It didn’t take much to get the glider airborne. The wind was gusting and I was standing hundreds of feet above the ground so a simple forward arm movement and a gentle letting-go propelled the two-ounce balsa projectile on its way … on a flight through American history.

It gently banked and headed in a straight line towards the Columbia River. The Columbia is the largest river on the western continent discharging an average of 265,000 cubic feet of water per second and collides head-on with the power of the world’ largest ocean. It is 1,243 miles long from its headwaters in British Columbia to the Pacific.

The little plane wasn’t losing elevation rather, like an eagle floating on the jet stream, it was effortlessly soaring. And had I been the pilot in its cockpit I, with a bit of historic hallucination, would have been able to look back over 200 years.

The Lewis & Clark Expedition, the Corps of Discovery, was very near this exact place in 1805 in the final days of their epic American journey. They first made land on the Washington side of the Columbia, but the rocky terrain, lack of usable timber and the absence of elk made for weeks of disappointment, so they crossed the Columbia to try their luck on the Oregon side.

Using the little flyer as a time transport vehicle, I saw the crossing, I saw the French Voyageurs of the handmade canoes paddling in exact unison across the Columbia at what was estimated at forty to sixty strokes per minute (as fast as six miles per hour). They could cover fifty to ninety miles a day.

The Americans and Europeans traveling with Lewis & Clark were interlopers. When Lewis & Clark arrived, they found around 400 Clatsop Indians, but further up the Columbia River in an area known as the “Narrows” is a prime fishing spot and one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America – occupied for 11,000 years or more.

An estimated 60-400 million beaver had lived in North American rivers and streams before the arrival of the Europeans, and from my vantage point aboard my glider, well, it was damned obvious. They weighed between twenty-five and seventy-five pounds. The annual salmon run in pre-European times yielded somewhere around 300 million fish each year, 1.8 billion pounds. Combined, this incredible amount of marine life made the living standard of the northwest coastal Indians in many ways superior to the lifestyle of those living in late eighteenth-century London, Boston or New York.

At this point, the almost weight-less glider started to twist and turn and sailed back towards land over present-date Astoria, Oregon, but it kept transmitting stories from the past.

John Jacob Astor, the city’s namesake sent 140 men (some taking an overland route and others traveling by ship) to the mouth of the Columbia River starting in 1810. They built Fort Astoria, the first American settlement west of the Rockies, in 1811. At least sixty-one men died in the attempt, some in the quest to negotiate the four-mile-long sandbar across the mouth of the Columbia River (the Columbia River Bar) which is still one of the world’s most dangerous navigational hazards. It has claimed over 2,000 ships and is called the Graveyard of the Pacific. When John Jacob Astor died in 1848 at age 84 he was the richest American, worth $20 million ($110 billion in today’s dollars) and his wealth accounted for one percent of America’s gross national product.

By now my glider was fading from view and heading toward one of those impossibly unfindable places all such gliders go. As I looked in its direction, an insignificant dot on the horizon, you couldn’t miss the longest bridge in Oregon (and the longest bridge of its type anywhere). The bridge spans the Columbia and links Oregon and Washington, and as my glider dropped to earth I thought about how the miracle of discovery, of human curiosity and determination, has served as a bridge between people since the beginning of time.

I launched my glider, and my imagination, from a concrete cylinder known as the Astoria Column. It takes 164 steps along a steel, spiral staircase to reach the top and all that climbing and all of that historical remembering took its toll, so I had a cigar and a Coors Banquet at the oldest bar in the oldest American town west of the Rocky Mountains.

My hope is that it doesn’t take a national holiday or an expensive plane ride to set one off on a search for America.