River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (30 page)

We walked onto the ramp to wait for the trailer. The emergency martinet, cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth, came up and shouted for us to leave. I told him the dory out there was mine and we were about to pull it off the river. “No you’re not!” he yelled, although we were standing next to him. I most certainly am! “You do and you’re going to jail!” There’s no danger whatsoever to the levee by bringing her in! None at all and none to the ramp! He pulled out his radio like a weapon and spoke into it, “We may have a violator problem down at the pull-out!”

As timing would have it, my friend just then arrived with the trailer. I was losing my capacity to reason with the man, and the Reporter said, “Step away. Let me try.” So I did, but it was no good, and from that point the conversation continued in volume between stage voice and bar shouts. I said, The Corps is closing the river, and you’re closing this ramp, so where does that leave us and my boat? “Right where it is!” And for how long? “That’s not my problem!”

Seeing our expedition, all our months of preparation, our weeks of hard miles suddenly going under because of one man’s senseless and baseless exercise of egomania, I went into a fury and shouted in his face, If that boat goes down, I’m going to enjoy my jail time for beating the hell out of you! “Easy,” the Reporter said, “he’s just a man under pressure.” No, I yelled into him, he’s a tyrannical little turd under pressure!

We took the trailer up the hill to park it, and the whole time I planned my rescue of
Nikawa.
I would swim to her if I had to. She was not going to go down. On Front Street, the sirens blew, and a police car cruised by twice, the speakers telling the last merchants to get their vehicles to high ground. A man hurried past: “They’ve hauled all the post office out!” We walked on toward the upper end of the levee, where we heard a hubbub. “It must have breached!” the Reporter said, and we rushed forward. “What happened?” he called out, and a fellow turned: “Treloar’s broke open!” We stood and watched the river gauge, the notches slowly emerging into the afternoon light, the water withdrawing from the sandbags that had held just long enough. For now New Haven was safe again, and, for a few more hours, probably
Nikawa.

That night, in the Hilltop Lounge, some of the citizens celebrated with us, and the Reporter showed them the four-leaf clover and asked whether they believed in such things. “You bet your life,” a fellow said sarcastically. Three weeks later a tornado hit New Haven, just as one had done after the last flood. When we heard that news, I said to the Reporter, We shouldn’t have accepted the town clover.

W
E HAD NOTHING
but hearsay that the Corps of Engineers had closed the Missouri to tows and perhaps small boats too, so, the trailer ramp forbidden, I decided to treat the shutdown as only rumor and make a run upriver to my home country where I could protect
Nikawa
and get better control of our fate. That sunny morning we found her secure at the dock, the cottonwood holding strong. Nick gassed up our tanks, and we, hoping the way was open, proceeded on west.

The Missouri was everyplace a wide and weird deep, a maze of tree lines where the river afflux turned the bottoms into itself, and I struggled to distinguish the channel from the rest of the water. Once under way, I immediately headed into a broad flooded field before I realized my error and regained the river proper.
Nikawa
again rose to skim the current, but boils banged her repeatedly, some of them forcing up large gelatinous bubbles, yellow bulbs of methane that slowly broke open in the sunlight. The Reporter took up a drift watch and learned how to tell a wind riffle from a floater and where to find the navigational day marks among the trees. Other than dodging drift,
Nikawa
almost steered herself, as if she were a horse that knows the way home. Without minimizing the dangers of the Missouri, especially when in flood, I was coming to see it as a river given to intimidation yet yielding good passage to those who look it in the eye, and I had to admit that the engineers in their elimination of the braidings have made ascent of the lower Missouri an easier undertaking than it was ninety years ago.

Hermann, Missouri, an old German wine town between the bluffs, is one of the most famous on the river and of inviting access to a boat traveler, its steeples, courthouse, nineteenth-century White House Hotel marking it well, its Wharf Street open to the water in an agreeable way, but we dared not stop and again risk being prevented from continuing. I’d visited Hermann many times, and told the Reporter about the night I was having dinner in a little place there. At the next table, a young man talked loudly and unceasingly about himself and his greatness to come; finally his wearying audience, a woman so Teutonically fair her eyebrows were transparent, said, “Kevin, love thyself not too much, lest thou make others puke.”

The country was rocky bluffs marking the river valley, their tops sprinkled with small burial mounds of the first people, most of the tumuli at cliff edges to give a long view down the water that may have represented the way into their next realm. Almost entirely free of industry and sprawled housing, those miles go among terrain lovely as any we’d seen, but it is, even today, something of a terra incognita because the wide floodplain typically keeps highways distant from the Missouri, and boating, other than fishermen’s johnboats, is virtually nonexistent on the 365 river miles between St. Louis and Kansas City. The territory is not actually isolated, but the wooded hills circumscribe one’s line of sight to create frequent impressions of a land only recently discovered. Yet it was up this lower Missouri that the vanguard of Europeans and Americans came into the West. I’ve found more than a hundred antebellum accounts of explorers and travelers describing the region, from the 1714 voyage of Étienne Veniard de Bourgmont to the 1861 trip Mark Twain briefly mentions in
Roughing It.
In between are narratives from many of the great figures in American western history: Lewis and Clark, Edwin James on the Stephen Long expedition, George Catlin, Narcissa Whitman, Alfred Jacob Miller, Pierre-Jean De Smet (six trips), John Charles Frémont, John James Audubon, and young Francis Parkman on his way to the Oregon Trail. From these hands famous and less so, one of the fullest accounts is hard to find and read by only a few, that describing the 1833–34 journey of the German prince Maximilian with his illustrator, Karl Bodmer, who created the most exquisite watercolors of the lands and peoples of the Missouri country ever made. The prince, perhaps the earliest ethnologist to visit tribal Americans on both continents, described meticulously what he saw, heard, and ate, creating a rich mosaic of the upper Louisiana Territory in its last days of Indian dominance.

The Missouri we saw on that May afternoon was little like the one those hundred chroniclers recorded, for the Army engineers have changed it from a river of ten thousand channels, chutes, islands, towheads, meanders, marshes, backwaters, slackwaters, sloughs, sandbars, and wrenchingly tight bends into a mildly curving conduit. The 750 miles of the lower Missouri—that portion below the last dam—is today essentially a single channel with hardly an island deserving the name. Instead of those features there are rock wing-dikes, five to ten for every mile, that straitjacket the river and force its current to scour the bottom to self-maintain a barge-navigable waterway. There is, however, little commercial navigation on the Missouri, unless you call Corps service boats or private sand-dredges navigation. The most heavily subsidized segment of the transportation industry, barge companies pay only about thirteen percent of the cost of operating and maintaining eleven thousand miles of major commercial waterways in the United States. Yet for a century the river has been manipulated for the nearly exclusive benefit of barges, a scheme that also opened expanses of valley bottoms to agriculture; according to state law, these “accreted lands” become the possession of adjacent property owners, largely farmers who can then demand federal protection from flooding into areas that were only recently towheads and shoals. Today the lower Missouri occupies about half the surface area it did before the engineers arrived, and of 160 large islands comprising 65,000 acres once in the river, only eighteen remain. Channelizing destroyed thousands of acres of natural habitats, removed spaces that formerly absorbed high waters to lessen the impact of floods, and forced Americans to pay millions of dollars to benefit a few companies and bottom farmers and people who should never have built houses and businesses in the altered floodplain in the first place. After the massive inundation of 1993, federal and state agencies started trying to give the lower Missouri back some of its escape valves by purchasing bottomlands that currents, engineered into violence, had alternately scooped holes into or covered with sand. What the government
gave
to farmers a few years ago, it began buying back to mitigate an impossible and destructive human design.

For the river, such schemes are but another moment in its long and ancient life; after all, what is a mere levee compared to the mile-high wall of ice that lay along the north bank three hundred thousand years ago? When our civilization is nothing more than disconnected pieces of half-buried things that don’t decay, the river will already have remade itself according to the grand natural arrangement where everything answers to harmony, and the Missouri will have rebraided from the Rockies to the Mississippi.

We passed the mouth of the Gasconade, “the boastful river” although no one any longer knows why, and twenty-five miles farther the Osage entered, both rivers formerly steamboat navigable during high water for a hundred miles upstream. At the debouchment of the Osage once dwelt the people who gave the river its name and whom Audubon described as “well formed, athletic and robust men of noble aspect” capable of walking sixty miles a day. Chief Big Soldier, before his nation was dispossessed of Missouri, told a white friend: “You are surrounded by slaves. Everything about you is in chains, and you are in chains yourselves. I fear if I should change my life for yours, I too would become a slave.” The Osage no longer lived on the shores of their river when white men fulfilled the old chief’s words by massively enchaining the once freely flowing water to spin turbines to run bumper cars and light billboards around the Lake of the Ozarks.

Then, atop a long limestone bluff at Jefferson City, rose a veritable image of the United States Capitol, the Missouri statehouse, perhaps the most eminently situated one in America. The architects placed atop the dome a bronze Ceres, goddess of fecund corn fields, yet turned her back to the river and the valley it once kept deeply and naturally fertile. For a couple of millennia the ancient goddess has seen civilizations come and go and has watched the effect of hubris on nations that can dream up divinity but not accord themselves with natural force.

Around the broad bend beneath the purview of Ceres, we ascended another twenty miles to reach the mouth of Perche Creek (usually pronounced PURR-chee), its lower miles formerly the course of the Missouri until the river moved itself across the valley before the engineers could. Half a league up the stream is Providence, population 3, formerly the steamboat landing for Columbia. Waiting was my friend with the trailer. The current in the creek rushed hard against us, turned
Nikawa
around, and we had to winch her into the cradle, and then we hauled her up the narrow bluff-road.

I arrived home one month and one day after leaving the Atlantic Ocean, now just over two thousand water miles behind us. When the flood and regulations might permit us to resume the voyage I had no idea, and I was concerned not only about losing time against the snowmelt in the West but also that the forced layover in my homeport, the ease of the familiar, could make my return to the river nearly impossible.

I
T RAINED OFF AND ON
for two days, but the Missouri neither rose nor fell appreciably, nor did the Corps open the river. I watched the calendar as a mill hand does the shop clock, and the Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative loomed greater than ever, since rain in the Far West could speed the melt. I wondered whether we should risk the tricky water, arrest, and maybe an angry farmer who might take a shot at us, even though the small wake from our boat would endanger no one’s levee.

During that forty-eight hours, the Photographer and I replaced the propellers and made changes in our equipage to ready us for the western rivers and Great Plains and mountains we would pass through. After all the days and nights with someone only inches away every moment, I found the solitude of keeping bachelor’s hall disconcerting, so each evening I went into Columbia to the Flat Branch brew pub, the creek an indirect tributary to the Missouri and our voyage, and the pub a direct contributor—writing being an insular occupation—to my social health. The Branch is a place of excellent ales and pilsners, with a dictionary and world almanac behind the bar to settle wagers. The second night, I joined friends at our favorite restaurant, Trattoria Strada Nova; they could see my resolve to continue fading in their glow, and I found on the table a note—
ADMIT NO IMPEDIMENTS, ALLOW NO SKID DEMONS
—to remind me that for many weeks yet the easy life was a hindrance and, for now, my true home was on the river. The message awoke me, and some time later, above the table that helped send me out again, I carved into the wall a map of our route.

I phoned to announce the departure to my great friend, who took the usual cautious Pilotis position: “Did you know I joined the Church of Procrastination?” What’s the doctrine? “Procrastianity.” Meaning what? “I don’t know—I’ll figure it out later.” Time and tide—, I began, but my first mate interrupted, “Is the way open?” You know the answer to that. “Not long ago,” said Pilotis, “I broke into a fortune cookie and found it empty. A metaphor of my life.” I said, Tomorrow the river is in your cookie.

The next day Pilotis appeared and we went down to the creek, launched
Nikawa
, and again took aboard the Reporter. A few other friends waved us back onto our little ol excursion trip, and I soon felt safely under way once more and was no longer afraid of home. When we entered the Missouri, it thumped us hard, leaned
Nikawa
downstream before I could wheel her into the current, level out, and let her run. Black terns, in a signal welcome, accompanied us for an hour. Of all our long route, those next thirty miles I knew best, and I talked for much of the way, pointing out a particular creek, a special eddy, a goose nest, all the time Pilotis saying, “Where? Where?”