Eye Blessing
by Simon Henderson
The journey took me East through the magnificent Columbia River Gorge country, over the Blue Mountains south of Pendelton where Chief Joseph led his weary band in 1877 and on along the Powder River and finally into the Snake River basin outside Boise. Ostensibly, I was driving to Idaho to meet with an old friend and to take the waters at various hot springs in the area. But truthfully, I was on a journey to accept my mortality. To reflect on life, death and healing. I had just been placed on a liver transplant list and needed to pull hard at the bandage of my denial. Reality bites were hitting me broadside faster than I was able to process them.
This, and the 6.8 earthquake which I had experienced in downtown Seattle a few days before changed my view of the world as a suddenly unpredictable and fragile place. I felt vulnerable. A long road trip across Washington, Oregon and Idaho seemed just the thing to soothe my nerves with ample opportunity to ponder the Great Mystery. And no tall buildings.
It was along the Columbia, not far from the Dalles, that my paternal ancestors first arrived in 1846. My Great Great Great Grandfather settled among the Klickitat People and married a Multanomah woman. He became fluent in the the various language groups of the gorge and was the first white trader in the area. He was respected and welcomed into the lodges of these river tribes. He fished from salmon planks at Cieleo Falls and wore the bucksin trappings of his wife's people.
As I travelled up the Gorge at 65 mph, I imagined how it must have been for him 155 years ago. This land of fractured basalt columns and ancient lava flows scoured in a Great Cataclysm 12,000 years ago, known as the "Spokane Flood". An inland sea in Montana was suddenly released through a passage in the Bitteroot Mountains, as the last of the glaciers retreated and collapsed a bohemoth ice dam. It unleashed trillions of gallons of water which coursed across northern Idaho and over the Columbia Basin of Eastern Washington and out to the Pacific. Water coursed, then carved the landscape, for a period of two weeks creating the Channeled Scablands. It is the largest observable Basaltic Plain on the Earth. It is the landscape of my youth