A Different Way of Seeing THE TIDEWATER REACH

Poem by Robert Michael Pyle

Photograph by Judy VanderMaten

Field Note by Hal Calbom

Once Upon Brookfield

This northern shore was packed with fishing towns, canneries thick as sea-lice on a spawned-out silver hen. Skamokawa to Baker Bay, palaces of red boards arose to slime, cut, and can the millions of salmon from fish-trap, wheel, horse-seiner, or boat. Towns, to house the Finnish fishers and Chinese canners. Graced with post offices, stores, schools, even telephone lines, they grew out of the wilderness ‘twixt high tides and high firs. Bosses’ mansions looked down on raw new streets, hopeful spokes of human longing and desire. Megler, Knappton, Frankfort, Altoona, Cottardi, Dahlia, Pillar Rock... and chief among them, beautiful Brookfield.

Brookfield began in 1873 with a cannery manned by Croatian fishermen. Occupied a pretty bay between Harrows Creek and Brookfield Point. No roads, only mail-boats, until log trucks came. Soon the old-growth ran out, both in river and hills. Cannery abandoned, steamers didn’t stop any more. School closed in ‘45, P.O. in ‘53. In ‘57, Crown Zellerbach bulldozed the town, and that was that.

We used to pore over foundations, pick through moss and ivy-strewn paths among the giveaway daffodils and snowdrops, looking for signs: shards of blue willow ware, keys, an old toy, a marble; rusted stove here, broken front steps over there. Imagining lives once lived, loves long gone. You can still get to Brookfield, through the loggedoff hills. But all you’ll see is dredge spoils and stumps, and the only signs on the forest floor are the shiny ones left by slugs and snails.

Dark River

Thanks to the isolation of the North Pacific Coast of North America, the Columbia was among the last major rivers to be mapped and explored. Its headwaters, high in Canada, confused explorers for decades, flowing in a direction seemingly opposite to its eventual course. Two-fifths of the river is in Canada, and relatively isolated. Early explorers in the late 1700s and mariners forever after were daunted by the fearsome Columbia Bar and the area’s reputation as “Graveyard of the Pacific,” where hundreds of ships and their crews have perished over the years.

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.

Meyers HaikuFest Founder and Chief Judge

Some say the mark of a good leader is how well his team can carry on without him in a pinch. CRR’s HaikuFest Founder and Chief Judge can be proud of his team of judges. Being pressed into service for the first time without Gary actively at the helm put them to the test. Confined to a Honolulu hospital and undergoing medical treatment, Gary entrusted Creighton Goldsmith to coordinate with the panel, and sort and evaluate haiku entries, keeping all the balls in the air for HaikuFest 2023.