River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (43 page)

“What did we hit?” the Photographer said. It had to be a rock, a big rock, a big invisible rock, a big invisible bastard rock. About then the tow wagon appeared, small atop the bluff, and warily started down the track, and I wondered whether I was about to turn a bad situation into the end of our voyage. Pilotis said, “Hold, earth, hold!” Down came the wagon, the Professor effecting a skillful descent, showing no fear of rolling over and over into the river. Slowly onward, lower, lower, and then he was down. He maneuvered here and there before we could find a boulder-free place for the wagon, shallow enough for the trailer, deep enough for the boat. I ran
Nikawa
up onto the cradle, and we tied her in. I stayed aboard in case we slipped back into the river, and Pilotis, relieving the Professor who wanted no responsibility should our rig go over the edge, got into the wagon, switched to four-wheel drive, shifted into gear, stepped on the accelerator, but the wheels turned and went nowhere on the slick, loose rocks. Now we had
all
our equipment imperiled.

I stood on the bow and shook my fist at the river, at the track. Then the Professor yelled, “It’s Arlen!” I said, What the hell’s an arlunn? “Arlen Simons. This is his ranch.” Excellent, I said, now we’ve got trespass trouble. Simons crept down the track in a big, brand-new four-wheel-drive pickup. The Professor had just met the rancher as he was returning home, and now there he was to offer help.

We ran our chain from his truck to the tow wagon, and with eight wheels pulling, pulling,
Nikawa
slowly came out of the water onto the rocks. We undid the chain, I walked up the track and came down to take the steering wheel of our tow wagon, studied the track again, then started up with the boat immensely behind, everything under incredible strain. If the wheels began spinning, disaster was next. Backing that rig down would be a nightmare. The tow wagon had the biggest engine available, and it took all of its power to drag
Nikawa
up, slowly up, the wheels not spinning, not yet anyway, not yet, slowly up, up, up to the top, the ever-blessed top! I got out, looked at her a hundred feet up on the bluff, an improbable place for a boat, and I thought, This is a pre-departure fear, and any minute someone will nudge me and I’ll be home, the voyage not even begun.

Laughing, disburdened Pilotis clapped me on the back, and I said, Let’s do it again to prove it wasn’t just another stroke of luck. Then I changed the props, Arlen helping, smiling, telling of his ranch where his people had been since 1882. We pulled
Nikawa
, again river-worthy, on across the bluff to leave it for the night next to his barn, thanked him profusely, and went down the road to the edge of Bismarck for dinner and River Relief.

Sitting in a grill with a good view of the Missouri, we cracked open peanuts and offered toasts, the abstemious Professor raising his mineral water, and Pilotis said to the crew, “You boys are new at this, but here’s what just occurred: Ignoring the advice of each of us, Skipper makes two bad decisions, risks a third, and brings us to grief in an isolated stretch of river without a real access road for miles. Drifting helplessly downstream, he finds a fisherman who wasn’t there a few minutes earlier, who points out the only possible escape around, which just happens to be exactly where we are. The tow wagon, which we almost never see during the day, happens to stop at that rarest of places, a good-visibility pull-off right against the river, but a spot high enough for the radio to work. Prof goes to find the most hidden track in North Dakota and just happens to catch the only resident in miles, who just happens to live near the track and who just happens to return home in the nick of time. The wagon somehow makes it down an eroded dirt trail a donkey would shy from, and the dangerous cut happens to be dry enough and solid enough not to give way. When loose stones make it impossible to move the boat, just then the curious rancher happens along in a new truck powerful enough to help pull our trapped contraption off the rocks. In an hour,
Nikawa
is safely high and dry and outfitted with new props. Now, here before you Skipper sits, mellowed out and watching the great Missouri as he sips a martini, and you’re thinking he’s a hell of a riverman, but he’ll probably claim you don’t have to be a hell of a riverman if you’re lucky.” No, I said, it was either clustered coincidences or destiny, the result being the same.

T
HAT EVENING
so many months ago when Pilotis and I studied inch by inch the maps and charts of our entire route and nearly concluded we couldn’t make the voyage in less than a couple of years because of several concerns, perhaps the greatest was whether a boat small enough to navigate the shallowest sections of the Missouri could ascend against its spring current, especially in a time of high water. On the fifth of June we prepared the canoe to learn the answer.

We returned the next morning to the place we’d come off the river, descended the narrow track again, unlashed the canoe, rigged it out, and struggled to get its four-horsepower motor, idle since the Allegheny, started. When I finally noticed we’d reversed the gas line from the six-gallon tank, we reconnected it. The Evinrude sputtered, caught, hummed its two dinky pistons, and off we went, Pilotis in the bow of the canoe, I at the stern, the others watching us head slowly out before they hauled
Nikawa
on to Washburn where we hoped to end the long day, although it was only twenty miles upstream. We carried a spare three-gallon gas tank because we had little notion how far nine gallons would take us against the current and twisting channels within a meandering river; because of his weight and the absence of checkpoints over that segment, I asked the Photographer to take his turn after we learned the range of the canoe. We tried to establish an arrival time, but all the unknowns made it conjecture, so we agreed that, should we not be able to make Washburn by dark, I would try to get off the Missouri to a ranch and leave a phone message on the Professor’s home answering machine. To save weight, we carried the radio but no tent or sleeping bags and only enough food and water for two frugal meals.

The good weather of the past days, now that we were totally exposed in a seventeen-foot canoe, changed from overcast to massive clouds threatening a storm.
Rule of the River Road:
Take to an open boat—bring on bad weather. Even with its bouldery bottom, the Allegheny had been a delight in the Grumman, but now we faced something else; the difference between the two rivers was as descending a ladder is to climbing a sequoia. Still, to hunt out the elusive Missouri chutes, to go up them and discover slowly that the small engine (a woman had called it “a little pisspot of a motor”) could move us forward, would give me pleasure and an increasing belief that the slender up-bound canoe could take on the big down-bound river.

We entered the channel that did in
Nikawa
, but we couldn’t discover our enemy, so hidden it was. The water, carrying only a modicum of sediment, flowed lightly green with clarity varying from six inches to about three feet, a gift of mud-trapping dams, and its depth was thumb-deep to over our heads. The motor stem and prop bounced off rocks and snags concealed by glare or murky pools or mild turbulence, but after each hit I quickly pushed the engine back into place, so we scarcely lost headway.

Passing through a nearly recumbent country of modest elevations and declinations, treeless except along the river fringes, we crossed and recrossed the Missouri to follow what I deemed the best channel. Our weaving course was like that of blind worker ants returning to the colony: a zig, a zag, a zigzag, a triple zag, an oops, wrong way. If only we, like them, could have smelled the trail. Were it possible to follow the center of the river, Washburn was just twenty miles distant, but the frequent crossovers added almost half again that mileage. Pilotis: “We could make better time on foot,” and I said, A hiker has to go up and down—at least our path is flat.

We guessed we might be doing four miles an hour, less the distance the current carried us backward, but our opposed directions gave the illusion we were moving faster, something I was happy to have since I thought the long hours in a canoe, seated in the same position and unsheltered from sun, wind, rain, heat, cold, insects—the usual ap purtenances of such travel—might wear the crew into rethinking their commitment. The map was so inadequate I tried to measure our ascent by time elapsed, although I was careful to underestimate the mileage we’d done, because to arrive “early” is more an inducement to continue than to go on well past an expected arrival. These considerations—and more that will soon become apparent—explain why, of all the people I’ve heard about who traveled the Missouri in this century, I knew of only one other who claimed to have gone from mouth to headwaters against the current.

Pilotis dipped a paddle to check depth in places with invisible bottoms, and, spotting an obstruction ahead, would duck so I could see it. We called the practice yondering, as in “to see up yonder.” Because the lower end of a chute can be quite unlike its head, and because often we couldn’t see the whole thing, making it up one required equal measures of luck and experience, and for a while the luck held. Then I chose a small channel that turned into a slough, and we had to retreat and try another, not a difficult task, merely one that tripled time and distance. Miles of that piece of the Missouri were more riverbed than river, wet sand splattered with puddles and isolated pools, and it was obvious that little water was flowing through massive Garrison Dam fifty miles above us. The chutes into the shoals were sometimes only marginally wider than the canoe, and I could reach over the gunwales right or left and touch dry sand. On those segments, the longest river in America was also the coziest.

Pilotis at first resisted trying those skinny troughs and began calling them broomsticks. We made our way up one, drawing sand several times but scraping on, only to proceed till we grounded out. With no room to turn the canoe around, I raised the motor and let the chute wash us slowly back down. We got out, stretched our legs, studied the river, and decided that same trough was the only possibility. We started up again. Pilotis said, “A cow pisses a wider stream than this.” I steered a more careful course, applied what I’d just learned about the channel, tried to avoid irritation, and, with hard assists from the paddles, we accomplished its length even though the difference from the first attempt was but a few inches here, a foot there. Then we reached a dark pool—darkness usually indicating deeper water—a stretch as quiet as a millpond that we ran so easily I could take my arm from its wrenched position on the tiller and steer us by slightly shifting my weight side to side. On came another slew of sandy strands, and the struggle to wrest a course from the river began again.

Pilotis advocated carrying the canoe over shallows with good footing, but I was determined to boat, not walk, across the country. Someday that might be another journey. Even a twenty-foot carry I considered a portage. So the ascent became a contest that I slowly drew my friend into, and the more sandbars and mud flats we managed to pass, the more Pilotis began to like the challenge, even when we had to use paddles as poles and push our way to the next pool. Because this travel was so different from our days aboard
Nikawa
, we enjoyed the laboring—and labor it was—but I knew too many miles of it might turn to empty drudgery ending in a desertion, and I wondered how long the crew could put up with such a traversal, such travail, especially if—
when
—the weather turned on us.

In the late afternoon big clouds of fouled darkness gathered at our backs like thugs ready to pursue a walker up a city alley. We were at last far enough west and close enough to mountain weather to encounter that daily summer phenomenon of a brief afternoon storm, so regular we could nearly tell the hour from it. We reached a good run of open water, the wind was at our backs, Washburn was surely not far ahead, and I opened the throttle all the way, and we fairly zipped along.

Canada geese had just finished nesting and were much about with their trains of little yellow and still flightless goslings; when we passed close to them there came a hubbub of complaint, accompanied by a mad paddling of webbed feet for the far side of whatever. Pilotis talked to all of them, explaining, lecturing, apologizing. On we went, our backs tiring, till finally we saw a feature to confirm our position, the Washburn Bridge, and we raced the weather to our waving orange flag and took the canoe off the river. Said Pilotis, “Anyone seeing that section of the Missouri from the air would think it a wet field. I mean, the rivers of the moon have more water.”

We ducked out of the short storm and into a café with an announcement on the bulletin board:

SILENT AUCTION
TO BENEFIT THE SPEECH CLUB

When the weather eased, we went out, found a fisherman to advise us about the thirty miles up to Garrison Dam, an against-the-current distance I believed
Nikawa
should undertake. I laid out our Corps of Engineers chart, the aerial photographs of poor quality, and went over the route with the fellow, trying to annotate it as he talked. “When you come up this here, hang on this side over here. Now, that island there isn’t there anymore, so you can go this way or on over here, but don’t try that one over there. That island there isn’t there anymore either, but if the wind isn’t blowing, you can just about see the channel there. Over here’s stumps, so hang over there, but don’t get too close to here because there’s trees there, and you can lose your props, you betchya. Okay, let’s see, well, somewhere along here, no, this here is all changed from here to there. Is this the only map you got?” Asked the Photographer, “Would a canoe do better?” Our counselor: “Might.”

When we were out of earshot, Pilotis said, “Haven’t we heard those very directions once a day for the past week?” It seemed true, but the fellow had settled for one more day the Canoe Debate, that distance-versus-risk discussion. I doubted the Grumman could go thirty miles in a day against the current and winding chutes, but we were going to find out.