The King of Roads

The ledge above the river

The rotunda sits on the point as if it grew there — gray stone on gray rock, a century of rain and wind eating at its copper roof. Below it the Columbia bends west in a sheet of working water, and the Oregon wall of the gorge runs east into haze. This is Crown Point. A paved terrace rings the building, and beyond the terrace there is only the drop: seven hundred feet of air, then the interstate threading the narrows, then the far riverbank where a freight train inches along the Washington side. On a clear day the mountains line up like a row of introductions — Mount Hood over the right shoulder, Adams and Saint Helens across the river, and Rainier hanging in the blue at the end of the world.

The old highway is why the stone house is there. It comes up from the west in a long climb, arrives at the point, and bends out of sight along the cliff, holding its line above the river. Before the highway, a motorist who wanted through the Cascade wall had to try a wagon road over the passes or put a car on a steamboat. No one had built a road along this face, because the face was too steep and the river was right there for the things that needed moving. This road was built anyway, blasted into the basalt, for no commercial reason at all. The reason was the view.

Its maker was Samuel Lancaster, an engineer with a landscape gardener's patience. He walked the cliff-tops and the talus slopes, choosing the line where the river would appear at the last turn, setting the grades gently enough for the cars of the day, curving the road wide enough to be a pleasure. He set it high, above the railroads and the water, where a motorist would look down at the whole country instead of through it.

A lumberman named Simon Benson paid for the stone house. In the old records it is a comfort station and observatory, which is exactly right: a round room of gray sandstone, windows all around, stairs winding up to the open roof. Motorists stop, get out, stand at the railing. The river carries on below — grain barges, tugs, the long trains on both banks — and the gorge makes its argument in silence. The mountains hold the river, the river cuts the mountains, and the road lets anyone watch.

Down at the waterline things work. Up here, the gorge only goes on being the gorge. The stone house has stood on the point for more than a century, and the road beneath it has been abandoned, reclaimed, and stitched back together, but the arrangement of rock and water has not changed, and neither has the reason anyone climbs to the point.

The falls and the cliff

East of Crown Point the highway folds itself into the mountain, and the waterfalls come one after another, close enough that a slow driver can see two or three in a row. Latourell drops free off a wall of basalt columns. Shepperd's Dell is a chasm so narrow that the road crosses it on a single arch, and the creek below is only sound. Bridal Veil comes apart in the wind. Wahkeena runs down a staircase of rock. And then Multnomah, the big one, 620 feet in two steps, the footbridge crossing between the two drops, the stone lodge at the base, and always a crowd standing in the spray, holding nothing against the roar.

In April, when the snow is leaving the mountains, the falls roar. The trail beside Wahkeena is wetter than the creek; the spray makes its own weather, and the air on the switchbacks tastes of stone and cedar. By late summer the same falls have thinned to bright threads, and the moss on the cliff has dried to the color of paper. The gorge keeps a different account of water in every month, and the highway stays where it was built, midway up the wall, watching.

This is the green end of the gorge. The basalt is columnar here, stacked like organ pipes, and in places the road is cut so deep into the wall that the rock overhangs the pavement. Moss hangs from the cut faces. Ferns grow out of the joint lines. Water seeps from the stone all year, and the earliest light finds the mist and makes rainbows in it. The highway was always a wet road; the builders fought the seeps and the slides, and the evidence of the work is everywhere — the low stone guardwalls, the arches across the chasms, the scars where the cliff was blasted straight down.

The interstate came later, along the waterline, and the old road lost its job as a through route. It became a scenic road, then a kind of museum of itself. On summer afternoons a line of cars crawls behind a bicycle, and nobody honks, because the point of the road is to look. Drivers in a hurry take the interstate. Drivers not in a hurry take the ledge.

The dry gorge

Somewhere east of Hood River the green gives out. The moss disappears from the rock; the Douglas firs step back from the road; the hills turn the color of old straw. This is the rain shadow at work. The west end of the gorge is wet enough for ferns and bigleaf maple; the east end gets so little rain that sagebrush and bunchgrass take over, and the air clears until the far hills seem closer than they are.

That transition is the whole country in miniature, and the old highway makes it visible in a way the interstate cannot. The interstate runs at the water, through the tight places where the cliff comes down to the river. The old road runs on the mountain's own terms — climbing, turning, taking the long way. Outside Mosier the road goes underground, two tunnels bored through the basalt, with openings cut through the rock so that the light enters as standing columns and the river appears between them in pieces, far below. The trail follows the old roadbed, and the tunnels are given over now to bicycles and walkers; tires hum on the old concrete, and the sound fills the stone.

Where the trail comes out, the river has widened and slowed. Barges sit low in the water, loaded with wheat. The town of The Dalles begins above the docks on flat land, and behind it the hills roll away dry toward the desert, fencepost to fencepost. In summer the gorge wind pours through all afternoon, and sailboards cut white tracks on the water off Hood River. Nobody is sailing anywhere. The wind is the point, the same way the view was the point of the road. That is the honest tradition of the gorge.

Between the two ends of the highway, the old grade survives in gaps. There are places where the pavement stops at a meadow, where a locked gate holds a bridge, where the unused miles have become grassed-over paths. On some maps the stretches show as dotted lines with the word "abandoned" in small type, and hikers find them: the stone walls still holding a ledge, the arch still crossing a creek that no longer needs crossing. The mountains are patient. They are still making talus, still sloughing rock down toward the river, and the abandoned miles are only the road's way of being let go.

Still looking

What survives is not the asphalt. It is the arrangement of it — the way the road turns, and the views arrive one at a time, as if the cliff had been composed for the purpose. It was. A driver could roll along in first gear and see everything, or hurry through and see nothing, and the road would forgive either choice.

On a winter evening the old road is nearly empty. The falls hang with ice, or run brown with the first heavy rain. The light goes early; the interstate below becomes a string of headlights and taillights, fast and purposeful. Up on the ledge the stone rotunda is dark. The wind comes up the gorge, and Mount Hood holds the last light — a rim of orange on a mountain of snow — and then the dark comes down over the basalt, over the river, over the water still falling toward the sea.

The road was made for a slower century, and it is still that century's road. The river keeps cutting the mountains at the old pace. The mountains keep holding the river. And the highway, where it is still a highway, keeps doing the one thing it was built to do — not to get anywhere fast, but to make sure that everyone passing through the gorge looks at it.