AMERICAN AQUATICA

Grief, Awe and Power at Bonneville Dam

My mom passed away a few weeks ago, and one day afterwards while I was sitting at home, my son came over to brighten my spirits by taking me to Bonneville Dam, our favorite local engineering marvel.

We are big Gorge Heads. Whenever he is back in town, we dart around the various waterfalls, bridges and byways of the Columbia River Gorge, from Cascade Locks to the Vista House to Larch Mountain. On the Washington side, the views are equally plentiful, and somehow sunlight takes on a slightly different hue there: the rays are just as golden, but the blue sky is more emphatic and the verdancy quotient explodes. I can’t explain it. It’s as though Bridge of the Gods links two separate-but-equally-numinous biomes.

The dam always provides an education. The boy and I are drawn to it through our genetics and family mythology. My grandfather started as a custodian at a gravel company before eventually taking full control of the company and leveraging its assets to help build the electrical infrastructure of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The boy inherited this ancestral DNA more than I did. He is a shape rotator with supreme spatial literacy. He’s taken that acumen and transformed it into an aviation career, allowing him to fly Cessnas over our beloved Gorge, where the visual splendor of the dam can be seen from dramatic heights.

Back on the ground, the visuals confront you, less as scenery and more like force: controlled crashing water, turbines, locks, an overhead crane. Fluorescent light in the generator hall, Old Glory waving in various locations. A powerhouse, an American machine in the maw of industrial power. The American spirit pulses through everything. Sentient patriotism; I dare anyone not to feel it.

Civic grace gives way to ancient aquatica on the Oregon side. There lie lamprey tanks, where the dam experience takes on a completely different register. Prehistoric beasts with suction-cup mouths float around in green water and particulate, a direct contrast to the hydro-modernism of the machine around them. They are the spirits of the old river, pressed up against the glass. A nearby fish hatchery is home to a massive sturgeon named Herman.

Back on the Washington side, the visitor center holds its own sort of strange appeal. I’m always a sucker for visitor centers, ranger stations, and trailheads, with a particular favorite being the Wild Rivers Interpretive Center in Florence, Wisconsin.

So the time-warp aspect of the dam’s Washington-side visitor center is of course like catnip to me. Completed in the super-liminal year of 1981 — when all the world was an Alan Parsons song and all datelines traced back to Omni magazine — the facility is lined wall to wall in saturated color and flanked by brutalist concrete. Pure visual glory — cobalt, magenta and transcendent orange, contained by yellow trim. A federal dream room, with fish.

The hallways and staircases bring visitors upward from the dam’s out-of-time waiting room. A portal between nostalgic river-management civics and the hydroelectric colossus that sits outside among the firs, gorge newts, and eagles. It stirs up that ancestral DNA; my grandpa spent years building infrastructure in his own right.

Happy Fourth of July to everyone.