River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (44 page)

T
HERE’S A LONG-STANDING
journalist’s maxim that it usually takes no more than three informants to direct a reporter to the right source; whoever devised the precept must have been a city-beat writer unfamiliar with breakfast in an American small-town café where a stranger has only to ask a waitress—no “servers” these women—to point out who in the place has answers to this or that. But for some reason it works only in the morning; unimpeachable sources apparently eat lunch and supper at home.

Our source that morning, according to the gospel of Glenda the waitress, sat with several large circular men at a large circular table, the difference between the two being the table wasn’t wearing a ball cap. He worked for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, and he said our chances of getting up to Garrison Dam, even in a boat like
Nikawa
, were “aught to naught.” The Corps was releasing minimal water to avoid adding to the flood hundreds of miles downstream and, to our happy surprise, to keep from sweeping away the ground nests that piping plovers, an endangered species, build on sandbars. He wished he could trade some of the exploding populations of geese—Canadas and snows—for little plovers with their sweetly descriptive call,
peep-low, peep-low.
He said, “There was a time, if a hunter left four geese on the hood of his truck when he went in for a beer, they’d be gone when he came out. Today, if you leave four geese on the hood, when you come out there’ll be eight.”

The Photographer, a retired lawyer who had spent years protecting Missouri rivers, told him of the fellow he’d met on his morning walk who was running for some state office and who agreed with not a single sentence from our man expressing concern for the environment. The Republican politician had concluded his preachment with, “Lookit, Nature’s got to give if people won’t.” Pilotis said, “Well, let’s just hustle on down to that old recalcitrant Missouri River and tell it to shape up and flow right.” The Game-and-Fish man, who did not object to being called a wildlife agent, said, “While you’re at it, tell the plovers to learn to nest in trees like sensible birds.” And the Professor: “With more than eighty percent of Americans in favor of strong environmental protections, why do Republican politicians typically oppose them?” Said the agent, “The eighty percent isn’t paying for their campaigns.”

When we reached the water, fog lay over the Missouri in a dense layer fifteen feet thick, yet above was clear sky. A fine day for aviators. I nearly could have stood on the bow of the canoe to look over the top of the mist and direct us upstream, but with thirty miles ahead of us, we didn’t wait for it to lift. I took the forward position to guide us through the ribbon of murk that turned black snags into specters, menacing shapes warning us to go back and claiming the alien morning as theirs alone. But we went on, happy for glassy water, a usual accompaniment to fog, the river so undisturbed it seemed vandalism for our prow to slice into it. With each mile the mist thinned, then was gone, and we moved under a Great Plains sky as blue as the mid-Pacific.

Now that Pilotis could run the shallows, I sat in the bow as navigator to keep the crew from feeling responsible for an error and, further, occupy them with the motor, deflect them from too many thoughts of home. Already the Professor was talking more each day about his garden, sometimes speaking of things I thought might undermine the others’ endurance; his complaints, while mild, I could do nothing about except to commiserate and encourage river vigor. The bow position also freed me from the tiller so I could take notes and photographs without endangering us. I regretted only that the motor, though a little pisspot, was still noisy enough to make unshouted conversation impossible, but my mates understood that the concentration our canoe passage enforced would help perception and memory of the river, and they knew such focus was good since they had come to learn the Missouri and not simply get
Nikawa
to the Pacific.

Cottonwoods grew thick along the banks, and much of the sur rounding country beyond the low bluffs was heavily cultivated, and with the fog and its eerie creations gone, we had to look closely—if not imaginatively—to keep ennui at bay. After all, this was North Dakota. The sun struck warmly into the cool air, and our moving through it provided a delightful mixture like an unstirred martini where one sip gives of vermouth, the next of gin; but as the day wore on, the air got more shaken than stirred by the Plains wind and became evened, dulled. I sat back trying to memorize the miles, occasionally pointing left or right to head us away from a snag or shoal or on toward a particular chute. From time to time, we had to paddle up a broomstick or push over a bar, but the exertion eased the confinement. When arms failed to relieve us, we’d stop at a sand bank and walk around, looking for curiosities or trying to identify some of the surprisingly abundant life that happens on places so apparently hostile.

In the long pools I could see three or four feet down and make out rocks and rampikes, a chaos of obstructions lurking only inches beneath us almost everywhere. To have come that far without such instruments of destruction sinking us seemed impossible, the result of sheer chance. It was splendid to skim above a wilderness of the inimical. I began to pick out creatures moving aside to escape our passage, some of them glittering an eye at us before flashing to invisibility, others lazy lumps of silt trusting in their ugsome camouflage. The bottom was a wavering garden of moss and slender plants, strands of algae, stones and gravel, sediments full of squirmings, slow currents of barbeled mouths, undersides slimed with egg casings, pools of turtle-clawed snags, and muddy humps that would suddenly show legs and scamper into a far murk. The inside of the river was slick with frog skins, sharp with fish fins, a dim realm still warming from the long Dakota winter and ready to be shot full of the spurt and squirt of milt, the bottom alive and everlastingly creeping about and wanting nothing more than food, safety, and a little sex, as if the creatures were the dullest of desk-bound scriveners with no urge to find the mountains, to cross them down to the sea—those undertakings they left to the world above them, to migratory birds from rain forests and jungles, to humans who could only dream of the ill-lit under-river world.

We had arranged to meet our mates downstream from the Knife River, but the nervous Photographer, whose well-intended concerns sometimes slowed our expedition, had left the Professor to wait for us while he retraced the road in hopes of finding a high place to spy the canoe. We pulled up and waited for him in what is probably the most deeply historied dozen miles of the upper Missouri. Just below was once Fort Mandan where the Corps of Discovery spent their first long winter and found their richest encounters with Indian life, ones not surpassed by the camp on the Pacific Coast the following winter. Soon after the Expedition departed, the Missouri washed away the site, but above it, safely on the high bluff, are outlines of a stockade and low circular swales marking an Indian village next to the remains of Fort Clark, a trading post established in 1830 and the scene twelve years later of a visit by the river traveler Peter Garrioch who described frankly topics other diarists usually ignored, perhaps the reason his fascinating journal has never been published. Here is a compressed version of one incident:

Never shall I forget the awful and abominable scene I witnessed in the boat on the evening we landed. From about nine o’clock in the morning till dusk, the boat was literally crowded with men, women, and children of the Ree, Gros Ventry, and Mandan tribes. The great end which these poor, ignorant, and licentious wretches had in view in flocking so eagerly to the boat, appeared to me, not so much to cohabit with the whites for the pleasure of the thing, as the remuneration they expected after the rutting business was over. I cannot dignify the scene by any milder term—if I should, I could not but charge myself with detracting from common decency. Fathers and mothers led their daughters, and husbands their wives to the obscene and abominable shrine of Venus, as parents lead their children to the sacred Fount of Baptism or their daughters to the Divine Altar of Matrimony. Never perhaps since the days of Adam or since public markets were first instituted did any specie of animals or goods prove more marketable or meet with more general demand and ready sale than the hind-quarters of these ignoble and prostitute females. I am perfectly justified in making use of an epithet regarding these abandoned women which, I am aware, ought in justice to be applied to the brute creation alone, as they are totally divested of the very thing approaching decency—the very shadow of it even. Not the slightest regard was paid to virtuous appearance or personal qualities. If the object that was led to the shrine bore the semblance of a woman it was enough; the reality was taken on chance to be discovered in the secret chamber.

When the Photographer finally returned, revealing he’d hunted more for pictures than for us, Pilotis left the canoe so the Professor could have a turn upriver, and I went again to the motor so he might learn our methods of ascent over shoals and up chutes. He assumed watch in the bow and at first gave out loud alarms at anything larger than a toaster and at everything he saw no matter how far off our course it lay, but then he settled down and performed well.

Strange pockets of heat lay over the river, stifling cinctures alleviated by stretches of cooler air, but all of it unnaturally still, as if the Plains wind had paused before switching weathers. I began struggling to pay attention to the country we were passing through, and I tried to convince myself it was not really the same as what we’d been seeing most of the day; whenever I begin to believe that anything in nature looks identical, I’m usually losing the capacity to perceive. My dulled wits could find nothing to rouse them, and they retreated to dreaming fountain drinks and trying to recollect old recipes for—for what? a blood orange frappé? a claret punch? a buffalo eleven? a prairie oyster? (Draw a dash of soda in a glass, add one raw egg, a dram of vinegar, and season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice; serve with a glass of seltzer on the side.)

And thus we plugged on, almost eager for places forcing us to paddle. I practiced to improve my technique for flushing us over narrow shoals, and sometimes it worked and sometimes we had to pole on across, but the sand grating beneath the aluminum hull was like a cleanser to my brain, scratching it awake.

At about five in the afternoon we saw in the distance the silvery tops of the huge surge tanks of Garrison Dam. More than two miles long and 210 feet high, it is one of the largest earthen structures in the world, a thing so massive, from the river at least, it didn’t look big, any more than, say, North Dakota looks big from a highway; it was just simply everywhere. By the time we reached the tailwaters where gulls gnawed on fish mortally bludgeoned by passage through the powerhouse turbines, and found the end of our day, we had made thirty-three miles against the Missouri, and at last I knew the canoe-and-pisspot would suffice, and one more possible impediment to our crossing vanished. When we lay down to sleep, we were only ninety miles from the geographical center of North America.

T
HE WIND BEGAN RISING
, inflating a hulking anvil cloud in the east, a nubilous sky up to no good. By morning a breeze had transformed into a norther and dropped the temperature thirty degrees and was buggy-whipping saplings and frothing Lake Sakakawea into a nastiness that would keep us off the Missouri until the air exhausted itself. Winds out of Canada can blow for half a week. Now, ever so close to the rivers requiring the snowmelt of the June rise, we were stopped cold like Antarctic explorers caught in a blizzard and perishing only a few yards from shelter. Because we knew the Plains winds should have struck us long before then, we didn’t complain, but I did wonder whether we weren’t now due days of blowing.

I tried to treat the halt as a welcome break from rivering, so we set up to wait it out in Pick City, nothing but a few wind-blasted buildings along a dusty state highway crossing Garrison Dam. In the American West, if a town appends “City” to its name, you can be sure it is anything but one (Salt Lake City the exception), and the traveler will do well to interpret “City” as “burg,” with its colloquial meaning of Podunk. Perhaps the least meretricious name for these places would be one I’ve never seen anywhere: Businessburg.

In Pick City, with little of anything but space and wind, we were happy to find lodging across the road from the Sportsman Saloon Bar and Grill, a name Pilotis found tautological and said so to the bartender who replied, “No, you’re wrong. We have very little trouble with drunks.” The town, population 203 depending on whether Mister So-and-so had yet joined the choir silent, would have been a faceless place devoid of anything redeeming—unless you consider utter openness redeeming—without the worn tavern and its antlers hanging like dusty cobwebs, its stuffed fish ready to leap through the ceiling, and its big schnapps cabinet stocked for winter. On our June day, the patrons drank thin, popular beers laced three-to-one with bloody mary mix which in that friendly bar made it easy to distinguish the locals by their ruby smiles.

To pass the time, we went to Garrison Dam, down inside the powerhouse, down deep until we came to a dismal and dank chamber filled with penstocks large enough to send an automobile through, steel tunnels carrying the Missouri toward the turbines. An aisle passed under the conduits, and we reached up to touch the cold metal shaking from the force of the river ripping down them, and as we stepped under the Missouri thundering inches above our heads, I thought how I was almost realizing one of my bottom-walker nightmares, this version hardly less chilling than those coming in my sleep. Farther on, we descended to another chamber where a vertical tunnel dropped the encased river into the turbines, and I laid my hand on a thick steel hatch: on the other side the river roared down with such colossal force we had to shout over the violence of its descent and the unnerving explosions of compressed oxygen bursting free.