About every twenty minutes, Nikawa encountered tows moving coal, their big wakes banging us. The fuel-gauge needles kept dropping, and Pilotis said, “If we go dead in the water, what’s the drill when a tow comes on? What do we do to keep from getting sucked under those barges or minced in the propellers?” If one engine stops, we’ll use the last gas in the other to run to shore. “And if the shore is impossible?” Look at it this way, I said, worrying about gas keeps our minds off floods.
Before the Ohio was engineered into dams and pools, it was, although not a particularly rocky river, full of sandbars, islands with blind and tricky chutes and channels, and the usual obstructions of snags. Published maps were little more than sketches, and many travelers, struggling with burdensome flatboats, relied on verbal charts like Samuel Cummings’s The Western Pilot; typical instructions from the 1847 edition:
Two miles below N. Albany, will be seen in low water, a bar on the left, which will drive you over to the right, above a white house, on the Indiana side, you must keep the right shore until you get near Yellow Wilson’s, or a large brick house that formerly belonged to him, then incline to the left, and keep down until opposite the left-hand point, called Hughes’s Bar. Then if you run the lower channel, make a long crossing for a clearing with a white house on the right side. If the upper channel is taken, run square in for a cluster of trees about 250 yards above the house, then keep nearest to the right-hand shore until you reach the point below on the right.
We wore on through the gray day, deeper into the meanders where the banks were too high to let us see potential salvation like a road or a farm. Said Pilotis, “We’ve got one small chance for gas at Leavenworth. After that, there’s nothing for fifty miles.” Nikawa doesn’t have fifty miles in her, I replied. Pilotis put the chart down wearily. “Why is this never easy?” Because this is America, I said. I was thinking that we often fail to understand how wild this land is even today, sometimes mistaking the ruining of wilderness as a subduing of it.
Pilotis spotted a little dock under a steep bank on the Indiana side, turned the field glasses on it, studied it, and I said, Yes? “Can’t tell yet.” Now? “Not yet.” You know what I want to hear. “It might be. Give me a few more yards. Could be.” Don’t disappoint me, Mate. “Looks good.” I’m starting to get happy. “Oh, god. I think it’s a barrel. Damnit! It’s a goddamn red barrel!” Get out your hiking boots. “Hold on. I think behind the barrel there’s a gas pump!”
And indeed there was a pump, a locked one with no one around anywhere. I said, We’re here to stay till we get the key. “What if the storage tank’s empty? Or the pump’s broken?” We climbed the long stair up the clay bank to a trailer sitting in a space cleared in the woods. No one there either, so we wandered on to a road and followed it into the remains of old Leavenworth, a settlement severely set back by the great flood of 1937. Only a few closed-up, weathered buildings were still there, and in the cinereous weather we found not a soul. If you’ve seen one of those movies where a couple of survivors of some Armageddon come up above ground to discover only screen doors banging in the lonely wind, cobwebs long empty of life, and dust whispering about, then you know how Leavenworth was. We walked on, turning toward the river again, and near the edge we came to The Dock, not the kind we wanted, but a homely café. Inexplicably, it was open.
The cook stepped from the kitchen to see who the hell had wandered in. “Off the river?” she said. We sat at the counter in front of a large refrigerator with a hand-lettered sign punctuated with equal signs as if the phrases were equations:
NO = VULGAR = LANGUAGE
WATCH = YOUR = MOUTH
Pilotis warned a look at me although I hadn’t said a word. We thought ourselves and the cook the only ones about, but then from a side room we heard a rough, threatening Appalachian voice: “Weasel’s gonna eat up your liver,” and a child began to whimper. The cook saw our expressions, and she said, “That’s her mom = The kid ordered chicken livers = Weasel’s her dog.”
The gasoline man wouldn’t be home till nightfall, so we settled in against the afternoon and ordered a plate of fried fiddlers (whole catfish), hush puppies, slaw, and potato salad. In Italy, country food is taken seriously, but in America, country eating is the serious thing, and we honored the custom, all the time in hopes someone would enter and get curious about two marooned sailors. At last the café owner, Peggy Apple, a tall woman in her sixties, walked up, asked the question we wanted—how we came to be there—and our telling of the river miles got her interest, then her sympathy, and she offered to drive up the highway for gasoline while we finished our fiddlers. Although she was able to return with only ten gallons, I figured it enough to get us the sixty miles to Cannelton.
We took Nikawa on around the meanders, past what had to be the fifth or sixth Knob Creek we’d seen in the last couple of days. The twists in the Ohio made for a weird compass: Kentucky lay south of us as it had since the state line, but then it went north, then east, then west, and south again, yet always it lay on our port side. Finally the river straightened to run a course absolutely due south, made a broad turn west, and again assumed a perfect 180-degree heading.
Once when I was near here, I met an old fellow of some charm, a teller of tales from the twenties; at the end of our first conversation, he gave me his card:
* * *
VYISDER ZOMENIMOR
ORZIZZAZZIS,
ZANZERIS, ORZIZ.
* * *
I looked at it and said I thought his name was Hiram Hiller. He broke into laughter. “And I thought you could read.”
Pilotis figured a good overnight stop would be Stephensport or Cloverport, Kentucky, but we found no suitable mooring, so we ran on, on over a stretch of broadly spaced swells with smooth backs that gave us a carnival ride again, but this one was a gentle carousel horse that took us up and down along the shores of Breckinridge County, Kentucky, where the citizens seemed bent on paving the riverbank with discarded kitchen and laundry room appliances mortared together with plastic flotsam.
We turned into Deer Creek, stopped to make sure we could pass beneath the small highway bridge—Nikawa did so by three inches—and there upstream we lay to. In spite of the hindrances, we’d come 132 river miles (only half of that mileage directly west), our longest run yet. We hitched a lift a few miles down to Cannelton, the old steamboat-coal town, and took quarters in the Castlebury Inn, once an 1867 commercial building. After washing up, we walked a mile to a good salad bar, talked about floods, and toasted to surviving another river day. While I was waiting for a pass at the hot peppers and green olives, a young man said to his wife, “That makes no sense, honey. Why are you doing that?” She smiled at him and said, “Because shut up, that’s why! I’m a girl.”
Nekked and Without No Posies
THE YOUNG WOMAN, a seller of caskets, found southern Indiana good country. “Lots of old people here. It’s almost ideal demographics.” Pilotis asked whether she ever found her work depressing. “I get equibalance from my other line, homeopathic remedies.” Her system sounded sure-fire to me: if the root extracts and natural tonics failed, one had the comfort of that coffin at hand. She said to me, “Cynicism is a poison, bad for the brain cells.”
Our host drove us up the road to Deer Creek with a stop at Lafayette Spring where water gurgled deep within a long, dark cleft in an eroded sandstone outcrop before emerging to roll a few yards down into the Ohio. Lafayette himself washed ashore there when the steamboat he was aboard struck a snag and sank in 1825; in the river the aged nobleman left his baggage, carriage, and, supposedly, eight thousand dollars in gold. Near that spring Abraham Lincoln and his parents entered Indiana from Kentucky on the way to a new homesite in the woods, an event commemorated by a bronze plate bolted to the rock: LINCOLN — HUMBLE — HOMELY — LONELY — GIFTED — GREAT. That peculiar laud somehow reminded me of Lincoln’s joke about the man tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, who replied when asked how he liked it, “If it was
n’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”
The kind of day we’d longed for since setting out fifteen hundred miles ago finally began to happen, although I first thought things were shaping up in the more usual way of weather: challenge, alarm, weari ness. The clouds had lifted, but now the sky was saffron from sulfurous coal smoke, the air botched with stink from a pulp mill, and the river yellow-brown like an Appalachian dustyard dog. When we radioed our request to descend the Cannelton Lock, the operator told me a newsman had heard of our approach and was trying to hunt us down. I told him to forget he’d seen Nikawa.
An upriver-bound tow, ready to enter the lock, called to ask us to pass him on a two-whistle—that is, to his port—so our diminutive wake would not push him against the bank. That our dory could move anything so massive was indication of the instability of the river road. Beyond the lock the water was as quiet as if in a bottle, and we ran past Tell City, another Swiss town, this one with a floodwall and an arrow-pierced apple painted large on it.
The bottomlands became wide enough to give industry sprawl space, and the entering streams bore names like Lead Creek, Muddy Gut, Big Slough; it was an area for a swift and unhindered run among hills dwindling to a mere rolling terrain as we neared the valley of the Mississippi. I propped back at the wheel, took off my shoes, and steered with my stockinged feet, a stunt to rouse Pilotis who seemed to be waiting for the next perturbation.
The Anderson River, a name my mate thought one of the least interesting in the country, entered at Troy, Indiana, about where seventeen-year-old Abe Lincoln built a small scow to take travelers out to midstream to board passing paddlewheelers. A Kentucky boatman hailed the boy into court for operating a ferry without a license, but Abe argued his scow didn’t cross the river, so it wasn’t actually a ferry and therefore needed no license; the judge agreed, a decision less important than the suit itself, which introduced Lincoln to the law. In that way, the Ohio helped make a President. Farther on downriver, at Rockport, Indiana, Abe hired out at nineteen to a flatboat bound for the lower Mississippi, a tour that revealed to him the vast magnificence of American landscape and the pustulant shame of slavery. It was also in Rockport that he met John Pitcher, an attorney who opened his exceptional library to Lincoln, books that would return later dividends to the nation through the eloquence of addresses, proclamations, stories, utterances.
Pilotis suggested a stop in Owensboro, Kentucky, so we could walk to a lunch spot I’d been talking about, but the rising river apparently interfered with getting docks into the water because we saw no safe place to tie up. A year earlier in that luncheonette I’d met a man, now thickset but as a boy, said he, “skinnier than a tobacco stob.” He’d not had a lucky life, but he’d been in jail just once. “I was bringen in hay bales and got the truck mired down in a wet field. Hell, I was nearly out of it onto the road too. I was in a hurry to see my wife—we was separated because she said I didn’t keep my word or take things serious. God omighty! I had to get out of that slick fast and be on time. So I took off my overhalls and put them under one tire. All I had for the othern was my union suit, so I put it under too. Except for my boots and wedden ring, I was as nekked as man can be, but I drove her out. I wanted Mary to see I’d turned over a new leaf, so I took her some flars. I didn’t have anywhere to buy them so I borried some off a fresh grave. Missus Chalmerses oldest boy, I believe it was. I didn’t borry them all. They was big ol gladiolas. Then, hell, somebody come aholleren after me, but I got away. Being nekked was pretty nippy—and, a course, I was tense about visiten Mary like I was, but there weren’t time to get clothes. So I come to take a couple of swigs on my bottle. Maybe it was three or four, just to ward off the cold. Anyway, when I got to her place and run up on her porch, I held them gladiolas in front of me. Thank god they wasn’t roses. When I give her the flars—well, you can see how things was out in the open then. She looked down and said, ‘Howard, you ain’t never gonna change!’ and she throwed them gladiolas at me. I went to whinen and beggen through the door to hear me out, when up comes a deputy, and he says, ‘Hello there, neighbor. Where’s your britches?’ And I told him out in Peck’s field, and he says, ‘Well, I believe you, neighbor, but I’m agonna have to take you in for stealen off a dead man.’ I said, ‘I cain’t go to jail like this!’ ‘Well then, neighbor,’ he says, ‘you’d better gather them posies up again.’ Hell, they wasn’t posies. Goddamnit, they fined me twelve dollars for stealen and six dollars for public nekkedness. I loved that woman, but I never could do anything right. When it come to her, I was just snake-bit.”
Downstream from Owensboro, we entered a run among several slender islands, each a couple of miles long and giving a sense of the old Ohio and a choice of ways down through back chutes, but when the islands fell behind, the river was again just an expanse in the flatlands. More than any other mode of travel, rivering enforces a living in the present where the moment is nearly all, for to think too much about tomorrow or yesterday is to slip into a distraction that can endanger the boat. We had no wind, saw no tows, so I shut Nikawa down and let her drift, and Pilotis laid out a lunch of mozzarella, pumpernickel, roasted peppers, half-sour pickles, Kalamata olives, and a bottle of good cabernet. We sat at the navigation table, repast before us, and floated along at two miles an hour. I began figuring. Could we continue this speed day and night, traveling not on our terms but entirely those of the river, we’d reach the Pacific almost at the same time we were working for. I said so. “Sure, but for that thing called gravity—we’re about to go contrary to it.” Pilotis was correct. Tomorrow the tilt of the continent would be against us for almost three thousand miles before we might find this kind of ease again. But for now the Ohio carried us, demanding only buoyancy, and during that hour we went exactly as went the river.
I talked of the previous night when I tried to get to sleep in the hotel but succumbed to a fierce case of doubt, concerns that now seemed ludicrous as we sat idly on the silent and hasteless river, nothing more required than sipping a California red, all the while floating west. Said Pilotis, “The river’s a clever sonofabitch. It’ll make us pay for every minute of this.” I said, And the price of life is death. So we toasted the old sonofabitch. Then it was time again to get behind the wheel and maneuver around Scuffletown Island and up to Newburgh Lock. We’d had our moment.
The outreaches of the river town of Newburgh, Indiana, gave us a ridge of large, recent houses and then, farther along, in floodlands, a string of trailers and shacks sitting atop twelve-foot posts, their bases plastered with waterborne trash. Seven miles below the Green River, we found a dock off the Ohio near Evansville, tied Nikawa in, and walked toward the city. On the big levee we came upon a middle-aged man dressed in a white suit and silver silk tie, sitting cross-legged and looking intently at the river. He glanced up and asked me, “Are you with the Postal Service?” I was wearing an Army surplus shirt, and over my shoulder was the satchel for my logbook. No, I said, but we’re crossing the country at about the speed of a penny postcard. He said, “Look out there,” and waved toward the Ohio. “Isn’t it beautiful? Trees and nothing else. Greenery. Do you know Evansville is the only city in America with no other city on the opposite side of a big river?” I named a couple of others. Trying to rise, he struggled but was unable to get up. He was drunk.
When we reached downtown, we went to the sixth-floor bar of a hotel affording a lovely vista of the seven-mile-long finger the Ohio points at Evansville, and sat through the golden hour with beverages and watched the gleaming water lose the sunset. Pilotis said, “There’s not another person up here so much as even glancing at the river. Only a drunk has the eyes to see it.”
Down on the waterfront, the Ohio Ribber Barbecue Cook-Off was under way, and the evening air was savory with hickory and mesquite smoke, sauces and grilling meats, voices speaking of cookery. From five states they had pulled their big metal ovens fashioned from fifty-gallon drums, propane tanks, home-heating-oil tanks, a World War Two bomb contai
ner, and one from a boyhood-home coal furnace. Each carried a banner: OINK, CACKLE, AND MOO. SQUEAL OF FORTUNE. IF YOU HAVE A BUTT, WE’LL SMOKE IT.
Everyone had sold out of cackle, so we took some moo on bread, a moist brisket in a sauce that disappeared to leave only the flavor of hickoried meat, and we finished things with a plate of fried Vidalia onion rings. Then we walked around the heart of Evansville, once a lively spot where the Wabash and Erie Canal joined the Ohio, now turned barren and boring by so-called urban renewal—that is, parking lots—a place conceived by the sort of city planners whose most important design tool is a headache ball. Except for the old courthouse and post office, the town center was full of architecture memorable for its shoddy temporariness, a congelation of sameness, an obliviation of time-earned character, a grid to get away from, which indeed the people had done so they could go down to the fecund riverbank with the eccentric and vernacular cookers and ovens, down where traditions lived and histories clearly continued, where city engineers seem never to have walked.