Driving along State Route 4 between Johnson’s Landing and Stella is a happy nostalgic tour for me, one that I shared with my cousin Bob Bell of Naselle last week when we went to Vader to pick out a wheaten terrier puppy.

It’s comforting that along the whole route I’m probably within walking distance of some friend’s house. Vehicle upgrades over the decades make it unlikely I’ll need to, but this wasn’t always true. While living in Altoona in the ’90s I once needed rescuing when my poor little car couldn’t quite make it up the long westbound hills into Cathlamet.

All these place names, plus others like Grays River, Skamokawa and Abernathy Creek, will be unfamiliar to new area residents. But these picturesque backwaters are deeply interlinked by their shared heritage of fishing, logging and farming. My adult life is closely entwined with salmon, so each of the old Columbia villages makes a splash in my imagination as I drive through.

“That’s where my friends Irene and Kent Martin live,” I pointed out to my cousin as we drove through Skamokawa, which was built with all the old houses facing the creek and sloughs from the time when local transportation was by boat instead of car. Founts of experience on contemporary salmon issues and experts on Pacific Northwest fishing history, conversations with the Martins always leave me much better informed. Later this year, we plan to publish Irene’s next book, about the many historic canneries on the Lower Columbia.

Passing over Abernathy Creek makes me grieve again about the premature death of my friend Jack Edwards, one of my early mentors in collecting salmon labels and other talismans of local industry. His garage was an Aladdin’s cave of objects picked from local barn sales, reflecting his enthusiasm about everything from hand-built canoes to first-generation marine engines and outboards.

In the same way, when driving Highway 30 over on the Oregon side, I always recall “Snooky” Barendse when passing through Knappa, and his cheerful joy about finding some fabulously rare local duck decoy.

It’s one of the greatest privileges of being your editor that I get to know good people so well.

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