this valley put me in mind of o n e wag's alternative translation: "splendour without any occasion for it."2 The conversion of the Columbia River into a v i r t u a l river has been con summate. It came at the cost of a v a r i c i o u s thinking, which led to, am o n g other things, the greatest bond default in USAmerican history (White 80). On the Canadian side of the line, British Columbians have long grown used to the mantra th at hydroelectricity would emancipate th em economically; successive governments felt they had no choice but to continue p r o m u lga t ing a m y t h that the numbers do not defend. More than a quarter century ago, provocative Liberal Pat M cG eer su rm ised that it wa s "unlikely that British Columbia will ever make a b u s i n e s s out of d e ve l o p i n g electricity and selling it e lse wh e r e " (65). So tales from the economic realm s only serve to exacerbate the bizarre and alienating effect you gain in this valley, and it is deepened by the effect on you of d r i v i n g along a st e e p valley near the top of one of i t s walls, rather than down at its bottom. We're used to roadways inching through a m o u n t a i n pass, or, if t h e r e isn't one, climbing up out of one valley in order to leave it a n d cross into another, b u t Hwy 23 perch es high above the iceless Columbia, occasionally plunging down near high water mark only to rise again, more like a c o a st a l than an interior highway. I64 Canadian Literature 170/ 171 /Autumn/Winter 2001 Even so, coastal highways lead somewhere; after 150 kilometres of H w y 23, carefree motoring hits Mica Dam (Fig. 1). And ends. Observing the Columbia River first-hand should come after reading about it. Pick Robin Cody's Voyage of a Summer Sun, Blaine Harden's A River Lost, or Richard White's The Organic Machine; they are all witheringly insightful treatments of t h e subject. As the nature- vers us- t e c h n o l o g y debate goes, Cody's and White's are even-minded. But none of t h e m quite prepared me for t h i s artifice. The Columbia feels, at least in t h e stretch between Revelstoke and Mica dams, like a fjord rather than a river. In t h e engineered West, it no longer flows through a v a l l e y ; it occupies one. Harden refers to its "puddled remains"; the scale of t h e metaphor is w r o n g , but the idea i s right (Harden 39,14).3 I've now seen all but a few of t h e Columbia's 1,900 kilometres, but only along two stretches—in the stretch north of R e v e l s t o k e , where the valley narrows dramatically, and, ironically, in one of t h e few remaining free-flow stretches of t h e river, down near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation—did this weird impression resonate so s t r o n g l y . Perhaps it was the work o f Frisell's teary guitar. But I think not. It was the sense of l o s s that assailed me more here than elsewhere. I was motoring north after participating in Revelstoke (Fig. 1) at a g a t h e r i n g of e c o l o g i s ts hosted by the Columbia Mountains Institute of A p p l i e d Ecology. Not an e c o l o g i s t , I aim to b u i l d bridges of e n v i r o n m e n t a l history between those who are and those who know about cultural heritage. I welcome White's argument that environ- mental history must study the relationship of t h e ecological and cultural heritage of a place, rather than those two subjects independently of one another: one must "do more than write a h u m a n history alongside a natural history and call it an e n v i r o n m e n t a l history. This would b e like writing a b i o g r a p h y of a wife, placing it alongside the biography of a husband and calling it the history of a marriage" (10). The gathering i n Revelstoke had been promisingly named "Learning from the Past," and I was heartened to m e e t some ecologists who did see the need to align if not to marry their research to t h e history of h u m a n occupation of t h e lands they studied and, in t h e case of s o m e Parks Canada personnel, managed.4 Because I was driving north from Revelstoke with human history in mind, and because historical human presence in t h e valley was drowned and contemporary human presence was spectral, I was spooked.