River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

  Eyeless Fish with Eight Tails

  A THUNDERSTORM had come in the night and rattled the river and razed trees along it; then a following fog, like a cool hand across a furrowed brow, smoothed the water, but visibility was poor as if we wore steamed-over spectacles. Sweeping up insects, martins and swallows sliced across our bow; there were many of the birds, and for hours they beat through the mist, and I could imagine their narrow wings fanning the air to clarity, but we still struggled to see the distant bends. Blown-down cottonwoods lay slanting off the banks into the muddied water, limbs broken, bark shattered, their leaves not yet withering. Then the wind rose, not strong, just enough to put athwart our course some shallow troughs that hid the storm rummage, logs splintered to wicked sharpness lying darkly half submerged like alligators. We could do little but go slowly, banging into those we failed to dodge. It was a morning of clunks and swerves.

  The mist made the tows hard to distinguish from the perpendicular mud banks, and more than once a mass of barges seemed to materialize out of a field to bear down on us. I overtook one long tow and immediately came upon another, an unusual closeness since the boats normally give each other wide berth. We seemed to be gaining on it as though it were dead in the water, but its wake was churning up strange rolls of frothing river. Nothing looked right as the gap between us closed fast. What is this? I said, and then realized we were approaching not the stern of a towboat but the straight bows of oncoming barges. Because a downriver boat (like ours) has less control than one going up, it has right of way, but tows take precedence over small craft for several reasons, two good ones being a line of vision severely limited by several hundred feet of barges in front and a stopping distance of a mile or more. It was not the moment to weigh fine points of river practice. I tacked sharply to starboard, Pilotis went crashing into the bulkhead, and we cleared the monster somehow, but the captain came out to shake an arm at me. He thought I was playing one of those games of weekend boaters.

  Below Henderson, Kentucky—where John James Audubon for a few years was an indifferent shopkeeper more interested in hunting, learning to draw birds and beasts, and keeping his pond stocked with turtles for his favorite soup—the Ohio becomes wider, a half mile across in places, and deeper, holes of sixty feet, and the high water created some boils, upwellings that made large shifting circles across the surface. Bean fields reached to the edge of the river, the plow furrows inches from the water, and with no stabilizing line of trees and shrubs to hold the banks, the edacious Ohio easily pulled the earth into it. Farmers, wanting to use each foot of rich bottom this season, would have less next year, and by not giving up a little now, they eventually would lose it all. But where a tree line protected the edges, nest holes of swallows filled the banks.

  A bald eagle dropped out of a dead sycamore and took a course directly above the river, and for a couple of miles we followed its draft, on around Cypress Bend, up to Diamond Island, one of the largest on the river, past more low islands big and small, the wooded ones called towheads. Of the six states bordering the Ohio, Kentucky has the most miles of shoreline, and all the islands along its coast, no matter on which side of the river they lie, belong to it, a result of the federal government in 1792 setting the upper boundary against the north bank of the Ohio. Sixteen miles downstream from the courthouse and the industries in Mount Vernon, Indiana, we had speedy passage through Uniontown Lock, and two miles beyond Nikawa passed the mouth of the Wabash River and the Illinois line. Before our voyage began, I’d spoken with a couple of boat mechanics living two hundred miles up the Wabash, water they refused to set out on. One said, “The fish in that river got eight tails!” “Sure,” said the other, “but can they swim! Now, if they only had eyes to see where they’re going.” The truth is, the entire Wabash, a biologist told me, “is under a fish-consumption advisory because of PCB and mercury contamination, and the lower river is dangerous to recreationists because of E. coli from animal wastes. It’s going to be difficult to get improvement here because the Indiana legislature is deeply under the influence of the Farm Bureau and other property rights organizations. But there are seven states downstream from the Wabash, and that makes pollution here actionable by federal agencies.” So when will the water get better? “When enough people speak out—as always.”

  The remnants of Old Shawneetown were hardly visible behind the levee; the best remaining building was the porticoed and pillared 1839 bank, once so close and open to the river a clerk could sling a halfeagle from the stone steps into the Ohio. That the bank still stands while the rest of the village has fled a couple of miles up the road is evidence of what an early chronicler called the citizens’ “pertinacious adhesion" to river life as well as a levee that grew higher following each flood after 1884. In 1932 the townspeople built their ultimate dike, one five feet above the highest high-water mark, a margin of assurance everyone believed in; then the flood of 1937 topped that levee by six feet with such a show of power the villagers’ pertinacity gave out and their adhesion yielded to the great brown master of the territory. At last they understood.

  In Illinois, Hardin County is almost a descriptive name, for the place is hard ground indeed, an area of quarries as well as forested hills, a durable land that does what the ramparts of Old Shawneetown could not: keep people dry and force the Ohio four miles eastward. The underlying rock gives the last topographical relief, the final scenery of delight to the Ohio shores. Ledges of sheer striated limestone like seawalls reach down into the water, and where they have broken open, cedar and sycamores cling to crevices in a lovely manner unlike any other place on the river.

  Along the south side of that big bend is Cave-in-Rock, a name with a nice ring to it although, as Pilotis commented, “Where else would a cave be?” Once called Robbers’ Roost, the two-hundred-foot-deep chamber, opening directly to the Ohio, its mouth looking like a huge and flattened keyhole, lies only a few yards from the river. Scrawled on the interior today are the usual insipidities of the marginally lettered, but the most famous words ever were those on Samuel Mason’s 1797 sign: LIQUOR VAULT AND HOUSE OF ENTERTAINMENT. The shrewd come-on, implying hooch and sex for sale, was an effective ruse to draw travelers and flatboatmen into a den of iniquity, although not the kind they expected. Inside, Mason’s thugs robbed them, a scam so good it continued even after a large reward encouraged two of his henchmen to sink a tomahawk in his skull, sever his head, and carry it, wrapped in blue mud to prevent putrefaction, in a canoe to Natchez where they presented it as proof of capture. Also around here lurked Colonel Plug, a fellow who would pretend to be a traveler stranded on a remote shore; when a samaritan took him aboard, the colonel covertly pulled caulking from the innocent’s flatboat, timing the leaks so the vessel would founder near his den where cohorts rowed out to rescue only him and the cargo. The thief, later known as Colonel Unplug, mistimed his last uncaulking and went down with his victims.

  Nikawa passed through the wake of the small Cave-in-Rock ferry and on down beyond Elizabethtown and Rosiclare, Illinois, but neither afforded a mooring off the river away from the pounding of tows. At Golconda we pulled into a harbor built by the Corps of Engineers, and there we refueled. Tucked into a nearby slip and locked up was, inescapably, the Dry Docktor.

  Pilotis called to find a room and managed to get a ride into town. When we climbed off the pier and went up to the road, we found waiting the longest limousine minus newlyweds, a mafioso, or rock musician I’d ever seen; in fact, it had once belonged to a country-and-western singer. I won’t say that all of the village could ride in it at once, but I will allege that when the hood ornament left Golconda (named after the ancient city of proverbial riches in India), the rear bumper was just entering. Remembering our previous clunkers, pickup trucks, and shanks’ mare, we rode preposterously to The Mansion, an old riverside house now an inn. Later, when we sat down to supper, in walked Cap and Mr. V—, smiling, full of good humor and bad tidings. Cap said, “We’re not taking on the Mississippi. It’s starting t
o back up the Ohio now, so you can imagine what’s on out west. I heard the current is almost thirty miles an hour in places. Uprooted trees coming down fast. And then that damn Missouri? Not us. Forget it.”

  Pilotis and I, clearly, couldn’t forget it, but we did try to ignore matters just then. Cap, hoping the spring rises would ease, planned to go home for a couple of weeks and then return to ascend the safer lock-and-dam Tennessee River, perhaps as far as Knoxville. I tried to persuade him at least to try the Missouri after his wait, but I failed; he’d set his course, and maybe he was right, considering that his destination was never the other side of the country but merely wherever he chose at the moment; he was free as we could never be. We put rivers aside and ate a good meal, poured out toasts, retold stories of watering westward, and Cap was jocund. Later, Schuyler Meyer and several students did ascend the Tennessee, and some months after that he fell gravely ill and died. He was seventy-nine. I never saw him or the Doctor Robert again.

  The Great Omphalos in Little Egypt

  THE MORNING was warm, lightly muggy, but we felt not so much the air as our anticipation tinctured with apprehension about rising waters. We needed a day of things done correctly and occurrences falling in our favor, and naturally it didn’t begin like that. The limousine mistakenly hauled our backpacks to the next town, so we had to wait for their return before we could go to the docks and board Nikawa.

  We filled our fuel tanks and took aboard a young Erie canalman—handsome, thick hair to his shoulders, an accomplished bagpiper whom I’d earlier promised a few days on the big rivers—and set off, our musician on the bow to pipe us into action. We dropped south past the strung-out Sisters Islands, low and slender in the Ohio manner, then around chunky Stewart Island. The river ran smoothly, an assist on this day when gasoline would be a concern, so much so that I concentrated on steering the most direct course through the bending channels.

  Descent down the lock of big Smithland Dam went easily, and just below there I resisted an urge to cross behind a mess of bars and islands to motor a ways up the mouth of the Cumberland River. Although the last fifty miles of the Ohio are its widest, the section is deceptively full of shoals; a smashing blow by an unseen something at Cottonwood Bar shook Nikawa but did not harm her and corrected me of trying to run too straight a course down the broad river and put an end to crew chatter about the difference between corned beef and pastrami.

  Ten miles below the Cumberland, a long, needle-like bar angled out from the Kentucky shore to hide most of the debouchure of the Tennessee. It’s a quirk of topography that these two major rivers, their sources far apart, enter the Ohio so close together, a detail that would seem to have made Paducah a bigger town than it is—after all, look what the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi did for St. Louis. We watched for a gasoline pump on the Paducah waterfront, found nothing open, and went on down to cross over the lowered wickets of Dam 52, an old barrier boats go right over in high water to avoid the lock.

  At Metropolis, Illinois, where chances of shoreside gasoline seemed remote, I decided it was nevertheless our best hope for topping off the tanks, although the ramp was underwater. A couple of generations after the “birth” of Superman, little Metropolis, given its name, decided it might as well advertise itself as his home, despite the impossibility here of leaping tall buildings in a single bound (there aren’t any); the local paper even changed its name from the News to the Planet. There is, however, genuine history on the east side at Fort Massac where I thought to make a landing on a slope of loose cobbles, a decision the crew took mumpishly. Pilotis said, “Even if we get up onto the rocks all right, there’s still no gas there,” but I believed we had no choice and that it was time again to test our luck. Our musician went to the bow to watch the bottom and then pipe us up some friends, but the wind pulled his notes back into Kentucky, and nobody noticed us, not even when we had to go overboard to pull Nikawa onto the stones.

  The first Fort Massac, or Massaic, the French one of 1757, long ago fell into rot, as did subsequent British and American outposts, but in 1971 Illinois began rebuilding the 1794 Yankee version and thereby returned to the Ohio one of its formerly numerous wooden fortifications. It was there that Meriwether Lewis stopped for three days on his way from Pittsburgh to the Expedition encampment opposite the mouth of the Missouri; he purchased thirty-four gallons of whiskey for the soldiers’ daily ration during the voyage to the Pacific from Alexander McNair, a young clerk who years later became the first governor of Missouri after being elected over a candidate running on a platform of an orderly rather than fast, greedy, and irresponsible development of the new lands—William Clark.

  Pilotis stayed with Nikawa while the Piper and I walked up to the fort as if we were flatboatmen come ashore to inventory our cargo and pay duty. I found a groundskeeper, told him our tale, asked the Piper to play for him and a few visitors; the man listened, whistled along, then handed us the keys to his van. As we drove off for gas, the Piper said, “Does it always work like that? Always that easy?” Yes, I said, duck soup. We could find only two gasoline canisters, so we had to make the trip twice, lugging in sweaty silence the heavy cans down to Nikawa. As we stepped into the cool river to pull her off the rocks, our young friend remembered he’d left his bagpipes in the van, a recovery that took long enough to make me edgy about losing daylight before we could accomplish the last twenty miles of the Ohio and fifty more up the Mississippi to a presumed flood-safe berth at Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I said nothing, but I thought, He travels farthest who travels leanest.

  Then we were on the water again, past the big gambling boat that plies a few miles of the Ohio, a tub from which no passenger has yet been known to look at the river. Not long after, we went over the lowered wickets of Lock and Dam 53, the last of the old-style barriers and the final one between us and St. Louis. For the next several days, we might be on floodwater, but it would be open river. In a few years, Olmsted Lock and Dam, under construction off to starboard, would replace 52 and 53, and another era of Ohio navigation would end.

  Mound City, Future City, and Cairo, Illinois, are the original settlements of an area called Little Egypt after a St. Louis merchant and founder of Cairo (rhymes with “pharaoh”) fancied a resemblance to the Nile delta, a place he never saw. The towns line up along a six-mile stretch of the Ohio where it joins the Mississippi, one of the great fluvial junctures in the world, a location seemingly perfect for a real river city—a Pittsburgh, St. Louis, or Kansas City. Indeed the waters are there, but otherwise the geography is an adverse peninsula of lowlands, a fact ignored when English speculators in the 1830s sold bonds in a town company. One of the investors may have been Charles Dickens who was outraged at what he found when he journeyed here by boat. Wrote Boz in the account of his 1842 United States tour, American Notes:

  At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, in ground so flat and low and marshy that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the housetops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and death, vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin. A dismal swamp, on which the halfbuilt houses rot away; cleared here and there for the space of a few yards, and then teeming with rank unwholesome vegetation, on whose baneful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop and die and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster, hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise; a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it—such is the dismal Cairo.

  This outpouring of vitriol didn’t drain Dickens, for the next year, in his American novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, his wretched fictional City of Eden is Cairo and the region Little Egypt:
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  As they proceeded further on their track, and came more and more towards their journey’s end, the monotonous desolation of the scene increased to that degree, that for any redeeming feature it presented to their eyes, they might have entered, in the body, on the grim domains of Giant Despair. A flat morass, bestrewn with fallen timber; a marsh on which the good growth of the earth seemed to have been wrecked and cast away, that from its decomposing ashes vile and ugly things might rise; where the very trees took the aspect of huge weeds, begotten of the slime from which they sprung, by the hot sun that burnt them up; where fatal maladies, seeking whom they might infect, came forth at night, in misty shapes, and creeping out upon the water, hunted them like spectres until day; where even the blessed sun, shining down on festering elements of corruption and disease, became a horror; this was the realm of Hope through which they moved.

  I submit these passages as challenges to those who hold the English to be practitioners of understatement, and I point out that Dickens’s rancor is not unique among nineteenth-century British travelers in America. While the barren grid of Future City still seems to be waiting for its tomorrow, Cairo and Mound City did grow to see some fulfillment of this Golden Hope a generation after Dickens’s expostulations, a rise driven by river commerce and industry, notably James Eads’s gunboat shops that constructed several ironclads for the Union, craft that broke the Confederate blockade of the lower Mississippi and mercilessly shelled Vicksburg. I don’t know whether profits from war machinery were part of the Golden Hope or Giant Despair.