River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (59 page)

The day was fair but warm and so breezeless that mosquitoes attacked whenever we came near a copse of willows. We had hopes travel by foot would turn up more and different wildlife than we’d seen—I repeat, our numbers and varieties did not match even remotely the accounts of early travelers—but the ramble yielded only a couple of towhees, a nesting osprey, and three magpies pulling their long tails like pennants across the canyon. Down in the hard flush, beyond the banksides of wild roses, swam brown and rainbow trout, some of the largest in the West, so we’d heard. Near our halfway mark and not far from Lewis and Clark Caverns high up the cliff—caves they didn’t know existed—we saw a mule deer at the edge of the river. Paying attention only to the cold swirlings, it watched the flow for a few moments, then leaped in and began a strong but unconcerned swim for the north shore. By the time the beast reached the other side, it was more than a hundred yards downstream at a bank of easy ascent. Said the Photographer, “I think he aimed for it.” In dry weather the Jefferson can get nearly “dewatered,” and we wondered whether the deer had learned to cross during those easier times, for hard current like we saw, on the Missouri anyway, once swept migrating bison to their doom.

The walk was long and hot but otherwise a vacation from the confinement of our boats, and several times I bolted ahead of my mates only to wait at some choice observation post, but by the time we reached the South Boulder River at the far end of the arid canyon, our drinking water was gone, and we were tiring and parched. Mosquitoes swarmed in as we came to the bosklands near Jefferson Island, and, thirst and weariness be damned, we scurried toward cover across the Cardwell bridge and went on to La Hood Park. There we found a 1930s tavern near a long-closed filling station with a large wooden canopy still covering the broken pumps, its underside painted with an illustrated map of one of the formerly great transcontinental routes, U.S. 20 running from Boston Harbor to Yaquina Bay in Oregon, from scrod to oysters. Although it lies ninety-five miles south of La Hood Park, the fame of 20 was such that it effectively obliterated the lore of Highway 10, which the station once sat alongside. Today the numbers have changed, and the way west in that place is Interstate 90, only a mile north of us. When I mentioned we were seeing the last of that four-lane we’d first crossed under on the Hudson River, Pilotis looked up surprised. “New York seems as remote as New Guinea.” By river passage, emotionally, it almost was.

At that point, our miles from the Atlantic and our elevation in feet above it happened, by my figures, to match: 4,250. To celebrate the coincidence, after a mathematical discussion of whether or not mileage and elevation at some place
had to
coincide, we went to evening prayers in the old tavern (the word is related to “tabernacle”) at the mouth of the canyon. Inside stood a noble altar of a back bar, with a large mirror framed with a hundred signed dollar-bill offerings above an assortment of bottles gleaming like candles, upon each label in bold numbers the price of a shot, and at our backs a bookcase neatly full of prayerbooks like
The Blonde That Rode Texas
.

Before ordering up spirits, I drank two glasses of ice water and asked for a third, whereupon the bartender, Baron (“a name, not a title”) Stewart, said to me, “Come around and I’ll show you how the drink hose works. I’m here to serve—booze. Now, when you’re quenched, what will you
drink?
”

My mates ordered lager, but that seemed insufficiently celebratory for the happy coincidence of our travel numbers, so I said, How about a martini? “What?” Stewart said. “If that’s your call, come back here and make it yourself.” I took the white towel, stepped behind the polished wood, mixed my potion, and tended our little company and the friends they were making—a demanding lot, I must say—while our host disappeared into the kitchen before returning some time later with plates of burritos and a stack of hot tortillas.

Soon filled to comfort and ripe for meditation, Pilotis engaged a fellow, a science teacher, in a tedious fifteen-minute discussion about the length of an “instant,” a ramble that made me redefine the duration of a quarter of an hour. During most of that debate, I fell into an interior commemoration of our mileage, and for the first time I thought not how distant we were from the Pacific but rather how far from the Atlantic.

Stewart told me, “I’m just here on hiatus—is that Greek or Latin? I’m a helping hiatus. You all have been talking a lot of numbers, but standing before you is a living number—meet Mister Eleven.” He was a short man, balding, round billows of white hair at his temples, possessed of a jolliness confirming he was not a bartender except by hiatus, the sort of fellow who might step from a crofter’s cottage in the Scottish Highlands to invite you in to a bowl of cock-a-leekie, but in fact he was from Florida, Weekiwachee Springs, “that place where mermaids swim in glass tanks and eat bananas underwater—but never a fish.” He had just learned to tap-dance and proved up our new friendship by not insisting on a demonstration. “That’s me, Mister Eleven,” he said again, so I obliged: Why are you a number? “I play eleven musical instruments, I’ve totaled eleven cars, I’ve been bitten by eleven snakes. Now I’m afraid I’m opening up a new category—falls. I fell down the stairs, I fell off a bridge forty-one feet onto a highway and broke both arms.” He held them up to show the large calcium knots on the ulnas where the bones had knitted less than perfectly. “Not long ago,” he said, “a neon sign fell out of the sky and hit me on the head. So now I wish I was just Mister Three.”

As a reporter, I’m pledged to try to ascertain the veracity of tavern talk, so I challenged him to name his eleven serpents, and without hesitation he said, “Black snake, green snake, blue racer, bull snake, chicken snake, garter snake, ring-neck, water snake, tree snake, copperhead, and water moccasin. That cottonmouth bit me in the navel when I was twelve. I grabbed it and pulled it loose. Threw it a mile.”

Just then there was an explosion from the deck behind the tavern, and we ran to the door. We should have known. I mean, this was Montana: outside, nothing more than two men shooting potatoes. Not shooting
at
potatoes but shooting them out of a homemade contraption called a spud gun. From the porch above a deep field reaching down to the Jefferson, a man named Parker and his assistant launched the potatoes to see who could get the farthest trajectory. The spud gun was about four feet long and made from four pieces of PVC plumbing pipe: the assistant rammed a raw Idaho potato down the barrel to the firing chamber into which he then injected a spritz of hairspray; Parker aimed the gun as his friend put a match to the igniter hole, and with a loud
!whump!
a spud went sailing some hundred yards toward the river.

Parker handed the gun to me. “Try it.” I said, I don’t have time right now to get a new face. “There’s no danger. Not much.” Don’t you have something smaller—say, a parsnip pistol or a radish revolver? “I’ve thought about that,” he said.

The temptation was too much, so I loaded in a nice, firm Idaho and fired the thing into kingdom come. “Hey, you’re a natural.” I said, Not quite, although I nearly finished seventh at the Missouri Turnip Toss back in ’sixty-three. “These things were invented in California,” Parker said, “but I hear they’re illegal there now.” Pilotis: “That’s right. The Association of Los Angeles Grocers got them outlawed when a masked man held up a produce stand with a large russet.”

In the dusk we retrieved our tow wagon and went down along the Tobacco Root Mountains, through the valley of the Jefferson, a pleas ant flatlands where, except in fast-water years, the gadabout river lingers as if in love with the bottoms. At Twin Bridges, under Old Baldy Mountain, near the junctures of the Big Hole and Beaverhead rivers, we found a cabin for the night, a place from the forties but clean and spacious. After we turned in, I heard across the dark room, “If Meriwether Lewis amazed the Indians with his air rifle, think what he could have accomplished with a spud gun.” A long quiet, then through the blackness, “If only he could’ve gotten the boys to haul from St. Louis those two hundred cases of Aqua Net.”

F
ROM THE BEGINNING
of the voyage, I had little hope of ever ascending the Beaverhead River. The Corps of Discovery accomplished it only by making the men wade the treacherous bottom, ropes over their shoulders to drag the loaded pirogues, a task that perhaps more than any other could have precipitated a mutiny. Clark, overseeing the effort, wrote almost the same sentence at the end of each day of the long haul: “Men complain verry much of the emence labour they are obliged to undergo & wish much to leave the river. I passify them.” And Lewis: “Capt. Clark found the river shoally, rapid, shallow, and extreemly difficult. The men in the water almost all day. They are geting weak, soar, and much fortiegued; they complained of the fortiegue to which the navigation subjected them and wished to go by land.” But without the Indian horses Lewis had gone ahead on foot in search of, lining the pirogues up the river was the only practical way to move their heavy stores.

While we considered the Jefferson the same river as the Missouri, the captains thought the Beaverhead to be but more miles of the Jefferson. By whatever name, those waters below and beyond the Tobacco Root Mountains are a hell of a tangling. Like an indigent, that river will take any bed it can find and the next morning go looking for another. One of our small maps warned:

The Beaverhead is a maze of braided channels, sloughs, and irrigation ditches that are numberless for all practical purposes. Also, there are more bridges than have been indicated here. Showing all details at this half-inch-to-the-mile scale would simply make the map unreadable. Don’t even count the bends, because from season to season they may be in different places. To have shown the islands would only have added another element of chance, for they come and they go. For example, the one that Lewis and Clark named “3000-mile island”—that far from St. Louis, they calculated—washed downriver many years ago.

We had other maps, the best available, including nine adjoining charts that when laid out were ten feet long and seven wide, all for a river only forty-six beeline miles, head to mouth, and about seventy-two by water. I say “about” because it’s impossible to be accurate with something as uncommitted to going anywhere as the Beaverhead usually is.

The difficulties are more than simply meanders or the narrow channels Lewis called bayous or the dead-end sloughs and old irrigation ditches, for the Beaverhead, possessed of all the impediments of the Jefferson, adds roots extending from the shore, undercut banks, irrigation pipes, sudden water releases from Clark Canyon Reservoir, and a controlling agency called the Bureau of Reclamation. As a result, people don’t go
up
the Beaverhead—they wait for the water to reach a certain level then go
down a portion
of it, sometimes carrying wire cutters for illegal fences. The Corps of Discovery required almost three weeks to ascend the 150 miles from the mouth of the Jefferson to the start of the Beaverhead, a trip they accomplished on their downstream return in less than three days.

All of those obstacles, of course, do not include seriously high water. Confronting us on the morning we hoped to ascend was a river, like a teenager, determined to get nowhere in particular as long as it did it fast. Once again, we could not find an experienced boatman willing to face such currents, especially to buck them.
Rule of the River Road:
When veteran pilots blink, head for dry ground. But walking along the brush-encumbered banks was also out of the question, an age-old circumstance that explains the several well-worn Indian “roads” Lewis and Clark came across in the Beaverhead country. So, without other recourse, we also took to a road and drove up the valley past a ridgeline that pushes against the river to form what many historians believe is Beaverhead Rock, the landmark Sacagawea recognized as proof she had arrived again in her home territory. Another outcrop some miles on south has always looked far more like a beaver to me, and some residents say
it
is the true landmark, explaining the lower ridge as a swimming beaver, the upper a walking one. Other people shuffle off the debate by noting there are formations all over the area that look like beavers walking, swimming, copulating.

We followed the valley. To the west lay the heavily mined Ironrod Hills and on the east the Ruby Range, dug up for garnets and talc. The road, rarely more than a mile from the river, led us into Dillon, a small college town of four thousand, then onto Interstate 15 and a twelve-mile run through the canyon of the upper Beaverhead, a place of umber-colored rock walls and an aridness even the swift water couldn’t relieve. On we went toward Clark Canyon Reservoir, an impoundment that buried the campground Meriwether Lewis named Fortunate at the union of the Red Rock River and Horse Prairie Creek, the latter leading westward to Lemhi Pass where we intended to cross the Continental Divide.

Our failure to move by water had suddenly gained us time. Since the date set for our start down the Salmon was still some days away, I proposed we take a few hours to visit the true headwaters of the Missouri, its farthest source, the one the Corps of Discovery missed. We were singularly unprepared for such an off-the-elbow expedition, even to the point of not knowing with certainty where that headstream was; I had read only that it rose someplace in the mountains beyond Upper Red Rock Lake. Our maps were insufficient, and we could not come up with proper ones on such short notice, but we headed off anyway for the road that parallels the Red Rock River, stopping along the way to ask questions in hopes of finding an oral map, but the veritable source of the Missouri was there terra incognita. Everyone kept trying to direct us back to Three Forks or toward a spring at Lemhi Pass which Lewis considered the farthest water, and a half-dozen times we heard variations on, “What? You think the Missouri actually begins where? Who says so? When did you hear that? Why do you want to go there?” Who, what, when, where, why.