River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (19 page)

M
Y FIRST MATE
said, “This is the kind of day airline pilots call ‘severe clear.’ It seems you could jump in and take a swim in that blue sky.” We left Gallipolis and made our way around the big loop of river marking out the southernmost tip of Ohio, the first half running nearly cardinal compass points: south, west, south again, then a series of slightly less true courses up the other side of the great bend. The Ohio country between the stretches of river is largely national forest, and the West Virginia shore also is wooded all the way to the bottom of the loop, where industrial Huntington spreads out along the flats.

A fifth of the distance across the continent, we had traveled few leagues not shaped by the last Ice Age and its several glaciations. Moving generally transverse to the flow of ancient snowpacks, we were at that point—as elsewhere—virtually following a sea-to-sea route cut or deformed by great chisels of ice: if you trace over a map of America the southern limits of the last few glaciers, you have a reasonably accurate chart of our entire course. Our passage depended absolutely on water, ancient and modern, frozen and otherwise.

More than any other kind of travel, floating a river means following a natural corridor, for moving water must stay true to the cast of the land, and we liked knowing our way was so primeval and, what’s more, that in every mile we were recapitulating human routes of the previous eight thousand or more years. No other form of travel can do that, for no trail, no road, is so old, so primordial, so unchanged in its path. The river, alone in nature, makes its own destination, and we enjoyed feeling that the high-banked Ohio, its course as untransformed as any long river east of the Rockies, was taking us there; not even the locks and dams much altered the perception. In our search for the essence of American water passage, this retrocognition was of the first order.

A strand of ring-billed gulls rose from the smooth surface and skimmed it, and we overtook a line of barges in hopes of getting through Byrd Lock before they arrived, but it wasn’t necessary; for our first time, the tender sent us into the auxiliary lock, the one half the length of the twelve-hundred-foot main tank. Even so,
Nikawa
in the chamber was but a cockhorse, and some of the Sunday visitors smiled and waved to us, to give underdogs courage, yet the faces of others betrayed a wistfulness, as if their lives were little more than anchors.

We had a long, slick-water, bridgeless run down to Huntington and its nine-mile shore with Riverfront Park, a greensward that somewhat ameliorates the big ugly floodwall typical of towns on the “new" Ohio. When Huntington, the largest and newest West Virginia city, was about to spring up in 1869 next to the settlement of Guyandotte, a newspaper published a list of attributes the older village offered, and a future citizen of Huntington conceded those advantages but said it would “take a search warrant to find them in the annual crop of dog fennel, popcorn, and empty pint bottles.” Soon after, an eastern visitor described Huntington as “a right big little town.”

A few miles beyond lies Kenova at the mouth of the Big Sandy River that separates West Virginia from Kentucky. Then, for twenty-five miles, tows pounded the water, and barge terminals and repair facilities, cement plants, refineries, floating harbors stacked with big containers, aerial power cables, and heavy truss bridges lined the banks. It was the kind of place an automobile traveler gets depressingly snagged in, but
Nikawa
bounced over the chopwater and soon had us free again.

I’ve not said much about towboats and their massive train of barges (the earliest vessels actually towed, that is
pulled
, their loads, but today a more accurate name would be pushboats); I’ve been silent about how they bulldoze the river for miles, about how we had to keep out of their way, about our necessity to take an oncoming one, sometimes nearly a quarter mile long, on the inside of bends (where the shallows are), so that the violent prop wash and tons of barge swept away from our little jug. While I’ve found captains and pilots to be polite on shore, in a wheelhouse they usually ignored us when we radioed our intention to pass them port or starboard, and when we waved, our arms seemed invisible to them. What the hell, they’re the big boys of the river, and they act it; but once out of their sailing line, given the millennia of seniority tiny boats have earned, we refused to accept the river as theirs only. We figured we were doing something they could not do, and we believed our transcontinental quest gave us equal right to passage.

It may have been the several large carp carcasses floating in Greenup Lock that led Pilotis to ask after we exited, “If all the millions of fish were pulled from this river, how much lower would it be?” We’d be dragging sand, I said. “Do you think as much as an inch?” I hoped it might be more because I liked the idea of the fishes helping keep us buoyant, and that in their absence we’d find the way harder, perhaps impossible without banging one gravel bar after another. Pilotis: “Carried across the country on the backs of fishes.”

At Portsmouth, the Ohio yields most of its southerly course to run much more directly west for better than a hundred miles; that kind of topographical detail gave us a sense of accomplishment and a small boost to our will to continue—a determination challenged whenever we looked at a map of the United States and saw how much country yet lay before us. At times we talked about explorers, settlers, early travelers, wilderness, of how America perhaps more than any other nation built itself and many of its cherished myths around westering, a concept then and now most evident and the source of the greatest theme in our history: the journey. Westering is only logical from a country whose people all have ancestors from the eastern hemisphere, whose leaders considered Westward ho! a manifest destiny to be executed for the good of humanity—never mind those already dwelling there who sometimes got in the way. The American fate was to drive on to the sea where the sun sets, to take up the land, remake it according to our own images. We, so goes the gospel of our historiography, we descendants of the purported ancient Garden, were foreordained to create a new one. Whether that impulse was noble I leave to others, except to argue that our destiny would look considerably more estimable had our ancestors—and we—conceived the New Eden in terms less those, to keep the biblical context, of Mammon. Whenever I found myself faulting something along the river, I was usually, as I heard a professor once say, “deprecating mercantilistic esurience.”

So, that afternoon, on we westered atop the remade Beautiful River to Portsmouth, a town with a first cause deriving from the Ohio itself, born of it, but now making itself into something else, a leopard wanting to become a lion. Portsmouth seemed bent on forgetting, denying, and hiding the river, turning itself into a place where the land voyager cruises up in the family sport utility vehicle, ties to a parking slot, and rafts the aisles of the megamall. I don’t intend curmudgeonry toward Portsmouth, for I consider the flatboat as one of the ancestors of the window van. From river rats to mall rats. Nevertheless, a traveler on the Ohio doesn’t see the town but rather a high, long, and forbidding concrete floodwall like a medieval rampart; lettering
WELCOME
across the fortress alleviates nothing, and the huge mural on the city side, while a tour de force, is painted history substituting for the reality of the river beyond.

Below the mouth of the Scioto River (with its tributary Peepee Creek), we came upon the
Docktor
, but there followed no response to our hailing. Five miles farther we found a cove with a good pier, gasoline, and food, and we ceased our run. Twenty minutes later, in limped Cap’s boat. We took mooring lines from Mr. V—who looked disheveled and dispirited, and we asked how it had gone, but he only shook his head. When the boat was secure he finally spoke: “This thing has turned into a hell ship.” I said to Pilotis,
Beelzebub.

Later, after attitudes got redressed with a glass of rum, the sanctioned beverage of our fellow voyagers’ vessel, we learned they had run afoul of a drifting towboat hawser that wrapped around their propeller and shaft like tentacles of a giant squid and left them dead in the water again. Cap, amazingly, had managed to summon a fleet diver from a towing company, but he was unable to cut through the tangle, and the
Doctor Robert
had to be lifted out of the river by a crane to remove the line. The story struck a chill in us because their ill-luck monkey could jump to our horse, but all I suggested was Cap might swap boats with a worn cruiser tied next to him, the one named
Why-U-Ask.

S
LEEPING ABOARD
Nikawa
was a choice between a straitjacket and claustrophobia, the first coming from a mummy bag on a narrow bench where a turn in the night could mean ending up on the pilothouse deck, the other from the cuddy requiring a bent recumbence beneath an overhead resting virtually atop one’s brow. Night to night, our only relief was to change places. Still, I liked sleeping aboard, lying snug if nothing else, and listening to the lap of water against the hull and sometimes being rocked easily into a slumber that came quickly but demanded patience in tolerating frequent wakings from cramped muscles or near rolls onto the deck.

When I was home I’d dreamed of the river, but on the river I dreamed of home. That Monday morning, well past sunup, my sleep had me trying to write an article on food, although I couldn’t find the precise topic. Then, at last, a brilliant breakthrough: I came up with something! I got the title: “How to Make Theater Air in Used Olive Bottles.” I awoke in exhilaration, sat up, hit my head, crawled out of the cuddy, washed, and found my copilot already in the café. I shared the dream, then listened to another from that night: Pilotis browsed in a grocery and avidly read labels on soup cans; on one low-calorie chowder, “Only two servings per teaspoon.” I said, Have we been at this river stuff too long?

Filling our fuel tanks before we set out, the young pump girl, hearing of our voyage, said to me, “Oh, God, I want your life!” Had I an urge to savage youthful dreams of a nobler sort than of soup tins or used olive jars, I might have told her what it took each day to earn the good moments. While a river can offer the adventure and romance of slow-moving freight trains you can board almost anywhere to let them take you who-knows-where, it otherwise is demanding, restrictive, exhausting. For every hour of excitement, for each sublime riverscape, there can be three or four hours of humdrum repetition that makes merely staying alert a mental tussle.

Of the twelve hundred books on my home shelves containing accounts of exploration and travel in America, a number are about river journeys. That Monday, as we reached the quarter-way mark of our try at crossing the continent, I realized I would hereafter read them in a new light: those with never a dull moment were suspect, if not mendacious, for to travel a river that is not white water is to go slowly, often drudgingly. One of the reasons the voluminous journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition have power lies in their honest portrayal of frequent tedium, often conveyed by the simple phrase “we proceeded on.” Because moving water is—and I do not overstate this—death waiting, the pilot cannot just put the boat on cruise control, sit back with two fingers on the power-steering wheel, and daydream through a spell of monotony. The river is no blue highway because a river removes reverie. I think that’s the reason, at the end of a day on the water, Pilotis and I were more tired than events usually seemed to warrant. Our most reliable and consistent antidote to humdrummery, in other words, was risk, and at every moment it called us, impelled us to heedfulness when nothing else did, even as it wearied us.

My usual remedy for tedium on a highway is to stop and walk a place, but on a river that’s harder to do. The Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative aside, many villages called to us, but a landing and tie-up was frequently unwise or impossible, especially so early in the season, with uncertain weather and rising waters keeping docks from going in or being open. We loved the isolation available on a river in spring, something harder to come by in July, but we had to pay for it. In one place the problem could be as simple as an impassable bank of grease-mud lurking with skid demons, or an impenetrable scrub, or in another it might be security. Pilotis had a clear vision of naughty boys covertly undoing our mooring line to watch an unattended
Nikawa
drift downriver, over a dam, onto rocks, under a barge; indeed, a small boat is a difficult thing to secure by any means other than one’s presence.

And so it was that day as we passed allurements. Vanceburg, Ken tucky, shone in the sun, the brightly red roof of its courthouse against blue sky; and Maysville, as pretty a town as there is on the Ohio, appeared even more inviting, the golden dome of its courthouse gleaming like high justice, steeples like slender fingers beckoning the miserable and fallen, Federal-style orange tin roofs, white antebellum columns, green lawns bright with May, and all of it climbing the narrow river flats for a few hundred feet before the rise became too steep for anything but oaks and hickories at last in full leaf. Here on the rim of the South we had reached midspring through both time and space, and at last we wore short sleeves. Often, where we could not stop I tried to relate memories from my other travels in the place, or Pilotis swept a village with binoculars and concocted a tale of what might be there.