River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (42 page)

We stopped at the Fort Rice gas station and trading post to ask what lay ahead, and we heard that the river was once again a natural waterway with the usual bugaboos, and a man told us, “Maybe you can make it up to Garrison Dam, I don’t know, but you sure as hell picked the best year to have a run at it. In seventy-five years I never saw the water so high.” Said murmuring Pilotis, “See, Captain’s got this rainstick.” The crew was delighted with the clerk’s history even after I reminded them the dams existed for only about half those years, and further, a high river is not necessarily easier than a low one—it just changes the location of obstructions. What’s more, the fellow probably knew nothing of the river five miles farther up, where, we’d heard earlier, the water was low because the dam was letting almost nothing through. The Photographer asked the man about the promised Hunkpapa jacket, but it wasn’t there.

We retrieved
Nikawa
from the farm and put her in the Missouri exactly where she’d come out and set off for Washburn, North Dakota, under one more day of blue sky, a good weather about to become critical to our continuing. A mile above Fort Rice, the river turns northwest and enters a twisted section choked everywhere with bars and islands, false chutes, and stumps. I wound us through a broken forest of deadheads bleached like skeletons that eventually led to more open water but so generously braided we had to hunt the channel at every moment, and our progress was slow, then slower, then it stopped altogether when
Nikawa
grounded out.

We went fore and aft and poled off, not cussing, just working, because at last we understood that getting hung up was not like a flat tire—an unexpected and usually preventable annoyance—but rather part of the nature of ascent up the Missouri, just as lifting one’s foot is part of walking. The Photographer, our fretter-in-residence, nonetheless said, “Are we pushing
Nikawa
too far here? Isn’t it time for the canoe?” I said we couldn’t know what was too far until we went too far, and we still had to play distance against time, against the June rise, and it was now June, and we were still about five hundred miles from the region of most questionable water.

On a narrow sandbar near the eastern bank, we saw for the first time white pelicans, veritable symbols of the high Missouri. I was telling about Lewis and Clark shooting a pelican to see how much water its big throaty beak would hold, but I didn’t get to say five gallons before
Nikawa
crashed hard into something and rolled to starboard, halfway to her gunwales, charts flying across the pilothouse; it was as if she’d fallen into a hole. Then she righted herself.

I cut power, apprehensively raised the motors, and Pilotis went aft to face what sounded like the arrival of the Grand Terminator. As the props emerged from the dark water into the light, Mate called out, “No damage!” We checked the hull for leaks, but all was sound. Pilotis: “Chapter Forty-four of
One Goddamn Scare a Day
,” and we took up another installment of the Canoe Debate, moot for the time being since the Grumman was on a highway somewhere ahead of us. We went on, relieved to have escaped once again, although I knew that those ringing hits accumulated on the crew, each blow less easy to shrug off, each one increasing our belief that the law of averages was gaining on us.

At a speed hardly better than what the canoe could do, we passed the location of an ancient riverside village now called the Huff Site that tractors, a highway, and the erosive river have not ground into oblivion. Raymond Wood, the archaeologist who excavated Huff, once told me that over the almost six hundred miles from the mouth of the Niobrara River to Garrison Dam, there was a prehistoric site along the Missouri about every mile, but the Missouri Valley farther west even to its headwaters is nearly free of them, and nobody knows why. We ascended beyond the mouth of the Heart River, once an important Mandan settlement. George Catlin spent time with those people when he came upriver in 1832 and wrote extensive and colorful accounts of them before disease all but eliminated the tribe. In one of his “letters” the painter wrote:

The Mandans are certainly a very interesting and pleasing people in their personal appearance and manners, differing in many respects, both in looks and customs from all other tribes which I have seen. . . . A stranger in the Mandan village is first struck with the different shades of complexion and various colours of hair which he sees in a crowd about him and is at once almost disposed to claim that “these are not Indians.”

There are a great many of these people whose complexions appear as light as half breeds, and amongst the women particularly, there are many whose skins are almost white, with the most pleasing symmetry and proportion of features, with hazel, with grey, and with blue eyes, with mildness and sweetness of expression and excessive modesty of demeanour, which render them exceedingly pleasing and beautiful.

Why this diversity of complexion I cannot tell, nor can they themselves account for it. Their traditions, so far as I have yet learned them, afford us no information of their having had any knowledge of white men before the visit of Lewis and Clarke made to their village thirty-three years ago. Since that time there have been but very few visits from white men to this place, and surely not enough to have changed the complexions and the customs of a nation. And I recollect perfectly well that Governor Clarke told me before I started for this place that I would find the Mandans a strange people and half white.

The diversity in the colour of hair is also equally as great as that in the complexion, for in a numerous group of these people (and more particularly amongst the females who never take pains to change its natural colour as the men often do), there may be seen every shade and colour of hair that can be seen in our own country, with the exception of red or auburn which is not to be found.

And there is yet one more strange and unaccountable peculiarity, which can probably be seen nowhere else on earth, nor on any rational grounds accounted for, other than it is a freak or order of Nature for which she has not seen fit to assign a reason. There are very many of both sexes and of every age from infancy to manhood and old age with hair of bright silvery grey, and in some instances almost perfectly white.

This singular and eccentric appearance is much oftener seen among the women than it is with the men, for many of the latter who have it seem ashamed of it and artfully conceal it by filling their hair with glue and black and red earth. The women, on the other hand, seem proud of it and display it often in an almost incredible profusion which spreads over their shoulders and falls as low as the knee. . . . By passing this hair through my hands, as I often have, I have found it uniformly to be as coarse and harsh as a horse’s mane, differing materially from the hair of other colours, which amongst the Mandans is generally as fine and as soft as silk.

We passed Fort Abraham Lincoln, the post the Seventh Cavalry rode out from to their rendezvous at the Little Bighorn. Four miles farther, we motored slowly through a scad of sandbars on the southwest side of Bismarck, the river glomerated with Sunday speedboats and water scooters, those aquatic motorcycles widely disliked except by the sports roaring them in circles leading nowhere. A few days earlier we’d heard a radio ad for the contraptions: “You’ll own the water with bold thrusts of power!” River-weathered
Nikawa
looked like the
Santa María
arriving at a Caribbean beach party, but we looped around a long bar and tied up at the dock of a rockabeatinboogie grill where we hoped to find the Professor. Columbus’s crew was hardly less baffled than we as we stumbled into Sunday at the Beach, and the partying made our long crossing seem something we’d only imagined, and I said so, and Pilotis said, “It’s the bikinis doing it to you.” I realized our isolation on the river during the day narrowed our lives to critical focus and, in a way, made continuing easy since alternatives were so few. But at that place, what choices, what allurements without the “excessive modesty of demeanour” of the Mandans! Pilotis watched me, and said to the others, “We’ve got to get him back on the river quick.” I said, Get me back on the river quick, otherwise I’m going to call North Dakota the Pacific Ocean and drop our final anchor.

The Professor, exercising his talent for finding guidance, said two fellows named Randy could tell us about the treacherous channel ahead. Pilotis: “We’re going to take advice from two beach boys named Randy?” On the dock, we found them togged out in tank tops and iridescent swim trunks, beers in hand, their radio thumping, and Randall One said, “Where you’re going, people lose their lower units up there. It’s bad and it gets worse.” They so struggled to describe the route through, Randall Two finally said, “Oh, what the hell, dudes, just follow us. We’ll get you started,” and they roared off in their bright speedboat of a design meant to restore self-esteem to men with small penises and attract young women in search of a mobile tanning bed. They left
Nikawa
behind, waited for us by opening more beer and heavy-metaling along to “Symptom of the Universe.” The Missouri has listened to Teton war chants, cavalry bugles, Mandan courting flutes, Arikara eagle-bone whistles, reels of Lewis and Clark’s fiddler, Pierre Cruzatte, and now Megadeth. Perhaps that’s what set Pilotis to muttering, and I said, A guide is a guide, so just consider the Randys Twain our Charbonneau and Sacagawea. “I’m considering going home.”

We were soon beyond the beach parties and their roaring boxes, into a stretch where a thick cover of trees lined the quiet river and a high bluff rose from the east shore, dense bottoms to the west; the way was shallows split by channels of moderate width. Our Charbonneau ran aground once, then again, and it was apparent the Randallmen were trying to proceed by memory rather than by reading the river. Narrowly escaping another shoal, they wheeled about, waved, and headed back to the safety of beach-blanket bingo. Said Pilotis, “They must have gotten out of range of their radio station.”

We pushed on cautiously, everyone on watch, I listening to the water against the hull for telltale changes in depth, and we slowly moved into more and more isolated country. After another ten miles, I noticed a spot of orange on a high bluff; it was, surprisingly, the Professor at one of the few places where a road, if for only a half mile, runs right alongside the upper Missouri. Over the radio he said, “About twenty miles more to Washburn and River Relief.”

The pilothouse was still full of cheer and the expectation of ease when the Missouri reminded us how long its miles are. The water split into three broadly bending channels, one down each bank, one down the middle, all of equal size. I figured things couldn’t be that easy, but for once we had a pilot in the sky, and I asked the Professor to assay our position from the blufftop. His was a long expounding ending with, “I’d recommend the middle channel, but I’m not sure. It’s your boat.” Those last three words I’d come to detest.

I considered and chose to follow the old piloting standard and take the chute on the outside of the curve where centrifugal force usually throws the most water. The current was fair and dark, the surface almost untroubled. Up we went, not fast. I asked over the radio, How do we look? “Okay, I guess.” On we went. Farther. Each of us quiet, concentrating. Then: a loud cracking, shattering, horrific smashing that slammed us against the bulkheads, jammed forward my right arm, the one on the throttles, and the engines began racing to destruction, and my elbow bled over the levers. I jerked the power back, killed the roaring motors. For a minute, nobody could move or speak. We had met the Grand Terminator, and we were his. We knew it. Our lower units had to be on the bottom of the river. Already the Missouri was pulling us downstream.

One at a time, I raised the motors, my heart flattened, as Pilotis waited in the welldeck to see what was left. “Port stem there! Prop half gone!” I raised the other. “Starboard stem is there! Prop torn all to hell!” The Photographer: “At least it’s just the propellers.” We’re done, I said, we can’t run on unbalanced props or we’ll ruin the engines. We stared at the river, then I went to the helm, fired the starboard motor, spun the prop just enough to turn the bow around, and radioed the Professor, We’re dead in the water, and I have no goddamn idea whatsoever how we can get off this river. On down we drifted, helplessly. I remembered a fellow a day earlier asking me, “You know what ‘Missouri’ means in Indian?” I answered with a couple of popular interpretations, but he said, “You’ve got that wrong. It means river-that-eats-your-lunch.”

The Photographer, in a consternation that may have surpassed mine, said, “Can we drift all the way back to Bismarck?” What the hell, I said, let’s just drift all the goddamn way back home. I thought, This time we’re in deep, deep trouble.

Every so often I spun the starboard propeller to keep little wounded
Nikawa
from being turned sideways by the brute river. Just as we were about to lose sight of the Professor and radio contact, I noticed a fisherman who had not been there twenty minutes earlier, and I called out to ask where there was a road down to the water. “There isn’t!” he yelled. “Not around here!” Then an afterthought: “Unless you call that track over there a road.” He pointed to a steep and curving dirt cut down a crumbling, treeless bluff. Pilotis looked at me in alarm. “There’s no way the wagon can get down that dangerous sonofabitch, let alone haul a ton and a half up it. If that ground gives way, we’ll lose more than just props—we’ll be out a boat, trailer,
and
wagon. We’re talking worse than destruction—we’re talking death.”

I said, Radio the Prof before we lose contact and tell him we’re heading for it—tell him he’s absolutely got to find it somehow. Pilotis: “Oh, jeezis.” I brought
Nikawa
close to shore, but rocks kept her off, so the Photographer, an anchor of a man, took the bow line and waded to the bank to hold us. We waited. Pilotis was probably right: the track would be impossible. The Professor was probably right: the middle channel might have been better. The Photographer was probably right: this was canoe country. Believing in my experience, working from my insistence, I had put us out of commission. The fisherman came up after a while, looked at the props, and said, “You really done it.” I did, I said. “If it makes you feel better,” he added, “yours ain’t the only blades out there. There’s whole lower units and about two hundred of my lures.”