Splash Dams, Folk Songs,
and Those Damn Contradictions

After a presentation on Buzz Holmstrom to an environmental group in Portland recently, a twenty-something fellow approached me. He was part of the small, well-educated, and environmentally-aware audience that crowded into the room that rainy morning. (I could barely imagine myself being so well-informed on anything at that age.) Afterwards, they had asked the sort of questions every presenter hopes for—the kind that shed light on your subject while making the presenter sparkle in the process. The group was as smitten with Holmstrom as I had been for years. This particular fellow had posed some of the more insightful comments.
He offered to lug some of the video gear out to the car. I shoved the projector and the overweight screen in his direction. He grabbed both with an enthusiastic smile.
On our way down the stairs our conversation rambled over familiar territory—our favorite Oregon rivers, the drought, Grand Canyon, dams, future river trips we hoped to make. And, of course, Holmstrom—dragging the windfall out of the woods, making a trip without permits, how good the good old days must have been…
Separated by a couple of decades of age and experience, we were members of the same tribe. Sort of.
It was in the parking lot that the young fellow cut to the chase, springing the real questions that must have been roiling about his fertile mind the moment he offered to carry the gear downstairs. The gaze on his face suggested formidable issues, borne of sincerity and commitment.
“How is it that Holmstrom, who loved the rivers, who waxed lyrical and spoke of the spirit of things, how could he work for government agencies that were exploiting the rivers, i.e,. building dams? How could he not realize he was, in a sense, helping to close the very rivers he drew inspiration and sustenance from, the waterways he cherished. How could that be? Wouldn’t he have been aware of this contradictory behavior, that he was compromising his values?”
Eghads! And I hadn’t even located my initial morning fix of caffeine.
The great thing about being smart, young and idealistic is that one can ask take-no-hostage questions with a twinkle in your eye. There in the public lot, with my parking ticket expiring, the rubber was trying to meet the road and the famous words of a long-ago boatman to a fearful passenger who was undecided about transport through Lava Falls, rang in my ears, “I don’t care which boat you’re in, but it’s time to get in the boat!”
Good questions deserve good answers. The mature adult, however, learns numerous techniques to avoid exactly these kinds of questions. If you don’t know them, well, there’s still time. There are good reasons for shirking this sort of interrogation—like getting through the day. My temporary, river-protecting sherpa was no fool; verging on the cusp of adulthood at a far younger age than I could ever claim, he had at least had the courtesy to not ask these questions in a crowded room of other idealists and lovers of rivers.
Indeed, these same kinds of questions, in different guises, had run through my head at times a long time ago. How long ago was that?
Eghads!
I mumbled a few glib remarks, hoping to throw him off the scent. Like a seasoned veteran, he sidestepped my pale answers and waited. People with surplus commitment and sincerity can be scary at times; they don’t know how to let you slide away gracefully.
When in doubt, though, I did what the English always do—answer a question with a question. Throw them off course. A knowing glance or a dose of smug superiority helps. Have you ever been down the Colorado River? I asked. But before he could answer, the gray Portland skies opened up and delivered a five-minute downpour of rain and salvation. We shook hands. I got in the car and slipped away, breathing a sigh of relief.

On the way home, of course, I fretted over Holmstrom and dams. It was far more fun to focus on an opponent’s or a hero’s contradictions than my own. By definition certain individuals who find themselves admired, revered, or reviled, are asked to carry a certain amount of symbolic luggage. For reasons still unclear, we attach ungainly portions of our dreams, longings, even failures to these spiritual sherpas.
So what did Buzz think of dams, if he thought about them at all? After all, river runners that read books think highly of Holmstrom for a variety of reasons—his boat building skills, his rowing ability, his humility and reverence for the Canyon, the mix of boldness and modesty, even his very human contradictions. Could he be called an environmentalist? Did he have some sensibility akin to an environmental consciousness, or was that something born of affluent times, a p.o.v. one can afford after a good education, a certain standard of living, a ton of hindsight and a hell of lot of free time? Who knows? Are all river runners de facto environmentalists? This line of questioning was leading, I suspected, to a bad run.
The first dams Holmstrom encountered would have been during his youthful days on the farm outside of Coquille, Oregon. “Splash dams” were sprinkled along the upper reaches of the North and South forks of the Coquille River. Indeed, the Coquille watershed had a reputation as the best river system for splash dams in Oregon. Middle Creek, which looped through the Holmstrom farm, was no exception. On it’s upper reaches where the best timber grew, loggers had built splash dams for decades.
The benign, even playful name, reminiscent of children frolicking and Sunday afternoon picnics, hardly does justice to the environmental damage these ingenious structures wrought upon the river and surrounding land. A brief description of the dams themselves will suffice; afterwards, one can easily imagine the environmental carnage.
Getting the logs to the mills as cheaply and quickly as possible was the problem/goal, especially in the steep, inaccessible forests of the coast range of Oregon, Holmstrom’s backyard. The idea behind splash dams was simple: construct a wooden dam, usually at the end of the dry season when water was at its lowest, across a creek, stream, or river; cut as much timber as possible and drag it, push it, or slide it to the dry stream bed; wait for the early winter rains (a “freshet” was the sudden overflowing of a creek due to heavy rain or melting snow) to build a head of water behind the dam; wait for just the right moment (too much rain would send the log float downriver into the valley and over the banks onto the farmer’s fields or right past the mills down to the Pacific ocean; too little water would cause the massive flotilla to lock up, creating a tangle and snarl akin to a boatman’s bad hair the morning after a Lava celebration that could only be released with large quantities of dynamite) then open the spill-gate of the splash dam, releasing a monstrous surge of logs, debris, and water downstream, releasing the logs. It was called a log drive. If one can set aside the visions of environmental ruin temporarily, if one can put oneself in a working man’s caulk boots in the 1920s and ’30s, the job of log-surfer probably produced enough adrenaline that a modern boatman might find this line of work, well, interesting.
Log drives, and stray logs, were a seasonal occurrence for Holmstrom. It is difficult to imagine him not curious or excited about a fast-moving river of logs passing by his front door. A blooming riverman, he did what any waterman or would-be surfer would do—he tried to ride the damn things. Don’t ask why! Like most of us, he probably practiced an early version of “disconnect.” There’s the splash dam; here’s the log drive. So what? This is really fun! Or this: All of his life Holmstrom loved to fish. One would think that, sooner or later, he would have connected the dots, if not in exact, scientific language, between habitat destruction and fish population. Surely he would have been aware of the disputes between the loggers, farmers, and fishermen along the river valleys that run out to the Pacific. Then again…perhaps not.
Beginning in the 1930s, local farmers and commercial fisherman (and a few fly fisherman) begin putting up a fuss that turned into a big stink. They took the biggest logging companies to court. Then, as now, the issues were more complex than they appeared. Some of the companies actually tried to improve their practices. After seventy years of service, however, the last splash dam was torched in December, 1956. An era had ended.
Holmstrom’s next meeting with dams would come years later, after he had run the Rogue and Salmon Rivers, the latter of which had no dams and remains damless to this day. (Hot damn!) Of course, this encounter was as poetic as it was “up-close-and personal.” On Thanksgiving Day 1937, he rowed his wooden boat up to the concrete face of Boulder Dam after his eleven-hundred mile journey and gave it a nudge. Pure Holmstrom. Reach out and touch…just to make sure, I suppose. To finish the epic journey properly. Or was it an act of futile, yet stubborn defiance, to butt up against the massive structure, an insect stinging the behemoth? Get outta my way! Under the circumstances, however, it’s difficult to imagine our man questioning the presence of this structure looming over him. And yet, he spent four-and-a-half days rowing across Lake Mead. It must have occurred to him.…that the river was disappearing. At the foot of Lava Cliff rapid he had written, “Sometimes I feel sorry for the river-it works every second of the ages carving away at the rocks-digging its canyons-carries a million tons of silt per day—& again I feel sorry for the mountains and rocks with the river gnawing at their insides…” The next year Separation and Lava Cliff would disappear under the encroaching waters of Lake Mead. Obviously, he noted their absence. Yet, his journals and letters say nothing of how he felt. Which could mean everything, or nothing.

Holmstrom’s next significant “close encounter” with dams occurred in April, 1938 on the Clegg cross-country river journey. That same year the mayor of Portland began a campaign to cleanup the Willamette River, a river so overwhelmed by industry pollution the stench could no longer be ignored. The Mayor, in an attention-getting effort, placed a fish in a cage and lowered it into the Willamette. (There were few animal-rights activists in those days.) Five minutes later the cage was hauled up, the fish quite dead for lack of oxygen in the water. Since there were few if any studies, the question of deformities, reproduction rates, or habitat loss literally fell on deaf ears. Thirty years would pass before Portland was ready to listen.
Not fifty miles outside of Portland, the Clegg party of three boats came up against recently-completed Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River. This time Holmstrom was able to go around the dam via the Cascade Locks, largest in the world at the time. He could actually avoid fierce Cascade Rapids, which may have been no more “unnatural” for Holmstrom then going “upriver” with Vancouver, B.C. socialite Edith Clegg. Common sense and good wages would have told him as much.
Not long after, Woody Guthrie rolled into Portland at the behest of the new Bonneville Power Administration. In 1941, they had hired the unemployed, left-leaning radical Woody to make up songs celebrating things modern-day conservationists and environmentalists tend to frown upon: dams. These songs would come to be known as the Columbia River Songs, though they might just as well be called the damn Columbia Dam Songs.
Folk singers, then and now, have been known to go against the grain of things, to swim upstream, to back unpopular causes. That’s their job, I guess. What the hell was Woody doing? Writer Robert Sullivan, in a special to the Oregonian, put it this way, “Woody did seem to buy the argument that the rivers were in fact ‘wasted,’ as most people of the time believed. This was a time when technology was a problem-solving godsend, when government assistance seemed the only way out of the devastating economic Depression. Guthrie was shown the fishladders and told that a trade-off was possible… Guthrie was no government patsy; he worked for the bpa because he seemed to believe that this was America’s great socialist moment.” So how would have Roll On Columbia sounded to Buzz? Or to my questioning friend in the parking lot?
While these contradictions might well befuddle modern-day lovers of rivers and folk music, Woody and Buzz, I suspected, would have repaired to the nearest tavern and drank a beer or three. They would have had a good laugh. Both were working men, both knew what it was like to be unemployed and country poor. It’s the economy, stupid!
This was not the age of irony.
Finally, in April 1940, Buzz went to work for the Bureau of Reclamation at Echo Park on the Green River. There is little poetry and no ambiguity about what he is there for—site evaluation for a future dam. Jack-of-all-river trades, he drilled and blasted the rock walls, constructed roads over impossible terrain, rigged machinery, rowed and built boats, and wrote happy letters to home. One would give much to be a stow-away in Holmstrom’s mind. Was this contradictory behavior for him? Did he see it as such? Was the gap between his love of rivers and what he was doing to earn a living on the river small and invisible, or grand and overwhelming? Did he simply ignore the apparent contradictions, neglecting to put them side by side under a bright, steady light.
For a variety of reasons, the project collapsed and the Bureau sent Holmstrom, along with two engineers, to Desolation and Gray Canyons to examine several more potential dam sites.
The icing on this sticky upside-down cake came in December, 1941 when Buzz went to work at Bridge Canyon Dam site in Grand Canyon. Bridge Canyon Dam! A dam that would have flooded the very heart of Grand Canyon. He was on the river again—rowing and building boats in a place he loved, with people he felt comfortable with, earning money. One takes a breath and wonders.
In February, 1942 he returned to Portland and enlisted in the Navy.
So where did this swift assembly of facts leave me? What did they add up to, if anything? What reply would serve to quell the quandary the young environmentalist had unleashed on the modest gas-station attendant from Coquille? It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine Buzz thinking of rivers as “wasted,” like Woody. It is equally difficult to believe that he didn’t appreciate cheap electricity and jobs in the middle of the Depression. The river runner/ working man/poet, who wrote of the Colorado River and its Canyon as if they were sentient beings, also bored holes in the Canyon walls and hauled engineers down the river looking for dam sites.
Contradictory behavior? To the young environmentalist, perhaps. In a post-ironic age of uncertainty and frequent change, with contradictions as numerous as the driftwood in Forever Eddy below Granite, the spotlight is always on. The gaps between words and behavior know no sanctuary; the difference between the venal and garden-variety contradiction is, at times, hard to distinguish.
Perhaps Buzz could not imagine all the rivers ever being dammed, no more than his father and brother could imagine that one day the timber would be all but gone.
Perhaps he knew, but kept his mouth shut.
Having elevated Holmstrom to the height of hero, pioneer, spiritual forefather, and role-model, it was easy to see how the gap between his words (not to mention his best deeds) and some of his actions made the young environmentalist twitch.
Was it fair for the young environmentalist to apply a modern standard and value to certain Holmstrom actions? After all, hadn’t some of Holmstrom’s values transcended time and place? Hadn’t we “adopted” Buzz to represent certain things? Lifted the parts of his life that fit well into our own set of values and aspirations? Yes, no, maybe.
Did Buzz understand what was about to happen to the rivers? Probably, in the same way one might make out a speck on the horizon that turns out to be, with time, the outline of a ship. More time passes before one is able to identify its flag or country of origin. Even then, one must wait until it docks to see what its cargo holds. Holmstrom hardly viewed dams with the same urgency that many do today. There simply weren’t that many around. Neither were there flocks of environmental organizations, degrees in environmental studies, or instant media.
Did Buzz fret over them or his apparently contradictory behavior? Somehow, I think not. He may have been more puzzled, possibly saddened, than anything. He was a working man who loved rivers. He had a boat and a wild idea. Off he went…down the river, following his dream, leaving behind the land of contradictions and paradoxes and politics, seeking sanctuary, breathing deeply the air of beauty and solitude and silence, if only for a short time, refreshing his spirit in preparation for his inevitable return to the fray.
To the young environmentalist I would confess a reoccurring vision, where memory and imagination dovetailed. Perhaps it would help to close the gap.
I am standing on the Black Rock above Lava Falls; it’s early morning and the sunlight is warm on my back. The day is fresh, promising. The roar of the rapid rings through my ears, literally filling the air. There’s a smell I can’t quite describe, but will never forget. It’s hard to take my eyes off the river; I stare, break it into parts—the ledge, or the slot, the immense hole in the middle of the right run—as if they were separate or distinct from the river itself. I think if I memorize the parts, the whole river will offer up a clue, a blessing, a passage through the maelstrom. If I take its pattern to heart somehow the river’s secret will give itself to me. Thick of tongue, heavy handed, heart-pounding, I am smitten, thoroughly lost…the dark rocks below, the slow-motion wave breaking upstream; the smooth inviting tongue, its tip and edges sharply calm; the white froth, the plumes, the clouds floating just above the torrent; the spray rising from dark green transparent caves and tunnels…I inhale slowly, breathing in the air and the sunshine, the water and the walls, the skyline, the wet dancing darkness before me…happy to lose myself in the rapid below…
…I might as well be standing beside a splash dam, the logs shooting out the open gate, with a peavey pole in my hand and a hard hat on my head.The growl of the river, the groaning of the logs against one another, the sound of boulders moving along the bottom of the dark muddy river…My heart pounds as I step onto one of those floating logs…balancing, riding, turning over the water…like a dance…my job is to keep the log drive moving down river, to avoid jams and crackups. And not fall into the river. To do so, to slip into the dark crevices between the logs, is to invite injury, if not death. I can smell the sea air blowing in from the coast, that fragrant mix of the ocean and forest and the farms downstream…I am part of a fraternity…Working men, trying to earn a living, practicing a rough craft…on the river.
Believe it or not, they called themselves “river rats” in those days. I wondered, if the young environmentalist had been born in that time and that place, would he have heard the fierce music of a splash dam? Or seen the damage of men’s handiwork downstream. A bit of both, I imagine.
Vince Welch