With the floodcrest downstream, Nikawa could no longer simply follow the curve of the river, so to avoid tearing her open on a wing-dike, we had to observe the navigational day marks attached to trees and poles; we tacked northerly along zigzags that are the hallmark of piloting on the Missouri, a procedure Mark Twain would recognize. It became necessary on bends to keep to the outside, often only a couple of feet from the bank, where the deepest water is, and everyplace we had to watch ripples to see whether they foretold merely wind or a rock dike or something worse. There is nothing more challenging or necessary than reading the surface of the water, and no pilot does it flawlessly all the time, for the only thing more fickle than wind is a river. An auto rides on top of a road, but a boat rides in a river, down in the usually invisible heart of it. People who do not like to swim in water that obscures their feet do not make for jolly river boatmen.
As we approached the old railroad pivot bridge at Atchison, Kansas, Pilotis stiffened. “Can we get under that damn thing?” I slowed, my mate went to the bow as we crept forward, nosing beneath while Pilotis called out the clearance. “Ten inches! Seven! Easy, easy!” I waited to hear a scrape or collision, but all was quiet except for the aerial soundings. “Six! Okay! Seven! A foot! Clear!” Had we arrived two days earlier, had I not been forced to lay over in my homeport, we would not have made it under that bridge. During the months planning the voyage, I’d forgotten to consider this lowest span on the navigable Missouri, and I wondered what others I might have overlooked.
At half past seven, we found at Atchison only the second dock since Kansas City, a small, friendly float although quite exposed to river drift. There wasn’t enough daylight to continue. Another Hobson’s. But for once the drift gave us something beyond consternation and broken props: a massive tree trunk, an ancient thing the river had pounded down to a heavy forked log, lay hooked under the front of the dock to form a V-shaped breakwater against the platform. After some shoving on the trunk, I slipped our horse between as if putting her in a stall. Could the timber hold, Nikawa had a chance to lie during the night safe from marauding drift. Pilotis: “What would we do without that tree?” Toss here sleepless or wake up in Kansas City.
The dock gangway was underwater, and we were not in the mood to get out the kayak, so we stayed aboard, but people came down to call their questions: “Why are you out there? Where you going? Aren’t you scared? Need anything?” Pilotis set up a small supper of smoked herring, Kalamata olives, pepperoncini, Branston pickle, and sourdough bread, and by the light of a candle I poured out glasses of merlot. We toasted, and while the Missouri rocked us softly by the Kansas shore, we sat in the little pilothouse, now our dinner club, and supped and said we’d not gone far on that day fraught with hindrance, but nevertheless we’d done the important thing—we had gone. Now we could hope to be above the worst of the flood. I relished how such an atrabilious morning led to the sweetest evening aboard we’d yet found. Months earlier, in my hopeful innocence, just so I’d dreamed of our voyage happening. The best part of that day was the night.
The Dream Lines of Thomas Jefferson
WE BROKE OUT the kayak that morning to get to shore, learned we had slept under the bluff on which Amelia Earhart spent most of her childhood, and found a man willing to take us into town to fill our gas canisters. Then we went to eggs and hash browns in a building not far from where Horace Greeley, on his great tour in 1859, ate his first dinner in the West. We found conversation with a fellow who had put his twenty-four-foot boat on many different American waters but had never succeeded in getting it up the tricky sixty miles of the Missouri from Ponca, Nebraska, to the first dam near Yankton, South Dakota. I told him we were determined to keep river under us, and he said, “In the right conditions, I hear some of the natives do it, but your boat will be at risk.”
When we returned to Nikawa, I laid out plans for our last miles on the open Missouri before we would encounter the Fort Randall Dam, and Pilotis turned to on the bow and afterdeck to make things shipshape. By noon we were under way, the sky clouded but the river smooth yet still full of debris, a sign the water was not dropping, since a rising river flushes out flotsam and a falling one clears itself by beaching floaters. We stopped often to unclog the props and motor stems, glad each time we found only entanglements rather than redesigned blades.
At St. Joseph, Missouri, one of the great jumping-off places of the nineteenth century, Nikawa crossed the route of the 1861 ferry that hauled the Pony Express over its first barrier; the little city has replaced expressmen with expressways in a web of ugliness that made it impossible to imagine the riverfront of pony days, but the opposite shore, grown up in a verdant line of trees, we could better picture as once the edge of settled country, the start of Indian lands. For the next week we would follow the great coast of the West lying on our port side, the East to starboard—a long skirting of the rim of the Great Plains before entering them in South Dakota. Onward from an old channel of the Missouri called Lake Contrary, we saw numerous beaver-gnawed tree trunks, an imprint returning to the valley after years of near extermination. The pair of stout ten-foot poles I carried along to use in sounding shallows and pushing off from shoals were lengths of ash sent into the river by beavers, the ends bearing marks of their chisel teeth. Pilotis said, “The symbol of the Army Corps of Engineers is a castle, but a more appropriate one would be a beaver.” Yes, I said, the first engineer on the Missouri, the creature that knows how to dam without damning.
The Lower Missouri, Atchison to Sioux City, 310 river miles
The overcast became mist, became drizzle, became downpour, and then reversed as the wind rose and churned the river to chopwater, and we seemed to make slow headway north. The Missouri gave gentle turns and a narrower width, creating beauty and a kind of cozy comfort. Said Pilotis, “I’ve heard that cattle being driven to slaughter calm down in a narrow chute with a curve in it. Maybe it’s the security of not seeing ahead, not seeing your doom.” The Blind Bend of Happiness? “Why not?”
I stopped in midriver, let the current work its will and take us in its nearly invisible grip, while I put into my logbook a sketch of the Mount Vernon Bends. Pilotis: “It’s one of the most captivating sensations a traveler can know, drifting on a river.” And then, watching us lose the mile we’d just gained, “We keep hearing about this guy or that coming down the Missouri last year or some other year, but nobody talks of anyone going up it. I see why now.” When I finished drawing, I heard, “So why aren’t we going these twenty-five hundred miles downstream?” It was a rhetorical question of weariness, for Pilotis knew we couldn’t ascend the westward-running Salmon River in Idaho without a jet boat, hence its name, River of No Return. I said, This is America—who ever heard of eastering explorers?
I spoke of recently reading an account by a Washington newspaperman who made a quick two-week trip across the nation and came to believe America was “a big country that impresses one most when experienced overland.” Pilotis growled, “Let me make a note of that profundity.” It’s true, I said, until one does it by water—then America isn’t a big country but hundreds of smaller ones. I meant, moving as slowly as we were enunciated differences that scarcely matched the political geography west of the Mississippi. Indians developed their concepts of the land by going afoot and carrying away in their heads detailed images like maps, yet that wasn’t how Thomas Jefferson went about it: his map was one of imaginary grids, of true latitudes and longitudes free of the rise and fall of the territory. Indians dreamed rivers and mountains, Jefferson dreamed township and range, things necessary to ownership. Traveling rivers and lakes as we were, only rarely did we see the manifest evidence of the Great Jeffersonian Plat —section-line roads and fields. I said, I’d love to see how William Clark might have laid out the West.
We proceeded on. To our port side lay the eastern boundary of our first Indian lands, the Iowa Reservation which abuts the Sac and Fox reserve extending a few miles north into Nebraska. Just below the state
line is the village of White Cloud, Kansas, named after an Iowa chief whose wife was Strutting Pigeon, both of whom George Catlin painted and described. The artist wrote at length of the year-long tour in England and France that fourteen Iowas made. In the fall of 1845, when pressed by a roomful of London preachers—“black-coats”—to take up the white man’s vision of the sole way to salvation, Chief White Cloud, not feeling well, perhaps from the merciless sermonizing, called on his war chieftain to respond. Neu-mon-ya (a name that does not mean what it sounds like), who had puffed hard on his long pipe throughout the lecturing, stood and spoke carefully so the translator could get it right:
My friends, you have told us that the Son of the Great Spirit was on earth, and that he was killed by white men, and that the Great Spirit sent him here to get killed. Now we cannot understand all this. This may be necessary for white people, but the red men, we think, have not yet got to be so wicked as to require that. If it was necessary that the Son of the Great Spirit should be killed for white people, it may be necessary for them to believe all this. My friends, you speak of the good book that you have in your hand; we have many of these in our village; we are told that all your words about the Son of the Great Spirit are printed in that book, and if we learn to read it, it will make good people of us. I would now ask why it don’t make good people of the pale-faces living all around us? They can all read the good book, and they can understand all that the black-coats say, and still we find they are not so honest and so good a people as ours. This we are sure of. Such is the case in the country about us, but here we have no doubt but the white people who have so many to preach and so many books to read are all honest and good. In our country the white people have two faces, and their tongues branch in different ways. We know that this displeases the Great Spirit, and we do not wish to teach it to our children.
Few small-boat facilities lay along the lower Missouri, and most of the ones we did encounter were closed, flooded out, or their docks pulled off the river altogether. We began to lose the afternoon once again to deep overcast in the west, and the prospects for a good mooring within reach of daylight were poor, and I said, Here the hell we go again. “Rulo, Nebraska, is just ahead,” Pilotis offered. I said, You could put little Rulo in a boxcar—we’d better start looking for a deep creek. The other choice (and an excellent one it could be), beaching on the inside of a shallow chute of a big sandbar, was impossible because all the bars, those few yet remaining in the channeled river, were under the high water. With the binoculars, Pilotis scanned the banks ahead, up and down, up and down. Desperation time? I said. We continued until, “Hold on! Hold on! Off to port, at eleven, isn’t that a dock?” Indeed it was. In front of a cabin bobbed the smallest dock we’d seen, not even the length of the kayak. Our Hobson’s for that day. I warped into the thing tied tenuously by slender ropes to a pair of cottonwoods well chewed on by beavers. When I said we could put our own line from Nikawa to the trees for safety, Pilotis said, “Do beavers gnaw rope?”
I snubbed the boat to the dock while my mate tiptoed across a narrow, bouncy plank to shore and went up to the cabin. A man in his forties stepped out with a rifle in one hand. There was an exchange, and the fellow laughed and came up to me. “I’m just putting the gun away. I was shooting beaver last night, literally. Got nine of them in four hours. You can see they’re taking my trees.” Other than toward beavers, Ron Hoagland was an amicable man who was stripping and refitting the old cabin; he couldn’t stay the night but was pleased to let us use it. When he left, he said, “There’s a bounty on beavers here because they burrow into levees.” Pilotis said moments later, “Nature knows best,” and we talked of how the bucktooths were the teeth of the river, the gnaw of creation to return the Missouri to its native condition, a sprawling of nurturing waters. I said, If nature undoes immediately what we work years to do, then we’re not doing it right.
The drizzle came on again, but robins took up their melodious evensong anyway, apparently no longer able to wait for a proper spring evening to arrive, their territorial courtship born not out of a pleasant dusk but from mere genetic necessity, and it seemed their hearts were not in it. That night a farmer told us rainfall around the Big Nemaha River was 120 percent above the yearly average: “We’re starting to call our chickens field perch.”
The heavy sky pushed Pilotis into the thrall of a spiritual skid demon like mine of two days earlier. Following the lead of Captain Meriwether Lewis when his Corps felt low, I issued an order for grog, and we walked a few yards to Club Rulo for a brace of ardent spirits, a pass at the salad bar, and plates of fried carp. We took up a position of good vantage by the Missouri, perhaps an error of judgment, and I continued to speak of the river, another error. I should have talked about prairies, or mountains, or baseball, or our Atchison morning when I heard a man ask a young woman, “What’s going on with you?” “Oh,” she answered tiredly, “I’m just doing life.” It sounded like a judge’s sentence. Then the waitress, who queried us while dispensing motherly care, delivered the fish and said, “Do you want some water, or have you seen enough of it?”
A Water Snake across the Bow
BY EARLY the next morning, we’d seen enough water of a certain kind. Accepting Ron Hoagland’s offer to put our sleeping bags on the floor of the cabin, I woke at seven to a thunderstorm, dozed on in the sweet rumblings and patterings until I became aware of an icy flow creeping along my outstretched arm. We grabbed up our bags and manned mops and swabbed for an hour before the storm ceased and the flow under the doorsill stopped. We went to Nikawa to bail out the welldeck and make logbook entries, then resumed our quest under a grand cumulonimbus sky pried open by long shafts of sunlight.
The way was beleaguered by drift, much of it large stuff different from the whole trees we’d been dodging earlier. Now old timber, fat trunks smoothly shorn of limbs and turned into waterlogged submarines just barely visible and weighing a half ton or more, moved down at us in the potent current, and at every moment they jeopardized the journey. A following wind pushed us upstream as it beat against the down-bound current to raise a rough river, but black terns came up and formed a vanguard to break us through the weather.
Pilotis said, “Have you noticed when river people learn we’re not Sunday boaters, their attitude changes and they’re ready to help? It’s good Nikawa doesn’t look like a runabout. She’s a workboat, a vessel of passage. She’s our ambassador.” I suggested our wayworn faces also set us apart from weekenders.
We were in almost isolated country, the river a uniform breadth of about three hundred yards, bound in by willows and maples punctuated by tall and wonderfully irregular cottonwoods that made a straight trunk seem a deformity. As elsewhere on the lower Missouri away from cities, there was virtually no industry other than an occasional grain terminal or even less frequently a power plant; the route did not appear like wilderness but neither did it look settled like the farm-and-village landscape lying beyond us. The most removed way to cross America is by her rivers; usually secluded and often sequestered, they give a sense of an untrammeled, peaceable nation, even when they themselves are in turmoil.
The Tarkio River, really a big creek, poured in its muddiness from overcultivated fields, and Pilotis said, “What in hell did you do that summer you lived up along it in that college town?” I said, Taught my classes, played tennis every evening, ate ten-cent boxes of popcorn, sat on the porch to read or watch the elm-lined street. I told Pilotis about the elderly woman living on the corner in a big Queen Anne house: each morning she came out to sweep her walk to let neighbors know she was still alive. Some eighty-year-olds phone a friend once a day, but this one just appeared with a broom. Always she said something to people passing by—locals or strangers—and often all she could come up with was churlishness. She didn’t want friendship; rather, she was simply staking out the territory, claiming a corner in our memories so that after she was gone it would be years before anyone could pass without remembering her and perhaps telling a gra
ndchild how the broom lady used to toss off her scoldings. One afternoon a boy sassed her, and I heard, in tremulous response, “Ohhh, mustn’t get saucy, young chum!” In all her life, I’d heard, she had done nothing worthy of recognition except her objurgations, and I came to believe she was trying to turn that quiet street corner into her living epitaph. Said Pilotis, “I guess it worked.”
The nuclear power station outside little Brownville, Nebraska, had a concrete floodwall plastered with mud-jug nests of cliff swallows, and the river was aflitter with their wings climbing into long ellipses, scimitar swoops down and around Nikawa, sunbeams gleaming off their iridescent heads as if that hot avian blood were radioactive. Brownville is an old steamboat village that wanted to become the state capital but couldn’t manage to hold on even to the county seat. Pilotis, looking as we passed: “Speaking of epitaphs.”
About three leagues above the Nishnabotna River (a Siouan name with several lively meanings but no certain one), we crossed the Iowa line after more than seven hundred miles along or inside Missouri borders, the most, with Montana, we’d see of any state. I use the word “see” advisedly because a river isn’t a place of wide or deep vistas; its valley and usual border of trees and its ceaseless bendings so confine the view that we never saw more than a couple of miles at a time. The prospect of an ocean, a lake, a mountain, those you can gorge on, but a river you take in piecemeal. Of the twenty-five hundred miles of the Missouri, we could see in the longest reaches no more than about a thousandth of it; since a river is continuous in a way few things in nature are—its beginning is soon its end, its source water becomes its mouth—it can defy comprehension even more than an ocean. At sea, the North Atlantic looks much like the South Atlantic, but the Missouri in western Montana looks nothing like the Missouri in Iowa. Yet, as with an ocean, most of a river lies beneath, out of sight, crawling invisibly to disappearance in the sea, that ultimate source of its source. We were looking at only the top half inch of the Missouri, and, had that been all we wanted to view, we could have anchored at its mouth and watched every bit of it pass before us in about a month, the time it takes in average flow for a drop of it to get from the Continental Divide to the Mississippi, one of the quickest, long river journeys in the nation. The mountain may come to Mohammed, but stay-at-home travelers can have a river come to them.