River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

Cairo still exists, a county seat surviving for a century and a half on its narrow peninsula between the big rivers and encircled by a levee, something like a moat in reverse. Perhaps Cairo is what Pilotis called an SBDB, a Seen-Better-Days Burg, even though it remains one of the most unusually situated towns in America, but its topography is so vast that the joining waters are almost impossible to behold from any view other than an airborne one. What Dickens failed to comprehend—but American Indians a millennium ago understood, as their ceremonial mounds attest—is the way Little Egypt sits at the center of what is probably the greatest nexus of grand watercourses in the world: within a crescent of about a hundred miles are the mouths of the Wabash, Cumberland, Tennessee, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, all merging into the Mississippi. At any time, but especially during flood, this is a powerful, overwhelming omphalos of waters.

  We went past Eads’s marine ways, yet visible, that launched his ironclads, then on under the 105-year-old railroad bridge, and two miles beyond we saw the Mississippi sprawling brownly out, yawning wide as all yonder, rolling menacingly down as if to Hell. We had done the Ohio, every flowing foot of it, and over its nearly thousand miles Nikawa had descended less than five hundred feet. Pilotis said, “Do you realize we didn’t see a single shantyboat? What’s the Ohio without shantyboats? Barbecue without sauce.” I asked our musician to go to the bow rail, take a secure position, and pipe us around Cairo Point—where passes the downflow of half the states and two provinces—and on into the Father of Waters. He went out, blew the bag full, and cut loose. Now that my native state at last lay on the far shore, he opened with “Going Home,” segued into a venerable piece Missourians claim, “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” and then to “Old Man River,” a song all but felicitous coming out of a bagpipe, yet with the skirls rousing us, we were ready for the great Mississippi, come hell or high water.

  VI

  THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER

  COMMERCE, MISSOURI

  Iconogram VI

  But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him! An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees; now twining themselves together in great rafts, from the interstices of which a sedgy, lazy foam works up to float upon the water’s top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled roots showing like matted hair; now glancing singly by like giant leeches; and now writhing round and round in the vortex of some small whirlpool, like wooded snakes. The banks low, the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slime on everything: nothing pleasant in its aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon the dark horizon.

  For two days we toiled up this foul stream, striking constantly against the floating timber, or stopping to avoid those more dangerous obstacles, the snags, or sawyers, which are the hidden trunks of trees that have their roots below the tide. When the nights are very dark, the look-out stationed in the head of the boat knows by the ripple of the water if any great impediment be near at hand and rings a bell behind him, which is the signal for the engine to be stopped: but always in the night this bell has work to do, and after every ring, there comes a blow which renders it no easy matter to remain in bed.

  Charles Dickens

  American Notes for General Circulation, 1842

  A Night Without Light on a River Without Exits

  OUR ROUTE drawn across a map of America strangely reflected the southern border of the United States from Florida to California, and we were now at the most southerly point, the place glaciers reached deepest into America. If you speak of north as “up” and south as “down,” then we were as down as we’d get, and from there to Idaho we would be going up, up northward, upstream almost three thousand miles, up against the flow of half a continent. As soon as we left the curving course of the Ohio, its line of current most evident on the surface of the joining waters, we caught the downrush of the Mississippi and felt that American outpouring, forceful beyond anything we’d known, and it was thrilling to move in a land that could show such native power.

  Nikawa rolled hard as if struck from below by some beast of the depths, her pilothouse leaning, and she yawed until I put her straight to the current, and then the Piper yahooed. “Steady,” Pilotis said. “We’re being taken downriver.” I pushed the throttles forward, Nikawa shivered, began to inch upstream, her flat bottom rising enough to escape some of the pull of the flood, and we started to climb toward the Rockies. Everywhere huge boils broke the surface: the ones ahead we cracked into as if they were curbings, and those rising suddenly beneath us jolted the hull as though we’d ridden onto the back of a river kraken. The current beat at the channel markers, taking some cans underwater while the conical nun-buoys went into a thrashing dance, a madtarantella, and Pilotis played the binoculars back and forth to watch for any buoys torn free and turned into veritable torpedoes. The river ripped along in such tumult it seemed alive and foul-tempered, unwilling to tolerate the smallest error.

  The Mississippi, Ohio Confluence to mouth of the Missouri, 196 river miles

  A big uprooted elm caught against a bridge pier shook violently, the Mississippi treating it as a terrier does a rat, and the tree was pitiful in its helplessness. Said Pilotis, “From here on, the logs will be coming at us. Head-on-collision country.” Entire trees were bearing down, not just willow saplings but sycamores and cottonwoods sixty feet long; yet it was shorter pieces I worried about, ones small enough to be sucked under and kicked explosively back up by a boil into our motors. To lose props in this turbulence, to go abruptly powerless, was to be at the mercy of the Mississippi because one must move faster than the current to steer. Goodbye props, hello Memphis.

  The young Piper said, “Do you think we ought to go back?” Go back where? “I don’t know, but it’s like we’re the Millennium Falcon passing through an asteroid field.” We were all watching for drift, struggling to distinguish big knots of dirty brown foam, hardened clots like little icebergs, from the floaters until the moment they hit the bow when all I could do was jerk to starboard or port in an effort to send them down alongside us rather than underneath where they would end up in the propellers. I kept thinking what the dark and torn bottom of the river must look like, kept remembering that Hernando de Soto ended up sleeping forever with the catfish in the Mississippi graveyard.

  I caught Pilotis staring at me. “You’re liking this.” Only a little bit, I said. “Only a little bit of a lot.” Once beneath the big Interstate 57 bridge, we entered a stretch where nothing reached the river except fields and bosky woods, and beyond, dirt tracks we couldn’t see lying behind unbroken miles of levees, conditions that made our fuel and the dropping light of ever more concern. I guessed the river to be running at about fifteen miles an hour, and we were doing about twenty-five, to give us a true speed of ten miles an hour through the upper end of one of the most twisted sections on all the Mississippi, a narrowness that creates swift currents even when not in flood. At Missouri Sister Island we had to travel twenty-two miles around the big horseshoe bend to gain only three and a half along our real course. The contortions and currents and our jockeying through drift ate up the gasoline egregiously, and the light dropped faster than the fuel needles. To worsen things, a bank of dark clouds moved in from the west and took the sun and stole away another thirty minutes of daylight. To run that swollen river in darkness would be suicide. I had no idea, should the clouds pass over, what time the moon would rise, but I did know it would be nearly full, and that was the only positive thought I had. I spoke all this to the crew, not to make them more apprehensive but to prepare them for what was shaping into a nasty possibility: a night without light on a river without exits.

  The low b
anks turned to flooded woods full of stumps and snags and swarming with mosquitoes. A try at mooring in such a place could be the end of the voyage, but I saw no other choice. “How do you know the docks aren’t underwater at Cape Girardeau?” Pilotis asked, and I said I didn’t know, but it was moot anyway because there wasn’t enough light to make it. The Piper said, “If we hadn’t stopped for gas we’d have enough light.” But not enough gasoline. “Jeezis,” Pilotis murmured, then, emphasizing each word, “This does not look good.”

  Nikawa neither rolled nor pitched, but she did yaw and shimmy as she worked to skate over the cauldron. The Piper studied the chart to take relief from watching the darkening water and in hopes of finding what would not be there, a haven. He said, “There’s a little town ahead on the Missouri side, Commerce.” Hell, I said, Commerce washed down the river two floods ago—Commerce is out on the bottom of the Gulf. “There’s nothing else,” he said. “Nothing as in zero.” And there wasn’t; even the sandbars were gone under. Pilotis looked at me. “Well, Noah?”

  The sky lowering, I was thinking how two people had put their trust in me, and now I was endangering them, proceeding without knowing whether the way were open, working harder to reach the mountains than to provide for their safety. Oh yes, they knew the plan when they came aboard, but still, I had no right to put them in jeopardy. Pilotis was correct: my job was to set our little ark down along some proper shore. The miles went on, the river knocking at the hull, waiting for an opening, the banks nearly impenetrable. Finally I said, We’ve got about half an hour of light, half an hour to find a way off this river. And on we went because it was all we could do.

  Then something began to rise from the treetops. I said, What the hell is that? Pilotis picked up the binoculars. “It’s a cross.” Cut the crap, I said. “It’s a cross on a steeple!” And it was. “I hope you’re going to take that for pure chance, mere coincidence.” I’m taking it for more than that, I said, I’m taking it as an exit. “Where? There’s nothing.” Off at eleven o’clock, an opening in the trees. “There isn’t.” I slowed and went warily toward the gap, paused, then entered. What’s that ahead, dead ahead? Pilotis squinted through the field glasses. “It’s a dog pen. One beautiful dog pen and a gorgeous clothesline.” The Piper said, “We’re in somebody’s back lot.” The water became too shallow for the sounder to operate, so I raised the motors as far as I could and idled one in case of a hit; then the trees opened further to reveal a small house, and I ran Nikawa up into the yard not far from a little houseboat, and the Piper jumped overboard and planted our anchor in the grass.

  A man came onto the stoop and stared at a dory sitting almost in his flooded pole-bean patch. Pilotis called, “Do you know where we are?” and he answered, “I know where I am,” and went inside. I said, If he comes out shooting, all we’ll do is duck because we’re not going back out on that river. He returned, cradling something in his arms, and approached Nikawa. Pilotis said, “Please let us stay.” He held up cans of beer and said, “Come on off, then. This is Commerce.” He was Dariel Williams, the first name rhyming with “peril.” Then we were popping open beers, our Piper played, and we laughed in deep relief and went up onto the stoop. I looked back at our river horse tethered in bluegrass as if she had never been anywhere but up a pasture creek.

  We’d climbed two hours up the Mississippi flood and found in dying light the single good landing, the lone haven. Pilotis asked, “Would you have spotted that opening without the steeple?” I answered, You already said it—I’m treating it as a pip of a coincidence. Then we went into the house. We had covered forty-eight river miles from Mound City on the Ohio to gain only sixteen westerly miles.

  The Ghost of the Mississippi

  IT WAS THE KIND of mistake I was happy to make: Commerce, Missouri, had not yet been entirely washed away. Other than the white church and steeple, there were several houses, a post office, and a small winery nearby, but the rest of what was once there—the name notwithstanding—was a motley few beat-up and shut-down buildings, and no one selling gasoline or anything else. Northward along a diminishing road below a wooded bluff was the Williams home, a small cabin added on to over the years so that it was a warren of dim rooms. Inside, the air lay compacted into a single scent of children, cooking food, and river-bottom damp; it was a heavy air, but one generated by breathing people, the very sort we were relieved still to be among.

  Annie, Dariel’s wife, offered us appetizers of bologna on white bread, to be followed by catfish—blues and flatheads—he had taken from the river; she battered the big chunks in cornmeal and fried them in an iron skillet. “Is there enough?” Pilotis said. “I mean, with all your family?” “It’s hard to run out of catfish here,” Dariel said.

  While the dinner crackled in the skillet, we sat at the kitchen table. Dariel operated heavy machinery at a quarry, a dangerous job requiring him to move rock around the edges of the pit. The Piper took out his fife and played an old Erie Canal tune, and children, Williams’s nephew and nieces, came from unseen corners of the house: a young girl just recovering from chickenpox, a ten-year-old boy, and his elder sister. The boy, Michael, sat absorbed in the music, the teenager trying not to be, and the little girl alarmed. Michael soon began pouring out questions. Where had we come from? Had anyone drowned? Did we think our boat would sink? When he heard Pilotis mention New York City, he stood up. “You saw the Statue of Liberty? I’ve only seen her in a book.” We told our tale, the boy alight with fascination at one more strange thing the Mississippi had washed up into his life. His excitement grew until his questions turned into a narrative of his own. He had a slight speech impediment, the result of a perforated eardrum affecting his hearing, something a recent operation should correct, but still his words required attention. What I heard as “Thomas” was “Commerce,” and “hatchet” was “statue.” He reported the indignities his elder sister visited on him and his attempt to sell her up in Farmington once, a try that brought an alleged offer of fifty dollars. To that she said, “Quit it!”

  He talked so much I said, Son, I think you’ll run for governor one day. “No,” he said, “I want to be an author.” “It’s about the same thing,” Pilotis said. “Slinging the bull.” Michael reached for a pencil. “I’ve got my signature ready,” and he carefully demonstrated it for us. You need to write a book before you can sign one, I said. “I’m about ready,” he said. “My first title will be An Outline of Missouri. You think that’s history, but it’s not. It’s about a ten-year-old boy who has no sisters and walks around the border of Missouri with his dad. They cross the Missouri River okay, but when they get to the Mississippi the father drowns, so the boy has to go on by himself. After he reaches his starting point, he goes to see the governor who gives him a million dollars, and the boy becomes a legend.”

  Nodding toward me, Pilotis said, “Watch what you give out in front of him. He’s been known to appropriate a story or two. That’s probably why his pen’s working right now.” “He can have it,” Michael said. “I’ve got more. Like The Ghost of the Mississippi. It’s about this ghost with pale blue eyes, no nose. Long, bony fingers that can claw girls’ necks.”

  At that point, the room went dark. After surprised exclamations from around the house and a shriek from an elder sister, Dariel guessed the flood was responsible, and Pilotis said to the boy, “I think you’ll be an author all right because coincidences take to you. That’s how our skipper gets by.”

  Annie pulled out a kerosene lamp. By its lambent wick and the flickering blue flame under the skillet, we began to eat while she kept the catfish coming, crisp and moist and sweet, and the talk rolled along. The boy told how river people when they really needed food “fished intelligent,” if illegally, by cobbling together a simple battery-powered device inside a snuff can that could make a catfish dance on its tail and sometimes even jump into the boat. The little shock boxes were almost better than food stamps.

  The house got so close in the warm darkness we all went onto the
porch and stood looking out at the river, now agleam with moonlight, more lovely than lethal, and Dariel said, “The current’s bad in this section because the river’s narrow and it goes over hard bottom. Tomorrow you’ll catch it pretty good from here on up past Cape, and the river’s still rizen. And the Missouri’s worse.”

  Honeysuckle and tree frogs and mosquitoes drenched the muggy night, and our conversation was a staccato of slaps and sentences until someone said, “Oh my god, look out there!” Down through the thick moonlight came a single barge, twisting in the currents, a juggernaut broken free and in search of a collision to stop it. “If there’s one loose barge, there’s six more,” the boy said, and a few moments later came a horrendous thud, a deep and ominous sound, and Dariel said, “That’s another one hitting the railroad bridge at Thebes, three and a half miles upriver.” When Pilotis and I went aboard Nikawa for the night, I lay swatting at mosquito whines and listening to the awful thuddings of berserk barges roaming the dark.

  Of Swampsuckers and Samaritans

  HAVING SLEPT with mosquitoes that entered a pilothouse that seemed to have only imaginary bulkheads, we got up as if we had chickenpox (two weeks later, the Piper did come down with it), but an early breeze blew the insects back into the woods, and the sun so struck the flood in its rush for the sea that the water seemed to throw off sparks like another ancient element, hard earth: corundum against iron. The river overnight had risen eight more inches. We set out on it, engines pushing us among the usual accouterments of flood: drift, foam, boils, steel barrels, a propane tank, barges askew in the trees, and bobbing nun-buoys playing peekaboo in the current. We were no longer much concerned about fuel, assured by Dariel we’d find it at Cape Girardeau. So the Monday morning was good, even as we passed under the old Thebes train bridge, one that bargemen detest, its position noted on the chart as “an area typically more difficult to navigate,” a warning especially to long, down-bound tows that must execute a sharp turn and then a broad one before realigning quickly to clear between the stone piers. Early towboatmen claimed that railroads, competing with paddlewheelers for freight, deliberately placed some bridges at angles to encumber and endanger vessels.