I grew up about 30 miles from the crest of the Continental Divide in Western Montana. The way the land divided the waters and assigned each drop a destination to either the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico fascinated my young mind.
One of my earliest memories is actually riding in the family car down the Columbia Gorge on one of those summer days when the stone walls magnify the heat like an oven. On that same trip we crossed the bridge at Astoria and I saw the end of the river where snow and rain near my home eventually flowed into the brine.
But these Columbian and Pacific waters were the waters from the other side of the mountain, as it were, because my hometown sat high in the east flank of the Rockies. The waters of the Boulder River, which flow through my hometown, follow a channel to the Jefferson, to the Missouri and on to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans.
In Montana there’s a social and geographic division between east and west, and though I lived firmly in the state’s west, there was another social and geographic subdivision – “west of the divide” and “east of the divide.”
In a place where the weather comes from the north and west, and the precipitation comes from the west, to be east of the divide meant to get only what could make it over the pass without first falling on the other side.
In the winter when I would petition the air for more snow, or in the summer when I would dream of rain, I would often stare longingly at the weather map and to points west adorned with cartoon snowflakes and raindrops.
At the same time I learned to appreciate what we did get. Though some years, like 1988, saw severe droughts, the 10 to 20 inches of precipitation each year kept us from being classified as a desert region in the almanacs.
By fishing and collecting berries and mushrooms I also realized that the water falling from the sky was the life of the place where I lived, and “just east of the divide” was still a really good place to be.
When I finally moved west of the divide, along the bank of the Clark Fork of the Columbia River, I also realized that being right up at the top of a watershed is a privileged location. The Clark Fork at Missoula is only about 120 river miles from its Continental Divide headwaters, but that entire length represents the largest superfund site in the United States.
Over a century of mining and smelting in Butte and Anaconda has polluted the entire river, and a recent removal of the Milltown Dam just outside of Missoula has temporarily increased the level of toxic metals flowing downstream.
Of course the Columbia is not the only river, even regionally, that carries the residue of industry in it. This last weekend thousands of us living on the banks of the Willamette River went out to our river to take in the hot sunshine and the cool water.
It’s times like that when we can almost ignore the fact that a six mile stretch of the river, near Portland, is designated as a superfund site. But on my float from Alton Baker to the Beltline overpass I was reminded several times that the river is not just a place of recreation for humans or of habitat for non-humans, but also serves as an active and passive gravity-powered conveyor of waste.
We cannot see the industrial and agricultural wastes in the water, but at least three empty bottles floated past my kayak – not even a message in the bottles – and then at the takeout point I had to consider that it is not just the irresponsible tossing of trash into our streams that endangers our rivers and our health, but also even the most responsible disposal of our human wastes.
Just before the Beltline Bridge over the Willamette, there’s the wastewater discharge for Eugene/Springfield Regional Water Pollution Facility. Here the air, and the water, smells like the sewage waste of about 215,000 people, and let me tell you, it smells like shit.
Like I said, this is a relatively responsible disposal of our wastes, as the wastewater division has a great facility and puts forth the energy to make sure the environmental impact of all our flushed crap is minimized, but when it goes back into the river it is still has a noticeable impact.
We all live downstream from someone else, and with this in mind, we should not accept crap in our rivers and continue to view rivers as our waste-conveyors. Advanced wastewater reclamation and recycling technologies are at our disposal, and we must work to make these the new standard.
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