How a River Was Tamed to Serve the American Dream

For 20 million years, the Columbia River went its way, thundering and meandering 1,242 miles from a mountain lake in British Columbia into the Pacific.

The Wanapum, Klickitat, and Yakima Indians, treated the Columbia’s salmon-rich waters as sacred.

Then, as the July issue of Outside tells the story, white settlers arrived in the Pacific Northwest, and the Columbia “began serving a myth of a different sort: The American Dream.”

Here in Southern California, where our rivers are filthy concrete canvases for graffiti artists, it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the mythic power of free-flowing water. Not long ago, when word got out that the Columbia was spilling fresh water into the sea, an L. A. City Council member called it a sin.

But Outside makes a strong case that folks everywhere--even Angelenos--have a stake in renewing their reverence for rivers.

In “The Beautiful and the Dammed,” Robert E. Sullivan journeys into the heart of darkness of riparian rights, following the Columbia from its mouth to its source.

The accompanying photographs, overlaid upon a map of the river, tell the story. Computers, dams, dikes and valves now attempt to duplicate what glaciers and clouds alone once did: balance the complexity of needs a river serves. But the users no longer are just fish and bears.

Now technocrats carefully raise and lower reservoir levels behind 130 dams in the Columbia and its tributaries to accommodate folks loading nuclear reactors into submarines and yuppie board-sailors who have flocked to the Columbia River Gorge.

Fish ladders at each dam are made to accommodate spawning salmon. But by some accounts, a full 90% of young salmon die before they make it back to the ocean--except those delivered by barge, which are unable to find their way back up the river to spawn.

There are some rather quixotic plans that might return the Columbia to a more natural state. But the story’s undercurrent is that other rivers can still be saved. An accompanying article by Mark Gained surveys threats to what he calls the country’s seven most beleaguered water systems, including California’s.

Also, in its July issue, Sacramento Magazine scrutinizes the pleasures and problems of that area’s rivers.

REQUIRED READING

* One in three Americans will eventually get skin cancer. The deadliest skin cancer, malignant melanoma, is the most common cancer among women 25 to 29 years old. The death rate for men over 50 from melanoma is increasing faster than for any other cancer. The August issue of Life reports on the good and bad news about sun exposure and throws in some ugly color pictures of the little monsters summer can produce: melanomas.

* Lt. Sherry Kiyler, boss of the Phoenix police department’s homicide detail, thinks she may be the only woman to head a murder squad in a major city.

Laura Greenburg’s rambling profile of Kiyler, in July’s Phoenix Magazine, is weakest when it hammers the what-a-gal angle. It’s strong when giving insight into the lives of homicide detectives and the management style of a good cop.

One afternoon, for instance, the detectives working on the murder of a pizza delivery woman, toss off a “never” list for their families: “Never let them work in a convenience mart. Never let them work pizza delivery. Never let them work any delivery . . . . “

* With faults from Joshua Tree to Barstow jiggling like slabs of Jell-O, rumors of The Big One are popping up again. But how big is big?

Probably not nearly as big as predictions would have it, says Jay Mathews, writing in the July 27 issue of The New Republic. The 1980 Federal Emergency Management Agency report, upon which many estimates of cataclysmic death and destruction are based, is shaky at best, he writes. The death rate will probably be far less than some predictions.

Aside: In a classic case of bad timing, the aforementioned Outside lists wobbly little Joshua Tree among its “next wave of dream towns.”

RIOT READING

Two new magazine discussions of L. A.’s riot offer a striking study in contrasts. Crimebeat (“the newsmagazine of crime”) offers a cluster of articles from various Establishment perspectives. Most interesting is a timely re-examination of the book, “The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System.”

In an interview with Crimebeat, author William Lee Wilbanks defends the findings of his controversial 1987 study, which said that, conventional wisdom aside, cops, judges and jurors are largely colorblind when handing out justice--or injustice.

Wilbanks goes on to decry the backlash against the system by people who see it as racist:

” . . . I think the message that goes out to certain groups is, ‘Why don’t you go out and attack the real enemy--the white people?’ It’s an incredibly racist message; it’s a message to redirect your crime.”

Not surprisingly, The Source (“the magazine of hip-hop music, culture and politics”) has a different take. If rap is the CNN of the disenfranchised, The Source is the hip-hop nation’s bible. Senior Editor James Bernard used that cachet to get to the heart of street thinking about “the Rodney King Rebellion.”

His report is far and away the most insightful examination of the gangsta role in what happened and the tenuous gang truce--which, he points out, was in the works long before the verdict.

Most readers will probably find Bernard’s blunt discussion--and apparent embrace--of many young gangsters’ newfound revolutionary fervor more unsettling than the simplistic pap about the gang truce often reported in the mainstream press.

It may also befuddle uninitiated readers. At one point, for instance, a Crip named Li’l V, takes Bernard aside and says, in all seriousness, “We’re not Crips anymore; we’re CARIPS . . . California Revolutionary International Pistolslingers.”

Bernard asks him what he wants from life.

“We want to drive Benzes and Rolls and own big homes and things like that,” Li’l V says.

Still, in Bernard’s view, “even in light of the rebellion’s glory and splendor, the budding cease-fire between--and among--the Crips and Bloods was even more dramatic and inspiring . . . “

If the killing does indeed stop--black on black, black on white, white on black, Crip on cop, cop on Crip--he’s absolutely right.