River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (22 page)

“Skipper, that cruise loosened my fillings,” Pilotis said as two domestic geese swam up to hiss and snap at me, miniature versions of the weather. “Appease the darlings of the river gods.” I offered the birds some bread which they gulped between snaps and hisses. We’d made only twenty-nine miles, but we didn’t care: now we had time to write in our logbooks, eat a cold supper, sit back safely in harbor, and perhaps let the storm rock us to sleep. I went up the hill to arrange for the dock, and the lady said, “Oh, heavens. I couldn’t charge you in weather like this.” I said, Ma’am, you should charge us for saving our lives. She smiled. “And how much would you pay for that?”

N
OT LONG AFTER DAWN
, when I went to the welldeck to dip up a basin of water for washing hands, Pilotis appeared and, as if addressing no one, said, “Why is a creek like a dog?” And then, stretching, answered, “Because you don’t know where it’s been.” I knew where my hands had been—cleaning the boat—and I sudsed away shamelessly. Eating little, we shoved off early into the overcast but stormless morning, the river quiet, and soon we passed the old Louisville waterworks, its minaret one of the distinctive landmarks on the Ohio. Across at Jeffersonville, Indiana, a boat-building town for more than a century and a half, the
City of Evansville
, a floating casino, was about ready to slide down the ways.

Louisville is where it is because the Falls of the Ohio, once the only significant natural impediment within a thousand miles, are where they are. The broad ledge, while not high, was just enough to stop steamboats and necessitate that cargo be hauled overland to a vessel on the other side; around that simple portage of goods, the city grew. During high water, paddlewheelers could execute a thrilling ride through the falls to avoid the haulage, and one nineteenth-century writer reported the flooding river sweeping houses over, occupants crying out from windows and rooftops. McAlpine Dam sits upon much of the ledge now, but near the north side, the base of the Falls of the Ohio is still visible at low water, and from the limestone paleontologists have found a large fossil bed, an album of ancient sea creatures long gone before the Ohio made its first run over the rocks.

After being blown off the river the day before, we were hoping to have a good run that Thursday, but the McAlpine Lock operator was a man who neither moved us along nor explained over the radio why he made us tie to the approach wall for half an hour. Like many of the lockmen on the Ohio, he refused to give any information, and my attempt to interest him in our long voyage ended with his silence quieter than Rocky Mountain snowmelt. So there we sat, both locks empty of boats. Finally the gates opened, we entered, the gates closed, and—we waited some more. Eventually we began a slow descent, but four feet down the water stopped moving and we sat again. Then we started back up. Pilotis spoke my irrational concern: “Did you violate some ordinance? Are they going to call us over?” Had I left the radio on while we grumbled about McAlpine operators? Then the upstream gates reopened, and I was sure we were going to get some directive. It was as if I’d just glanced in a rearview mirror and seen flashing red and blue lights. Pilotis went aft with the binoculars to look upriver for a police boat, then called out in annoyance, “Oh, good god!”

I went back, took the glasses, and there slogging up was—what else? The
Docktor.
We were being held up for her. She came in and took a bitt behind us, and after another delay we started the descent once more, and we talked stern to bow. Cap said, “It’s been raining to the west. That damn Missouri River of yours is starting to flood again. Trees, docks, all hell’s coming down into the Mississippi.” I said, For a minute there I thought you had bad news. “I don’t think we’ll try it,” he said. “Current ten to fifteen miles an hour against us. And the drift. Waterfronts are under. Way too much risk.” Hell, I said, there’s only twenty-five hundred miles of it.

An hour and a half later we were at last free of the infernal McAlpine Lock and could skim down the pebbled river as if we were a water strider, and Pilotis said, “So that flooding, what do you think?” I shrugged. “I know this—you can’t always go where you want when you want.” But on this voyage, I answered, to go where we want, we have to go
when
we want. “So then, did you put up that ‘Proceed as the way opens’ just to mock yourself?” I said, The only way to test the waters is to get out on the waters, and, as you know, most of the time it’s too late to turn back when you understand you should turn back. Two years ago the Missouri flooded for half a year. “And what’s six months against your life?” Pilotis said. This voyage
is
my life—I can’t get along from here without getting to the other side of the country—it’s a necessity of topography and heart—you know what’s been happening in my life—I’ve put everything into this voyage—my landward life resumes at the Pacific Ocean. “Skipper, you sound like Meriwether Lewis.” I said, Sometimes all you can do is commit to the flood and believe yourself lucky.

The Ohio clicked under the hull, water of happy texture, and we were finding the good run we’d wanted, but of course on the river all things sooner or later come into balance, and our counterweight just then was gasoline tanks nearing empty. Below the reach of Louisville industry, we passed some shoreside houses, new places, then we were again between hills rising from a narrow bench that opened every so often to tilled plots atop eight-foot-high earthen banks. We found no fuel at West Point, Kentucky, and nothing at Brandenburg sixteen miles farther. From there the Ohio takes to meandering through sparsely populated country where horseshoe bends and oxbows make it run an errant seven or eight miles to gain only twelve hundred feet westward. The river turned rough and drift beset us, so we had to slow down here, weave around floaters there, all of it killing fuel economy, and twice we had to stop to clean the props of branches, but the twisting green hills gave recompense in their rumpled sublimity.

About every twenty minutes,
Nikawa
encountered tows moving coal, their big wakes banging us. The fuel-gauge needles kept dropping, and Pilotis said, “If we go dead in the water, what’s the drill when a tow comes on? What do we do to keep from getting sucked under those barges or minced in the propellers?” If one engine stops, we’ll use the last gas in the other to run to shore. “And if the shore is impossible?” Look at it this way, I said, worrying about gas keeps our minds off floods.

Before the Ohio was engineered into dams and pools, it was, although not a particularly rocky river, full of sandbars, islands with blind and tricky chutes and channels, and the usual obstructions of snags. Published maps were little more than sketches, and many travelers, struggling with burdensome flatboats, relied on verbal charts like Samuel Cummings’s
The Western Pilot;
typical instructions from the 1847 edition:

Two miles below N. Albany, will be seen in low water, a bar on the left, which will drive you over to the right, above a white house, on the Indiana side, you must keep the right shore until you get near Yellow Wilson’s, or a large brick house that formerly belonged to him, then incline to the left, and keep down until opposite the left-hand point, called Hughes’s Bar. Then if you run the lower channel, make a long crossing for a clearing with a white house on the right side. If the upper channel is taken, run square in for a cluster of trees about 250 yards above the house, then keep nearest to the right-hand shore until you reach the point below on the right.

We wore on through the gray day, deeper into the meanders where the banks were too high to let us see potential salvation like a road or a farm. Said Pilotis, “We’ve got one small chance for gas at Leavenworth. After that, there’s nothing for fifty miles.”
Nikawa
doesn’t have fifty miles in her, I replied. Pilotis put the chart down wearily. “Why is this never easy?” Because this is America, I said. I was thinking that we often fail to understand how wild this land is even today, sometimes mistaking the ruining of wilderness as a subduing of it.

Pilotis spotted a little dock under a steep bank on the Indiana side, turned the field glasses on it, studied it, and I said, Yes? “Can’t tell yet.” Now? “Not yet.” You know what I want to hear. “It might be. Give me a few more yards. Could be.” Don’t disappoint me, Mate. “Looks good.” I’m starting to get happy. “Oh, god. I think it’s a barrel. Damnit! It’s a goddamn red barrel!” Get out your hiking boots. “Hold on. I think behind the barrel there’s a gas pump!”

And indeed there was a pump, a locked one with no one around anywhere. I said, We’re here to stay till we get the key. “What if the storage tank’s empty? Or the pump’s broken?” We climbed the long stair up the clay bank to a trailer sitting in a space cleared in the woods. No one there either, so we wandered on to a road and followed it into the remains of old Leavenworth, a settlement severely set back by the great flood of 1937. Only a few closed-up, weathered buildings were still there, and in the cinereous weather we found not a soul. If you’ve seen one of those movies where a couple of survivors of some Armageddon come up above ground to discover only screen doors banging in the lonely wind, cobwebs long empty of life, and dust whispering about, then you know how Leavenworth was. We walked on, turning toward the river again, and near the edge we came to The Dock, not the kind we wanted, but a homely café. Inexplicably, it was open.

The cook stepped from the kitchen to see who the hell had wandered in. “Off the river?” she said. We sat at the counter in front of a large refrigerator with a hand-lettered sign punctuated with equal signs as if the phrases were equations:

NO = VULGAR = LANGUAGE

WATCH = YOUR = MOUTH

Pilotis warned a look at me although I hadn’t said a word. We thought ourselves and the cook the only ones about, but then from a side room we heard a rough, threatening Appalachian voice: “Weasel’s gonna eat up your liver,” and a child began to whimper. The cook saw our expressions, and she said, “That’s her mom = The kid ordered chicken livers = Weasel’s her dog.”

The gasoline man wouldn’t be home till nightfall, so we settled in against the afternoon and ordered a plate of fried fiddlers (whole catfish), hush puppies, slaw, and potato salad. In Italy, country
food
is taken seriously, but in America, country
eating
is the serious thing, and we honored the custom, all the time in hopes someone would enter and get curious about two marooned sailors. At last the café owner, Peggy Apple, a tall woman in her sixties, walked up, asked the question we wanted—how we came to be there—and our telling of the river miles got her interest, then her sympathy, and she offered to drive up the highway for gasoline while we finished our fiddlers. Although she was able to return with only ten gallons, I figured it enough to get us the sixty miles to Cannelton.

We took
Nikawa
on around the meanders, past what had to be the fifth or sixth Knob Creek we’d seen in the last couple of days. The twists in the Ohio made for a weird compass: Kentucky lay south of us as it had since the state line, but then it went north, then east, then west, and south again, yet always it lay on our port side. Finally the river straightened to run a course absolutely due south, made a broad turn west, and again assumed a perfect 180-degree heading.

Once when I was near here, I met an old fellow of some charm, a teller of tales from the twenties; at the end of our first conversation, he gave me his card:

I looked at it and said I thought his name was Hiram Hiller. He broke into laughter. “And
I
thought you could read.”

Pilotis figured a good overnight stop would be Stephensport or Cloverport, Kentucky, but we found no suitable mooring, so we ran on, on over a stretch of broadly spaced swells with smooth backs that gave us a carnival ride again, but this one was a gentle carousel horse that took us up and down along the shores of Breckinridge County, Kentucky, where the citizens seemed bent on paving the riverbank with discarded kitchen and laundry room appliances mortared together with plastic flotsam.

We turned into Deer Creek, stopped to make sure we could pass beneath the small highway bridge—
Nikawa
did so by three inches—and there upstream we lay to. In spite of the hindrances, we’d come 132 river miles (only half of that mileage directly west), our longest run yet. We hitched a lift a few miles down to Cannelton, the old steamboat-coal town, and took quarters in the Castlebury Inn, once an 1867 commercial building. After washing up, we walked a mile to a good salad bar, talked about floods, and toasted to surviving another river day. While I was waiting for a pass at the hot peppers and green olives, a young man said to his wife, “That makes no sense, honey. Why are you doing that?” She smiled at him and said, “Because shut up, that’s why! I’m a girl.”