Where rocks and bars played out, we passed through shallows of dark silt the props stirred up and the engines sucked in with the cooling water, but that too had historical precedent in the number of steamboats that came to explosive grief because of suspended sediment clogging boilers.
The consequence of our travailing that day was we could not make our destination, Poplar, Montana, where we’d heard there was a boat ramp good enough for the trailer to reach Nikawa and let us use the canoe. With the afternoon wearing on, we grew apprehensive with the realization we would likely have to get the dory out at Culbertson. As unruly, illogical, shifty, and willful as the Missouri is—here’s one more river traveler’s gambit—it nevertheless gives recompense, and in that country of long reaches and mild bends it returned to us some of the finest riverine landscapes we’d seen since leaving central Missouri. Plunging right into the shallows, the steep and high Bighorn Bluffs exposed banded banks of yellow and faded-ocher clays and soft rock eroded into cuts and washes and pinched coulees. We knew we were approaching the far edge of the Great Plains, and that on some afternoon, if we didn’t founder, on the horizon a blue smear like an approaching storm would appear, but it would be the foothills of the Rockies.
From time to time we passed portable irrigation pumps sucking the river, and toward each of those I would mark out a heading because they indicated deeper water as a lighthouse does a shoal. On two occasions, beaver lodges built against the banks revealed where the river ran at a swimmable depth, and wherever we saw geese or ducks floating I made for them, knowing if there were enough water for goslings and ducklings to take their protective dives, Nikawa also had safety; but where we saw shoal-loving herons and pelicans, I took a different course. Still, since we were on the capricious Missouri, no method of piloting was without flaw.
By late afternoon, the Culbertson Bridge came into view, and Pilotis picked up the radio in hopes the Professor was there at the only checkpoint for miles, but we received no response. More calls. Nothing. Then a crackling that slowly modulated into a voice, and with the binoculars we could see him waving the signal flag. He radioed, “There’s no good ramp here, just some muddy slopes that look bad for Nikawa and worse for the trailer. Which do you want, an earache or a toothache?” We searched the shore and finally settled on a place near the northern foot of the bridge that attaches to the Red Bluffs. It took some doing to get Nikawa over the rocks, and the Professor had trouble maneuvering the trailer around the worst of a quagmire. The boat struggled against things of earth, and the tow wagon against those of water. It was a match made in hell, a union the Missouri, no less than the Styx, makes a specialty of.
After I squirmed us into position and then partway up the cradle, the trailer wheels sank to the hubs, and I had to back off, beach the bow, and jump ashore to study the muddle we were in. All we could do was try to make the quaggy ground passable, so we went in search of stones, driftwood, branches, flotsam lumber, and then we began wading, digging, and laying down two narrow tracks. Pilotis paused to say, “On the Hudson, do you remember the line in old Ed’s poem, ‘Go soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk the skid demon’?”
When the trailer was again more or less in position, I went back onto Nikawa and brought her up, but now the trailer was too high. I asked the crew to come aboard and stand all the way aft to raise her bow. I gunned the engines for a second, the nose lifted, rode forward partway onto the cradle at an alarmingly steep angle, then could go no farther. She was so precipitously inclined, as if again on Lake Erie, I could see only sky ahead. I called toward the stern, Walk forward slowly, one at a time! The big Photographer came up last, and as he did the bow gently teeter-tottered down into position, but the props came out of the water and could push no more, so with much sweat we hand-winched her the rest of the way. Pilotis went to the tow wagon and put it in gear, but it couldn’t overcome the poor traction and dead weight of Nikawa which moment by moment was forcing the trailer wheels through our cobbled-together ramp and into the mud. In another few minutes they would be locked in. With every inch they sank, so did our chances of getting out.
The Professor mentioned he’d seen a fisherman near a pickup truck just below the bridge, and Pilotis and I took off running. My friend’s face seemed to say, “We’ve had it. This time Mister Lucky isn’t going to escape.” My mind, I’m afraid, was about to agree. “Will you help us?” Mate yelled down to the fisherman. “No time to lose!” The man walked all too deliberately to his truck and drove us back. As fast as the crew could work, we double-chained his pickup to the tow wagon. The trailer was now in nearly to its axle. Trying not to hurry and spin the tires and dig in deeper, we put the vehicles into gear, but nothing happened except strange sounds of steel under great stress, the engines pulling so hard I warned everyone away from the chain in case it parted. We took protection behind Nikawa and pushed on her stern while the trailer tried to break the suction of the muck; now the sounds were more sexual than mechanical as the wheels began to rise from their slimy pits, and suddenly our venture depended on the weakest link in our chain. “Push, you sissies!” Pilotis yelled. “Lean into it, you mama’s boys!” And we did, and with a last slurping lurch the wheels came up and out and onto the upper end of our ramps, and our whole kit and caboodle rolled free and onto stable ground. Pilotis scowled at me: “Next time you disregard your instinct and take on the Skid Demon, I’m relieving you of command.”
Our Montana samaritan said, “This bank is one nasty bastard, and it’s like that because ranchers here keep opposing anybody who suggests putting in a good ramp. They do it everywhere because they don’t want people using the river. They think the Missouri is theirs.” As he started back to his fishing hole, he said, “Oh, by the way, welcome to Montana, the place where they say, ‘If it ain’t yours, it’s mine, so get the hell out.’ It ought to be our new state motto.”
We drove into Culbertson, three miles off the river, a bland little western plains place, once described this way: “Just when or how the town came into existence is not known, but the theory that there was a town gained currency between 1888 and 1892. In the latter year, however, a certain Lucy Isbel stepped off the train and spent some time looking for it.” We found Culbertson readily enough and also a couple of rooms and a garden hose to flush mud from Nikawa and the trailer. After showers and a small ration of River Relief, Pilotis and I joined our mates in a railroad passenger car turned into a café—it wasn’t a classic diner, just a railroad car turned into a café.
For the last couple of weeks we had made a standing bet about who first could divine the name of a waitress (waiters in rural America are as rare as passenger pigeons). The contest nearly got the Professor punched in South Dakota when he guessed Edna, a moniker from another time, for a woman just coming into her age-sensitive years. Pilotis, following some maverick interpretation of the odds, repeated the same name from café to café, but I tried to consider not only age but also locale, speech, and hairstyle. (I’ll say here, without concern about jactitation or advancing the narrative too far, that I eventually won with Stephanie, a guess predicated on sentences of this order: “So like, are you guys like in a boat or what?”) The wager usually amused our waitresses and got them talking about things beyond meat loaf. That evening Charmaine, toting a touchy load of cynicism not uncommon to the recently divorced, said, “Where you coming from to get way up here to Nowhereville?” Pilotis: “New York City.” She: “What interstate does that?” The Photographer: “It’s no interstate—it’s rivers, lakes, a canal.” She looked closely, evaluating us, then said, “Bullshit.” Having just ascended thirty-eight miles of a wrung-out river, a route more damp than watered, I could see her point.
My Life Becomes a Preposition
FROM CULBERTSON to Fort Peck Dam, the next place we could put Nikawa into the water, was just over 140 miles, a distance we’d traveled in her on our longest outing. If we averaged thirty miles a day in the canoe, we could make it to the reservoir in five days, a de
stination reachable by automobile in a little over an hour. These may be mere numbers to you, a reader seated comfortably somewhere, but on the river they are the essence of one’s life. Sixty minutes in our canoe crossing the northern plains could seem something like the following “sentence,” provided you read it slowly and are unafraid of losing your place and backtracking and you skip not a single word even after you get the idea (call this armchair participatory rivering):
River river river river river river river river river river river river river et cetera river river river river river river river river river river river river river and then some river river river river river hot river river river river river river river river river river river river river river mud river river river river pay attention to the river river river river goddamn rocks river river river river river river river river river river river river river river oh boy river river river river enough river river river river river river river river nothing so endless as a river river river river except the universe itself river river river or time river river river river river even the sky has edges river river river river river on on up up river river river river river river river river oh jeezis river river river river river river river river river Möbius strip river river river river river always river river river river river more river river river river river river river river river river river ever more river river river river river river river the river asks had enough river river river river river river river river river river river against the river river long river river I’m ready to get stuck river river river more of you river river river river river river river river river river river river river river river river sandbar river river river river river river river river river river river river river where are the river birds river river even they find this stretch too much river river river river river river river river river river river river O Missouri river river river river river river I know you’re testing us river river river river river river river butt hurts river river river river is that as fast as that peckerwood of a river motor can go river river river river river river river the way’s open river but are we proceeding river river river the Great River Boredom Test river river river river river river river river river river river river river me and my cockamamie ideas river river river river river river river river river river river no wonder Professor talks of leaving river river see what you did to him river river river river river naughty old river river river river river river river river I’m talking to you river river river river river river river river river river river river river river river where are those Ears when I want them river river river river river a brook can laugh say the poets river river river but who ever heard of a river laughing river river river long long long long river river river river river river river river river river river river river oh mama river river river river how many more days of this river river river river river river river river river avoid river irritation river river river river river river all I know is river river river river wet galactic equator of a river river river river river the river is an eraser river river river river river river river river erasing my mind river river river river long river makes traveler insane river river river river river river river river river river river river river and this is only one hour on the river river river river river river river William Clark would understand this river sentence river river not a sentence river river river river no predicate here river river just all subject river river river river no I’m subject river river you river are predicate river river you river are not a noun river river you’re a verb river I’m rivered river river sing to me Billy! river river river river sing me a river song river river river river we got no fiddler Billy! river river river river river river river river river you big goddamn et cetera river river and you got no stop in you river river river river you don’t so much as pause river river river river river you don’t got commas river river river river river ceaseless river river river river river river river but please river river what we want is a fuckin period
Now, good reader, you have the idea.
A ship’s logbook, my pattern for this account of our try at a transcontinental voyage, will often take liberties with time and distance by indulging freely in compression so that a reading of it gives information but hardly a sense of what the voyage felt like. To this point I have given at least a chapter to each day on the water, but to do so for our canoe ascent to Fort Peck Dam would try your attention beyond endurance, just as the real miles did ours in the doing of them, even though you, wearied, numbed, and perhaps cross, would come away from those verbal Missouri miles with a keen sense of how it was.
Most of that long segment below Fort Peck presented the Great Plains at their blandest, hours of low earthy banks just high enough, like an English roadside hedge, to keep us from seeing beyond the river so that even our vision couldn’t escape to bring relief. The Missouri became a kind of black hole, and our souls, like light, were unable to escape. As if condemned prisoners, we frequently had only blind endurance to carry us on. One day, a person on death row may read that sentence of a river sentence and surely will feel it as no speed reader ever could.
What follows are edited excerpts from my logbook, concisions I hope you, good lector, will fill in with what you already know and perhaps expect: shoals, the incessant contesting the river, the perpetual hunt for the most promising chute, the ceaseless crossing from bank to bank, the hard thunks against the canoe, the occasional shocks that rolled us gunwale to gunwale and made us wish we were on foot, sun and heat, the aluminum canoe glaring almost as much as the endless water, the continual unspoken realization we were never as far upriver as we either thought or hoped. During it all, not once did the canoe reach a certifying position before I estimated it would, and everything was farther away than we ever believed. Such eternal self-deception helped us continue and sometimes made me think the title of this book should be In Praise of Ignorance.
MONDAY, DAY ONE
Launch canoe at the perilous mudhole; crew happy to be in tow wagon today. Morning clear, bright, breezy. Motor starts on first pull and P[ilotis] says, “That can’t be a good sign.” Indeed, an hour later, fuel line from gas tank gets plugged, and we go dead in water; repair and proceed. Standing Rock Reservation will be on our right all the way to Fort Peck. I tell P Continental Divide is now exactly halfway between us and Pacific. Not uplifted by report, P says: “I thought we were closer.” Around Devil’s Elbow and past site of old trading posts Fort Kipp and Fort Stewart. Beyond four-mile-wide floodplain lie rounded, eroded hills, but most of what we see are soft banks spending themselves into river to give the Missouri its essence of mud as filé does gumbo.
Mergansers, mallards, canvasbacks, shovelers—ducky world. Almost without exception, since above Harlem River we meet no other boats or people, and America seems land empty of residents; here, our fellow citizens are magpies, geese, gulls, terns, pelicans, the latter rising into echelons to wing past, their shadows sometimes falling over us and giving the only shade on sun-blasted river—if we could harness them into aerial umbrella! Above Hardscrabble Creek small rattlesnake swims toward us, so buoyant it appears airborne; when I reach out paddle, snake quickly coils, hoists tail like battle ensign, feints at blade; after we pass, it unspirals to weave on. Why would snake swim river? Can it conceive of another side to life? Do serpents have curiosity like bears that go over mountains? From cottonwood, two great-horned owls watch squintily, one yawning at the river; you said it, brother. Butterfly, with much exertion, comes alongside and overtakes us: new definition of our slow ascent.
Miles, miles, on, on, the river. The Great Ears hear tedium of my mind and correct it by stopping motor in swift channel, and we start drifting back, losing what we’d just gained; paddle to shore in midst of this grand privacy; pull off motor housing to find slipped throttle cable; reconnect and set off, now relieved for few moments to have boredom again.
Strange hump-and-pinnacle of soft rock weather-eaten into likeness of kn
eeling camel. Begin looking for tow crew as (we guess) we approach Brockton. Close to where Black Duck Indian village once was, see orange flag waving among trees; god, I love that flag. Make landing across from Mortarstone Bluffs. Because all towns along here are old Indian agencies next to railroad, they aren’t on river but against tracks; no charm whatsoever; only things near the Missouri are sewage treatment pools.
In small tavern we meet Brendan Ryan, sixty-five-year-old Irishman from County Mayo, who left on bicycle from nearly same spot in New Jersey as we but five days later; even with rest periods he’s caught us and will reach Pacific long before we can. Listening in, bartender says, “You guys’ trip is a WPA gig just like construction up at Fort Peck Dam in the thirties.” I explain to Ryan about Work Projects Administration but barkeep interrupts, “No, WPA stands for We Poke Along. Those boys building the dam got issued shovels with rope handles so they couldn’t lean on them.” Irishman sees this as sportive folklore.
TUESDAY, DAY TWO
Denver sandwich for breakfast. Up road to visit Lakota and Nakota Museum where poignant exhibit about Indians once incarcerated in old Hiawatha Insane Asylum (P: “A cruelly ironic allusion”); some inmates bore wonderful names: Mrs. Two-Teeth, Sits-in-It, Maud Magpie, Cecile Comes-at-Night, Drag-Toes, Robert Brings-Plenty, Yells-at-Night, James Black-Eye, Guy Crow-Neck, Poke-Ah-Dab-Ab. Photos of forlorn, lost faces.