I turned the wheel and set Nikawa on a course due northwest in hopes of holding it until we reached a shore we couldn’t descry. If we were forced to keep shifting our route, we might not hit land for miles. Seeing little but sprigs, switches, and shoots, we went on. Six pelicans passed above, their easy, unhurried flaps and glides gibing us. On into that willowy wooden world we went, losing depth, but the trees still slipped aside or under us, a vast pliable wall whispering against Nikawa while Pilotis called soundings from the welldeck, the numbers ever declining.
Then it happened. No warning, it just happened: the nose of Nikawa popped through to a channel of fair size running along a steep clay bank about eighteen feet high, perhaps elevated enough to let us see an escape if we could get up the overhang. I held our course directly for shore, and as we neared, smack in front of us rose an improbable stair, a long wooden thing not unlike the one we’d found so long ago on the Allegheny. I beached Nikawa, and Pilotis and I jumped onto the soft ground and started up. “Do you hear that?” my friend said. “Is it some kind of weird motor?” Atop the broad first terrace was a man on a decrepit sputtering tractor plowing a garden. Surprised to see people emerging from the willowed river, he came up to us and said, “It’s a sonofabitch down there, ain’t it? Them goddamn dirty bastard willas wasn’t there a couple years ago.” Between swear words, the most pleasing I ever heard, he described a route to open water, not a difficult path since we’d already stumbled onto a through channel. “The @!#@*! trees don’t run all the @
[email protected]#*! way up to @!#@*! Williston, not @!#@*! yet anyway, but in another @!#@*! year, who the @!#@*! can say?” And so forth.
We went back to Nikawa, headed on upstream, and weaved along the twisted channel, and Pilotis said, “We just shoved through a wilderness of willows and came out right in front of a stairway—almost the only one we’ve seen in six days—leading to the only man around for ten miles, and I’m not even surprised. But I am concerned what happens when our luck runs out.” I said, If I flip a coin ten times and each time it comes up heads, what are the odds on the eleventh flip? “Fifty-fifty. I know that, but how much would you bet that you could flip ten more consecutive heads? That’s what you’re trying to do.” I said, I’m not trying to—I’m having to. The Photographer interjected, “I think we should worry about how many more willow flats might be ahead.” Fine, I said, then we can worry whether lightning will strike on Monday or Tuesday.
After some miles we saw a road reaching into the river and stopped to go up it. We found ourselves on a picnic ground. A woman came toward us and said, “Are you the ones going long distance?” It sounded like a preface to bad news. “Your friend was here for a couple of hours, then he hurried away,” she said. “He seemed real agitated, talking about who to call to get out a search-and-rescue unit.” Her husband offered to drive toward town to hunt up the Professor and give him a message. Off we went again, happy in the assurance that there were no more @!#@*! willows between us and the Williston bridge. The braided river re-formed into a good channel of swift current bordered so closely and heavily by trees it looked like a bayou. Pilotis said, “What if the trip had begun on the Missouri instead of the happy Hudson and the easy Erie Canal? Would we have continued?” It was true: the eastern waters gave us the comforting notion that we could make it across the country.
Well before dusk we found the Professor, not glad but calmed and talking to a television crew that had apparently picked up his repeated and fruitless calls to us over the radio. As the Big Contrary would have things, it set against us a swift current and a vicious eddy that twice thumped and spun Nikawa before I could get her bow close enough to catch the winch line, the cameramen recording our struggle in water turned nasty by the Yellowstone River not far above. That night in a tavern, as we watched our difficulties on The News at Ten, I heard Howard, a man wearing a flowered bow tie, say to the bartender, “Pacific Ocean? Hell, Bert, those clowns won’t make it to Fort Peck.”
Because he might be right, I didn’t tell him I was head bozo or that we jack-puddings passing for jack-tars had come 1,550 miles up the Missouri and 3,500 from the Atlantic, the distance from New York City to London. After all, we still had almost nine hundred miles of the Missouri to go. And then, and only then, the Pacific would be but a thousand miles farther. When I lay in bed that night, I wished I’d not heard his words and never done the numbers.
Pilotis Concocts an Indian Name for God
ONLY SIXTY-FIVE MILES below Canada, we had reached the most northerly point of our voyage. For a river of such deviousness, the Missouri from the Williston Bottoms strikes a remarkably due-west course of more than four hundred miles until the short detour at Virgelle, Montana, then takes a long and winding southerly route paralleling the Continental Divide. As never before, we would now feel with each day that we were gaining on the Pacific. Ahead of us that Saturday morning was the first segment of waters fully dependent on the June rise to afford passage to any object larger than a washtub. From Williston onward—could we keep moving—the Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative would decline somewhat with every mile.
When we had pried from the natives as much river information as we could, we went down to the water, and I felt the draw of that state whose name is mountain. The current was swift, muddy, and full of stiff clots of brown foam formed from agricultural chemicals running off fields along the Yellowstone which we heard was charging down hard and high, a report that made the Professor uneasy. I tried to redirect his worry to the more real concern of finding a ramp or low shore solid enough to let us get Nikawa off the river should we need to. Through cultivated bottoms and anciently eroded uplands the meandering valley ran, four to five miles wide, the depth of the channel holding at about six feet; even against the spring rise and the perturbations put in by the Yellowstone—driftoids and low riders—we scudded along, yet still the Professor stood his watch in tension.
Not since the lower river had I been able to steer from boil to boil to keep depth and current under us; nevertheless, one strange upchurning struck Nikawa hard, a teeth rattler. Rhetorically, cussingly, I asked how we could possibly bang something in such a surge, and the unnaturally quiet Professor said, “That takes away the peace of mind boils gave us.” Pilotis, concocting, said, “What’s that Indian name for God which literally translates as the-one-who-now-and-then-but-not-often-understands-the-great-Missouri?”
The Professor remained edgy, no longer even speaking of his garden, and I feared we were slowly losing his continuance. Each thump from a boil or log seemed to hit him in the stomach, and I found myself trying to steer a course, erratic though it was, with the least chance of unnerving him. I asked if he were feeling the miles, but all he said was, “I’m with you.”
As we approached the mouth of the Yellowstone, I began to anticipate that great defining river, another of the ever-westering nineteenth-century boundaries of the white domain, one of the final jumping-off spots before transcontinental railroads negated such places. The water became more embroiled, nothing Nikawa couldn’t handle with ease, but the Professor’s mandibular muscles flexed and flexed until I asked him to read aloud Meriwether Lewis’s entry about reaching the confluence in 1805:
After I had completed my observations in the evening I walked down and joined the party at their encampment on the point of land formed by the junction of the rivers; found them all in good health, and much pleased at having arrived at this long wished for spot, and in order to add in some measure to the general pleasure which seemed to pervade our little community, we ordered a dram to be issued to each person; this soon produced the fiddle, and they spent the evening with much hilarity, singing & dancing, and seemed as perfectly to forget their past toils, as they appeared regardless of those to come.
Below the Glass Bluffs on our Saturday, the famous confluence spread out like a lake, half muddy and half greenly and lightly occluded, the Yellowstone pushing brown billows of silt into the Missouri to form underwater clouds that rose and rolled in the river as a cum
ulus does in the sky. What the Big Muddy works on the Mississippi, the Yellowstone enacts upon the Missouri, so much so that some early rivermen argued it was tributary to the Yellowstone. After John Neihardt passed the joining of waters on his way downstream in a motorboat in 1908, he wrote in The River and I:“All unique characteristics by which the Missouri is known are given to it by the Yellowstone—its turbulence, its tawniness, its feline treachery, its giant caprices.” On our crossing, we found some truth to his notion.
To say it simply, reaching the Yellowstone was splendid not for its flat shores or distant terrain but for its textured waters. I circled us twice that we might take it in, watch its try at overmatching the Missouri, and a good effort it made, not pretty but powerful. The Professor asked whether I’d considered the Yellowstone for our route west, and I said I had. While its smaller meanders make for a somewhat more direct route than that of the Missouri, the portage it requires over the mountains would be much longer than ours, but that’s not all: after nine hundred miles of crossing the western plains, a traveler on the Yellowstone must still pass through days and days more of country only rattlesnakes and right-wing militiamen can love. Worst of all, highways and railroads bind in most of the river. I said, How could we have a sense of adventure with an interstate at our shoulders for two hundred fifty miles? Despite its wild grandeur in the mountains and the national park, the Yellowstone all too soon yields to civilization. While the Missouri suffers from big dams, something the Yellowstone is free of, the Missouri is the greatest and oldest highway of the Near Northwest, a river that flows through two latitudes and eight longitudes of remoteness, beauty, and unsurpassed history.
At the confluence, fishermen were snagging in the river for one of the most peculiar and ancient of its big creatures, the paddlefish, or spoonbill cat, a species that survived the rising of the Rocky Mountains, the drying and decomposing of Cretaceous forests of tree ferns now become coal beds, and the demise of dinosaurs. But paddlefish may not be able to withstand those new things called dams that block their spawning runs and drown the gravel bars their eggs require. Spoonbills continue today very much because of captive breeding in test tubes; although now it’s rare to find one of such size, they can grow to six feet long and two hundred pounds, large enough to give credence to old tales of even greater ones jamming the paddles of steamboats. Since the fish are strictly slurpers of plankton and will not take bait or a lure, fishermen drag big treble hooks through the murky water the fish prefer in blind hope a spoonbill will get in the way; the catch there usually goes to a small caviar enterprise nearby that report edly puts its profits back into local conservation projects. Pilotis said, “Call me retrograde, but I’m pulling for the paddlefish to mistake one of those guys for two-legged plankton and swallow him. ‘Jonah and the Spoonbill.’ Why should a New Yorker or Muscovite get to eat up the eggs of a species that watched the last diplodocus go down?”
Opposite the mouth of the Yellowstone once stood Fort Buford, now partially restored. During its construction in 1866, Sitting Bull made camp across the Missouri to observe and wait for completion, then he attacked and made off with a large circular saw he turned into a war drum. But the Buford soldiers got their revenge fifteen years later when the chief returned to hand over his rifle, his face covered by a blanket.
Not far beyond the old garrison, we came upon a man in a motorboat that had lost power and was being washed toward the swirling mouth, so we tossed out a line and towed him back to the Buford ramp and then headed again upstream. Four miles above the juncture of rivers is Fort Union, perhaps the greatest outpost along the once widely forted Missouri. The original stockade and buildings disappeared long ago, but recently archaeologists excavated the site before the National Park Service reconstructed most of the structures with stunning precision, so that in the midst of a vast, near barrenness, where perhaps the finest trade station on the river once cheered tired travelers with its high whitewashed plank palisades and gaudy red roofs fluttering flags and banners, it does so again. Upon reaching that location in 1833, Prince Maximilian wrote:
Fort Union is built in the territory of the Assiniboins of whom a certain number generally live there. . . . Among the amusements and festivities are their eating feasts when the guests must eat everything set before them if they will not give offence. If one of the guests is not able to eat any more, he gives his neighbour a small wooden stick and the plate with food, the meaning of which is that he will make him a present of a horse on the next day if he will undertake to empty the plate; the young men do this in order to gain reputation.
Although we still had much of the afternoon left, to have missed ending the day at Fort Union would have been an affront to historical precedent, even if the place no longer took in rivering folk and set them down to full mugs and laden trenchers, and the only Indian involved in trade there was a park ranger in the bookshop.
Trickles, Dribbles, and Gurglets
IN MY WRITING, when it comes to intuition versus advice, if the former is mine and the latter another’s, I unfailingly choose intuition, but when the issue was the Missouri River on our last day in North Dakota, I did the opposite and followed the counsel of two government officials who said the high water should carry Nikawa well upstream. That ended the Canoe Debate for the morning and, nearly, the expedition. We started easily enough over those first miles above Fort Union, and took comfort in knowing the course of the Missouri for some distance was one of rather long reaches after we got past a trilogy of oxbows. The day was fair, the wind but a breeze.
We immediately crossed the Montana line and entered Mountain Time, congratulated ourselves, said how we had only one more zone to reach, and the crew spoke of the Rockies as if they expected them on the horizon at any moment. I reminded them that the only contiguous state wider than Montana was Texas with its eccentric borders; I said that even dawn took almost an hour to cross Big Sky country, and that our route to Idaho was anything but direct.
The old Great Northern railway bridge, one of the few in the nation where locomotives and automobiles share exactly the same roadbed (but not at the same time, we hoped), is a vertical lift span, its design evidence that steamboats really did ascend two thousand miles up the Missouri on their way to Fort Benton—a bit of the past otherwise hard to believe the farther we went. I thought, If a paddlewheeler can make the run, so can Nikawa. It is such insistent optimism that leads travelers into continuing up the Missouri against the evidence of the river itself which for two centuries has gone to great lengths to indicate its general unwillingness to be navigated by anything other than schools of the finned and gilled.
Even before we were beyond the oxbows, the lake-like river created by the joining of the Yellowstone and the Missouri disappeared, and the depth dropped from sixteen feet to six, and sandbars began breaking the channel into trickles and dribbles and gurglets, a piece of river so unmitigated I could use my century-old chart to steer through bends and even around some shallows. But the glare off the water at times made reading it most difficult, and I soon ran us onto a bar, a beaching that held Nikawa as if the shoal were adhesive; neither poling nor wallowing her by shifting our weight from side to side could free us. It was a grounding beyond any we’d yet had. As life must go, so it did in that moment of our struggle: a motley flotilla of young blades, their heads tied up in red bandanas as if ready for the bounty main, came canoeing around the bend to witness and comment on our predicament. Seeing they flew a jolly roger from their beer boat, Pilotis whispered, “Prepare to repel boarders.” We heard a buccaneer sneer to his fellow picaroon, “Don’t offer them help. They don’t know how to read the river.” To that Pilotis called out, “Try it upriver sometime, O jolly canoemen!”
When they had passed from view, my mates stripped down and went over the side to push and groan against the bow until they overcame the shoaly grip on the hull and I could steer Nikawa back into four feet of water. On we went, struggling against a river that rewrites mile by mile every law
of hydraulics yet advanced by science. Where there should have been current, there was sand; where there should have been a deep, there was sand; where there should have been sand, there was sand. All the same, I thought I might be slowly catching on to the Missouri chop-logic for those particular bends and reaches, but not before we had to pole off twice more. The erratics drove the sounder mad, and I glanced at it only to remind myself that even an electronic intelligence couldn’t quite fathom the Big Naughty. As I steered back and forth trying to keep to a good channel, trying to avoid an alluring and more direct route, Pilotis said, “It’s hard to escape an asphalt mentality that makes a straight line look like the right way.”
The worst part of a grounding was not the labor in escaping but the afterthought of wondering whether a strand of shallows was an anomaly or an indication the river was deteriorating into impassability and the June rise insufficient. On that day, the answer was six or seven miles of shoals followed by something worse, something that could not merely slow Nikawa but stop the voyage entirely—the archenemy upon whose nether church our venture could founder, Old Scratch-of-the-Rocks. By afternoon we were having to squeeze through narrow bankside channels where we clanked against stones, each time stopping for those dread moments of waiting to discover whether we still had props and motor stems. Even the halting was tricky, for if I proceeded too far after a hit, I might damage the engines, and if I didn’t go far enough beyond a rock chapel, the current would carry us back over it. In all this I found a single favorable aspect in our edging, grudgingly granted progress, another feint a Missouri River traveler uses to keep from submitting: just such an ascent was the way boats passed up the great stream for two hundred years; since I was there not simply to learn American rivers but to learn the rivers in their histories, I tried to accept how that one was teaching us in spades.