Spirit of Winter: The Benson Bridge Closure



“For many summers the white water has dropped

from the cliff into the pool below. Sometimes in winter

the spirit of the brave and beautiful maiden comes back

to see the waterfall. Dressed in white, she stands

among the trees at one side of Multnomah Falls.

There she looks upon the place where she made

her great sacrifice and thus saved her lover

and her people from death.”

Ella Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest

Here’s something you can’t get to right now: the splash-pool on the first drop at Multnomah Falls, as seen from the Benson Bridge.

A few weeks ago, rock-fall damaged the iconic bridge, and it has been closed since. It could be Memorial Day before the bridge is repaired and hikers can easily access the multitude of trails above the falls, which include the popular Multnomah-to-Wahkeena Loop, the Elevator Shaft, Benson Plateau, and the Larch Mountain Trail. Except for the loop, these trails aren’t closed, but access is more difficult. As a hiker, I find the lengthy repair incredibly frustrating. As an Oregonian, I consider it an affront. 

The Benson Bridge is a major tourist attraction, and a crown jewel of Oregon. It belongs to the people, and its repair should be a priority.

Frankly, I don’t understand why it isn't. The reason must lie in bureaucracy, and the red tape always attached to regulations governing maintenance and repair of historic landmarks. And while the Benson Bridge is perhaps Oregon’s most recognizable architecture, it’s also made from concrete and rebar. Once the red tape is cleared away, the actual fix should be straightforward and quick. The damage is to the rail and part of the walking surface, and the structural integrity of the bridge is intact and undamaged.

Aside from reopening access to the area’s trails, there are other good reasons to hasten the repair. Two and a half million reasons, in fact. Multnomah Falls is Oregon’s most visited natural attraction, drawing more people than Crater Lake. Not being able to walk up to the bridge is like going to the natural history museum and finding out the dinosaur exhibit is closed. Sure, there’s still a lot of cool stuff to look at. But there are no dinosaurs.

On the other side of the bridge, the trail climbs to a viewing platform at the top of the nation’s second highest waterfall, at 620ft. That trail and viewing platform are effectively closed, unless you hike several miles and descend from trails above the falls.

Yet, the thing that probably irks me the most is the fact that Simon Benson, a lumber baron and philanthropist, donated the land and the falls to the people and state of Oregon more than a century ago. The bridge was built in 1914. That means this is the 100^th anniversary of the Benson Bridge, and it will likely be closed for almost half of the year.

Ella Clark, in Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, relates the story of a Multnomah wedding feast stricken by plague, and saved only through the sacrifice of the bride, after she discovers plague marks on her lover’s face. It’s a beautiful story befitting one of Oregon’s natural treasures, and it resonates all the more now because part of that treasure is denied to us. When the maiden stood at the top of the cliff, preparing to leap, she said to the Great Spirit, “If you will accept me as a sacrifice for my people, let some token hang in the sky.” Just then, the moon rose, and she leapt.

There’s snow in the forecast this week, and the maiden in white will stand again at the side of the falls. What will she think of that silent bridge hanging broken in the sky?

Peering Into Stumps

 

 

Dew and Spiderweb, Silver Falls State Park, Oregon

Taken March 11^th, 2013, with a Nikon P100 (cropped from original).

Used for February in the 2014 Borrowed Times calendar.

 

I have written before about my fondness for stumps. There’s always something going on with them, and I can’t resist looking inside them. This photo was taken at Silver Falls State Park, on a rainy day in March, when very few of the almost one million annual visitors were present. Their litter, however, was left behind, and I cleaned up a ton of trash on the trail. The park service was actively thinning trees while I was hiking there, and trail maintenance prevented access and photography at several of the park’s ten namesake waterfalls. All in all, it was a disappointing day in the woods, and I had to look elsewhere for something resembling “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." I found such an area, and it was in a stump.

I don’t recall what this stump looked like. I believe it was a cedar, not too old, not too big, but there memory fails me. Part of the problem with my memory of this stump is the fact that I didn’t look at it as a whole. Rather, I looked inside it, and on it, and found a spider web that had collected rain in a sheet of drops suspended between a vertical gap in the decaying wood. The web was a net of silver threads anchored to sepia cedar and a veneer of rich green lichen. Rain drops weighed it down, and sparkled, and under them hung odd bits of rotten heartwood that had fallen and been caught in mid-air. As a scene, the web and rain and stump were compact, hidden, and entirely weather-dependent – I happened on it by chance (and a habit of peering into stumps), when it existed in that exact combination of elements, and before the rain collapsed the web, or dripped off the spider silk, or dried up. Of the spider, there is no telling.

Although the web was smaller than the size of my hand, there was room to get the camera underneath the web and shoot upwards towards the rain. Getting the focus right was difficult, and water kept landing on the lens. It took some time, but what else was I out there for?

I quoted above part of the Wilderness Act of 1964, and while Silver Falls is a state park and most definitely not a wilderness, I was happy to find a small part of nature that had not been dominated by man and his works. In that stump, nature went on doing its thing – decomposing, raining, spinning webs, and creating beauty. I took a few moments to appreciate that beauty, and study it through the lens of my camera, and then I walked on down the trail, feeling a little bit more untrammeled by the works of man.



Short Sands, Oswald West State Park, Oregon.

Taken March 25th, 2013, with a Nikon P100.

This photograph snuck up on me. I didn’t realize how much I liked it until months later, well after I got home and had gone through the day’s photographs a few times. I like the oxide bleeding from the black stone, the intensity of the green sea-slime (or whatever it is), and the strange framing and sweep of the rock. I’m drawn to patterns and abstraction in nature, in the way that things line up with wild purpose and yet lack intent. A cliff-face like this one can be hidden in plain sight, simply being the way it is. At Short Sands, the attention is often held by surfers and waves, on the waterfall at the end of the cove, and in the swampy Sitka and cedar rainforest on the cape above. All of those things are active, moving, evolving. Yet, here’s some stone, a splash of color, some zen – slow, dawning, unhurried – and somehow in its simplicity more varied and evocative than the other images I brought home that day.