Voyage of a Summer Sun: Canoeing the Columbia River

by Robin Cody, Robin Cody (Afterword)

Overview

“The story is the Columbia River, not the canoe and me, but I’ve learned that friends can’t hear me tell about the river until they know why I was out there. This is not an adventure story, though some adventure was unavoidable, and I didn’t set out to find myself if I could help it. Nor did I launch the trip with a large point to prove. It was a voyage of discovery, and its telling is the uncovering of surprise on a river I thought I knew…” —Robin Cody, from the prologue

On a June morning in 1990, high up in the Canadian Rockies, Robin Cody pushed his sixteen-foot Kevlar canoe through tall grass and mud to launch it on peaceful Columbia Lake, the nominal source of the river that heaves more water into the Pacific ocean than any other in North or South America. For the next eighty-two days, Cody would portage massive dams and revel in the rapids as the great river plunges 2,700 feet in 1,200 miles before reaching the river’s mouth in Astoria.

Cody’s canoe sneaks up on the bear and moose and raptors and beavers who make a living on the Columbia. He drops in on riverpeople: the trapper, the wind surfer, the archeologist, the lock operator, the native woman who grew up at riverside in a dwelling of tule reeds. With a generous and infectious spirit, Cody draws us into the mysteries of a much-altered and regulated river that is still, at heart, a life-giving place.

This first OSU Press edition of Voyage of a Summer Sun—winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award and the Oregon Book Award, and an Oregon State Library choice for “150 Books for the Oregon Sesquicentennial”—includes a new afterword by the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870716614
Publisher:	Oregon State University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Series:	Northwest Reprints
Edition description:	1, Series: Northwest Reprints. First published by Knopf, 1995
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Oregon native Robin Cody is the author of Ricochet River, which also appears on the Oregon State Library’s “150 Oregon Books for the Oregon Sesquicentennial” list, and Another Way the River Has. He lives in Portland.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Where Things Come From 3

Headwaters to Golden: The River Awakening 13

Golden to Redgrave Canyon: Bear-Scare and Water-Fright 31

Kinbasket Lake: He Saw What Was Coming 47

Mica to Revelstoke: Loon, Rain, and Oompah Music 67

Arrow Lake: This Is Why You Did It 83

Free-Flowing River: Keep the Wet Side Down 101

Lake Roosevelt: We Were the People 119

Grand Coulee: A Man Has No Idea 137

Change a Big River: Rattlesnake, Milfoil, and Carp 155

'Nchiawana, Columbia: We Live in Two Worlds 173

Hanford: Nobody Knew What We Were Doing 193

Turning for Home: This Is Our Mother, This Country 211

East Gorge: Still in the Brown Country 229

Celilo: She Who Watches 245

The Urban Waterway: To a Clearing in the Wilderness 265

The Pull of Tide: So Big and Soon 283

An Afterword 303

Editorial Reviews

A spellbinding journey into the heart and soul of the West… Humorous, meditative, powerful, this work holds the reader like a magical eddy.” -Craig Lesley, author of The Sky Fisherman




“The book Huck Finn might have written if he’d had the chance to canoe the Columbia River instead of rafting the Mississippi…” -William Wharton, author of Birdy

From the Publisher

On June 17, 1991, Cody launched his 16-foot, 47-pound Kevlar canoe on Columbia Lake, high in the Canadian Rockies. Eighty-two days later, he beached the canoe at Astoria, Ore., completing his voyage on the Columbia River. Cody (Ricochet River) gives a sparkling account of his adventure, interweaving historical detail and natural history with childhood memories of the river. Despite its 14 dams, the Columbia has formidable rapids; its huge reservoirs, buffeted by strong winds, present a hazard to small craft. Day 39 found Cody at Grand Coulee Dam, his halfway point. There he visited an elderly couple who had observed the construction of the dam. As he passed the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, he was startled to see abundant wildlife on the nation's most hazardous nuclear waste dump. Cody notes that in two generations, the Columbia has been shackled and turned to human use; his journey was, in part, to observe both the natural and man-made systems. Readers interested in nature will find this irresistible. Illustrations. Author tour. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Like Ben Bachman's Upstream: A Voyage on the Connecticut River (LJ 2/1/85), this is a well-written account of the land, culture, geology, and history of a river. Cody's three months of paddling streams and reservoirs, portaging huge dams and dodging rapids began as a search for "connectedness-what the river is to what it was." His water-level perspective, though, forced concentration on the present. He describes rather than concludes and does not preach, but he believes that the various changes humans have made to the river have also changed a large part of the world around it. Animals, people, fish, and history mingle with Cody's own background in this pleasurable, personal account from a journalist/author native to the river he affectionately portrays. Recommended for public libraries, especially throughout the Pacific Northwest.-Roland Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale

Library Journal