CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT – Even before architect Maya Lin took the job, people pestered Jane Jacobsen for clues to what the Columbia River’s ambitious Confluence Project would look like.
“I said I can tell you what it won’t be, I can tell you it won’t be bronze statues of two white guys pointing west,” said Jacobsen, executive director of the project, which coincides with the Lewis and Clark bicentennial.
The project instead is a cohesive effort to commemorate the coming together of rivers, the joining of the Columbia River to the Pacific and the interaction of Lewis and Clark with American Indians.
It fell to an initially reluctant Lin, whose first renown came from designing the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to bring it all together. She chose seven projects along 450 miles of the Columbia River, from the estuary at its mouth through the rocky Gorge and dryland hills to Clarkston, Idaho.
She calls the project “art in progress, and an art in formation.”
“Every site tells us a story of what the place is, from an ecological point of view, from a Native American point of view and also using Lewis and Clark’s words to see this place as it was 200 years ago,” she said.
“I’ve used language as my common thread because I think it is our common thread as a species, to tell a story that will pull the entire confluence project together,” she said at the dedication of the first of the projects at Cape Disappointment on the Washington side of the river’s mouth.
“And then, as always, because I think conceptually I have chosen to pull history, a textbook out (of) their journals into the real space” of the natural landscape.
She paused to note an eagle flying overhead. She recalled otters she had seen frolicking in the estuary, where Lewis and Clark found some 100 species of wildlife, more than in any other place in their 8,000-mile trek.
The centerpiece at Cape Disappointment is a fish-cleaning station Lin designed from a 12-ton segment of columnar basalt she picked from an eastern Washington quarry. It is polished and inscribed with the legend of how the Chinook Indians who inhabited the area came to be.
An old steel structure Lin called remarkably ugly was removed and more of the unsightly, including a parking lot, will follow, here and at other of the seven projects.
In April, when the Cape project is finished, the parking lot will be gone and the fish-cleaning station will be on an arm of land reaching into the bay.
“At one point will be a walkway that will take you directly to the ocean with annotations of the passage westward. Equally balanced will be another walkway made out of crushed oyster shells that will take you into a quiet glade of seven found cedar totems.
“I see it as a sacred cedar circle because it is the sacred wood of the Chinook tribes … and I think I’m doing this in honor of their presence here,” she said of the totems.
On a viewing platform will be an entry from the journal of Sgt. Patrick Gass, an expedition member, who wrote on Nov. 15, 1805, “This morning weather appeared to settle and clear off but the river remains still rough.” He wrote of leaving camp. “Went about 3 miles when we came to the mouth of the river where it empties into a handsome bay.”
This first of the seven projects is heavily tied to Lewis and Clark but not all of them will be, Lin said.
“Some are not, some are very strong,” she said. “I think we’ve chosen sites that are at various times very strong for Lewis and Clark, at times very strong for the tribes.”
While the Lewis and Clark theme is not overpowering, it is one of the links that ties the seven projects together.
Lin said the cape project was one of the most difficult of the seven sites to work with, and the most beautiful.
No work has been done on the next project upriver, at Frenchman’s Bar near where the Willamette River joins the Columbia.
But nearby at old Fort Vancouver, across the river from Portland, will be a vegetation-covered land bridge, an attempt to restore an Indian trail from the fort to the river.
The 40-foot-wide bridge was designed by Seattle architect Johnpaul Jones in consultation with Lin.
Lin plans to restore the plants tribes grew on the riverbank.
“We’ll get rid of this rip-rap,” she said, referring to the boulders on the bank that block erosion. “They won’t be needed.”
“We’re going to be as aggressive as we can be to push back a lot of the roadways. You basically have situations where the automobile has taken over and fractured these park areas.”
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