Hold the Enlightenment (33 page)

Blake Island is a popular park, and there are over fifty campsites, complete with moorings for power craft. The Marine Trail camp is set about half a mile away from the other sites, which didn’t really matter much because there was no one else staying overnight on the island this February evening. I suppose there was a ranger in residence somewhere, but it was as if we had the island all to ourselves. I stood for a moment under the full moon, and stared at the great city glittering in the distance, only three miles away.

Joel burned us a dinner of bean and cheese burritos on his camp stove then wandered off to shoot some time-lapse photographs of the moon over Seattle. It was going to be a strange picture, I thought, with all the planes zipping over the city from Sea-Tac airport. There’d be dozens of radiating rays in the photo, like significance streaks in a cartoon. The image suggested a perspective that was not immediately forthcoming.

Somewhere in the city, I could hear the faint dithering dweep and howl of a police siren, and then I saw the car’s blue and red lights flashing as it raced along a hillside, just parallel to the waterfront. Someone in trouble or hurt. It felt strange to be camping, cooking on a camp stove, and watching a live version of
Cops
.

I listened hard, but lost the sound of the siren in a rustle of leaves stirred by a soft breeze. I was camping damn near in the city limits, on the Cascadia Marine Trail, in the place where Chief Seattle was born, and, on this one particular evening, it was a place dedicated to solitude. A small place, a small thing.

I don’t know about our time of decay, or nations cresting and collapsing like waves on the sand. I do know this: That white guy Chief Seattle? The one in bell bottoms who was out to save the world all at once? That was me, crashing up against the shores of time.

M
ud on the banks of the Missouri River will suck you down to midcalf, pull the boots or sandals off your feet, cling tenaciously to your skin, clothes, canoe, ice chest, and every last thing you own, and then accompany you home and distribute itself around your living quarters and deposit a ring around your tub that appears to wash off and then magically reappears for about a week or seven. The enduring and insistent mire is locally called “gumbo” and is sometimes described as “greasy.” After a heavy rain, the mud extends out miles from the banks of the river. Most of the roads to and from the Wild and Scenic section of the Missouri—which, to confuse matters, is located entirely in Montana—are gravel or dirt, and it’s a simple matter to drop your car axle deep into the gumbo mud, a situation which can be life-threatening along the Missouri at its most Wild and Scenic, an area that is not within walking distance of anywhere. I know, it’s happened to me.

That was when I’d first moved to Montana, over two decades ago. I was scouting the Missouri at the time, wondering about the classic float, a trip that was then pretty high up on my Life List of Stuff to Do. I got home that year, enlightened in the matter of mud, and then things began to happen fairly rapidly, two decades galloped by, and when I next checked the to-do list, there it was, “Missouri River Float,” undone and staring me in the face like an accusation. I began to dream about it, that float, and the dreams were all bright and sunny, but I was unable to get to the sparkling green water because I was knee- and ankle-deep in mud.

These greasy frustration dreams were unacceptable. My will was stronger than mud, damn it. And so I was on my way to Fort Benton, Montana, the put-in point for the 149-mile-long Wild and Scenic section of what, in any fair and decent world, would be considered the longest river on the planet. The Missouri rises at Three Forks, Montana, at the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers, flows vaguely north, then turns east through Montana to North Dakota, before dropping south through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri, finally joining the Mississippi at St. Louis. That’s 2,546 miles: longer than the upper and lower Mississippi put together.

If the Mississippi is to be considered a continuation of the Missouri—as I’m arguing it should be—the river is 4,220 miles long: longer than the Nile (4,132 miles), the Amazon (4,000), and the Yangtze (3,915). It’s a great big huge world-beater of a river, a ribbon of history and geology and wildlife. Along this free-flowing stretch of the Missouri, mule deer and bighorn sheep frolic all over the adjacent geology, mourning doves mourn unseen in the occasional cottonwood, and rattlesnakes hiss from the banks. There are thirteen Lewis and Clark campsites, some of them set amid cliffs that look like toadstools or ancient Greek temples or castles in Spain or defunct comedians; there are dinosaurs, buried in the mud; there is a violent and often grimly amusing history; and there is, of course, the matter of my own greasy river dreams.

Fort Benton, Montana, was one of the truly tough towns of the old West. At the turn of the last century, it was, according to one newspaper, “a scalp market, the home of cutthroats and horse thieves.” Armed robberies, gunfights, and lynchings were common, almost daily occurrences. The U.S. Army saw the town as “a whiskey-trading post for hostile Indians.” And indeed, there is a recipe for “Indian whiskey” at the local museum: “To muddy Missouri Water add 1 quart of alcohol, 1 pound of rank black chewing tobacco, 1 handful of red peppers, 1 bottle Jamaica ginger and 1 quart black molasses. Mix well and boil until strength is drawn from the tobacco and peppers.” Firewater, indeed.

In 1868, irate citizens of Fort Benton lynched their own town marshal in an effort to make the streets safe for extreme drunkenness. It seems someone had been stealing from passed-out inebriates distributed about in the muddy streets of an evening. Townsfolk complained to the marshal, William Hinson, who said (regrettably, he may have thought later), “What our town needs is a half a dozen hangings.”

A vigilante sting operation sent out a decoy drunk one night, and it turned out that Hinson himself was the thief. The next day, the citizens told Marshal Hinson they knew who’d been stealing them blind, told him they were going to hang the fellow in half an hour, and asked him to bring a rope. And thus Hinson’s last official act was supplying the noose for his own execution. The hanging site is right next to the present-day Episcopal church, and most citizens, I imagine, would be happy to point it out to you. I don’t know. I didn’t get to stay in Fort Benton very long because I was late. So was everyone else.

Bobbie Gilmore, a kayak guide, had come from Whitefish, Montana, hauling a trailer full of sea kayaks. My old pal photographer Joel Rogers came from Seattle with two of his friends, David Fox and Scott Wellsandt. Linnea Larson and I were driving in from the other direction, and we all got to Fort Benton at about the same time, which was several hours later than we’d planned. It was a graceful little town of shady neighborhoods and old brick buildings fronting the river. The Grand Union Hotel, once the finest accommodation between Minneapolis and Seattle, had been refurbished and looked inviting, especially since the sunset was eminent.

Wise travelers might have checked into the hotel and gotten a leisurely start in the morning. We packed up the kayaks in a frenzy of sweat and started having fun right away. We paddled forty-five minutes into the night then set up our tents, prepared dinner—I don’t recall what, it may have been Joel’s quesadillas—and sat around the fire, catching our breath. There were no artificial lights anywhere and the stars were bright enough to cast shadows. It was a time for thoughtful comments on the day that had been.

“You know,” I said, settling back with a drink in the starlight, “it takes a real moron to forget his sleeping bag.”

“You forgot your sleeping bag?” Joel asked.

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

The nights were mild, and the others were fools to carry bulky sleeping bags, or so I told myself, paddling the next day. There were a few pelicans downriver, and they rose as we approached. I love the idea of pelicans eight hundred miles away from any ocean, and, quoting from a bird book, told everyone that the birds had a wingspan of eight feet.

“I don’t think that one does,” David Fox said.

“Probably a juvenile,” I said.

“Those two don’t,” David continued, “or that one either.” When David was last in Montana, he’d testified in a Billings courtroom. He’d been working for CNN, covering the Freeman militia standoff outside of Jordan. The Freemen had “confiscated” his video cameras, probably for being too literal about eyewitness evidence, like the wingspan of certain birds.

We passed through Black Bluff Rapids, which is marked at river mile twenty on the BLM Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River map. The water was smooth as a mirror—a muddy mirror—and the rapids didn’t actually exist.

In point of fact, most of the “rapids” marked on the map are from the steamboat days of the late 1800s. They are gravel bars, or areas that are tricky to navigate upriver in a steamboat. The Missouri trucks along at an easy average of 3.5 miles an hour and there is no whitewater whatsoever. It is a lazy float, appropriate for beginning canoeists or kayakers or rafters. I suppose you could get in trouble on the river, but you’d have to work at it in a fairly assiduous manner.

Bobbie, apparently attempting to raise the adrenaline quotient, said, “Well, in a couple of days we’ll hit Deadman Rapid.” She let the name sink in. “Women,” she added solemnly, “can go through there.” At mile twenty-two, we passed the mouth of the Marias River on our left, where Lewis and Clark spent nearly ten days on
their upriver trip: June 2 through 10, 1805. They were stuck there in the throes of a navigational quandary. Their mandate from President Thomas Jefferson was to ascend the Missouri, cross the mountains, and descend the Columbia to the Pacific. At this fork in the river, each stream seemed about the same size. Which was the Missouri? (These days, there is little doubt. The Marias, confined by the Tiber Dam, seventy miles upstream, is now little more than a creek at its confluence with the Missouri.)

Most of the men in the Lewis and Clark party thought the north fork, the Marias, was the Missouri; both Lewis and Clark were skeptical. They measured the width of each stream, explored up the banks of each, and inquired locally, always a wise move for any traveler. Bolstered by what the Indians said, they concluded, correctly, that the south fork was the Missouri, and would take them into the mountains.

The river carried us past the Marias. Bobbie was giving Linnea some paddling advice. I was eavesdropping because I can use all the help I can get. “I tell my clients that a woman’s center of gravity is lower, so women are more stable in kayaks than men,” Bobbie said. “Women are probably more stable in life altogether.”

“You mean,” I interjected, in all innocence, “because they got fat butts?”

“Said the moron who forgot his sleeping bag.”

The character of the Missouri changes abruptly about forty miles into the float. At first it’s just as one might expect: a big, slow-moving river, lazing through meanders in a high plain with mountains shining in the far distance. But at the ferry-crossing town of Virgelle, the river changes direction, sweeping almost 90 degrees from northeast to southeast. The Missouri straightens out and floaters find themselves, for the entire rest of the trip, in a canyon several hundred feet deep. It is a relatively new thing, this canyon. The Missouri used to flow north, toward Hudson Bay, but glaciers grinding down from Canada during the ice age blocked the northward run and formed a dam that turned the river south and east. The Missouri spun about in a rage and shot through soft
rock to the south, tearing up the land in a fury of frustration. The rocks were and are soft because this area of Montana was once a vast inland sea. Dinosaurs frolicked on its banks, especially to the east, near the final stretch of what is now the classic Wild and Scenic float. When the sea finally receded, 65 million years ago, it left a legacy of sedimentary rocks—clays, sands, silts: a dried-out sea bottom, essentially—and the Missouri, diverted by glaciers, cut through this soft stone like a hot knife through butter.

Meanwhile, tributary streams flowing into the Missouri from either side formed their own small canyons, which cut into the main channel of the river. It is a strange, crumpled landscape, odd and alien and vaguely disturbing. The land seems not at all as it should be; it looks somehow shattered, broken; and anyone who sees it will know immediately why the area is known as the Missouri Breaks.

Ten miles into the canyon, sandstone parapets rose on the riverbanks, and the vertically striated columns stood out like eroded statues in Egyptian temples. The canyon walls—all battlements and spires, resembling broken teeth—enclosed us as we floated farther downriver, eventually camping for the night near Eagle Creek, at the Lewis and Clark campsite of May 31, 1805. “The hills and river Clifts which passed today exhibit a most romantic appearance,” Lewis wrote in his journal that day, almost two centuries ago. “The bluffs of the river rise to the hight of from 2 to 300 feet and in most places nearly perpendicular; they are formed of remarkable white sandstone.”

I was reading aloud from the journal now, and what we saw in the dusk directly across the river was the exact sandstone wall described by Lewis. “The water in the course of time in decending … had trickled down the soft sand clifts and woarn it into a thousand grotesque figures.…”

“Exactly,” said Scott Wellsandt.

Lewis, with “the help of a little imagination and an oblique view,” saw “eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having the parapets well stocked with statuary.” He saw “collumns standing almost
entire with their pedestals and capitals.” He saw stone “in the form of vast pyramids of conic structure bearing a serees of other pyramids on their tops.”

“What do you see?” I asked Scott.

“That one, over there, looks like the skinny Laurel and Hardy guy. Stan Laurel.”

We declined the opportunity to make fun of Scott’s vision. Not only was he a great big huge powerful guy, he was the best cook on the float. This evening he’d made pad Thai on a camp stove and it was delicious. “Stan Laurel,” I said, hoping Scott’d cook for the rest of the trip. “Anyone can see it.”