River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (54 page)

I stumbled into Pilotis who had stopped with the others to rest, which they chose to do like horses, standing on one leg then the other. They probably thought they
were
horses. But I was a man, so I lay down, not bothering to take off my pack, ignoring the dried cow pies, and in the two or three moments before I was sound asleep, I heard Virgil ask, “Is he okay?” Someone said, “He’s got four thousand miles on him.” Further proof of their lunacy: they took me for a used Buick.

When my mates called me to, I argued it was insane to proceed, only to arrive at dawn and go to bed. Continue! I intoned in a lordly manner, I shall follow along soon! As I started to slip off again, Pilotis said, “It’s not a bad idea. What if we’re off the mark and have to rewalk it the right way in daylight?” There you have it, I mumbled. Virgil concluded the discussion: “I need my medicine.”

So they dragged me up, and we set off again into the botched night, our trudge as sorry as a body can do, one that could take days to recover from. I remembered our good Professor, by now home and curled in the warm arms of his wife, his pea patch waiting for the morning sun and his loving touch. But we?
We
went on across the invisible earth, the endless land, through the most complete night I’ve never seen.

Sometime thereafter—who any longer could care when it was?—I saw a gleaming, a sinuous glimmer. Glory! A psychic flourish of cornets! It was our friend the great Missouri! My piteously mad colleagues yoicked and yalped in exultation, and I joined them so as not to tip off my awareness of their grievous condition. Then we reached a gravel road leading down a ridge to the valley, and there before us shone the two lights of Virgelle, one of them in the old general mercantile that was our destination, the place where a bed waited upstairs, where a door opened and a lovely young woman in a white shirt said to a befogged writer, “You made it! You’re actually here! I love your books!” And he said, “Books?”

Then, as a crescent moon rose, either to mock them or to celebrate their arrival, they learned they had walked nearly nine miles, double the distance by river. As the eastern sky lightened, the dewitted writer found not an herbal tea but a tall glass of fresh water and, upstairs, clean sheets, a warm blanket, and a small quiet room.

T
HE MORNING BEGAN
, I thought, as madly as the night had ended. Although the 1912 Virgelle mercantile had become a bed-and-breakfast a few years back and no longer sold hobbles, trousers, laxatives, stove lids, or a thousand other items, the cellar still held a deeply piled clutter of ancient and useless remnants once on shelves upstairs, a cross between a trove and a landfill. Pilotis told me our guide had phoned his mechanic who guessed the motor problem was indeed a blown fuse, and Chanler had gone down among the stacks to search for one. I shook my head at the absurdity of such a hunt—he would sooner find a fuse in our bed sheets or under the French toast.

About the time I finished breakfast, Chanler came from below, dusty and cobwebbed, his hand cupping an assortment of old automobile fuses. I was astonished he’d found anything even approximating one, but I knew the chances of a proper match were nil.

The Photographer drove him through the backcountry we’d just walked over to Chanler’s broken-down boat in our tow wagon which the Professor had left for us. I set to work on my logbook, then poked down the road, happy to have the prospect of a day off the river and an afternoon sleep. About one o’clock, as I was ready to go upstairs, I heard a motor on the river and thought how good that it wasn’t the johnboat. I’d no more than announced, Sack time! when in walked Chanler, who said, “It was a fuse all right.” Do you mean, I asked, on all those shelves of old mercantile stuff you found one that worked? “The third fuse I tried.” Pilotis said, “I believe it. Of course I believe it. In fact, I believe now Skipper’s luck isn’t running out but somehow multiplying like mice in an attic.”

We waited a long time for the Photographer to return and discovered when he did that he’d stopped to take pictures of old teepee rings—circles of stones that once helped hold Indian tents to the ground; he had been as sure as the rest of us we’d be going nowhere soon. The route we’d covered last night, he said, was aswarm with mosquitoes. Wearily Pilotis and I gathered up our kits and went to the boat, and my friend said, “It seems this river wants to get us up to the mountains.” Either that, I said, or wear us down into quitting.

From Virgelle, the second most northerly point of the Missouri, the river runs southwest, then south to Three Forks, the so-called Headwaters, a distance of something more than two hundred miles. The sky was in gloom, the air cool, and the route at first was low earthen shores such as we’d passed between for days in the Dakotas. Soon after we set out, Chanler brought us alongside a bank the river had cut into a cross-section as neatly as if done by an archaeologist, and asked what we saw: in soil three feet below the surface lay a saucer-shaped orange stain surmounted by a bowl-like black discoloration. It was the remains of a campfire that burned before the people who made it were called Indians.

Over a winding route we passed the mouth of the Marias River which Lewis and Clark and their men debated over: Was it the true course of the Missouri? To take the wrong one and have to return could lose the Corps the season and, as Lewis said, “probably so dishearten the party that it might defeat the expedition altogether.” The choice was critical enough the group spent six days exploring both routes for some miles and ended up with opposite conclusions: the men to the last one believed the north branch, which Lewis named Maria’s River after a cousin he was enamored of, was the Missouri, while the captains held for the south fork. Had the leaders been wrong, their explorations might today be no better known in popular history than those of, say, Jacob Fowler or Howard Stansbury. On the day we passed the little Marias, we could not imagine anyone mistaking it for the Missouri, so strongly did the big river sweep along.

Farther, we stopped again to look at the site of Fort McKenzie, now a cultivated flat under a big center-pivot irrigator, but in 1833 it was here that Prince Maximilian and Karl Bodmer gave up their ascent of the Missouri because of Indian hostility on westward. The German ethnographer described their arrival in a place we saw only as an empty field:

We approached the landing-place and at length set foot on shore amidst a [welcoming] cloud of smoke caused by the firing of the Indians and of the
engagés
of the fort, who were drawn up in a line on the bank. Here we were received by the whole population with the Indian chiefs at their head, with whom we all shook hands. The Chief of the Bears was quite an original: his countenance, which was not very handsome, with a large crooked nose, was partly hid by his long hair. On his head he had a round felt hat with a brass rim, and a silver medal on his breast. We were led through a long double-line of the red men, the expression of whose countenances and their various dresses greatly amused us. When we arrived at the fort there was no end of the shaking of hands, after which we longed for repose, and distributed our baggage in the rooms. We had happily accomplished the voyage from Fort Union in thirty-four days and lost none of our people and subsisted during the whole time by the produce of the chase.

The riverbanks began to rise until they were considerable steeps of light-colored clays and shales utterly unrelieved by vegetation of any sort. On came rain and behind it a drying wind to wither the clouds enough for bolts of sun to reach us, and by the time we hove up in Fort Benton, we’d pulled off our wet gear. We tied to a small public dock just below the remains of the old fort itself and climbed the terrace to Front Street and an ice cream stand where we bought hotdogs and milkshakes, and once again river travel was easy, and
that
, we knew, was a bad sign.

About four thousand miles above the mouth of the Mississippi, Fort Benton was once the head of navigation on the Missouri and the most inland port in the nation, some say the world. On the river today between Hermann, Missouri, and Fort Benton, there are no longer any towns that really front the Big Muddy because those other places have moved to higher ground, or the river has moved, or up has gone a levee or floodwall, or a spread of industry has come in. Except in books, the historical link between the river and its towns has nearly vanished. But Fort Benton, a bit bedraggled yet genuine, still embraces the river, and one can walk out of a café or shop and take a few steps straight to the water. The landing is now a park, and at its south end, just a few feet from the Missouri, stands the fortress-like Union Hotel of 1882, closed but—as it has been for some years—reportedly undergoing restoration. How fine it would be to take a third-floor room and lie abed and watch the river below! Northwest of town, behind the grid of streets, the big hills rise barrenly as they do in nineteenth-century photographs of the landing lined with paddlewheelers and stacked with cargo. Across the river, though, the scene is different: the broad flat is again full of trees as it was before the coming of the steamboats and their fireboxes. But the motto chiseled into the old grammar school is even now more hope than fulfillment:
INDUSTRY IS USELESS WITHOUT CULTURE.

Recent rains were turning the Missouri into nasty currents and eddies, a downrush too powerful for our canoe to take on, and the rapids above Fort Benton precluded launching
Nikawa.
I asked our tired but true-hearted helmsman to take us another sixteen miles up to Carter Ferry, if he thought the motor would hold out. Someone said, “After Carter, then what? Why don’t we stay here till we solve it?” But I had pledged long ago to accept even a single mile if that were all that was offered—in short, to proceed as the way opened. “But tomorrow, then what?” With almost four hundred miles of Montana yet before us, I had no idea. Months earlier, I made plans based on how the Missouri had run for the past decade, a period of low water; once again the Big Contrariness revealed the ineptitude of planning for anything less than everything.

The bluffs were even higher beyond Fort Benton, dark awesome things which only the afternoon sun kept from looking like promises of doom, the kind of terrain people die in. But farther on they became almost kindly, covered by hundreds upon hundreds of nests of swallows that unconcernedly glided over the awesome flush of water thumping our boat as if the waves were fists swung by someone in high conniption. Should the motor fail, we would have a quick ride back to Fort Benton either in the boat or in our life vests.

But the engine kept plugging. The unruly water had shut down the Carter ferry, although the
TOOT FOR OPERATOR
sign was still out. We pulled up on a gravel slope, fifty-six miles above Virgelle and only fifteen below the grand cascade section of the Missouri near Great Falls. How we would ascend those next miles of bad river to reach the base of the first of five dams built atop the big ledges, I didn’t know. I could only hope for luck multiplying like mice in an attic.

I
N THE CAFÉ
on Front Street in Fort Benton where we’d returned for the night, the sour waitress brought our breakfast eggs and hash browns with a side of caveats: “That river’s more likely to kill you than an old grizzly bear. The water hasn’t been this high in years. The ferry’s shut down, so that ought to give you a clue. Just go on home and take a nice rest because ain’t no damn canoe going to get through up there because when that river don’t want nobody on it, nobody gets on it except people like you easterners—or some damn Californian.”

Our boatman of the last two days had neither the time nor inclination to take us up to Morony Dam, the first of the five barriers built close to one another. The advice of everyone was to portage: after all, it would add only fifteen miles more to what we’d have to do around the dams anyway. I refused. Lewis and Clark made it to Belt Creek—they called it “Portage Creck”—before leaving the water, and although we were but a crew of three, we had a major compensation called the internal combustion engine. Somewhere we could find someone with a boat capable of ascending—surely, someplace there was somebody. We went looking and eventually met Jack Lepley, a retired high school teacher, a tall and friendly man who called the sheriff, persuaded him, and then told us the volunteer search-and-rescue team might take us those few miles in its small boat with a water-jet motor; perhaps we could make a contribution to the maintenance fund.

At six o’clock that evening we met Kurt Buskirk—a name we had to work at to get it right—a hefty young fellow glad to have the chance to log a few official hard-water miles. We hauled up to Carter Ferry and with some uneasiness set out in a drizzle that soon ceased. I didn’t say it aloud, of course, but I whispered to Pilotis, Every time we look this river in the eye and call its bluff, it smiles on us. Pilotis: “Tell me that two hundred miles from now.”