Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) Part 46: Hwy 22 West Of Salem

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This is kind of a continuation of the feeling I started in the last post, but with a different angle of incidence. How things were to how they are.

After passing the junction of Hwy 22, Hwy 223, and Hwy 99W that has developed over the last 40 years to enable you to bypass the intersection burg of Rickreall so well that you don't have to go through it even if you are trying to get to Dallas from Salem, the highway bents from NW-SE to dead-on E-W and begins the first part of the final approach into Salem from the west across the flat farmlands that dominate the area between there and the edge of the Eola Hills that define West Salem. 

Just like many things I comment on in my roadworthy experience, this was not so remarkably as it is. That is actually a banal observation overworded because I wanted to, but no less true: the interesting thing about Hwy 22 coming into Salem from the west is how it's evolved. The only similar highway I can imagine in form and function is Portland's own Sunset Highway, but that was laid down at one more-or-less fell swoop. It's a full-on freeway. Hwy 22 started out as a local road and evolved that way, and it hasn't finished its evolution. 

Dig, if you will, this picture:

This is along part of that length I mentioned before. Straight on like an arrow from Rickreall to the Hwy 51 junction just west of Eola Bend. Less than a mile to the right as this angle has it, there's a local road called Rickreall Road that winds close to the namesake creek, intersecting 99W just south of 22 at the namesake community. This road used to by Hwy 22, and was bypassed by the road in the picture above, which went in around 1970, give or take a couple of years. 

At the time and for many years after the verges each side of the road were treeless, giving unobstructed views of the fields and farms on either side and the rail line it passed over, but at some time during the intervening 30-plus years succeeding the 1980s someone got the idea to plant these trees, and I did rather enjoy the feeling of going down a tree corridor as we passed through this part of Polk County approaching the metropole. 

The next picture is taken from the car window at a place I like to call Eola Bend: the historic townsite of Eola still exists here and this amounts to the business district. It's the extreme western edge of the incorporated area of Salem, and it's where Hwy 22 finally comes up against the Willamette.

The name on the building reads Eola Inn, because that's what it was as a business and what it is as a landmark. It's been a roadhouse, middle-to-upperbrow supper club, and a outlier to the Rock'n'Rogers chain of un-remarkable painfully-50s burger dives. 

It now appears to be the central building of an awkwardly-arranged used car lot. Never saw that one coming. 

Where The Elite Meet And Greet On The River

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They say Portland's gotten expensive.

Well, look at what gathers on the riverbank these days. Pretty soon, you'll have to earn six figures just to camp out in the park.

Tilikum Crossing: Bridge of the People, meet Big Ol' Yachts: Marina of the Rich People.

The Garden At South Waterfront

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There is a lovely park just off the circle where Montgomery becomes River Drive in the Riverplace nabe; it has lilyponds and colorful flowers and all sorts of botanical niceness.

It makes for great photographs of irises with this great freeway bridge in the background, I'll tell you that much.

I've got a couple of others to share in episodes to follw.

The Tilikum Crossing In Profile

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A most agreeable angle can be had of the Tilikum Crossing (full and complete title: Tilikum Crossing, Bridge of the People) on the walkway along the extension of River Parkway south of the Marquam Bridge.

The cable-stayed span is a rather beautiful design, if only because it resembles a suspension bridge. It's a change to the landscape, and I adore it.

A Most Crook'd Tree

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This is just a tree along the walk down to Poet's Beach along the Willamette in the South Waterfront.

... and it has the most delightfully bent trunk.

The walk down to Poet's Beach is lined with those boxy stones, and some of them have prose and poetry inscriptions by children and indigenous voices. The one there, is by "Amy", a third grader, who observes correctly that A river is a wonderful thing. It keeps the fish from drying out.

The Steel Gray Of The River On A Cloudy Day

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The POV for this one was just above a short stretch of Willamette River left bank in the shadow of the Marquam Bridge called "Poet's Beach", and the color of the clouds reflected on the water caused the Brown Eyed Girl to exult about the steel gray color of the river water.

There are things about our individual worlds that can't compare to others'. For those of us who grew up in the Willamette Valley, the quality of the light here during days like this is like cloudy days nowhere else in the world; little wonder a great many of us act like Oregon (and particularly northwestern Oregon) invented the cool, cloudy day. But there's something to it, outside of parochial chauvinism; at least one of the actors in the series Grimm mentioned that the particular light of our area gave the production a certain feel it couldn't get elsewhere, like it was a character unto itself.

So, we get steel-gray rivers under torn, cloudy skies like nowhere else in the world, really, and it's not really an idle boast. This sort of light is the light that brings artists from elsewhere.

The Bridges Of Multnomah County

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A look north, downstream of the Willamette, showing the several bridges that unite the core of Portland. The big one, up front, is the Marquam Bridge, the one that carries I-5 over the river, and the trusses of the Hawthorne is clearly visible, but even though one can see bits of the Morrison, Burnside, and Steel, they obscure each other and you can see only hints of them.

I've always adored the Marquam. It's got a graceful arch to it and the way it gracefully swings between the west bank and the east bank, doing its job without bragging, and largely unappreciated for it. 

But I think it's gorgeous.

Downtown Portland Sans Tillkum Crossing, April 2010

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I wasn't thinking of or looking for another picture of Portland's skyline or any sort of throwback action but I was inspired to go back and look through some very old photos ... I mean ViviCam 3705-years-old ... and I couldn't hold back from sharing this.

This is a photo taken in April 2010, on a gray, misty day, of the downtown Portland skyline as seen from the very east end of the Ross Island Bridge. It is notable for what isn't there: there are a number of buildings that are here now that aren't there then, but the big thing that isn't there would be down in front now.

The thing that's missing is, of course, the Tillikum Crossing bridge, which would be between the photographer's POV here and the Marquam Bridge. This is one of those photos I referred to earlier: there are locations that are no longer possible to get the same photo because of the development that has happened here in the last 20 years, things that have fundamentally changed the look and atmosphere of the Rose City. Buildings that now exist where once there was open space, and massive new constructions that have interposed themselves between a still-accessible space and the thing one once went to that place to observe.

I'm thinking it's past time I got an updated downtown skyline photo. Not just of my favorite angle, from the top deck of that bridge there in the photo, but also an update of this one, from the east end of the Ross Island Bridge.

A View Through The Bridges

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Another view upriver from my Steel Bridge viewpoint. 

I didn't get precisely the view I was hoping to - I don't know if such a thing is achievable - but I did get zooms that, if not calendar for frame-worthy, certainly have interest, as far as I'm concerned.

The view is, again, looking south, or upriver. What's in full view is the bascule leaves of the Burnside Bridge's lift span, and what is in view through there are truss approaches to the Morrison, with the glimpse of the Hawthorne through that. The towers in the distaance are the condo silos of the South Watherfront.

The thing I really want to draw attention to are the two 'conning towers' on either side of the Burnside's draw span. They are lovely and quaintly decorated and look very pretty up close. Anyone gets down there, please give them a lingering look. They are visually very delightful.

This Way To The Willamette Greenway

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This rather mundane-looking sign shines a light on several things, all of them very Oregonian indeed, some of them revealing our state's character, who we think we are, who we want to be, and how far we have to go to get there.

On the south side of Lloyd Blvd as it curves north to go under I-5 and meet up with Oregon Street by the Steel Bridge is this marker sign:

The things on this sign compel me to issue a prolix explanation, since these are very Oregon, very Portland things. And I like to do this, so here goes, as close to thumbnail as I can get.

The logo at the top says Willamette Greenway. This is a Very Oregon Thing, as it speaks to what's becoming a multi-generational ambition for a real connection to one of Oregon's defining things. 

Due to an evolution begun in 1913 under Governor Oswald West, when Oregon's beaches were declared a public highway assuring access to all, and culminating in the late 1960s with Governor Tom McCall's Beach Bill making in a permanent part of Oregon's political and social culture. Oregon's beaches are free for all, and open to all. Private parties reserving Pacific beaches to themselves are not The Oregon Way.

About the same people in a position to think about things like this wondered the same thing about another great thing that defined Oregon, the Willamette River. Most of the population of Oregon live in its famous valley, and it's vital to Oregon's business, Oregon's agriculture, and Oregon's famed way of life. Was there a sort of Beach Bill approach that could work to protect the Willamette as well as preserve it for all who depend on and enjoy it?

Out of that thinking came the idea for the Willamette Greenway, which, today, is both a goal to work for (Statewide Land Use Planning Goal 15, to be precise) and a way of approaching public policy about it. As understood by myself, the concept is that of a green space with as much public access as possible down both sides of the Willamette from source to mouth while at the same time preserving and protecting the ecological contexts of the river. 

The picture of public and private ownership of the river and its shores, presumably, is quite different from that of the Oregon Coast in 1913, so we don't have one big public access strip down both sides of the Willamette. What we do seem to have, though, is a river with scenic, almost wild shores and construction set back from it in rural areas, fairly generous access points, and, in city-center Portland, Tom McCall Waterfront Park and the Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade as premiere examples of where it can take us.

The floating walkway and
"Duck's Dock" from near the
Steel Bridge.

The Eastbank Esplanade is Willamette Greenway thinking made real. As pictured in previous episodes, it's a pedestrian access over the riverside railways and accessible ways to get to a wide, paved walkway where joggers and pedestrians can enjoy being up-close and personal with the Willamette; as pictured here, it's a floating walkway (With the boat dock named for late Trail Blazer Kevin Duckworth) in the shadow of the I-5 super-slab connecting that esplanade walkway near the Steel Bridge to the main part of the Esplanade between the Burnside and Hawthorne Bridges. It's open to all, accessible whether or not you're ambulatory, relatively easy to get to, and convivially designed, despite having the West Coast main road at your back. 

It, too, speaks of not what we have but what we hope to have. For a city with a reputation for loving its green spaces to a fault, the presence of this freeway right on the east bank is a heavily dissonant note. Any number of plans over the years have been floated for the removal of what we call the East Bank Freeway and the rerouting of its traffic elsewhere, and here is evident another thing I mentioned: the distance between how we see ourselves and how we want to be here in Oregon. That as well is a thing made real here.

We may yet reach that point where the Oregon we have matches our noblest public aspirations. After all, it took more than fifty years between Governor West and Governor McCall to make untrammeled public access to Oregon's beaches a permanent part of the Oregon edifice. 

Anything's possible if you keep at it long enough.

The Grain Elevators At River Mile 12

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Just north of the Steel Bridge, standing between the Rose Quarter and the Willamette River, is a hulking grain elevator and shipping facility that seems increasingly out of place in the evolving cosmopolitan atmosphere that seems to obtain there.

This has been an active grain-shipping facility for a very long time now. Since approximately 2010, it's been owned by the Louis Dreyfus Company, one of the biggest firms you never heard of. It's glandularly huge in world commodities; chances are, if you eat, it's touched the ingredients in your food at some point along the line. If you don't eat ... well, good for you, you android you.

Also, fun fact? Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she who was Elaine in Seinfeld and the title character in Veep, is the daughter of the late Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, who ran the company for a while. It's a family-owned joint. 

And this is the name I've known it under; working in transportation dispatching as I have, I've known it as the Louis Dreyfus Dock or just the Dreyfus Dock. But that has come to an end apparently, according to the Portland Business Journal, in '19, LDC sold the facility to an outfit called Rabin Worldwide, who buys and sells industrial properties. It'll either remain empty for a while, remain a grain terminal, or maybe suffer the fate of so much of old Portland: redevelopment. 

So that goes.

Fremont, Broadway, and Louis Dreyfus Dock

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This is basically an angle of what you see if you took my viewpoint on 3848 and turned 180 degrees.

The red truss is a part of the Broadway Bridge, and the great arch beyond is an irregular visitor to this block, the nearly-iconic Fremont Bridge. The Louis Dreyfus grain elevator is there on the left, and beyond the bridge the boutique condo district that NW Portland has become gives way to what remains of the working port district on the Willamette's right bank.

The grittiness of the area lives on as an echo, but that's getting attenuated as the money comes in. And so it goes. 

The Blue Heart Of Portland

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Looking south from the vicinity of the Steel Bridge is looking up-river along the Willamette, in the reach that extends through Portland's veriest city center. There are many bridges and so very many new buildings, most of which you see in this shot did not exist fifteen years ago (again, same planet, different world ... Saint Ursula was prescient in a way).

On the right, downtown; on the left, the burgeoning central east side. Going from foreground to background we see, in whole, the Burnside Bridge, and in parts: the Morrison Bridge, the Hawthorne Bridge, the Marquam Bridge arching above them all, and if you look sharp, one of the towers of the Tilikum Crossing. 

And this is Portland's Blue Heart. 

Willamette River Close-up at the Steel Bridge

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The zooming in to make the bridge frame the glimpses of city beyond is always a bit of an irresistible compulsion to me, as is bumping the color up a little.

It's the struggle between fidelity to reality and fidelity to memory; the colors may be more vivid than they were in reality, but they're exactly as vivid as they are in memory. And the satisfaction in devolving the shapes in the girders and the structures they frame by disconnecting them from what they connect to in the greater sense, that makes them make more sense, and making them a more abstract thing is something I also cannot turn away from, and it's satisfying

.  For information's sake, the red truss over the river beyond the supports to the Steel is part of the Broadway Bridge, and the small blocky apartments was once known as McCormick Pier, though it may well have changed its name. Everything down in that area of town has. 

Even the graffiti seems to support the artistic view of the place.

The Bulk Ship Corio Bay Departs The Willamette

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I did say it was as working river, this harbor. Here, now is a bulk ship leaving the Willamette and entering the Columbia for, we're presuming, points west (actually, subsequent checking of VesselFinder.com revealed it was headed for Nanaimo, BC).

This is the good ship Corio Bay.

It sounded a large, booming sound as it proceeded out of one river and into the other, then languidly sailed downstream the Columbia, toward Astoria, and at that speed, it would have made it there that evening. VesselFinder reports that the ship is still at Nanaimo.

VesselFinder also reports that the ship sails under the flag of Hong Kong, but the foretop sports Old Glory, also a maritime flag that is half red, half white:

The Brown Eyed Girl wondered aloud what that meant, so I endeavored to find out. That particular maritime flag says, in International Code of Signals-speak, I have a pilot on board, so the Corio Bay was getting river-pilot assistance to navigate the inland waters of the Columbia. What a life that must be ... there isn't anyone I don't know, including myself, who's wondered about going on that adventure at one time or another in their lives. 

Where Two Great Rivers Meet: Kelley Point

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Here we return to the recent present, a few days back on our lark to Kelley Point. This is where the mighty Willamette gives its all to the even mightier Columbia. 

To the left of that line of small pilings stretching out to that marker, Oregon's Willamette river; beyond the end of that line, stretching into the distance and off to our right, the mother river of the Pacific Northwest, the Columbia. 

On the left there, that grove of trees is the southeastern-most extent of Sauvie Island, Belle Vue Point. The indigenous name for the island is Wapato, and, at about 33 square miles, it's the largest river island in the Columbia and one of the largest in the United States.

The far shore is in the state of Washington. 

You are on the edge here in multiple ways.

The Steel Bridge, April, 2010

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This was taken the same day the previous entry's was, too; end of April, 2010, this being Portland's venerable Steel Bridge as seen from the parking structure at NW Naito Parkway between Couch and Davis. Beyond that, the Louis-Dreyfus grain dock. 

The framing of the picture probably means that you could take the same shot and it wouldn't look terribly different.

Holgate Slough, Corbett and California

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Most of the photos I've been exploiting over the last few instalments have been from the picture-taking expedition to the wilds of South Portland. The ideal viewpoint we located was the intersection of SW Corbett Avenue and California Street ... that's where the big downhill grade begins.

It offers gifts in more than one direction, though, it must be said. As witness:

What you can see from there is the Willamette, where it widens out to encompass Ross Island and Hardtack Island, two large gravel bars that would eventually be tied together at the south end to provide a lagoon for Ross Island Sand & Gravel to quarry for all those years. That charming floating home community is lined along the side that becomes what is called Holgate Slough. Of particular note is the blue building perched on the bluff overlooking the river, in the upper right of the frame. The mural on it is famous and the target of many a fellow amateur photog and blogger, and it's on the back side of Wilhelm's Portland Memorial Funeral home. It's reputedly the largest mural in the United States of America.

We journeyed to this corner of town to find street blades with the new South directional; we found none (though those odd brown blades in the South Waterfront continue to annoy in more ways than one). We expected something since the City o'Portland is apparently locked and loaded to run out and slap a decal on all suitable blades and then replace those that need replacing, but nothing. Nada one. So despite the City insisting this be a problem and fixing it nonetheless, we can still go out there and pretend to the preferable reality that it didn't happen. However, looking at the weathered blades at the corner, it's still a known thing that they went from merely worn to instant antiques. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Bridges Through Bridges On The East Bank Of The Willamette

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Let's go back the air of 2014 to see what we were doing then.

Me and the Brown Eyed Girl went down to the east bank of the Willamette, which is probably a place we should visit a little more often; you get great views of the west bank and the downtown skyline is always photogenic.

This time I decided to let the sightlines and points of view do the work for me. The result is that looking through the approaches to the Marquam Bridge at the Hawthorne Bridge and the Justice Center across the river becomes something that is at once identifiable and abstract, and since I was able to get the picture with no other people in it it actually becomes a little other-worldly.

No other large town on the Willamette gives one a view like this. Portland seems to belong to its river more than Salem and Eugene and Albany and Corvallis do.

I can't be the only one for whom sightlines in this town inspire one to wrought indulgence in text. Ah, well.

[pdx] Sellwood Bridge: We Love Our River

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The river traffic was fairly bustling this day in 2017.

There's a line out of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, after Dr. Haber begins toying with reality via George Orr's dreams. He's in his new office suite, overlooking Portland and the river, and Heather Lelache has just witnessed, with knowledge, Orr's dream rewrite the reality of a 21st-century, overbuilt, overpolluted Portland into the Portland that's more like it was back in the 70s, and Haber relates how he, in the new reality, came out to Oregon, and the thing that stuck with me from that scene was the line:

The ecosystem out here was still fairly intact.

And that came to mind as I looked out and saw the blue sky and the water of what was once one of the most polluted rivers in America, the Willamette, a river that's all Oregon's, and that we are as proud of to have as we are proud to be able to pronounce it correctly.

The Willamette is a pulchritudinous river along her entire length from Eugene through Salem to Portland, but it attains a certain mightiness north of Willamette Falls. Not only that, it's influenced by ocean tides ... there's a gentle tidal bore that causes the river to go up and down from the mouth all the way up to the falls at Oregon City.

I was skeptical, then me and my wife spent an lazy afternoon watching the water rise off Sellwood Riverfront Park. Then I was just boggled. Still am.

There wasn't just pentiful fun craft frolicking on the river, but there was some serious work going on under the bridge as well. This crew seemed to be doing some sort of maintenance on the bridge pier:

Men with hard hats on the barge, marine industrial equipment of every description, but it was the bubbling coming up near the top of the picture that intrigued me the most.

Wondered what they were doing down there. Still do.

Meanwhile, Maria kept everything snug and in place. What a cute little boat she is, too.

We love our river.

We're positively ... ah, Chipper about it.