Discuss: Pastures of Plenty

Woody Guthrie is a legand in the Northwest and around the world for his lyrics and passion for the voice of the underprivelaged.  Matt Rasmussen writes with great clearlty about how “the mighty Columbia” river is not what is was ment to be due to what man has chosen.  The price for power for Northwesterners has cost us greatly with the lack of samon runs.  Many of us have know since Grand Coulee that the river would never be the same for the samon.  Thank you also to Stuart D Klipper who captured the beauty and tragic nature of daming the columbia.  The native americans were right that the white man will take away all that is good in nature.

I grew up on the pre-dam Columbia, born in Richland, Washington in 1948. We would go to Celilo occasionally on the weekends and buy freshly netted salmon from the Indians. The videos you see in the museum in The Dalles do not do it justice. What a grand spectacle it was—the noise, the falls, the Indians, the fish. The sunsets were misty pink—salmon-colored!

I returned to the river in the 90s for the windsurfing and that was very exhilarating too! The rolling, spraying speedbumps that send you into the sky!

All of the Gorge, even dammed, is still magnificent. My heart sinks when I think of the change that has happened to it. But then my pioneer family also suffered from the oppressive hard work and poverty of rural farming.

My dad went to work at Hanford after the war, as did many fathers who knew they had to join corporate America or starve. How we forget. I feel lucky to have been some small part of the river when it was in it’s natural state.

Thanks for the story!

Ah yes, I spent a few months on the banks of the Columbia on the Colville Res just above Grand Coulee and it is true . . . the river is deep and wide but it doesn’t sing anymore. When you create an unnatural lake with a dam you drown all the natural dips and turns and rocks and gullies of a riverbed. It becomes like a 6-lane highway for the river, smoothes out the bumps, takes away the song. The dam to me looked obscene, like an invasion from another planet. So sad.