Another Way the River Has: Taut True Tales from the Northwest

Robin Cody's life and work has been shaped by rivers of the Pacific Northwest. His first novel, Ricochet River (1992), is a coming-of-age story about three teenagers whose lives are woven together by a fictionalized version of the Clackamas River. His second book, Voyage of a Summer Sun (1995), which won the Oregon Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for nonfiction, takes readers on a 1,200-mile canoe trip down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. Now, after a fifteen-year hiatus, Cody's new collection of essays, Another Way the River Has, returns to similar territory by offering readers twenty-four essays about people and places shaped by the ecology, history, and politics of Pacific Northwest rivers. At first glance, Cody's collection feels like a disjointed assortment of snapshots pulled together from previously published articles written for local newspapers and literary magazines. However, as these colorful vignettes unfold, important insights into the ecology and history of the Columbia, Clackamas, and Willamette rivers emerge. The collection is held together by encounters with people and places that Cody meets on the lower Columbia River while traveling aboard a homemade boat called The Turtle. Trolling up and down the river, he steers readers through scenic channels and industrialized stretches of a watershed that lures avid birdwatchers and salmon fishers, even as it passes through hydroelectric dams and turns the “flywheels of Northwest commerce” (21). Cody is critical of hydroelectric dams, excessive logging, and industries that threaten riparian ecologies, but is also attentive to subtler aspects of watershed sustainability, such as the preservation of urban greenspaces and wetlands. It is Cody's relentless attention to the local that makes Another Way the River Has an important work of bioregional prose on the Pacific Northwest. By listening carefully to working class people whose lives have been impacted by state and federal water policies, Cody illustrates the need to engage site-based environmental studies with attention to local history, labor practices, and political legislation. This is evident when Cody heads upriver to meet Donald Sampson, a tribal elder of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, who works to restore salmon populations on the Columbia River. Rather than advocating the restoration of all salmon populations, Cody delves into controversies concerning wild and hatchery bred fish. Sampson, who muddies the water between categories of natural and unnatural, has grown “wary of the academics who worship at the altar of genetic purity” and insists that hatchery bred fish will join native salmon, learn to “become wild,” and eventually reclaim a Columbia River that is rightfully theirs (182). In the Pacific Northwest, these are fighting words. To understand why, it is worth reading Cody's fine collection, which concludes with a series of essays on the demise and resurgence of salmon populations—an iconic fish that continues to be a source of both unity and division in Pacific Northwest cultural, legal, and environmental history. Anyone interested in a quick or extended dip into the Columbia River and its local histories should step aboard The Turtle with Robin Cody at the helm.

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