River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (52 page)

Said Pilotis as we left that stinking shore, “How long do you think we’ll let those rustlers of clean water, those corporate hamburglars, go unhanged?”

We proceeded through a refuge that, discounting mosquitoes, showed us no wildlife whatsoever, not even an English sparrow, a non-native bird that will live almost anywhere. The rest of the afternoon turned into something to be got through. Our backs tired, our legs twitched in the cramped space, our bums burned from the hot aluminum and the bites, our eyes went bloodshot from glare, our noses filled with the butt end of cattle.

The Missouri is great in part because, like the Grand Mysterious, it lets nothing go on forever. A wind, not a hard one, came along to blow the air fresh and cover the hot sky with dark clouds so that our last miles were tolerable. But when we came within view of our destina tion, Robinson Bridge, a fierce windflaw ripped down from a rocky bluff to shake the canoe and, as if it had hands, grab my hat and pull it off in spite of the chin strap which caught the safety cord on my sunglasses, then hurl the entire entanglement upward before flinging it down into the river.

I must confess, at that moment I’d had it. I went to my knees and thumped on the bow of the canoe, shook my fists at the gritty air, and yelled for Pilotis to wheel about toward my sinking hat and glasses, the only protective spectacles I carried. This was going to be a difficult loss.

Pilotis turned the canoe as quickly as the waves allowed and swept up alongside my cap just as the river was taking it to the bottom. I leaned over, grabbed out in desperation, snagged a strap, and pulled up. Still enmeshed in the cords were my sunglasses. Then I was laughing, thanking the river for keeping such a necessity afloat just long enough, and I turned toward the thieving wind to imprecate it as if it were the 104th Congress trying to steal away the beauty of American lands and waters.

Moments later we were ashore. That night the Photographer reminded me of a famous line from Aldo Leopold, author of the celebrated book
A Sand County Almanac:
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” But that was two generations ago, and now the world is not so lonely for those who act on behalf of our planet.

S
OON AFTER DAWN
, the Professor left us to haul
Nikawa
to our destination at Virgelle before heading home to his wife and garden. As he packed his bag, I saw a pistol. You’ve had that the whole time? He nodded and spoke of his unease along the river while he waited for our boat to arrive. Although I said nothing, I then understood more: except for illness, nothing so burns out a traveler as fear.

When the rest of us assembled, I asked them, Are you still with this little ol excursion trip? Their mouths said yes and, I thought, so did their tired eyes. For that day, I reminded them, we would be in the government boat with someone else to shoulder the concerns. I said, Today we sit back in our ease—we’re just tourists.

Chanler Biggs was nearly ready to retire from the Bureau of Land Management, whose badge and khaki uniform he wore that morning down by Robinson Bridge, and he brought to us much knowledge of the 150 miles of river up to Fort Benton. He was a sturdy block of a man with bristle-cut hair Marine-style, a broad mustache cowhand-style, and a stitched-up cheek where a solar cancer had recently been cut out to leave a scar pirate-style. He had high blood pressure but neglected to bring along his medication; as for his arthritic ankles, he treated them with little more than laughter and endurance. We took to him immediately and accepted him as our pilot.

He was, however, unhappy with the borrowed vessel we had to use, a beat-up johnboat powered by an engine that drew in water and forced it through a nozzle to create thrust; such so-called jet boats, being propellerless, can run fast in water only a few inches deep. I had chosen
Nikawa
over such craft because they are noisy, ferocious gas guzzlers prone to sucking up gravel or sediments and then malfunctioning. While we understood and respected the reason the government would not allow our four-horse pisspot to push the canoe up a portion of the Missouri designated a Wild and Scenic River, we still found it ironic that federal managers would permit a 150-horse jet boat capable of carrying us in six hours over a distance our canoe would require four days to accomplish. Of all the country we had passed through, the splendid and historic stretch of river lying just ahead was one we had hoped to cover in some leisure. A week or two earlier on the Plains, a jet boat would have been a godsend, but on that Tuesday it was an annoying requirement made somewhat tolerable because the Photographer and I had seen the White Cliffs from a canoe a few years before.

The heat of the previous day dissipated, and we put on jackets when we reached the river. Under a lifting overcast, we set out early, and Chanler said for the first of several times, “I wish I had my boat,” words we all would soon be echoing. Another agent had fouled his motor with gravel, leaving us a hard-starting thing that nevertheless, once properly fired up, moved us nicely through the narrow valley where each mile onward took on the look of a foothills watercourse. The sedimentary bluffs showed layers of an ancient seabed in stratifications of tan sandstone intermixed with shales, the slopes more treeless than otherwise, and the enclosing shores varying between eroded badland breaks descending to the river and much higher hills farther from the water, gentle enough in their declivities to hold grass and even small conifers. From place to place between the coulees stood eccentrically worn spires, many of them topped with hard, flat rock that gave them the look of a procession of skinny graduates wearing mortarboards. Chanler stopped on occasion to comment. Once he said, “I’ve bagged seven bodies off this river. Every one of them the result of stupidity or not wearing a life jacket or both.” The river, he added, was the highest in years, and Pilotis gave me a nod that meant, “There you have it, Mister Snowmelt Imperative.”

Into the remoteness we rode easily as if we were steamboat passengers with nothing to do but prop back on the boiler deck and watch the territory ever so slowly begin to turn itself into mountains. It was a stretch of the arid upper Missouri country almost unchanged by hu mans, other than a few abandoned homesteader cabins, a defunct gold mine, and evidence of overgrazing. Where cattle could not get in, narrow flats of small cottonwoods that “woodhawks” years ago cleared out to sell for steamboat fuel had now returned to a river William Clark would recognize: “This countrey may with propriety I think be termed the Deserts of America, as I do not Conceive any part can ever be Settled, as it is deficent in water, Timber & too Steep to be tilled.” And Lewis: “The country more broken and barren than yesterday if possible.”

We stopped just below the mouth of a stream Clark named Judith, after the woman he would marry following his return to St. Louis. There, near a new highway bridge, the last we’d pass until Fort Benton, ninety miles upriver, our helmsman had arranged to pick up more gasoline, but nobody was present, nobody was apparently within miles, so we took out lunch and ate, walked around, waited, walked, waited. At last we decided the gas was not going to arrive, a detail that would have stopped us right there had Chanler not remembered ten gallons stashed in a nearby locked shed he happened to have a key to. Pilotis could not decide whether we were having good luck or bad. Chanler calculated mileage against gallonage, checked his figures, and concluded we should have
just enough
fuel to get us to Virgelle where a hot supper would be waiting. “If I had my boat,” he said, “I’d know for certain whether we could make it.” The man’s command bearing gave us an unspoken assurance all would be well, and we proceeded on happily.

It was near here that William Clark climbed out of the river bottoms to the surrounding rim to see what progress the Corps of Discovery was making toward the Rockies:

From this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time with Certainty, I could only discover a fiew of the most elivated points above the horizon. the most remarkable of which by my pocket Compas I found bore S. 60 W. those points of the rocky Mountain were Covered with Snow and the Sun Shown on it in Such a manner as to give me a most plain and Satisfactory view. whilst I viewed those mountains I felt a Secret pleasure in finding myself So near the head of the heretofore Conceived boundless Missouri; but when I reflected on the difficulties which the Snowey barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific Ocean, and the Sufferings and hardships of my Self and party in them, it in Some measure Counter ballanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them; but as I have always held it little Short of Criminality to anticipate evils I will allow it to be a good Comfortable road untill I am Compelled to believe otherwise.

What Clark saw “with Certainty” was not the Rockies at all but portions of a topographical quincunx of clustered mountains at each corner with the mouth of the Judith River in the center; these clusters, rising distinctly from a somewhat level plain, are the Bears Paws, Big Snowys, Highwoods, and Little Rockies, all geologically distinct from the cordillera behind them. The Missouri passes among those stone outposts that seem to defend the great bulwark of the Front Range every traveler across the Plains longs so deeply to see. Clark, wearied by the “Deserts of America” and a consequent urge for destination, will not be the last to turn that longing into error.

We rode over Deadman’s Rapids—once Drowned Man’s Rapids—and ascended on toward the lower White Cliffs. There the most famous riverscapes along the Missouri begin modestly, almost faintly as if only a tracery of frost on a windowpane, in eroding sandstones topped by grassy contours steadily changing to ever more rock twisting into small pinnacles interspersed by crevices, pinched canyons, and sheer walls that might have once been fortresses were they not so fragile looking, their outliers elementally eaten into turrets, parapets, casements, barbicans, battlements, merlons; below them, broken boulders strew out like engines of war from some battle between the forces of earth and wind, rock and water, a scene of ancient antagonisms where the enmity of the elements had it out, where a piece of a continent, the old beachhead, lies moldering in perpetual dissolve.

Although the cliffs are not truly white, the glare of the afternoon sun on the bleached stone and the contrast with various dark volcanic intrusions made them seem nearly so. The eroded magma stands in large humps or low ledges and dikes fractured uniformly enough into blocks that a visitor innocent of geology could swear they had been cut and set by masons of the sort who laid up the great mortarless walls of Cuzco rather than by the aimless violence of sheer chthonic force.

To voyagers bound upriver, the White Cliffs are the last and grandest expression of the Plains, the prairie in climax, the flatlands in ecstasy; they are fulfillment, culmination, finale, and their power comes not solely from the harsh beauty or eccentric geology but also from a traveler’s relief in knowing the Great Plains lie behind. To us they seemed like victory, our Battle of the Long Miles at last about to be won.

We watched the rocks rise minute by minute as the low sunlight burned them brightly and revealed aeries of golden eagles in whose yellow eyes we, far below, were a passing mote, a riffle in the river. Our voyage appeared to move with so gratifying a momentum I thought we could nearly glide the rest of the way to the Pacific; our miles had never been easier or lovelier. Such a blissful situation, of course, should have alerted me.

Sometime in the late afternoon, under the shadow of Last Chance Bench and across from Dark Butte, the albescent land began to change, and in effect the day started again, the alarm being the abrupt silence of the motors. Our guide nervously cranked the engine, cranked it, and it gave us nothing. The river captured our progress, once more pushing us back toward where we’d come from.

Said Chanler, “I guess this boat doesn’t get three miles to the gallon.” In the midst of sprawling beauty and little else, we were fuelless, tentless, foodless, nearly potable-waterless, and thirty miles from Virgelle. The hour was a few minutes after five, and Chanler’s BLM office had just closed, yet he picked up his shortwave to try anyway. Why not? There was nothing else to do. I doubted the transmission would even get out of the canyon. No response, another try, nothing, once more, no. Then a rasp of static, a faint voice. His assistant had gone back to the office when she thought she heard the radio. A moment later and she would have been out of earshot and we, without sleeping bags, would be facing a cold night on the river. Pilotis said, “Stroke of luck number one hundred nineteen.”

There would be no getting gasoline to us down the high north cliff, but on the south, almost where we were, there happened to be a coulee with a nearly forgotten track to the river. Said Pilotis, looking at the map: “Number one hundred twenty.” Chanler described our position to a volunteer who, as luck would have it, just happened by the office and had a ready pickup and two jerry cans. Then we took up the long oars of the johnboat and began poling for the place Sheep Shed Coulee joins the Missouri, and after a mile we tied up and began our second wait. The river was now in shadow, the temperature dropping, but salvation was coming. Chanler said, “Hell of a way to run a navy.” I picked up our copy of the Lewis and Clark journals and looked for White Cliffs entries and found the long descriptive passage from Lewis for May 31, 1805, the one containing the often noted last sentences, “The thin stratas of hard freestone intermixed with the soft sandstone seems to have aided the water in forming this curious scenery. As we passed on it seemed as if those seens of visionary inchantment would never have an end.”

Chanler told us about the other Corps, the Engineers, and their wish in the 1960s to dam the Missouri a few miles away, an impoundment that would have turned the White Cliffs into a wave-lapped ledge and drowned most of the “seens of visionary inchantment.” He talked about two sheep Lewis killed there and the extermination by the 1930s of those Audubon bighorn—a species now replaced by the smaller and less distinctive Rocky Mountain sheep—and told of the old homesteader who cut the tip off a long cow horn and shoved it in a gap in the logs of his cabin so, in the bitter winters, he could use it as a urinal.