“When I first took my job,” King said, “my friends were like: ‘What’s a slough?’ And when you look it up in the dictionary it says swamp.” And you’ve got to help us clean it up,’” she saidĪ shopping cart protrudes from the Columbia Slough on June 22, 2023.įor years, the slough has been the unwanted stepchild of Portland’s waterways. loud enough for officials to listen, ‘Hey, this waterway is in our backyard. Heather King, executive director of the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, said that’s when people who called the area home - many of them lower income or from historically marginalized communities - found a voice. But the cleaning didn’t start in earnest until the 1990s and 2000s. People generally stopped dumping things into the slough back in the 1970s. At the Whitaker Ponds stretch, you can see fish, insects, herons and plants in crystal clear water. Various cleanup efforts along the slough have paid off. Marginalized communities find their voice Taylor’s operation is really just him buying trash bags and taking part in the SOLV Adopt-a-River program. That’s how I fund my operation, with the cans.” Over the last three years, Taylor has kept a spreadsheet of everything he’s collected: “I’ve pulled out 150 tires, 65 propane tanks, 650 needles, 5,000 cans. Paul Taylor piles his collected trash where the SOLV Adopt-a-River program will come to pick it up, on June 22, 2023. “I figure it’s the dream of every piece of trash on Cornfoot Road to make its way into the slough and out to the great Pacific trash patch,” he said. If you’ve ever seen a guy in Northeast Portland schlepping a kayak on a bike, that’s probably Taylor. “The only drawback to it was there was so much trash in the water and along the banks that it didn’t really feel like a pleasant experience,” he said. But drivers can catch a glimpse on their way to the Fazio Landfill, Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant or Portland International Airport.īut when Taylor went kayaking, he was amazed by some of the beautiful hidden spots he found. Nowadays, the waterway is largely hidden by a row of cottonwoods. In the 1900s, farmers dug dikes, draining the land and creating the slough. The slough used to be a marsh, where Native American tribes hunted. It’s a 19-mile stretch of water that strings together some of Portland’s most polluted industrial sites. When COVID hit, retired programmer Paul Taylor decided to kayak the Columbia Slough.
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