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Alumni Sandstorm ~ 12/31/17

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Columbia High School: What's in a Name, anyway?

The Bomber Dust Storm
Published by Club 40
Fall/Winter Edition 2017 - Vol. 31, Issue 1
Pete BEAULIEU ('62)

This being the year 2017, it's the very first year that 1977
graduates from Richland High School can join the privileged
ranks of the remembering and memorable "Club 40." And this
year is doubly special because it also recalls when, thirty
years ago in 1987, the famous folk singer Woody Guthrie's
classic ballad on the Columbia River was elevated as the
"official folk song" of Washington State: "Roll On Columbia,
Roll On". 

	And so, it is with this 1987 honoring of a near sacred
name - Columbia - that all real Club 40 types, new and old,
find cause to lament that the title of Columbia High School
was ever downgraded to the generic Richland High School. Not
even the original name of the town site, this, which for the
first few months of 1905 was first known as Ben-town or
Benton, after the father of one Althea Rosencrance, daughter
of an original town father, Ben. It took only a few months
for postal workers to effect the change to Richland, because
in this case Benton sounded too much like Bentsen in Pierce
County. Pierce County? Likewise, the reason for the more
recent high school name change, it is said, is that postal
workers, again, were too easily confused - and too often
misdirected the mail to the older Columbia High School in the
overshadowing metropolis of Burbank downstream. Burbank! You
just can't find good help these days. What use modern zip
codes?
	For those who remember, and we all do remember,
"Columbia" is more than a name. Columbia is a folklore;
Columbia is a blood stream; Columbia is us. We all have a
story, and I hope this one is evocative enough to serve all.

	One of my earliest memories, in the ambience of the
Columbia River, is one of our family's leisurely Sunday
saunters to the banks of the tributary Yakima River south of
town. In the shade of some ancient poplar trees Dad carved
from some very ordinary and unsuspecting sticks a set of
magic whistles for each of us three boys (myself, identical
twin John, and Tom, older by not quite three years). Toot,
toot, toot! I still can't figure out how he hollowed the
sticks for air flow, but he did, and it was on that day that
I knew for sure that there was not much that Dads cannot do.
Roll on Columbia, roll on...

	It was an idyllic afternoon. Not so much as a light
breeze, but absolute peace. Something like what Wordsworth
(my mother's favorite poet) had in his heart when he penned
his "Intimations of Immortality": "The earth, and every
common sight, to me did seem appareled in celestial light,
the glory and the freshness of a dream... [and ending with]
thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." I still see
myself on another such visit near the same sacred grove,
helping to pick now-wild asparagus. "What is this thing"... a
concrete standpipe amidst traces of shallow irrigation
troughs? "Oh," explained my Mom, "there used to be farms
here, but now they're all gone." "Gone" is an explanation?
Gone? I still recall clearly the dusty and desolate mystery
of that moment - standing on the edge of a boom town, even on
the edge of time, where things are all of a sudden just plain
"gone." Not to worry, though, since a few original "tract
houses" popped up here and there, scattered about in amidst
Richland's cookie-cutter landscape of planned and over-night
mass construction sites. 

	Now the Yakima River feeds into the Columbia which, in
our Alma Mater (before it was edged aside), we sang of as this
"hallowed name," and in the last lyric that "we shall not
forget that lesson [of loyalty symbolized by the River]
through eternity." Probably my first memory of the actual
Columbia comes with "the flood" of 1948. I was four years old
and I was small, and the River was forever and it was big.
Dad had built a row boat in our back yard, and in the very
first launch upstream of "the Y" we weaved among the upper
branches of flooded trees, where the golf course now
entertains newer generations. (The exploited Indian burial
grounds were around there somewhere.) Earlier that same
spring as the waters rose we made weekly trips to the Lee
Boulevard turnaround to read the depth of the water on a
vertical marker. The day came when the water suddenly flooded
everything and was clear up to the base of the high ground
just a few yards east from George Washington Way. All the
trees in Howard Amon Park were sticking strangely out of a
sheet of water. (George Washington? Oh, yeah, in this new era
of amnesia, one or two on the Seattle City Council want to
remove the statue of this dead white dude Washington from the
university campus.) 

	But, back to our ballad for the Columbia. 

	Guthrie had been commissioned to write ballads (he did
twenty-six in all) celebrating Grand Coulee Dam and hydro 
dams, all praising the benefits of hydropower. Slack water,
today, up and down the entire Columbia, all except for the
forty or so free-flowing miles between Richland and Wanapum
Dam (named after a small subsistence tribe discovered in 1942
that had never been hoodwinked into any Indian reservation.)
In the late '50s and early '60s, the seasonal fluctuations of
the McNary upstream pool were most dramatic. Living only a
short walk away, we liked to imagine a touch of Tom Sawyer in
our lives. So, there were things to explore... In the autumn
the muddy river bottom was exposed outward all the way to the
first island. At other times on a crisp and early Saturday
morning, when nature was still asleep, it was possible to
slip undetected through the fog to the river's edge.  In
those days aerial surveillance gave a Columbia River duck
count in the millions. At the north end of Richland the banks
were solid black with mallards. Then, disturbed by our
arrival, the banks themselves seemed to expand out into the
water, and finally the sky was filled with a storm of
quacking ducks headed out to the safety of the second island
upstream. Roll on Columbia, roll on...

	Summer time in those few years gave very high water.
Sometimes logs several feet in circumference, and much else,
were numerous enough to endanger private docks along the way.
In the summer of 1960 the high - ground river road at the end
of Park Avenue (half mile south of the water treatment plant)
was under three feet of water. And at the end of Park Road
some of the clump of black walnut trees is still there,
shriveled from what once was but still surviving. In the late
'50s, when we were still junior high aged students, these
trees were luxurious and it was easy to fill shopping bags
with fallen black walnuts. To help the harvest, we used to
camp under those trees with our Whammo slingshots and supply
of ball bearing projectiles from the Hobby Shop, and shoot
walnut clusters from the branches. Roll on Columbia, roll on...   

	Another water's edge poetic included in the spring
flood was the hunt for confused bottom-feeding suckers
(seen as predators of salmon egg deposits or rheds). On the
second island the rising water created sloughs reaching
inland to higher ground. The sport was for four or five of us
to begin side by side, closing off the deep end, and then at
least waist deep to move inland together, herding maybe a few
culprits into the shallows where with good luck they could be
eliminated. On one such occasion I was armed with a lethal
four-pronged garden spade. From the murk in front of me a
varmint suddenly shot between my legs headed out toward
deeper water. I wheeled about and tossed my weapon as hard as
I could toward where I estimated he might be in two or three
seconds. 

	A good trajectory from release to touchdown, only the
handle grip was sticking vertically out of the water. I
approached. Looking down, there he was unmoving and pinned
dead to the bottom, with one prong buried between the gills
at the back of the head. A perfect shot from some twenty
yards away. Such was my glory on that day on the river. That
evening the TV movie was none other than Gregory Peck in the
classic flick "Moby Dick". I knew in my every sinew by my
rite of passage earlier in the day that I was a worthy
spectator of anything Herman Melville could write about
whaling. Roll on Columbia, roll on...  

	Then there were the White Bluffs as the backdrop
opposite the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, bounding the
opposite side of the Columbia. The Bluffs beckoned for fossil
hunters, and the lower road along the River had not yet been
washed out by later irrigation landslides. In Richland and
only a few houses down from our house, Harold BURGER ('62)
won the lasting admiration and envy of all fossil seekers. He
had uncovered a few authenticated mammoth ribs and possibly
more (the memory fades here). Even on lucky days the rest of
us had to settle for fragments. But, then there's the
expansive westward view from up there... Ten miles to the
west is the treeless Rattlesnake Mountain and about a third
of the way up the east face slumps at a more relaxed angle of
repose. This slumping feature marks the high water mark of
the recurring floods from faraway Lake Missoula during the
final centuries of the Ice Age. For two weeks at a time,
every 500 years or so, the Hanford site was under 800 feet of
rushing flood waters from collapsed ice dams hundreds of
miles away. Other flood evidence is the coulees themselves,
including the Grand Coulee, and the oddly scattered boulders
(called erratics) one sees downstream of what is now the
Wanapum Dam site. 

	Combine the time scale of the fossils concealed in
White Bluffs, and then the floods of 10-20,000 years ago,
and then the modern release of the billions-of-years old
secret energies of the universe in the man-made Hanford
reactors - and suddenly the Columbia High School viewer is
much diminished in space and time. Here's the almost timeless
poetry of some "river" much bigger than the River. Might we
suspect that, for some at least, such a surrounding
desolation helps account for our special sense of high school
comradeship and even the Club 40 thing? Roll on Columbia,
roll on...
	Some twenty years after Dad died (1988) I was able to
take my mother up the River on the swift boat tour of Hanford
from the water. Instead of so many ducks, now there are
egrets and pelicans on the islands. Swallows nest where the
Bluffs drop directly into the water, without so much as a
blade of grass to mark the transition, and with well-fed
predatory hawks nested around jagged corners and out of
sight, only a few feet away. Deer still huddle amidst
scraggly shade trees along the Hanford site river's edge.
Then there's the hollowed shell of the original Hanford High
School. Some poignant personal memories here - only one other
baby was born in the Hanford hospital after my twin brother
and I (that would be Wayne MYERS ('62), with Ed QUIGLEY ('62) as the
first in Kadlec Hospital in early August 1944). Mom had been
raced out here from an incomplete and unprepared Kadlec
Hospital maternity ward in Richland, in a military ambulance
and preceded by a military police jeep with siren wailing the
entire thirty miles. "It was really exciting," she later
wrote to her sister in Illinois, "we must have been doing
sixty!" John and I entered the world twenty minutes later, no
anesthetic, temperature 105 degrees, in sight of the River.
Roll on Columbia, roll on...

	So, what of today and tomorrow, and what's in a name? 

	The Mississippi River folks will forever have Oscar
Hammerstein's lyrics of "Ol' Man River," from the stage play
Showboat: "He keeps on rollin' along..." But to many of us the
incomparable voice of opera singer Thomas Carey can't hold a
candle to Club 40's Columbia River heritage. So, what then of
the neglected name Columbia High School? It is said that "a
rose by any other name would smell as sweet" (from the lips
of Shakespeare's Juliet), and so Columbia High School is
still "Col Hi" by any other name, no matter what the
counterfeit name and its amnesiac lettering above the front
door. Instead, from the Alma Mater, this: "And though we may 
depart / A corner of each heart / Will cherish ever more the 
hallowed name of / Columbia, fair Columbia..."

Roll on Columbia, roll on...

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