River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (12 page)

As I tried to read the southern horizon, so dangerously and enticingly near, I looked at the houses bright in the sun, and I thought how in one of them a woman must be sitting down in her rock-solid kitchen to a hot muffin with marmalade, and next door someone’s dad checked baseball scores from his anchored easy chair. I remembered making a drive the past September down the lake-shore road, a route rich with the sweet waft of ripe vineyards. Lake Erie was forcing me to admit I was a man of wheels, not hulls, who was in over his head. Wrong phrase. I remembered my Navy time and how, just before lights out, from the address system would float the hymn “Those in Peril on the Sea,” with its opening words, “Eternal Father, strong to save, whose Arm hath bound the restless wave.”

We crashed on, on, on, the noise beginning to wear us more than the slams and locking us in a separating silence. Climb, hang, crash, climb, hang, crash. Damn the torpedoes! No, that was Mobile Bay. Lake Erie was Oliver Perry on a cloudless afternoon like ours, stepping dirty and bleeding from a doomed ship to a fresh one, taking along his battle flag, “Don’t Give Up the Ship!” Oliver Hazard Perry—there was a middle name no novelist would dare to match to such a history—he who was terrified of cows yet drove the British off Lake Erie and wrote to William Henry Harrison that immortal terseness: “Dear Genl: We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” But we were no Perrys; our message would be: “Dear Mother: We have met the enemy, and we are theirs.”

Pilotis called for a position. In five minutes I came up with a probable one: about thirty miles out of Buffalo. And then I noticed the swells seeming less awesome—was some Arm binding that restless wave? Yes, and it was that of Pilotis. Mate was quartering the swells. I yelled, We’ll be out here till nightfall if you keep that up! But the binding continued. Soon after, I again took the helm, and we returned to frontal assault.

Pilotis shouted, “I think it’s getting worse, blue sky or not!” Thunderous bashes, Pilotis thrown to the deck again, a wet spot on my head that could only be blood. “If that peninsula is Dunkirk, we’ve got eighteen more miles to Barcelona! In a rising sea!” Just then I became furious with the relentless spray across the pilot window, and I cursed and cranked the wiper violently. In the end, it’s some lone detail that kills a venture, because every moment, every small occurrence, is a potential last straw in wait. Pilotis knew I wanted to keep water under us as no one before ever had on an internal American crossing, but my mate was right—things were worse. More cursing. The next crash knocked my hands from the wheel. We’d been at it six hours. My elbow was swelling from banging the bulkhead. All right, goddamnit, I yelled, Dunkirk it is! To live long enough is to come to a Dunkirk. Ask an Englishman. On our faces this time was no Hell Gate Grin. It was simply beat out of us.

I pulled the wheel to a new bearing, and we rode a runnel in behind the breakwater, into a placid cove, and in a normal voice Pilotis said, “Careful, shallows on both sides.” Sweeter words I’d never heard. Our Battle of Lake Erie was done.

T
HE DUNKIRK DOCKS
were rickety where they weren’t collapsed, something like our constitutions, but the old wooden ways seemed to us like terra firma. For only the third or fourth time in my life, I found it almost incomprehensible that I was yet among the quick, but to stay there I’d surely used up too much of my predestined allotment of luck. Catching myself in such dreary determinism, I got hungry. My copilot found a phone and tried to call the Photographer to tell him we were a few miles shy of Barcelona, and there went another dollop of good fortune: Pilotis actually reached him, and the trailer was soon on the ramp and
Nikawa
out of the lake. I clambered underneath to check her hull and found nothing more than the whacks the Missouri River inflicted when I was first learning the ropes. We went up to Dimitri’s restaurant where we could look onto the lovely blue water, and I heard a woman chirp, “I wish we had a boat. It’d be wonderful to be out there today.”

I telephoned the builder of
Nikawa
to ask whether she could continue to take such beatings, and he said, “The C-Dory can take it. The question is whether a crew can.” When I sat down to a hot bowl of Greek lemon soup and a stack of a sandwich, I wished I’d heard his words a day sooner: to have understood that the only weakness lay in me and not also in
Nikawa
would have cut fear by half and also laid out a challenge to lift a kitten-hearted sailor. We had no celebratory toasting because merely drawing breath was elation enough, and there was still Chautauqua Lake waiting in the warm afternoon. Seamen should hold off a week before trying to convey to a landsman what a hard voyage was like, but we didn’t, and the Photographer, an excellent fellow but a worrier of the highest caliber, said, “Do you realize after ten days you’re still in New York?” I said, Do you realize after another revelation like that you’ll die in New York?

Off we hauled, down State Route 5, the Lake Erie road, and every so often we saw the water between gaps in the trees, again masquerading as a harmless piece of scenery. Riding behind us, dry and sassy, was our river horse, and I was then almost sure she had never really been on the lake, and I couldn’t understand how something so small in the water could look so big out of it.

A moment of significance began when we reached rocky Chautauqua Creek where it empties into Erie at Barcelona Harbor: we turned south and took Portage Street, a route used for unnumbered generations, both red and white, to move between the far interior and the inland seas. On through pretty Westfield, the grape juice village, and southwest up a grade so moderate I had to point out it was a kind of continental divide, that our nearly imperceptible, thousand-foot climb had just taken us up and into the Mississippi River drainage basin, the same one holding Hell Roaring Creek, the farthest source of the Missouri River, just over the mountain from Yellowstone Park, fifteen hundred air miles west of us. The waters of Chautauqua Creek end up in the St. Lawrence, and those of Chautauqua Lake in the Gulf of Mexico; although their little tributaries at that point lie only inches apart, the distance between their Atlantic destinations is about two thousand miles. Now, for weeks to come, we would roll downstream all the way to the Mississippi, more than a thousand sinuous river miles distant. Elevation report: one quarter of a mile above the Atlantic.

Down the slope from the divide was Mayville at the north edge of Chautauqua Lake and, at the town limit, a sign:
NEW YORK’S BEST TASTING WATER.
Artesian springs won the village the title two years earlier, but Mayville had just lost it to Jamestown at the opposite end of Chautauqua. I liked a lake noted for the taste of its sources rather than for its violence.

We filled beverage jugs when we refueled
Nikawa
, then went to the head of the sweetly watered lake to launch, and told the Photographer where and when we hoped to arrive, and we were under way again. On a chart, long and skinny Chautauqua, once two lakes, looks like a pair of link sausages joined at Bemus Point where the water narrows from two miles wide to about nine hundred feet. Although cut by glaciers, the last working on it ten thousand years ago, and looking like and lying parallel to the Finger Lakes to the east, Chautauqua is not one of them. A place of modest beauty, its shores are completely humanified by an encasement of “cottages" and, at its southern end, the sprawl of Jamestown.

We held a course along the western shore and slipped under the long shadow of the bell tower on the point at Chautauqua Institution, an ecumenical endeavor that dispatched religious troupers into the American outback in the late nineteenth century to entertain and educate with tent shows called Chautauquas a people otherwise rather culturally desperate. The Iroquois name, perhaps then unknown to the Methodists, translates freely as “place where one loses the way.” I stumbled into the meaning a couple of years earlier when I came to Chautauqua to give some talks, my version of a tent show, and on my first morning there I woke to find the sun rising in the west. Now, I knew that zealous Methodists can work wonders, but at last they had outdone themselves. I could see I was due for either conversion or correction. Figuring the latter easier, I went to a detailed wall map and happily found that the Methodists had not yet achieved celestial puissance. By arriving in the dark, I’d twisted my self-vaunted sense of direction and ended up believing I was on the opposite side of the lake.

Getting what we know to dawn on us is a fundamental human bugaboo, and my piece of lackwit is surely one of the most auspicious of this life, for it was the study of that wall map that kindled a crucial coalescence when I
saw
what I’d forgotten: the Allegheny, the great river of western Pennsylvania, looping up into New York to reach within seventeen miles of Chautauqua Lake. Then my interior dawning: the Iroquois and the French believed the true headwaters of the Ohio River were not the confluence at Pittsburgh but the source of the Allegheny in a remarkable pasture near Gold, Pennsylvania, where, within a circle of a few hundred yards, rise also the Genesee and, according to some, the West Branch of the Susquehanna. The “place where one loses the way,” lying so fortuitously between the two great Eries—canal and lake—and the Allegheny-Ohio, was one of my missing links in an internal transwater route. At last I’d discovered a passage, if not to the Northwest, then at least to the Great Divide in Montana. It was Chautauqua, true to both its Iroquois name and its Methodist intention, that finally led me into our voyage. Years ago my weary father, trying not to doze off one Sunday afternoon, said to me, “Keep an eye out and wake me before I fall asleep.” I’ve spent much of my life attempting to do the same for myself.

Chautauqua was the easiest passage we’d yet undergone, nothing whatsoever to hinder us, and an hour after setting out, we were nearing destination and approaching the shore to watch for the boat ramp and our trailer. We were, after our Erie boat ride, traveling in a jestful casualness without a close watch on the sounder, chart, or an odd buoy off to starboard, and I ignored a rising wind. Following our damaging hit at Pollepel Island in the Hudson, I had written in my log in large block letters
INATTENTION IS THE ENEMY
. The north portion of Chautauqua is about thirty feet deep, but I knew the south end is much less, and still I took
Nikawa
right into an invisible rock dump, and off went the heart alarms as metal cracked loudly against stone. I raised the motors for inspection. We weren’t getting away with that hit: the propellers were bent and jagged. Out-of-balance blades can ruin motors, but we had no alternative except to limp slowly along in search of the Photographer and his waving signal flag.

Two miles south at Burtis Bay we saw the banner and the trailer at the ready. Three men from a rod-and-gun club wandered up to watch us fight the crosswind. I got close enough to shout our landing plans, and the men warned the lake was low.
Rule of the River Road:
Good advice comes after the fact—bad before. I elected to avoid asking the Photographer to step into the cold water to hook the winch cable to the bow so it could line us up with the trailer, choosing instead to run onto the slips, a fairly easy task with a motorboat, but a ton of
Nikawa
catching gusts would require a bravura performance. Perhaps surviving Lake Erie made me imprudently audacious. I judged the wind, took a short run, and hit the trailer, backed off, recalculated, and hit it again. Over the blowing and engines, I thought I heard the fretful Photographer call out, “Umbrella!” On again I charged, and with terrible noises from behind, I drove our horse into the stable.

As we cinched her down and raised the motors for portage, I asked what he shouted that sounded like “umbrella,” and he said, “Watch the umbrella.” What umbrella? Pointing, “That umbrella.” Madly twisted into a devil’s nest around the sorry propellers were the ribs of an old bumbershoot. I said to the rod-and-gun boys, If you ever decide to take a boat across America, pay no attention to Lake Erie, but watch out for little old Chautauqua. And Pilotis said, “I’ve been thinking that if I ever write about this jaunt, I’ll call it ‘One Goddamned Scare a Day,’ but now we’ve ruined the accuracy of that title.”

I asked tiredly and rhetorically, Are we the hell out of this state yet? And one of the codgers said, “No you ain’t, pal.” We took up the eighteen-mile portage, hauled
Nikawa
along over wooded hills, and a half hour later crossed the Pennsylvania line after nearly six hundred New York miles which, were they straightened out, would land us in Cincinnati.

We pulled up in Youngsville, humble and plain as kraft paper but joyously out of the Empire State, and there we found a room, a bit ramshackle but large. While the crew washed up, I went to work on the propellers with hammer, pliers, and file; I’d chosen aluminum props because, unlike stainless steel, they can often be repaired on the spot. When I finished, they were again true enough for a try at the lower Allegheny River.

IV