CRUISES: Columbia Gorge–Cruise West Shares the River

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

We sit around the lounge in the Spirit of ’98 holding our life jackets. There’s a buzz typical of the start of any cruise. The captain delivers his safety message: We’re about to go up a river, the Columbia, that’s wide and wet – and powerful: the fourth largest river in the United States. It is the one most harnessed for hydro electric power. We’re floating on a dynamic platform. Many things like bad weather, wind, even a floating log can make it move! So on stairs, especially, leave a hand free.

The captain points out we are going into a fairly remote area. He looks around. “It’s just us out there,” he says. “You can’t call 911. So be attentive.”

He smiles, the engines rumble and we’re off. The passengers cheer especially a group sitting around two tables, a family of 17 that cruises every year, the patriarch a physician, an anesthesiologist, the matriarch as cool and lively a mother as two doctor-sons and two daughter-attorneys and a horde of grandchildren could ever want. This group has chosen well because this cruise line is a family-run enterprise whose beginnings go back to 1946. Then Chuck West, an Alaskan bush pilot married Miss Alaska and essentially jump-started Alaskan tourism. They finally sold the company that had become West Tours to Holland America. After retirement Chuck got bored and developed a feisty little cruise company called, what else, Cruise West (wasn’t God great to give this man so convenient a surname). Cruise West now has nine ships that essentially sail everywhere. His son Dick West runs this company that has very little staff turnover; crews seem to know they are treated as family. Certainly they are very keen to give passengers good service perhaps more than you get in many other cruise lines. This is particularly pleasing because the company points out it has a no tipping policy and sometimes, on other such ships, staff can appear grudging when that’s the policy. The amiable crew is all-American and handles its American passengers well in a capable confident manner you sometimes don’t see in some Asian-crewed ships.

Another contrast with a river cruise into the Columbia Gorge is that you are not on an ocean liner sailing towards a foreign country. You are sailing into the interior of your own country with all its history, culture and passion. You are traveling along a river that in the first part of the 19^th century saw the greatest human migration in history, a flood of people essentially welcomed by Native Americans who surely must have regretted their initial kindnesses to Lewis and Clark, and the masses that followed on the Oregon Trail.

Cruise West takes pains to present the past events along the Columbia river from both sides of history. We were fortunate on our voyage to have a presentation by Roger Wendlick who has lived the Lewis and Clark expedition as a first person interpreter and living historian for more than 20 years and during that time accumulated every book or document written about the expedition. He has brought his collection, the world’s greatest on the famous adventure to Lewis and Clark College. He was written up at length in the Wall Street Journal in December 5, 2003.

The Nez Perce name for the Lewis and Clark expedition was “Payoowit”. It referred to the smell of unwashed people explained Angel Sobotta, a direct descendant of Chief Red Grizzly Bear and Old Chief Joseph of that tribe that, more than any nation, helped the expedition and pioneer families who came later. We had the privilege of having Ms. Sobotta come aboard to present her Nez Perce family history, an informative talk that generously did not dwell on how shabbily the US government treated the Nimiipuu, the Nez Perce people.

Those were difficult times for all. In Walla Walla, one of our shore excursion stops, we noted the statue of Marcus Whitman, the physician protestant missionary who had established a mission school with his wife Narcissa there for the Cayuse tribe. An epidemic of measles struck in 1847 with heavy mortality among tribal children who had no immunity to the white people’s diseases. Tribal members traditionally blame their medicine men for patient’s recovery. They rose up and massacred the 14 persons at the Whitman school including Whitman and his wife in what ignited the Cayuse War. The Fort Walla Walla Museum explains much of this, some by docents like Vi Jones.

The Columbia river basin fascinated our passengers whether the stories were about the previous century’s events or about the more recent development of wineries in Walla Walla. This area, with more than one hundred and fifty wineries, is the most remote of all the Washington state wineries. This may account for the camaraderie that visitors see whether they go wine tasting at the Bergevin Lane Winery that annually produces more than 7000 cases or the longer established Walla Walla Vintners run by wine pioneers Miles Anderson and Gordy Venneri which was eighth in the valley when it opened in 1995.

The winemakers Amber Lane and Annette Bergevin chose their last names to identify their winery. Asked why they didn’t use their first names and go AA Winery and get to the top of the Yellow Pages, they replied they didn’t want to be up there with Alcoholics Anonymous.

Myles Anderson (no relation to us) is the former Director of the Walla Walla Institute for Enology and Viticulture. Although most wine makers are quick to discuss the terroir or sense of place their vineyards have-- and soil is only part of that -- Miles is particularly proud of how the recurrent ice age Missoula Floods, floods of biblical proportions, brought volcanic, rich soil to the Columbia basin. “We have ancient soils, “ Miles says, “So rich you’d think the dinosaurs had pooped all over the land.”

Walla Walla is a great example of Small Town America. Strangers smile at visitors all the time. When told that was unusual in some places and today much appreciated by tourists, one local person smiled and said, “We’re so nice we’ve been named twice.”

Pendleton is another great little place we visited, grown a bit from the trading post that was established in 1851. The Pendleton Mills came later in 1893 and a visit to this famous maker of Indian trading blankets and men’s plaid shirts gave the cruise shoppers a chance to indulge in what had, up to that point, been a lost art for them. Before lunch at Hamley’s Old West Saloon we had a tour of Pendleton’s underground historic red light district. Used mainly for prostitution and illegal gambling it took on a second life during Prohibition. A local realtor, Kristine Taylor, an extremely witty articulate docent for the Underground Tours, dressed like a lady of the streets of that era, took an appreciative group through the tunnels, explaining, informing and educating in what was the best guided tour we’d ever, ever had.

Later we toured the Tamastslikt Cultural Center, “the only Oregon Trail interpretive center that gives the Native point of view.” The center didn’t allow photography but an annual event in town made up for that, a Gathering of Nations Pow Wow with beautifully dressed Native Americans competing in chanting, singing and dance.

The week-long cruise was busy and educating. If the memories collide it is only because they were all so enjoyable: gazing at 620-foot tall Multnomah Falls, the most visited natural feature in the state; counting salmon passing by the Interpretive Center at the Bonneville Dam; cruising past Hood River with its fearsome crosswinds and marveling at the ingenuity of those intrepids who have transformed windsurfing into kite sailing; transferring into jet boats to speed up the Snake River to Hell’s Canyon and slowing down to see petroglyphs and Bighorn Sheep; marveling at the healing powers of nature by seeing how Mt. St. Helens is recovering from the desolation of its 1980 eruption. And somehow bonding with this little family called Cruise West, the cheerful and contented bunch who run this replica of a Mississippi steamer based on what the boats looked like in the early 20^th century.