An historical photo shows now-vanished waterside structures that were once slightly downriver from the U.S. Quarantine Station at Knappton, on State Route 401 east of the Astoria-Megler Bridge.

I got my 65-plus flu vaccine and the latest covid booster shot last week and encourage you all to do the same. As usual, sore arms were the only side effect, while getting them protects my loved ones and myself from illnesses that are still potentially deadly.

So far, flu is at a minimal level in Washington state and no one has died from it yet this season, but it will pick up during the holidays. One hundred twenty-six Washingtonians have died of covid since Sept. 1, far fewer than during the peak of the pandemic but still a very troubling number. In the latest reporting period, 224 state residents were hospitalized with one of covid’s incarnations, including 21 in intensive care.

Just over 20% of state residents have a current flu vaccination and about 11% are protected by the latest covid booster. (This year’s flu shot appears to be a good match for the strain of the illness that’s most likely to appear here this winter.)

Ancient scourge

Highly infectious smallpox was a real concern when I was a boy in the 1960s. It was our parents’ civic duty to make certain we all got poked in the upper arm, where a weakened strain of the disease tattooed three or four generations of humanity with a telltale pockmark. I’m very happy my pretty daughter doesn’t have to carry around that ugly scar. (Less happy about her several ink tattoos…)

The polio vaccine was still new when I was a boy. We happily lined up in Wyoming Indian Elementary School where we were given little paper cups containing sugar cubes on which a drop of vaccine had been dissolved. My mother Lois — and Uncle Chuck Kley, a Blaine drive-in restaurant owner — were among members of their generation afflicted by this once-horrible disease.

Keeping diseases out

Smallpox and other deadly infections were forcefully brought to mind by reading of the logbook of the Columbia River Quarantine Station, established in 1899.

The quarantine station was set up at a time when commerce flourished between disease-infested tropical ports and the Pacific Northwest. Though they lobbied hard in Congress for a quarantine station, Oregonians in general and Astorians in particular were anxious to keep it at a distance from their homes.

Hence, when Congress finally ponied up the money, the station was placed at Knappton Cove, about three miles east of the Washington end of the present-day Astoria-Megler Bridge, at the site of an old Eureka and Epicure Packing Co. cannery owned by the fabled Hume brothers, who started the salmon-canning industry on the river in 1866.

So far as I know, the station logbook was largely unknown to historians and I donated this essential piece of Pacific County legacy to the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum. It’s full of fascinating details about the ships that came and went on the Columbia from the turn of the last century until 1938, when the station was phased out.

Smallpox was a serious concern for quarantine doctors, along with cholera, malaria, bubonic plague and yellow fever. It wasn’t quite routine for incoming ships to carry disease, but it wasn’t all that uncommon, either.

Standing his ground

One of the most interesting entries in the log has to do with the U.S. Army transport ship Sherman, which arrived from Manila in June 1908 with smallpox aboard.

Believing the entire crew to have been exposed, the station’s surgeon, John Holt, stood his ground against U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft, who was elected president later that year.

“Commanding officer of troops aboard objects to having troops from tropics go ashore in tents and believes station area not large enough to accommodate 1,200 or 1,300. Necessary to disembark before vessel can be disinfected. No housing facilities ashore. Vaccination of all hands begun,” Holt wrote on June 15.

On June 17, he continued “Secy. of War Taft ordered ‘Sherman’ to San Francisco. P.A. Surg. Holt refused to release ‘Sherman’ as Secy. of War has no authority over her, while in quarantine.” Finally, on the 19th, satisfied he had protected the mainland from infection, Holt let all but five of the weary soldiers continue on their way.

Somewhat amazingly, despite his direct defiance of a soon-to-be president, Holt stayed on his job until 1913. (Then again, maybe it was considered punishment enough to be left in a job commuting between Knappton and his home in Astoria.)

Haunting memory

My personal experience of smallpox, however slight, will always stay with me. I had just had the vaccination when I was sent to stay with Grandpa and Grandma Bell while my parents stood by my little brother, who was a risk of dying in the hospital from a kidney infection.

I was a little sick myself from the shot, my arm itched like the devil and the sore produced a peculiar, indescribable sort of odor that combined with the closed-in old person smell in my beloved grandparents’ house to leave an indelible impression. Just to top off the evening, we watched “Phantom of the Opera,” the scary old black-and-white version, on the single channel that emerged from the static on their TV set.

If I were at all inclined to write like Stephen King, that night would find its way onto the pages of a horror novel. As it is, let’s just say I’m very happy smallpox is nightmare of the past. Let’s keep working together to consign other germs to the same fate.