Kodachrome Dreams
By Joel Gunz
Originally appeared in The Anvil
I
When I feel the need to get out of the city or out of my house or just plain out of my head, I drive about 15 minutes east of Portland into the Columbia River Gorge. Avoiding the asphalt chute of Interstate-84, an Eisenhower-era highway project that blasts along the shore of the river, I follow instead the World War I era Old Columbia River Highway—a route that necessitates slower driving and affords more opportunities for contemplation.
Oregon’s license plates once advertised the state as a Pacific Wonderland. This is due in part to the Gorge and its mist-tufted cliffs, hidden ravines and moss and lichen-bearded basalt gullies. An elf could step out from behind a fern and you wouldn't be surprised.
I have recently gone up the river about half a dozen times, and this has nothing to do with my recent divorce. Nothing at all. Still, a recent Sunday seemed like a good day for a return trip. I had no idea where I was headed, exactly. So I decided to wander. We had just had a winter snowstorm—a weather event that left patches of hardened snow in the shadows of the pine trees and great icy mounds built up by snowplows that looked like they could hold out until April. Meanwhile, fresh moss and new grass were already emerging. I’ve always had a preference for that tail-end time when the winter snows begin to depart reluctantly, like children leaving a party.
II
When I was about 17, I wrote a poem that illustrated the point in a youth’s life when he is suspended, as it were, between childhood and adolescence:
TWELVE
Big boys with
imaginary playmates
of the month
tacked to their bedroom walls
and fold-outs of Spiderman.
Under the bed
toy guns
and other hidden clutter.
I guessed I’ve always been fascinated by that period of oscillation when one thing becomes another. The cinematic dissolve when one scene fades into the next. Winter yielding the right-of-way to spring. A boy collecting toy guns and lethal ideas.
III
It’s not that I’m suicidal or anything, but when your marriage is breaking up, you think a lot of crazy thoughts. Some of them might involve death. I’d been thinking along these lines myself when I stopped at Shepperd’s Dell, a wide spot in the Old Highway that features a short, 100 yards, if that, trail. This path winds along the edge of a recess in the walls of the gorge, ending at a three-tiered waterfall. The cliff that the trail follows would have made a great jumping-off spot, and I contemplated the possibility. But I don’t really want to die. Yet, here I was, in the woods, in the snow, thinking morbid thoughts. Could hardly help but recall Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In my case, however, it was early afternoon. And I have promises to keep to my kids.
IV
About two years ago I discovered—or, perhaps, rediscovered, I’m not sure—the Hotel St. Francis, a small spa and hotel that you can reach by leaving the Old Highway, crossing over the river at Bridge of the Gods, and continuing eastward until you stop your car at Carson Hot Springs. It seemed that I had been there before, a long time ago, as a small child, but I'm not quite sure. Built in the 1930s, the simple wood frame building hasn’t been updated in decades, and, if you've never been there, it still gives you the impression that you have.
Somehow I ended up at Carson Hot Springs again. As I came around the final bend of the narrow road that leads to the hotel, something wasn’t right. Where there should have been dense forest and undergrowth, there was a new building under construction, its unfinished exterior walls wrapped in gaudy Tyvek insulating paper. The original bungalow cabins, one of which Jane Seymour once stayed in while filming a movie here, were gone. Described in tourist literature as “Washington’s last old-fashioned health spa,” the St. Francis was being scraped into the dustbin of history. All that remained were some bits of foundation masonry.
V
Samuel Lancaster, the Old Highway’s chief architect, supplied the lofty aesthetic rationale behind that road-building project. "There is,” he wrote, “but one Columbia River Gorge [that] God put into this comparatively short space, [with] so many beautiful waterfalls, canyons, cliffs and mountain domes." Believing that "men from all climes will wonder at its wild grandeur when once it is made accessible by this great highway," he made sure that the highway was, above all, sympathetic to its environment.
Unfortunately, those ideals proved to be untenable in the long run. The cliffside that the road traces is unstable, and in the fall and winter it is frequently buried under landslides. Some parts have had to be demolished out of concern for public safety. Its narrow lanes and switchback curves make it impractical for large trucks. Except for the handful of residents who rely on it as their only connection to the outside world, the Old Highway is given over almost exclusively to tourist traffic. It is a relic.
VI
The previously mentioned Jane Seymour movie came out in 1993. Made for cable, Praying Mantis is about a woman scarred by childhood trauma who grows up to marry a series of men, each of whom she then murders on their wedding night. One brief scene was filmed at the Hotel St. Francis. Although that cabin has been destroyed, the video in which it appears is available for purchase through Amazon.com.
VII
In one of my parents’ photo albums there is a snapshot of Grandma, my parents, my sisters and me that was taken when I was about six. It is a sunny summer day, and we are at Crown Point, a spot on the Old Highway that affords a breathtaking cliff-top view of the river, upstream and down. In this picture, the sun is beginning to hang low, edging toward the period late in the day that photographers call the Golden Hour, when colors intensify and shadows deepen and it is almost impossible to take a bad photo. The family is all there, three generations of us. I remember the blissful sense of at-one-ness I felt that day smiling for the camera, smiling on the inside and out, utterly and uncomplicatedly happy.
After my day-trip I told a friend who also frequented Carson Hot Springs that the old hotel was being torn down and replaced. There was a pause. Then he said, “It couldn’t last forever.”
