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About The west shore. (Portland, Or.) 1875-1891 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 1, 1880)
October, 1880. THE WEST SHORE. pool. We climb this rock- ledge, scrambling through brush and fern drenched from the flying spray of the fall. The little space is soon traversed and we stand in front of the Mult nomah Fall. A blufT eight hundred feet high, more than perpendicular it overhangs ; a long row of frightened looking pines j a deep, dark cavity, like a volcanic crater ; a black pool ; and then stretching all the way from that sunny-edged bluff to that black pool, a band of spray as white as snow and soft as wool. The creek comes reluc tantly to that frightful jump-off, and as we look away up that eight hundred feet, it seems as if the bright waters rear back, till urged from behind, it can no longer hesitate, but hurls itself sheer through the air, a shower of pearls and foam, and drips with gentle patter into the pool beneath. There are no rainbows, for the sun never shines there. The grass and shubbcry, pale and sickly, seem to peer anxiously around for more light. Hut it is the native home of the moss. In long pendants or dense cushions, it sways and quivers as the spray whirls by it, or the cold wind from under neath the Fall flics over it. Gentle in its tumult, beautiful in its grandeur, soothing in its wildncss, and bright amid its perpetual gloom, we hang this picture in the brightest light of memory's gallery. Multnomah rail fairly inaugurates the wondrous panorama. We cannot begin to tell of the water-falls and rock-falls ; how the seething lava stif fened, and the moss and (lowers strove to hide its shaggy bareness; how now, ages after, we find human habitations set amid those volcanic memorial how now, amid that rumble from the underworld with which the Columbia . chants his conquest of the hills, we hear the shriek of steamer and the sny that this failure In a work which would be of incalculable benefit to the fi'e, is the most beautiful instance afforded in our own State of that grand principle of the "Circumlocution Of fice," not to do it." The road from this point on is a good one. 1 he portion around neu Moun tain must have involved vast labor and patience. We can take but n hurried glance at the Locks and the village of shanties that have grown around them. A grand undertaking is in progress here ; one, let us hope, which will be speedily and efficiently carried out. Hut in this country, where everybody is free but the people, we must wait for he completion of any government job, A broad strip of level land, covered with a dense growth of young tlrs, ex tends for some distance above the Locks, We must glance skyward once more as we nastcn tnrougn tne woods. About five miles from the Locks, while descending a densely wooded hill, we glance southward through a break in the trees, and then stand motionless at the sudden sight. Right before us, looking as though about to fall and bury the whole country, is that stu pendous, but nameless crag, which from fur and near, from steamboat and rail car can be seen to overtop all its rocky brotherhood. More thun three thous and feet up, up, the eye follows the black outline, until it rests upon the dizzying point. We hang this picture next to that of the Multnomah Fall. It is a beautiful thing that this picture gallery of thn mind is so elastic. As we go on, we find room in it for a few large paintings of the blue heights across the river which appear in duplicate in sky and water. We stow away several studies of Shell Mountain, with it broken fingers pointing heavenward and that roar of blasting powder ; how, just op- j dizzy road winding over its downfullcn posite the middle Cascades, our exe crable trail suddenly expands into the Dalles and Sandy wagon road J how we meditate on the unstability of human roads and the uncertainty of appropria tions therefor ; because wc remember that sixty thousand dollars has been given for the purpose of making the said road, and jet it is not half-made. Whether the appropriations proved ubar1y enough for the officers" or not we canitot uy, but we are prepared to the old Egyptian story of Memnnn, how the harp of the statute sounded of itself when the morning sun first touch ed it, we wonder irthcre are not harps sweeter than Mcmnnn's, which sound these rosy-tinged obelisks and temples and pyramids of Nature. ' The ancient harp w.w strung to the "music of tho spheres." That same eternal music rises now from the river flowing seaward and from the winds that pour inland to meet It. Where is there a river like cur river? From the very heart of tho continent it .1 j i comes, waking tne silence 01 vasi prairies, and then echoing buck the newly sounded notes of human industry. It receives cargoes by the hundred from the most fertile of lands, and then laps the barest crags or sweeps tho most desolate of deserts. . Its stately width of miles wanders over the flutest of plains, and there is Imprisoned by walls of adamant in black pools across which we can almost throw a stone. Rising fifty feet in flood-time at the gateway of the mountains, it thunders down the narrow pass as if to tear away tho foundations of tho earth 5 then with ' calm and majestic flow It pusses onward . to the sea. In its fifteen hundred miles of con stant change, it sees all shapes of land and rock which Nature s most fantastic mood could frame. Tho glaring sun and grassy hills of the interior succeed the stupendous snowy mountains of its fur North, away beyond tho British line. To tho rolling hills, succeed the vast and sandy Umatilla plains. 11c low the plains, the riven range of tho Cascades, lava scorched and water worn, llelow the mountains, that two hundred miles of 14 continuous woods" through which our greatest poet lm mortulizcd the name of Oregon, ami beyond the woods tho sea. Lakuk I'otatoks. Mention is made in the Walla Walla Union of nine po tatoes of the White Pearl variety, raised by Mr. Alfred Thomas, on Mill Creek, near Walla Walla, which weighed 18 lbs. We have before u at this writing two potatoes, (Peerless,) from a lot of six, which weighed 16 lbs. These po tatoes were raised by Mr. Talbot, at " Dayton, W. T., and it .is claimed that they were not selected before weighing. pinnacles. And when Hood River is reached and the journey ends, what pictures by the hundred, sky and land, and water, hang there. But the colors into which he who is to place them on canvass must dip his brush, are as yet hidden behind the rainbow. So we have safely traversed the charmed land. As we bid good-by to the river in the early morning, we see that the snow-peak have just caught It meet and drink that is depriving the flush of dawn. And a we recall j many a family of food.