Working At The River Port

By Judy Davis

Written en plein air at Pebble Beach, Stevenson, Washington

Water laps at the shore, just as it did in the days when steamships brought mail, goods, passengers, and excitement to this river town. Today the cruise ship dock is empty. There are no kiteboards, sailboards, canoes, kayaks, or other watercraft on the river. There’s little wind, and it rained earlier in the morning. The tourist economy is off to a slow start.

The Sysco truck idles as the driver unloads food at The CXXX Bar and Grill. Staff readies the deck for the noon crowd.

Cars fill the lots around the tan and green Port of Skamania County buildings, once incubators for small businesses, but now largely filled by Insitu spilling over from its facilities in Bingen and White Salmon. A UPS driver unloads big boxes at a loading dock. Large wooden shipping crates stamped “Insitu” sit inside a chain link fence.

Cordwood was once an important commodity in this town. Large steamships burned four cords of wood each hour. That’s four stacks, each one 4 feet wide, 4 feet tall, and 8 feet long. The thick forests around here were denuded to fill the voracious appetites of the steamships. Barges powered with sails hauled 100 cords of wood at a time upriver to The Dalles where trees were scarce because steamships needed to refuel often whether the nearby land had trees or not. Men earned their living in sweaty, dangerous work—sawing, splitting, stacking, loading, and unloading cordwood.

Today people sit at computers to design and engineer unmanned aircraft. Sweat doesn’t seem to be involved in this sort of work. Neither does the river lapping at the shore.