Crossing the Channel
After two weeks in our new riverfront home, with its wide view of Ross Island, Beverly and I decided to see the place up close. It was no longer enough to walk or bike the trails along the bank, looking across the water to the island's cottonwood and ash trees. It wasn't enough to watch osprey nurture their chicks or to scan the treetops for great blue heron and bald eagle nests. We were still outside the view, and needed to break down that distance.
Ross is the main island among a clustered quartet in the Willamette River a mile south of downtown Portland, Oregon. Its 404 acres of land, shaped like a cartoon teardrop, enclose a 130-acre lagoon. The island is home to more than 50 species of birds; shelters otter, beaver, and a few deer; and accommodates migrating Chinook, Coho, and steelhead in its shallow habitats. One primary attraction for us, when considering whether to move here, was being able to witness all this. A reputedly thriving refuge right in the urban core.
But, we knew, it had a backstory. Owned and mined since the 1920s by the Ross Island Sand & Gravel Company, it is still in the process of state-mandated cleanup, of refilling deeply dredged edges, and of restoring terrain and habitat. Though 45 acres were given to the city of Portland in 2007 as a gift by Ross Island's owner, and 6.4 acres belong to the port of Portland, the rest remains company-owned. Sand and gravel are no longer mined there but are brought from other sites in the Northwest for processing even as reclamation takes place. So Ross Island is still becoming the thing we thought we saw from our sixth-floor windows.
On an early August morning, the first cloudy day in weeks, we rented a tandem kayak from a shop in the marina downtown. Then we paddled the mile back south toward our home, resting as we glided past, gazing at its dark windows and waving to where we imagined our cat was watching for us. We'd expected the water to be colder, but it felt like bathwater.
The northwestern end of Ross Island's bank -- the city-owned section -- was littered with bits of driftwood and bleached tree limbs, a tire, rocks, scorched remnants of open fires. Scavenging seagulls mingled with crows, ducks, geese. I saw a hunk of metal -- perhaps an oil drum or muffler. This all looked like any well-used public shore. A white sign we'd seen from our windows but hadn't been able to decipher declared the island a sensitive wildlife habitat.
Upriver, after passing a heron sunk meditatively into himself atop a stump, we glimpsed the lagoon through cottonwoods. No longer public land, from here it seemed quieter, calmer. A small sailboat anchored in an inlet. I used the rudder pedals to bring us nearer shore as we rounded the island's southern tip and turned into Holgate Channel. Here it felt like we'd entered an entirely different waterway. The passage was narrower, osprey clamored in their nests, the water was darker, air cooler.
Then we turned into the lagoon for an eagerly awaited peek since we couldn't see it from home. Maybe we'd even spot the lagoon-side bald eagle nest we'd heard about.
It was as though we'd been transported to the moon or to a post-apocalyptic landscape of monstrous processing machinery, barges crouched in the water, a rim of vast gravel mounds. Here was the heart of the matter, operation central, and it was a blasted vista gone silent that morning. We stopped paddling. Colors were too vivid, surfaces menacing in their poised strangeness. We could look away and see the trees, hear a soaring raptor against the eerie silence, notice signs of returning forms of life, and hold on to hope for eventual restoration. But we were also where business was still being done. Less of it, yes; processing rather than dredging, with machinery moving toward obsolescence. But we would not forget: the Ross Island we imagined remains a work in progress.
Back home, we knew we'd been on deep, deep waters, now just out of sight. We no longer felt distant from what we saw. Soon, settled by our windows, we watched a black barge slowly emerge from Holgate Channel, heading north. It was so large that we thought it might never stop filling the view.
