The Missouri we saw on that May afternoon was little like the one those hundred chroniclers recorded, for the Army engineers have changed it from a river of ten thousand channels, chutes, islands, towheads, meanders, marshes, backwaters, slackwaters, sloughs, sandbars, and wrenchingly tight bends into a mildly curving conduit. The 750 miles of the lower Missouri—that portion below the last dam—is today essentially a single channel with hardly an island deserving the name. Instead of those features there are rock wing-dikes, five to ten for every mile, that straitjacket the river and force its current to scour the bottom to self-maintain a barge-navigable waterway. There is, however, little commercial navigation on the Missouri, unless you call Corps service boats or private sand-dredges navigation. The most heavily subsidized segment of the transportation industry, barge companies pay only about thirteen percent of the cost of operating and maintaining eleven thousand miles of major commercial waterways in the United States. Yet for a century the river has been manipulated for the nearly exclusive benefit of barges, a scheme that also opened expanses of valley bottoms to agriculture; according to state law, these “accreted lands” become the possession of adjacent property owners, largely farmers who can then demand federal protection from flooding into areas that were only recently towheads and shoals. Today the lower Missouri occupies about half the surface area it did before the engineers arrived, and of 160 large islands comprising 65,000 acres once in the river, only eighteen remain. Channelizing destroyed thousands of acres of natural habitats, removed spaces that formerly absorbed high waters to lessen the impact of floods, and forced Americans to pay millions of dollars to benefit a few companies and bottom farmers and people who should never have built houses and businesses in the altered floodplain in the first place. After the massive inundation of 1993, federal and state agencies started trying to give the lower Missouri back some of its escape valves by purchasing bottomlands that currents, engineered into violence, had alternately scooped holes into or covered with sand. What the government gave to farmers a few years ago, it began buying back to mitigate an impossible and destructive human design.
For the river, such schemes are but another moment in its long and ancient life; after all, what is a mere levee compared to the mile-high wall of ice that lay along the north bank three hundred thousand years ago? When our civilization is nothing more than disconnected pieces of half-buried things that don’t decay, the river will already have remade itself according to the grand natural arrangement where everything answers to harmony, and the Missouri will have rebraided from the Rockies to the Mississippi.
We passed the mouth of the Gasconade, “the boastful river” although no one any longer knows why, and twenty-five miles farther the Osage entered, both rivers formerly steamboat navigable during high water for a hundred miles upstream. At the debouchment of the Osage once dwelt the people who gave the river its name and whom Audubon described as “well formed, athletic and robust men of noble aspect” capable of walking sixty miles a day. Chief Big Soldier, before his nation was dispossessed of Missouri, told a white friend: “You are surrounded by slaves. Everything about you is in chains, and you are in chains yourselves. I fear if I should change my life for yours, I too would become a slave.” The Osage no longer lived on the shores of their river when white men fulfilled the old chief’s words by massively enchaining the once freely flowing water to spin turbines to run bumper cars and light billboards around the Lake of the Ozarks.
Then, atop a long limestone bluff at Jefferson City, rose a veritable image of the United States Capitol, the Missouri statehouse, perhaps the most eminently situated one in America. The architects placed atop the dome a bronze Ceres, goddess of fecund corn fields, yet turned her back to the river and the valley it once kept deeply and naturally fertile. For a couple of millennia the ancient goddess has seen civilizations come and go and has watched the effect of hubris on nations that can dream up divinity but not accord themselves with natural force.
Around the broad bend beneath the purview of Ceres, we ascended another twenty miles to reach the mouth of Perche Creek (usually pronounced PURR-chee), its lower miles formerly the course of the Missouri until the river moved itself across the valley before the engineers could. Half a league up the stream is Providence, population 3, formerly the steamboat landing for Columbia. Waiting was my friend with the trailer. The current in the creek rushed hard against us, turned Nikawa around, and we had to winch her into the cradle, and then we hauled her up the narrow bluff-road.
I arrived home one month and one day after leaving the Atlantic Ocean, now just over two thousand water miles behind us. When the flood and regulations might permit us to resume the voyage I had no idea, and I was concerned not only about losing time against the snowmelt in the West but also that the forced layover in my homeport, the ease of the familiar, could make my return to the river nearly impossible.
Clustered Coincidences and Peach Pie
IT RAINED OFF AND ON for two days, but the Missouri neither rose nor fell appreciably, nor did the Corps open the river. I watched the calendar as a mill hand does the shop clock, and the Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative loomed greater than ever, since rain in the Far West could speed the melt. I wondered whether we should risk the tricky water, arrest, and maybe an angry farmer who might take a shot at us, even though the small wake from our boat would endanger no one’s levee.
During that forty-eight hours, the Photographer and I replaced the propellers and made changes in our equipage to ready us for the western rivers and Great Plains and mountains we would pass through. After all the days and nights with someone only inches away every moment, I found the solitude of keeping bachelor’s hall disconcerting, so each evening I went into Columbia to the Flat Branch brew pub, the creek an indirect tributary to the Missouri and our voyage, and the pub a direct contributor—writing being an insular occupation—to my social health. The Branch is a place of excellent ales and pilsners, with a dictionary and world almanac behind the bar to settle wagers. The second night, I joined friends at our favorite restaurant, Trattoria Strada Nova; they could see my resolve to continue fading in their glow, and I found on the table a note—ADMIT NO IMPEDIMENTS, ALLOW NO SKID DEMONS—to remind me that for many weeks yet the easy life was a hindrance and, for now, my true home was on the river. The message awoke me, and some time later, above the table that helped send me out again, I carved into the wall a map of our route.
I phoned to announce the departure to my great friend, who took the usual cautious Pilotis position: “Did you know I joined the Church of Procrastination?” What’s the doctrine? “Procrastianity.” Meaning what? “I don’t know—I’ll figure it out later.” Time and tide—, I began, but my first mate interrupted, “Is the way open?” You know the answer to that. “Not long ago,” said Pilotis, “I broke into a fortune cookie and found it empty. A metaphor of my life.” I said, Tomorrow the river is in your cookie.
The next day Pilotis appeared and we went down to the creek, launched Nikawa, and again took aboard the Reporter. A few other friends waved us back onto our little ol excursion trip, and I soon felt safely under way once more and was no longer afraid of home. When we entered the Missouri, it thumped us hard, leaned Nikawa downstream before I could wheel her into the current, level out, and let her run. Black terns, in a signal welcome, accompanied us for an hour. Of all our long route, those next thirty miles I knew best, and I talked for much of the way, pointing out a particular creek, a special eddy, a goose nest, all the time Pilotis saying, “Where? Where?”
Item: Doug Elley, former mayor of the village of Lupus, invented a two-storey outhouse jocularly called the Sky Crapper that employs solar energy to turn human waste into desiccated and odorless crumblings, an innovation to reduce sewage in the river and one that will surely have its day, even though a senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire (who spent only $145.10 on his 1982 reelection campaign), cited the thing as a fleecing of taxpayers.
Item: Plowboy Bend bears t
he name of a sternwheeler sunk there in the mid-nineteenth century, one of more than four hundred steamboats to go down in the Missouri, half of them from hitting snags. The average life of a nineteenth-century paddlewheeler on the river was less than two years.
At Rocheport, a village of singular charm, we turned up Moniteau Creek, and while Pilotis held Nikawa to the old railroad bridge, the Reporter and I ran for sandwiches. It was near the mouth of the Moniteau (the name is a Frenched-up corruption of the Algonquian word Manito, “Great Spirit”), the winter I was twenty, that I got the idea of crossing the Missouri on ice floes just to see what it was like. One warm February Saturday, I started over the frozen chunks about the size of bathtubs, crusty and jagged pieces loosely locked together. Several yards out, I heard a rifle shot, and another, and I paused. Then I realized the reports came not from a gun but the ice itself as it snapped under stress from the current. I could hardly believe how loud the sound was. I felt the floe I stood on begin to shake, then wobble, and before me the ice parted to reveal the cold, muddy swirl twisting below—a more fearsome thing I’d never seen. The frozen river wasn’t locked in place as I’d supposed but was being forced slowly downstream, buckling, snapping, opening, closing, ready to swallow whatever came onto it. That’s when common sense and terror hit and I headed for shore, unsure whether to go gently and slowly or hard and fast. How did Eliza do it? When I reached land, I looked back, incredulous that I’d thought I could actually make it across. After I finished recounting that imprudence, Pilotis said, “The way closed by opening and saved you.”
About twenty-five years later, almost exactly at that spot of my near demise, I encountered a thing of another sort. I was hiking along the old M-K-T Railroad, today the beautiful Katy Trail, in search of ancient pictographs William Clark mentioned on the way west in 1804. He wrote, “A Short distance above the mouth of this Creek, is Several Courious Paintings and Carveing in the projecting rock of Limestone inlade with white red & blue flint of verry good quallity,” and between the lines in his journal he drew three of the figures. Over the years, steamboat travelers continued to note the numerous pictographs so close to the river, but railroad construction at the turn of the century blasted most of them away. I walked along in search of what might be left, and from time to time glanced at the river and wondered whether I’d ever discover a water route across the country that would allow me to ascend the Missouri to its farthest source. I finally gave up on finding any figures and stopped to watch the darkening water roll past. When I turned to take a last look at the rocky bluff in the falling light of that July evening, my gaze, as if it were an arrow put in flight by an unseen archer, landed directly on a rust-colored image, and I froze in disbelief, my skin crawling. There was a pictograph, but not just any pictograph—that one was the precise image Plains Indians drew to indicate the seventh lunar month, the Blood Moon, or the Moon of Heat. On that eroded limestone was a drawing of my name. I realized William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, whose names I also bear—William Lewis Trogdon—had seen it, the only piece of Indian “picture writing” all of us—red, white, mixed—ever encountered.
A few months later, I moved to an old farm near the river bluffs, and I began seriously hunting a water way across America.
“Is all that true?” the Reporter asked. I pulled Nikawa close to shore, handed him the binoculars, and pointed to the bluff twenty feet up. He lifted the glasses, searched, then, “Whoa!” he murmured, and Pilotis, who knew the story, said, “Treat it as remarkable but don’t encourage his belief in coincidences.” Clustered coincidences, I corrected, and then I told a third story.
The final anniversary gift my spouse made me, a few months before she went on to another life and I to the rivers, was a big Hopi rainstick. For several days, I often turned it back and forth to listen to the pebbles trickle down like droplets inside the hollow cholla limb. By the end of the week, a serious dry spell broke, and the rain and snow fell throughout the winter, not just along Perche and Moniteau creeks but across the entire Missouri Valley well into western Montana to end an arid decade and create just the kind of snowpack a cross-country voyage would need.
The Reporter said, “You’re taking liberties with this story.” I answered I was taking nothing, every detail verifiable. Call it all clustered coincidences, luck, or what have you, I said, but fabrication it is not. “Well,” he mused, “we did escape New Haven a few hours after the woman gave us the four-leaf clover.” Pilotis, who admits no gramarye into anyone’s philosophy and grows vexed with those who might, said, “What? Not again!” and scowled at me. “Where’s your native Missouri skepticism? This is the land of Show Me.” I said, Done been showed. Then we reached the Boonville Bends.
Item: Near the north bank once was Franklin, briefly an important village and, in 1819, the destination of the first steamboat to ascend the Missouri which washed the settlement away soon after it became the head of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, a starting point that moved progres sively west with the years, finally ending up almost halfway across Kansas.
Item: Arrow Rock, a village vying with Rocheport for historic quaintness, sits too high for the river to flush away, so the Missouri pulled its other trick, abandoning the place for the opposite side of the valley. Indians mined chert from the bluffs there for tools and weapons, and it was in Arrow Rock that Dr. John Sappington developed anti-malarial quinine pills, and in 1844, relinquishing a fortune, he published his formula for the world to use.
Item: Not far away in a barbecue joint, a place of excuses and poor food, two friends and I ordered sandwiches. I wanted a truly hot sauce, Jim wanted medium, and Bob mild; when I asked for the three, the ornery waitress pointed to a small squeeze bottle on the table and said, “There it is.” We need three, I said, which one is this? “All of them,” she glowered. “You want hot, put more on.”
Under the Glasgow train bridge, on the site of the first all-steel railway span in the world, the later one knocked loose from an abutment by the previous flood, the current was fierce enough to put us on alert, our edginess compounded by an approaching storm. I searched the riverfront for a tie-up, but everything lay horribly exposed to current and drift, so I doubled back to look again. “Rub that clover,” Pilotis mocked. Above Stump Island, although it is one no more, I eased in behind an earthen bank, where the flood had turned a sunken spot into a shallow, quiet pond, and we moored to a dead tree. Ever circumspect, Pilotis said, “If the river drops, we’ll be high and dry in the morning,” and I answered, As a novitiate into the Church of Procrastianity, I’ll think about that later. The Reporter, staring out the window, said, “Are we going to walk through that muck?”Rule of the River Road: When you have a choice, it will be Hobson’s.
We rolled up our pant legs, debated another Hobson’s—muddy shoes or feet—then went over the bow and into six inches of classic Missouri-bottom gumbo, stuff that adheres as does guilt to a novice sinner. Not happy with such rank adventure, Pilotis spoke in Henry James: “There’s a constant force that makes for muddlement.” We slogged to a road and up to little Glasgow and into a farmers’ tavern, Hartung’s Inn, widely called The Hard Up Inn, and ordered plates of broasted chicken and peach pie. When dessert arrived, so did what may prove to be the acme of Pilotis’s empty-fortune-cookie existence, a moment my friend had waited for since first hearing an old Yiddish joke years earlier. Noticing the cutlery had disappeared with the chicken bones, Pilotis said to the young waitress, who had humored and charmed us, “Taste my pie.” Surprised, she answered, “I cain’t do that.”“Please taste my pie.” She looked at the table and said, “Cain’t—they ain’t no fork.” Raising an index finger, Pilotis crowed, “Ah ha!” To ease her embarrassment, I turned to her and offered, You just made someone’s evening. Said Pilotis, “Evening? No! My life!”
Gone with the Windings
TO MAKE SURE an ebb in the river would not leave Nikawa stranded on the mud, I Tom Sawyered the Reporter’s cameraman—he liked to be called a “shooter”—into
sleeping aboard. Of course the Missouri, hearing all that happens along its shores, behaved with expected contrariety and helpfully rose four inches from the rain that came down without surcease through the night. Of the past thirty days, it had rained on all but two. The Shooter had bailed the afterdeck three times, and slept poorly in the cramped pilothouse even after he found my full bottle of rare sourmash, but he was young and pleased to join the expedition for a few hours. The Reporter, Pilotis, and I slept passably well in quarters large enough for us, and we brought the night-watch breakfast and told him of our café conversation with a retired farmer who had seen Nikawa tied to a tree in a place he usually parked his truck while he fished. He asked, “How far you going? Up to St. Jo?” I said the Pacific Ocean. “Well, that’s a piece futher,” he said, “but why would you want to do that?” Pilotis, having the gift of summary, answered, and the man, perhaps thinking of the many crops he’d taken off the bottoms, said, “I could do me a book about the Missoura, and I’d call it That Dang River, but I don’t spect I will, so if you want that name, you go ahead and take it. If the wife would let me, I’d even call it That God-dang River. Take that one too.” Said Pilotis, “It sounds like something in China.”