River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (17 page)

Below the Beaver, the hills of the Ohio become higher and edge right to the water, a combination that has prevented significant industrial encroachment for some miles, and at last
la belle rivière
looked just that. At Montgomery Lock a drizzle came on and seemed to wash us back into the uglier aspect of railyards, then we passed a nuclear power plant across from Industry, the name perhaps accurate beyond its founders’ dreams, and four miles farther we left Pennsylvania. Now on the south bank was the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, and across the river lay East Liverpool, Ohio, a town I’d known before only from the road and thought it possessing a worn grime similar to that of its English counterpart. But from the river we saw old homes atop the high bank, slender steeples, and a graceful 1905 suspension bridge. It was for such changed views I had come. Wellsville, five miles below, with more historic houses along the bluff, was downright inviting, and there the Ohio began its 260-mile southwesterly drop before shifting to a more westward course at Huntington, West Virginia.

A repair crew held
Nikawa
off for a while at New Cumberland Lock. When we entered, Pilotis took delight in tying to our first floating mooring bitt, a pin or small bollard that moves with the rise and fall of the water to make securing a boat much easier; those plaintive squeaking, stridulating rollers added a new voice to the chamber music of mechanically profundo valves and soprano gears, that one strikingly like the song of humpback whales.

The afternoon finally began to dry but the clouds remained low, and, having done sixty miles, our longest run yet, we turned into a protected cove near a titanium processing plant. Pilotis began laughing, then said, “Get yourself ready,” and pointed. Tied to a pier was the
Doctor Robert
fresh from its overland transport to Pittsburgh. “Here you go again.” No we don’t, I said, not anymore—we’re now a convoy of one. We warped in behind to refuel. Down in the engine well of the character boat stood a mechanic and Cap, both splattered with oil. “Never mind,” Cap said. “Don’t ask.” But I did, and his lone crewman, Mr. V—, answered: “The diesel just quit above Montgomery Dam. We began drifting toward it. Dead in the water. Wasn’t a thing we could do except get on the radio. A towboat managed to reach us in time and put a line on us. One hell of a scare.”

I thought of how Cap once referred to
Nikawa
as Tupperware, and I looked at Pilotis, who said softly, “That was nearly our boat.” I whispered that the
Doctor
would be a suitable vessel if only she could tow behind a dry dock; from then on, to us she was the
Dry Docktor.
That evening we borrowed a clunker of a station wagon from the marina and pursued a tip and drove a few miles south to one of the “mother towns of Ohio,” Steubenville, laid out by Bezaleel Wells; the first steamboat built there was named after him, although its frequent breakdowns earned it the moniker
Beelzebub.
We met Cap and Mr. V—at the High Hat Café for a round of martinis followed by plates of chicken sautéed with banana peppers and mushrooms, a recipe the owner’s mother had brought from Italy, all of it so good that Cap laughed and toasted and told jokes and for a while forgot about his
Beelzebub.

T
HE SUN ROSE
and with it our appetites for a hearty meal; by the time we drove the borrowed clunker to the 1000 Franklin Café in Toronto, Ohio, “hearty” had defined itself as hamburger, a craving only Americans can deeply understand. The choice was a Billyburger or a Goonieburger. “Either is appropriate for you,” Pilotis commented needlessly. The waitress didn’t know who or what Billy and Goonie were, but she said of the Goonie, “It comes with everthing includen tomaters.” And the Billy? “It just comes with everthing.” Pilotis ordered the Special, fried fish, and asked, “What kind is it?” Replied she, “Jumbo fish.”

By the time we boarded
Nikawa
, noon was upon us. Our course was about as due south as a river can run, the Ohio curving just enough to give us the joy of anticipation, of waiting to see what lay around the bends, an important occurrence for water travelers who never have their route perceptibly climb or descend as does a highway to the sweet and sour of the unexpected; people who think driving across southern Florida or central Kansas is an encounter with ultimate levelness should try a stretch on a river.

The thousands of nineteenth-century traders and settlers who put out onto the Ohio to take them deep into the newly gained territory commonly carried a small book at first simply titled
The Navigator
(but with a ninety-six-word subtitle) which they purchased from the author’s print shop in Pittsburgh. Zadok Cramer gave terse but trenchant “particular directions on how to navigate" the Ohio and the Mississippi to readers employing boats they built themselves or bought cheaply, craft intended for a single downriver float: flatboats (arks, barges, broadhorns, Kentuckys), keelboats, skiffs, and who knows how many hybrids, all of them sharing one significant element: they had no propulsion but gravity—that is, the current. Cramer advised:

The first thing to be attended to by emigrants or traders wanting to descend the river, is to procure a boat, to be ready so as to take advantage of the times of floods and to be careful that the boat be a good one: for many of the accidents that happen in navigating the Ohio and Mississippi, are owing to the unpardonable carelessness or penuriousness of the boat builder, who will frequently slight his work or make it of injured plank, in either case putting the lives and properties of a great many people at manifest hazard.

Because the Ohio is no longer a freely flowing river, we found our descent almost as simple as driving an auto, if you discount that at every moment our road moved under us in several directions at the same time, and one other thing: towboatmen who, with their gigantic loads, showed contempt for a small thing like
Nikawa
, a scorn not surpassed by interstate truckers for automobiles.

Steubenville has long been a town of suspension bridges, and the newest of them, the Veterans’ Memorial, is a stunning piece, all of its myriad supporting cables depending from a single, central tower that looks like—take your choice—a tuning fork, a wishbone, or a clothespin rendered by Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg. At Coketown, appropriately, we caught a scent of coal smoke, an odor once so prevalent on this river it could have been bottled as Eau de la Belle Rivière. And then came Wellsburg, with trimmed lawns to the water, a delightful old inn, and Pilotis wrote on the chart “nice place,” although one eminent guide to West Virginia described it in 1941 as “an unromantic-looking industrial town for a long time more widely known for its ‘gin weddings’ and ‘marrying parsons’ than for its glass plants and large paper mills producing great quantities of paper bags.”

The men of the Pike Island Lock took
Nikawa
in at their leisure. Again we had to furrow through a nasty field of woody drift and plastic flotsam. Once we started descending, the wheels of the floating bitts howled and screeched, and Pilotis said, “The Lock Mess Monster is dying.” Then we were free, went past the Sisters Islands, taking one on our port, the other starboard. I’ve never seen an island I didn’t want to explore, perhaps because, unlike us, they seem so entire unto themselves with their capacity to withstand the relentless river and their isolation that spawns mystery.

At Wheeling, West Virginia, we came upon another suspension bridge, in days gone the longest in the world, drift stacked against the piers neatly like cordwood; the Tenth Street span connects the city with Wheeling Island (the largest inhabited one in the Ohio and a rarity with its road links to shore). The historic structure of twin stone towers has the look of a small Brooklyn Bridge, although it’s been around more than a third of a century longer, the smoke-grimed rocks revealing its age as if wrinkles. Built in 1856 and the oldest on the Ohio, it and its 1846 predecessor changed river law in two Supreme Court cases argued between Wheeling and Pittsburgh; the latter, fearing loss of its river trade, claimed the bridge interfered with navigation and won the first decision, but Wheeling prevailed on appeal, with the new law holding that the height of steamboat stacks must be governed by bridge clearances. When the span collapsed during a windstorm in 1854, the packet
Pennsylvania
continued to lower her chimneys in derision as she passed Wheeling, but the mockery lasted only until the present thousand-foot-long version went up. For us it was good to go beneath a bridge that has looked down on the stovepipe hat of Abraham Lincoln, the mustache of Mark Twain, the sooty funnels of a hundred thousand steamboats, the rifle muzzles of Union soldiers, and every other Ohio River traveler since before the Civil War.

Formerly a river town, Wheeling today turns its back to the Ohio, showing bum-ends of old brick office buildings and warehouses and a wretched four-storey auto garage that largely negates a new park along the bank. The name Wheeling probably derives from several early settlers, venturing down the Ohio in quest of land, whom Delaware Indians captured, decapitated, and set their heads as a warning on poles along the river, a site subsequently called
wih-link
, “place of the skull.” Local residents, as you might guess, offer other etymologies.

On we went in the quiet, reflective afternoon. A river—with its attendant cascades, eddies, boils, and whirlpools—is the most expressive aspect of a natural landscape, for nothing else moves so far, so broadly, so unceasingly, so demonstrably, and nothing else is so susceptible to personification and so much at the heart of our notions about life and death. Across generations and around the globe, humans, we double-footed jugs of seventy percent water, have seen rivers as both our source and the way out of this world. The Osage Indians use the same word,
ni
, for water, river, sap, breath, life. To the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, the afterworld lay on the far side of a river, a bourn from which no traveler returns. But, the marine sailor might ask, what about seascapes? I’ve found the ocean, despite its continuous movement and manifest moods, too overwhelming to comprehend as anything other than an implacable immensity. The sea is the wind made visible, but a river is the land turned liquid. No engineer ever tried to bridge an ocean, dam a sea, or turn its currents another direction: oceans surpass our capacities too far. River travelers, even ones not poetically inclined, soon begin to conceive the water as friend or foe, to view it as possessed of a will, and at times even a primitive mind capable of acting companionably or inimically. In this country, bankside inhabitants often call themselves with pride “river rats,” a self-inflicted insult expressing their humility before that force controlling their lots and their lives.

I’ve driven more than a million miles over American highways, but I don’t recall loving, for itself, even one road. How can you love an unmoving, stone-cold strip of concrete, ever the same except for its aging, its attrition? But a river comes into existence moving, and it grows as it moves, and like a great mother carries within itself lives too varied and multitudinous for our myriad sciences even yet wholly to number and name. I say this now because we had just accomplished our thousandth wet mile, and during that passage I felt we were atop something animate and wondrously strong and strange which, were I but once to fail in my respect, would take me in a moment to its deadly bottom.

About then, Pilotis called my stare from the sounder.

Of the ancient monuments of America, few are as considerable, abundant, and fertile with mystery as the aboriginal mounds standing like sentinels all along the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, and their tributaries. These hundreds upon hundreds of earthen constructions—mostly simple tumuli, but also ones shaped into serpents, bears, birds, and platforms to hold temples—commonly lie hidden among shoreside trees. But why are they usually along rivers? I think the Osage expressed it:
ni
, river, breath, life.

The largest conical earthen mound in the New World is at Moundsville, West Virginia. Called Mammoth, or Grave Creek Mound, it is at least two thousand years old and once held the remains of Indians wearing copper bracelets, bone and shell beads, a gorget or two; but its most famous artifact was a sandstone tablet inscribed with a couple of dozen characters variously interpreted as “ancient Greek, Etruscan, Runic, ancient Gallic, Old Erse, Phoenician, Celtiberic, Old British, Appalachian.” Translations of those twenty-four marks seem to express more the mind of an interpreter than the inscriber:

Thy orders are laws.

Thou shinest in thy impetuous elan,
and rapid is the chamois.

***

The Chief of Emigration
who reached these places
has fixed these statutes forever.

***

The grave of one who was assassinated here.
May God revenge him,
strike his murderer,
cutting off the hand of his existence.

***

I pray to Christ,
His most Holy Mother,
Son, Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ, God.

***

United States of Egypt.
Built by States of Eastern Union.

***

I knelt on the island,
Øn’s yule site on Meadow Island,
now the island is a Hodd.

***

Your hope to be imbued with measure
of purity, manners, industry,
misery, folly, strength.

***

Bil Stumps Stone
OCT 14 1838.

And in 1948 another interpreter opined the characters were actually an image of the back end of an automobile, a prognostication carved by a giant prophetess. The tablet, now lost, was likely inauthentic except as an artifact planted during the first excavations of 1838 to lure tourists to the gallery dug into the heart of the sixty-nine-foot mound, a dim and damp exhibit hung with Indian skeletons and lighted by guttering candles, a spook show designed to thrill paying visitors. Atop the tumulus the purveyors built an observatory, later replaced by a dance platform, replaced by a saloon, replaced by a Union artillery position in 1863; around the perimeter at one time was a horse track. When these efforts failed to make enough money, citizens proposed leveling the mound to provide fill (the fate of a hundred other mounds nearby), or building a post office at the summit, or turning it into the Tomb of the Unknown West Virginia Soldier. In 1909 the state reluctantly and belatedly accepted this preeminent ancient monument and for some years assigned the care of it to the penitentiary across the street. It was convicts who restored it to something like its original contours.