A story for the switchbacks, told one boot in front of the other on the climb above Benson Bridge. Every foot of this trail, the stone arch below, the whole way up, was laid at visitors' feet by a man most have never heard of. Born dirt poor in Norway and unable to read a street sign when he arrived, Simon Benson grew into one of Oregon's richest men by cutting timber smarter than anyone before him, then spent the rest of his life giving it all away, a hotel, a school, free drinking fountains, and the falls themselves. A stirring tale of generosity that turns a leg-burning climb into a walk through one immigrant's astonishing gift to a whole people, without spoiling the full sweep of what he gave.
Keep climbing — don't you stop on my account, just put one boot in front of the other and let me walk these switchbacks up alongside you a
while. Name's Ranger Boone Merrick. Your legs are starting to talk to you about now, I'd wager, and that's all right. Because every foot of
this trail you're sweating up, that pretty stone bridge you just crossed down below, the whole way you came — a man you've likely never heard
of laid it all at your feet, and never asked a thing back. Let me tell you about him while you climb.
His name was Simon Benson, though he wasn't born to it. He came into this world as Simon Bergerson, in a little valley in Norway, back in
eighteen fifty-one. Dirt poor. When his people finally scraped together the passage to America, they came through with nothing but their backs
and their name — and they traded even the name in at the border for one the clerks could spell, and became the Bensons. Simon was barely more
than a boy. Couldn't read the signs over the shops, couldn't order a meal, couldn't ask the road. Just one more penniless immigrant kid in a
country that didn't speak his tongue.
So what did he do? He went to the woods. Out here in Oregon there was timber past imagining, and Simon Benson set about cutting it smarter
than any man before him. While everybody else was dragging logs to the river behind teams of oxen, slow as a Sunday, Benson laid down little
logging railroads and built steam engines that could winch a fallen giant clean out of the brush all by themselves. And here's the one that
gets me every time. When his logs reached the Columbia, he didn't care to pay a fortune to ship them down the coast — so he built rafts. Not
little rafts. Log rafts the length of three football fields end to end, chained tight into the shape of one enormous cigar, millions of board
feet lashed into a single hull, and he towed them out the mouth of this river and down the open Pacific clear to San Diego. Folks said it
could not be done. Benson did it, over and over, until the boy who couldn't read a street sign was one of the richest men in the whole state.
Now most men, friend, when they come into that kind of money, they build a wall around it and hang a gate in the wall. Not Simon Benson. He
carried a notion — old-fashioned, maybe — that a man ought not die with his fists closed around his money. So he started giving it away while
he was still alive to watch it land. He built a grand hotel in Portland that carries his name yet. He put up the money for a whole high school
to teach working kids a trade. And because he was a temperance man who hated to see a laborer duck into a saloon on a hot day just to get
something cold to drink, he handed the city twenty bronze drinking fountains, bubbling water up free on the street corners. You can still bend
over a Benson Bubbler in Portland today and drink your fill, on the dime of a man gone near a hundred years.
And then there was this gorge. Benson looked at this country — at Multnomah, at Wahkeena just west of here, at this whole green wall of
falling water — and it scared him. Scared him that some outfit might buy it up, fence it off, and charge a man to look at his own waterfall.
So he bought it himself, the falls and the land all around, with his own money. In nineteen fourteen he paid to throw that graceful arch
across the gap below you — Italian stonemasons cut every block of it — so ordinary folks could stand right out over the water in safety. And
then, on a September day in nineteen fifteen, he turned around and gave the whole of it away. Handed Multnomah Falls and hundreds of acres to
the city and the people, free, and forever. Benson Park, they called it.
He wasn't even finished. That very road you drove in on, the old Historic Highway — when the money ran dry and the work stopped cold, it was
Benson who reached into his own pocket. Twenty-one thousand dollars one time. Seventy-five thousand pledged another. Just to keep the powder
and the stonemasons working until that road ran clean through the gorge.
So here is what I'll leave you with, as you round the next bend with your heart hammering in your chest. A poor immigrant boy who couldn't
read the signs grew up and gave a whole people a waterfall, a bridge, a highway, a school, and a cold drink on a hot day — and never once
asked a thing in return. The trail under your boots is his. The bridge below you is his. The view you're climbing toward is his gift — and
yours now, and your children's after you. Some men spend a whole life getting. Simon Benson spent his giving it away, and look what's still
standing. Go on, now. The top's not far, and old Simon would want you to make it.
