River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (53 page)

To help our salvation reach us, I hiked over a broad sagebrush flat, hopped around a rattlesnake, and climbed the high south rim for a good look up the coulee, but I could discover no track or even the real possibility of one through the gullied bottom. I sat down and took up my dog watch.

As I had several times before, I wished we could make our crossing twice, once on the water and once along the surrounding shores and ridges that yield so different a perception of river country. At the very edge of the cliff was an exotic garden of small basins and concretions, stone toadstools reaching to my knees, a welter of rocks worn into oddities, grotesqueries, weirdities, nature gone whimsical if not deranged, a realm created by a fevered dreamer. In climbing to the top, I’d stepped over some bourn of the reasonable world to find a madscape hanging on the drop edge of a yonder, the kind of land I’d hoped—in vain—the first pictures from the moon or Mars might show us, a loony world we could recognize instantly as not ours, a place looking truly otherworldly rather than like west Texas. I felt I’d made an interplanetary climb above an alien river.

Far below slipped the slow downward sweep of the Missouri, propelled by the mountains toward the gathering of all waters, the river canyon illumined by low, supine sun shafts, thick and heavy as if light too were a topography, one I could walk out on to cross the river. The view was surpassingly splendid, one I’m not likely to encounter ever again. And then I came back to the practicalities of the coulee and its water-eaten bottom. There was no way our deliverer could pass through it. We were about to belong to the night.

I returned to the dead johnboat with my report, words hardly out of my mouth when the volunteer radioed to say he was cut off by a deep gully. We again went to the map. About six miles downstream was one last coulee with a track to the water; beyond that lay only hours of inaccessibility. We set out once more, poling the clumsy boat to keep it in the fastest current and away from shallows, the valley silent but for boils against the hull, the soft rattle of cottonwoods, the last whistles of the evening by this bird or that.

After an hour, in the gloaming, we came to an abandoned homestead, and Chanler took up the shortwave to radio we had arrived near the mouth of Flat Creek. We began our third wait. I asked him how,
should
our fuel reach us, we could make it upstream in the dark, something even many steamboat pilots wouldn’t attempt. He said only, “I know the river.” I asked, Those aren’t famous last words, are they?

The hills were gone into the night when we picked out a pair of eyes gemming the dark, coming on slowly and erratically down toward us, disappearing, reappearing, vanishing again, and then the headlights of the pickup blinded us. I’d rarely seen our crew work so expeditiously, and in minutes we were refueled with what would either get us to Virgelle or leave us worse off than we were. Nobody ever raised the question of climbing into the truck and riding out for a return the next morning. We were too dauntless, or too distracted, or perhaps we thought our destination closer than it was. Soon afterward, I had an inkling that such an oversight might be the miscalculation of my life.

Our guide did not ease the boat upriver but rather let it rip along, damn the turns and impediments. Such conditions of speed, darkness, and an unpredictable and swift river left no room for one more error on a day of errors. Our pilot stood amidships to steer us over the black boils, Pilotis sat aft by the warm motor, the Photographer and I were in the bow as a human windshield where the frigid blast almost negated my two shirts, sweater, life vest, and slicker. Never had I been so thickly bundled yet still cold. Through the chilling darkness we went, Pilotis seeing the White Cliffs for the first time as few travelers ever have—bound upstream fast on a moonless night.

A river in the deep dark seems to give off radiance as if it had absorbed the day as a road does heat. The phenomenon was, of course, merely reflection from an origin I couldn’t discern, and our pilot could just distinguish the gleam of the Missouri from its black shores and islands and, we hoped, hunks of drift. As for things beneath the looking-glass water, obstructions even only an inch below, those remained as unseen as a wall behind a mirror, and we proceeded upward, trusting in an image no deeper than a sheet of paper. At the speed we were moving over water infrigerated by snowmelt, to crash and go overboard in our heavy clothes would be to walk the dark bottom. The word for what we were doing is foolhardy, but something—perhaps the cold or my weariness or even my unfounded conviction we were destined to reach the Pacific—kept me from taking up my Lake Erie means of controlling fear: “We’re doomed, so what use is fright?” But had the boat and decision been mine, we would have gone ashore, built a fire, and huddled around with stories and dozes until dawn opened the way. Despite my concern, I must admit to enjoying the thrill of the ride and the challenge of watching for rampikes and deadheads until about midnight when, flagging from the hour and effort, I began to think of death as a good sleep.

Tired and torpid, onward we went, trying to stay alert to be sure our helmsman did not nod, and we were almost reassured periodically when he would jerk the boat away from a sudden obstacle; it was like being saved from death two or three times an hour. For a while I let the scent-laden damp air keep me awake as we passed through pockets of sage, ponderosa, blossoming Russian olive, more sage, cattle stench, ponderosa again. The breaks became silhouettes, and the grand monuments merged with the tomb of night. Numbed by the chill and the drone of the motor, my senses seemed to fail as they must in death, and it was as if we’d passed down a nether corridor to an upper level of some Dantean infernality of cold, wind, darkness, and, worst of all, unendingness. Under such conditions, it is easy to abandon a luxury like hope and just give over to discomfort. So, through what to us were the Black Cliffs of the Missouri we went, neither awake nor asleep, neither alive nor dead. We were simply nullities. We were but darkly moving mindlessnesses like the river itself, and not until that moment had we and the river been so one.

On and on we went, time passing at the rate it does in a dental chair. Maybe we only presumed our progress; perhaps we actually sat still, our speed matching the current, while the only movement was the river passing beneath us, and if the tank did not again run dry, when dawn came we’d find ourselves where we began hours earlier—if there were such a thing as dawn in a place like that. On, on, on, the landscape increasingly indivisible, and then:

I thought I went deaf, the quiet became so abruptly complete. Or maybe I’d expired. Perhaps that was the way it happened: suddenly you go senseless while your mind spins for a few more moments like the wheels of an overturned wagon—slower, slower, then the revolutions cease, and that’s it. R.I.P.

I heard a sonorous voice, a resonant one such as we expect God to have. Then It profaned the night. God can take Its own name in vain if It wants to. And the Voice said, “We’ve got a problem.” I knew then I must still be alive, because surely, neither God nor the dead have problems—after all, problem is just another way of spelling life. “The motor won’t turn over. There’s got to be a short.”

So, I was yet on Earth, in America, and this was life on the Missouri. The swift black river once again began carrying us down toward the wrong ocean, and our great adversary, gravity, was one more time overmatching our momentum, and all the while our helmsman fiddled with switches and circuits as we drifted back six miles to the hour until we understood the motor would indeed stay dead. At his command we rose stiffly, took up the cold oars, and began poling across our Acheron to the north shore, eventually reaching the mouth of Little Sandy Creek. As we tied up our dismal ferry, our Virgil lamented, “We were almost there. We were nearly done.” I thought, We
are
nearly done. I managed not to say, even to Pilotis, For one day we’re forced to put our expedition into other hands, and look what happens.

After clanking around in the metal boat, we climbed up a low terrace and came upon three tents spilling out groggy and partly clad women and one nominal man, all in high alarm and ready to confront the danger—us. Between our explanations and their objurgations, we shouldered our small packs full of materials more useful to a geographer or secretary than someone setting off on foot across Montana at half past midnight. I tried not to think of all that soft warmth soon to be again snugged into cozy tents, but wasn’t this the time to break out a round of ardent spirits and regale the night with tales of our crossing? Even the Corps of Discovery had consort with natives of a certain gender. Of course, our piddling corps had not a drop of any social beverage.

We climbed the steep second terrace above the Little Sandy which in glacial times was the route the Missouri took around the White Cliffs as if it too found that a hard country. We came atop a vast black plain under a black sky, our moods the same hue. Chanler’s flashlight soon failed, and the small one Pilotis lent him was suitable for scarcely more than finding a shoe in a pup tent. We could not see the ground, so each step was only a presumption of footing, a short and hopeful free-fall.

Our guide, to judge from the wobble of the penlight, was not having an easy time of it, his ankles arthritic and his blood pressure without medicine. Noting the gradual loss of his command bearing, Pilotis took up Chanler’s pack and gave him most of our food, an apple. I asked for assurance that he knew the way to Virgelle and that it was close enough to make sense of tramping through the dark. “It’s not that far. I just wish I had my medicine.” Can you make it? “I’m all right.” Off we went; the only thing greater than my doubt was my skepticism. I whispered to Pilotis, There have been a few miscalculations today, so if our little stroll starts to turn into another misreckoning, we may have a reordering of leadership. Said my friend, “Just remember, we’re all here because of your grand transcontinental idea.”

Thus set straight, I fixed the position of Polaris to keep us from circling, but that didn’t mean we wouldn’t end up far from where we intended; the difference between, say, a heading of fifteen degrees and sixteen after a few miles equals a whole lot of corrective footsteps and a possible mutiny. We were too fagged out and it was bootless to complain, so the Photographer, often given to bursts of optimism, named every positive element, which came to two negatives: no mosquitoes and no rain. And to myself I added, our Virgil is still alive. If he went down this far from help, the result could be dire.

For a while I was encouraged by a distant cluster of lights—probably the wide spot in the road called Big Sandy, fourteen miles north—not because it was anywhere close to our destination but because it reminded me there was yet life on earth. In my head was a map of where I thought we were, and I occasionally asked Chanler when we would turn west toward our goal of Virgelle (rhymes with “incur hell”) which, by the way, was hardly more than a couple of buildings and a grain elevator hidden in the river valley. Every so often I closed my eyes for several steps at a time; since we could see almost nothing, it made little difference. When I opened them after one ambulatory nap, the lights of Big Sandy were inexplicably gone, and I thought it possible I had only wished such comfort into existence. The result was dispiriting: we were alone in a still land such as one can never find on moving water; anyone who thinks an ocean a lonely realm should try the plains of eastern Montana at night. I knew that to walk a straight course long enough in Chouteau County is eventually to cross a road, but the place is eighty miles wide, which, to pass some time, I calculated to equal about 150,000 steps, not considering the up-and-down of the terrain. That figure cheered me since footfalls, unlike miles, I could count off each moment.

We came upon twin parallel ruts that seemed to be a track, and our Virgil thought they were probably the right thing. Then, to my relief, we finally turned west and could begin to hope for a twinkle that would mean a warm bed. We walked on into the thickening dark by the thin blue light of stars which the ground absorbed but the sky gave back in just enough measure to create a horizon, and toward that we went single file, fettered to each other’s silhouette. When I shut my eyes, I steered by the footsteps ahead until they were engulfed by the rumble of heavier steps, the hooves of phantom beasts we could only hear, like something from a dream of ghost bison. Remembering the manure we every so often stepped in, we assumed they were cattle, and we hooted into the dark in hopes of sending the stampede away from us. Said Pilotis, “Someone’s going to explain to me tomorrow why cattle are inside the boundaries of a wild and scenic river, crapping up the place.” I liked the sentence because it assumed we’d have a tomorrow.

After the second hour, I called to our pilot to ask whether we were still on a course he thought he knew, but he was too exhausted to respond other than perhaps by an invisible nod. Then the possibility came to me: Could we be on a death march led by a man gone loco? Was
I
loco? An insanity of exhaustion? A sane fellow would be back around the women’s campfire. Or, failing that, wasn’t the rational solution to lie down and sleep away what was left of darkness and then walk out by first light? As I was considering sanities, a pale green glow leaking a long milky tail suddenly appeared in the northwest and traced out a slow and flattened arc right under a dim Polaris. The thing didn’t grow brighter as meteors do but simply sustained a leisurely glide across the sky, and then was gone. We all stopped in our tracks to watch it, make guesses what it was, before stumbling on in a darkness that seemed greater than before. Was the thing an omen?

Ha! Anything is an omen if you choose to see it that way! Yes! Those are words of real wisdom! So!
I
am not the one here gone loco! It’s the others! Of course! The fatigue has done them in! They wont listen to reason! They’ve gone witless! I could test them! Ask them, let’s see, yes! “Although the lion is a symbol of English royalty, are there lions in Britain?” Query them! Yes! They’ve quite lost their faculties! The Great Plains frazzled them! Oh, it’s sad to see good minds falter! Poor, poor Pilotis, floundering along up there, couldn’t tell a mouse from a moose!
A
dock from a duck!
A
butt from a butte! Quite mad, most apparent! But I’ll say nothing until I can call the asylum!
A
couple of weeks in a small locked room! Perhaps a nurse in a crisp white uniform! Herbal teas to soothe jumbled wits! Yes! I’ll bring cookies! Simple sugar cookies! The kind babies get! I’ll look after my good hearts! Indeed! After all, their decline is my fault!