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Woody Guthrie – Grand Coulee Dam* * * * *
In 1941 the Bonneville Power Administration hired one of America’s great folk singers, Woody Guthrie, to write songs about a river he knew little about and had only recently seen. Yet, in only a few months, he proceeded to record more than a dozen of the most lasting and evocative ballads ever written about the Columbia River.
Guthrie was no nature writer, though. These were not songs about the natural beauty of one of North America’s major river systems, whose course snakes through British Columbia, Washington and Oregon before it empties out into the Pacific Ocean. Although the river’s beauty is mentioned in almost every song, these were really songs about dams, about power, about industry and, most of all, about workers. In this song, for instance, the Columbia is a “wild and wasted stream” whose potential lies in powering factories and flying fortresses being sent off to fight Nazi Germany. In ‘Talking Columbia River’ Guthrie is even more equivocal, signing about a river “just going to waste” while “folks need houses and stuff to eat, and the folks need the metals and the folks need wheat. Folks need water and power dams. Folks need people and the people need the land.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone talking about rivers “going to waste” these days, especially with our current knowledge of how big dam projects on the Columbia alone have destroyed salmon stocks, displaced thousands of Native and non-Native residents, and caused untold damage to other plant and animal species in flooded areas. But, coming out of the Depression, Guthrie’s faith in progress becomes somewhat more understandable. These are songs about hoping that things will change. While the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams were never intended as socialist enterprises, they did represent the possibility of a new type of development, with the state building and taking control of major power generation projects while, in the process, providing jobs and new opportunities. While their potential to democratize the economy of the Pacific Northwest was never realized, with most of the power feeding into the giant military industrial corporations that dominate the region’s economy, it’s hard to blame Guthrie for being optimistic.
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Near Castlegar – Sweet Kryptonic Blue* * * * *
But, on my recent trip back to the town I grew up in, which sits along the Canadian side of the Columbia where it meets the Kootenay River, I wasn’t thinking much about Guthrie’s Columbia. While I was swimming in two creeks and two lakes that drain directly into the Columbia - not to mention the river itself - I was thinking less about progress and work than I was about cold fresh water, tiny fish swimming around my feet and the ways in which I could somehow quit my current life and find a job that involved swimming every day in lakes and creeks. Even the dams I drove by on the way to various swimming holes seemed like extensions of an overwhelmingly pleasant landscape - the giant concrete structures there since long before I was born, neither particularly offensive nor beautiful. No, unlike Guthrie I think that, if I had to write a song about the Columbia River and what it meant to me in a larger sense, it would probably be instrumental and would definitely be long.
[buy
Woody Guthrie/
Near Castlegar]
