Lux Sit

From the blue table at Mo’s she watches the pilot boat lights creep into the docks. Yellow lights on the bridge span glimmer, red ones flash, reflect off the river below. Travelers’ lights flicker past the guardrails. Green navigational lights show where to go, where not. Lights on the ships at anchor seem unbearably sad, while lights up in town speak of ways to spend an evening, a life, in restaurants, night spots, theaters, before the blue hearth of the television.

She sits at the blue table at Mo’s, thinking of all the lights, all the lives, all the ways she might have followed this fickle river. And how regret could equal happenstance minus foresight, and remorse could just be content filtered through oinks and rude breath of sea lions.

Nets And Floats

Commercial and sports fisheries on the Columbia River have been in decline since the late 1800s. Canneries established in the 1860s rapidly depleted the supply of fish, and in the early 1900s laws were passed to try to preserve the fishery. The Columbia River dams, beginning with Bonneville Dam in 1938, hastened the decline of anadromous fish, such as salmon — which are spawned in fresh water, live their lives in saltwater, then return to fresh water to spawn and die.

She doesn’t care. There is a blue glass dolphin on a bouncy spring stuck in a sparkly chunk of coral on the windowsill, and a blue glass crab with a sticker that says “I glow,” both of them for sale. And there is the glossy blue table. And there is the river, which might be blue in certain lights. And there is the night ahead.

She takes a sip from the blue plastic water glass that says “Mo’s” on the side, pays her bill, steps out into the many lights of the Columbian night. Keeps an eye out for the green ones, the navigational aids, with no clear idea at all of what comes next.

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.

from page 9 me know, I need to show my appreciation somehow -- maybe smiling, waving and tooting my horn. To ignore them is rude. How do I behave while driving so that I don’t seem to be looking for how many people notice me, yet acknowledge those who like the car?

GENTLE READER: You are overthinking this. For all anyone knows, you could just as easily be honking and smiling at an old friend. Sure, Miss Manners agrees that nobody likes a showoff, but also: Who cares? As long as you are not causing accidents, she sees nothing wrong with a little car preening. Enjoy it.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: If a man marries a woman whose children are grown and married, does he become their stepfather, or just their mother’s husband?

GENTLE READER: It depends how much the children like him.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: What should a host do when guests fall asleep, but insist they aren’t tired?

In the first instance, a friend came over for dinner after work. Our chatting continued with me in the kitchen and her in the living room, a few feet away. When she stopped answering, I found her fast asleep.

After waking her, I said we’d get together another time when she wasn’t so tired, and that I would even send the dinner home with her. She declined, but later fell asleep again -- at the dinner table!