THE TIDEWATER REACH

Tracks

Bird life remains abundant in the tidewater reach. In fact, thanks to habitat we have provided, the double-crested cormorant has become super-abundant, preying on young salmon and befouling the Astoria bridge with guano. Lewis and Clark paid special attention to bird life. One accounting claims the expedition discovered and named more than 50 new species of birds, while recording the presence of 120 familiar fowl.

On this page we excerpt poems, pictures and field notes from our own “Field Guide to the Lower Columbia River in Poems and Pictures,” The Tidewater Reach, by Gray’s River resident and renowned naturalist Robert Michael Pyle, and Cathlamet photographer Judy VanderMaten.

The two dreamed for years of a collaborative project, finally realized when Columbia River Reader Press published color and black and white editions of The Tidewater Reach in 2020, and a third, hybrid edition in 2021, all presenting “a different way of seeing” our beloved Columbia River.

Gulls at Rest

On the bridge lie gray lumps like so many dust-bunnies blowing in the wakes of trucks, plucked and pummeled by the river wind. From the Astoria Bridge you see wraiths rising in the morning sun from sandbar humps: divots from the dredge’s work, haunted by fogs and damps escaping river mud, too light to stay behind.

Every drain-hole clogged with grass, like so many green muffs. How the wind howls through, how the spindrift catches in those stranded turves. All above the rails the gulls float past, sickle-wristed, playing with the wind, eyeing the sands for stranded clams and fish. Lighter than the river-wraiths, too light to fall below.

It’s the young gray gulls that go down, missing the practiced flick of wing that tips a weightless body away from death. Gray tumps of feather and bone that blow away in time, fertilize the drain-hole grass, settle into mizzling rain and rising wraiths, but never blend with bridge. Too heavy to live, too light to fly anymore.

For information on ordering, as well as our partner bookshops and galleries, see pages 2 and 43.