River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (50 page)

Hail stops, then wind, rain next, clouds move east, day slowly rebrightens and twenty degrees cooler. Find two eagle feathers stuck in bank—lightning rods someone left us. We set off again, behind one more thing that came and went so quickly we might have dreamed it. Our muddied clothes attest otherwise.

On gravel bars pelicans and cormorants raise big wings to dry; avocets, willets, Franklin gulls clean and groom as we wish we could; sandpipers worry themselves up and down rocks and cry
, Wet-feet! Wet-feet!
Indeed.

We finally find our crew at terrible place for landing, but we’re tired so we clamber up muddy gulch, over putrefying steer, its stench fierce, shrubs crawling with ticks. Once ashore, I realize we’re five miles short of destination; don’t want to face either distance or putrescence tomorrow, and I announce I’m going back out; good P reluctantly accompanies. We go on, doing nothing more than proceeding in silence to about where steamboat
Amelia Poe
went down some hundred years back, not far from Frazer, Montana. We call it a damn day. But these miles are like memory—can’t be taken from us. Can they?

FRIDAY, DAY FIVE

Most nights before I fall asleep, I read journals of Lewis and Clark or Maximilian, and strange thing has happened, strange because for years I’ve usually read before turning out lamp, yet never before—as much as I’ve wanted it to happen—have I carried a book on into a dream. This week it’s occurred twice, once with Meriwether, now with William; the dream last night had Lewis peeping through brush to watch lubricious scene between Clark and “the Indian woman.” I was present but apparently invisible. When I woke, encounter had somehow measurably strengthened my resolve to continue; once again I felt I had enough left to go on. I ascend in dreamboat.

Hard wind in night blows morning clear; mild temp. Beaver slaps tail at us soon after we set out. Hour later we reach Frazer Rapids, and for first time we must get out of canoe and cordelle it over rocks; fast current, slick stones, and invisible holes make progress touch-and-go; water ankle-deep to above the knees; foreheads sweating, feet almost going numb in coldness; but it’s only for hundred yards; legs strung with long strands of algae we drag along as if tethered to river.
As
if?

Pools usually lie above rapids, and so they do here. With much curiosity we begin to await mouth of the Milk, sometimes vigorous watercourse Hidatsas called River-That-Scolds-at-All-Others. Along this segment of the Missouri, M. Lewis wrote of grizzlies, “I expect these gentlemen will give us some amusement shortly as they soon begin now to coppolate.” Bears gone, no such entertainment for us.

Trying to slow erosion, farmer has bulldozed down cottonwoods for revetment along a bank—does he think dead ones hold better than living trees? On, on. I’m trying not to anticipate mountains; if Rockies continued due north-south orientation they have in New Mexico and Colorado, we’d now be at foot of Front Range; as it is, we have a couple of hundred miles to go before entering them. It’s this northwesterly angling that permits the Missouri Valley to approach Continental Divide so far west; without Montana angle, this geologic shift, our portage would be quite long, as if we were to try boating across Colorado.

A
few farmers abandon junked vehicles and machinery along edge of the Missouri in full knowledge river will sooner or later eat away sheer banks and topple junk into water.

Over the edge

and out of view
,

I live upstream
,

my dear neighbor
,

so to hell with you.

Then we pass south-side slope where rancher has dumped mess of dead and stinking cattle into river. P: “A rotten thing to do.” Yes, but a kind of historical recreation—L & C complained about buffalo carcasses in the Missouri near here. Those bison, of course, were not vandalism.

Stop to stretch legs by old wooden ferry hauled onto shore but left too high for river to carry off. I fear we might have passed mouth of Milk River without seeing it, something that can happen when island inter
venes, but soon the Missouri becomes two rivers side by side, blue-green one on south, muddy one to north. I steer exactly along division where I dip my right hand in and cannot discern ends of fingers, but on left I plunge in length of my paddle and can still see beyond its blade. In vertical cutaway how strange separation would look. Then we reach that curious debouchure, sometimes rich with creamy glacial silt. Cf. M. Lewis q.:
[“The river we passed today we call Milk river from the peculiar whiteness of its water, which precisely resembles tea with a considerable mixture of milk.”]
It’s quarter smaller than the Missouri, and seems incapable of scolding it.

Pass huge overflow spillway of Fort Peck Dam, about eight miles downstream from dam itself. Happy to have five-day canoe segment nearly behind us, and say so, forgetting Great Ears. Almost immediately enter one rock garden after another, striking stones again and again; cussing; where they cease, long strands of algae twist around prop; each pause to clear it causes us to lose much of hard yardage we’ve just made; cussing; effectively, we’re ascending here nearly three times—up, back down a piece, up again. Heat waves off river make it tough to read; cussing; our eyes red and tired. Above Willow Point, current stiffens and threatens to overpower pisspot; cussing. Then we’re into maze of islands and I lose track of our probable location, decide to keep turning left since dam lies south. Failing to avoid irritation. My life is down to one word, a preposition repeated repeatedly: on, on, on.

To P: If there’s some possible way to miss largest earthen dam in America, I’d say we just managed to do it. “No time to get us lost, Skipper.” But of course that’s just when one does get lost. Rule of River Road.

At last I recognize roof of old lodge at Fort Peck and start taking what I think are shortcuts through the islands; if I’m wrong we’ll be out here into night rather than sitting in cool dusk on great old verandah and sipping secret (not permitted) glass of iced gin. Finally, finally, finally, tops of tall surge tanks at powerhouse come into view, and soon we pass into shadow of dam that’s so big it seems to be foothill; four miles long. Our fifty-seventh day on water: we’ve reached Fort Peck Reservoir. Learn Corps is holding back river because of flood conditions in Missouri 1500 miles away. Rockies now less than week distant? “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

S
OME FEW DAYS
before I left home to take
Nikawa
east to launch her in New York Bay, I heard through a happenstance a piece of grave news. To control “traffic” between mid-May and mid-September of each year, the Bureau of Land Management does not permit boats with motors to go upstream on the 111-mile segment of the Missouri from Kipp Landing to Virgelle. When I learned of the prohibition, even though all other aspects of the voyage lay in order, I was troubled by such a long portage around the most famously scenic stretch of the river. A cartage where there was no alternative was one thing, but a portage where water—beautiful and historic water—existed to let a boat pass was something else. An agent with the BLM told me an exception was remotely possible, but a request would require weeks for a decision. He listened as I explained our proposed trip and my deep resistance to portaging. After some time, he volunteered to take us over those miles in a government patrol boat. We would have to travel faster than I wanted, but I had no other choice. With reluctance, I accepted.

At Fort Peck, I called the agent to tell him we were about two days out, but he needed more time, so we decided to spend the unexpected free day in the lodge rather than in a tent upriver. I had not had more than forty-eight hours off the water in two months and was visibly showing the wear, and I thought I saw a nearly commensurate fatigue in my mates. We didn’t need sleep so much as change. After a nicely quiet Saturday breakfast alone, I went to the long front porch to sit and transfer notes into my logbook, study maps, and sometimes just lean back and listen to the robins and magpies. I liked that old porch because it was solidly still, not once rolling, yawing, or pitching. The Photographer, the most diligent of companions, spent the morning getting our motors adjusted and ready for the last quarter of the voyage. In the afternoon we all walked around to restore our legs, and I went to the Corps of Engineers office to ask about the reservoir and the river beyond. I knew our days in
Nikawa
were about finished until we could reach the far side of Idaho, but how much farther she could ascend I didn’t know, nor could anyone tell me.

The Missouri comprised more than two fifths of our transcontinental miles, but emotionally it took up greater space than that, and once again an enforced layover repaid us even though the snowmelt question still loomed and would until we were far down the western slope of the Continental Divide.

That evening at our supper table in the lodge, while flitting critters bumped the window screens and night sounds and the scent of pine sap seeped in, our talk showed the effects of time off the river. Pilotis, who had been somber for several days, rose to the surface of the conversation like a hungry pike and pursued thoughts as if they were mayflies, but it was the Professor who started things when he asked if I’d gotten the idea for our voyage from John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” where a man swims home by way of a string of sixteen neighbors’ pools that form a kind of intermittent stream through his suburban neighborhood. I’d not thought of the influence although I had long considered Cheever’s idea a clever one. I said something about liquid challenges, and the Photographer commented, “It takes time to see that a river is not just about water.”

That’s when Pilotis began talking. I couldn’t get all of it down, but this is the gist of much of it: “I didn’t know when I left home that I wanted something bigger than people and their little gods and small catechisms, their damned certainties and covered-over confusions. The Missouri
is
bigger. It’s like a Roman deity—powerful, playful, cantankerous, lusty, profligate, changeable, dangerous, yet still interested in the humanity that approaches it. I’m not deifying it, just comparing it, but anyone who doesn’t believe it’s a living force—something far more actual than any divinity in any religion—is innocent.”

About the time our pie reached the table, this: “That river isn’t about people—it’s too primeval. When I see an ocean, I don’t see time, but on the Missouri I see time everywhere, along the eroded banks, down in the shallow bottoms in those worn and rounded stones, even in the current. Flow and erosion, flow and erosion. The valley is the face of a clock, and the hour hand’s the moving river, always showing how our days are ebbing, getting washed downstream. Civilization will run out long before the sun burns up and turns rivers back into interplanetary gases.”

And later: “Stand on the water’s edge and see how easy it is to imagine a valley before you existed—then imagine it in a time when you’re long gone. That river scours existence, pulls solidities loose and flushes them away. To it, our days are no more than cottonwood fluff. Our little selfish ploys and conceited aspirations are just so much sediment. People are about cleverness. A river’s about continuance. We talk about dams and wing-dikes, but we don’t need to fret about that Missouri. It’s not endangered—
we are.
When I’m out on the water, I don’t worry about it. I worry about me. I’m just too small for that river.”

J
UST ABOVE
the big dam, we put
Nikawa
into the water the next morning and set off onto the Fort Peck impoundment, one of the most isolated big bodies of water in the lower forty-eight states, a lake reached, beyond the dam, by only about a half-dozen unpaved roads. As we launched, a fellow said, “Are you going out in
that
?” The antecedent to “that” was a darkening southwesterly sky coming on apace once we had committed to the deeps. Across the fifteen-mile-wide water the wind quickened and kicked up the lake and sent
Nikawa
into her crash-and-bang mode. Before an hour was done, lightning began slicing the growing blackness to spread it everywhere, and Pilotis’s face flickered as if illumined from within, eyes candescent, things even more eerie than the ravening sky. The Photographer said, “It looks like we’ve been eating lightning.”

I changed course and made for the nearest shore which just happened to be Grave Point. Against a black-violet overcast, the lake glowed greenly as the Caribbean can do on certain nights rich with phosphorescent plankton, and the day turned to an unearthly spectacle of bizarre firmament and waters that seemed a foreboding of doom, an assemblage of unnatural occurrences that can take small boats to the bottom. The treeless surround appeared to recede from us as
Nikawa
breasted the waves, the wind and the very darkness itself thick with the smell of ozone and voltage. When she at last did reach land, there was nothing to tie her to, so I set her nose up on a low bank of pulverized black shale that would hold us if the wind didn’t come about. Our bow railing, ever the lightning rod, was the only metal anywhere around, but we remained in the pilothouse nevertheless and watched the storm thrash the water and mess the sky, a blasting that had no good in it for anything of the earth.