River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Second: after we walked down to the boat, we learned the truth of the rumor: several miles west, at Albion, a bridge-construction barge was blocking the waterway, and the convoy would have to stay put until the Canal Office could persuade the highway department to let us through. We were enticingly near the terminus of the Erie, and I mumbled and mulled and decided we’d press on alone in hope luck would befall us and the slender Nikawa could squeeze through where the others could not. In that land of numerous low bridges, we would proceed to see whether the way might open.

  The fifteen miles to Albion were easy and full of the delight of small lift-bridges clanging a bell at the traffic and rising promptly at our arrival. With each safely behind, we felt the accomplishment of mileage slowly earned, and I savored it for its inchmeal accumulation. That gray and mild morning, Pilotis cut a finger wrapping our anchor line, uttered an “Umph!” and I followed with, “Ejaculated the squire,” a thing we did only when we were happy. We passed along the H villages of Holley, Hulberton, Hindsburg, then a stretch of old, hand-laid stone canal wall with recent breaks repaired by a load of coarse rock dump-trucked into the breach—another paradigm for our era. Twice we came upon mergansers that let us approach close before diving beneath our bow only to reappear in our wake, a game according to Pilotis, and I said, If only we could glide like that under the construction barge.

  Then we saw it and knew Nikawa couldn’t squeeze by, and I heard, “Stop thinking about snow in the Rockies.” Amidst my mutterings, we coasted to a halt. Almost immediately, as if by the hand of a water spirit, the huge thing, like a garden gate, began to pivot, workmen with ropes over their shoulders pulling it aside, and we proceeded as the way narrowly, ever so narrowly, opened, and Nikawa slipped beneath the scaffolding, Pilotis singing “Low bridge, everybody down.” Then I quoted the proud old Eriemen who boasted, “We bow our heads to nobody but God and the canal bridges.”

  Along the way were tidy farms, neat fields, and an apple orchard. By the Knowlesville lift-bridge we made fast to a wall at the old Tow Path Store, a false-front general merchandise of a type more common farther west. We filled fuel tanks, water jugs, and our little larder, and then went on, passed over Culvert Road, the only place automobiles go under the Erie, a detail once noted in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. On to Medina for a walk and lunch. A man, perhaps a bit barmy, told the owner and cook for all to hear, “I never said I was Jesus. All I ever said was I’m related.” Later, when I asked about him, a woman said, “He’s not a lunatic—he’s just a believer because his evangelical father used to punish him and his sister by pounding them with a Bible. It drove the girl into Hare Christmas.”

  We took to the Erie again and went on to Middleport where a couple of years earlier I swam in the canal with some tugboatmen, a thing most residents, remembering earlier days of foul water, still refused to do. Yet in truth the Erie Canal is probably cleaner today than ever, a result of wise federal and state environmental regulations—not to mention those rascal zebra mussels.

  We reached Gasport, once the home of Belva Ann Lockwood who, in the days before women could vote, ran twice for the Presidency. It was in the village on the Fourth of July, 1839, that citizens raised toasts to the President, the Governor, Heroes of the Revolution, the Militia, Old Glory, American Democracy, the Plow, Literature, the Erie Canal, and—why I don’t know—the Mississippi. Then came Orangeport, the only town in the United States, so I heard, to take its name from the color of a hotel. By early afternoon we saw the steeples of Lockport on its bluff. The old flight of five stone locks there has been well preserved right next to the somewhat newer and much larger ones that in just two steps took Nikawa fifty feet onto the top of the great Niagara Escarpment, the long shale ridge that is the cause of the falls. We were exuberant at reaching those last locks, for unimpeded water now lay between us and Lake Erie.

  Waiting for the gates to release us, I violated our unspoken precept—few lines of endeavor are as encumbered with superstition as the sailor’s—and unnecessarily talked of the next day: tomorrow Lake Erie and a short milk-run across water without speed limits, bridges, locks, construction barges, or the tortoise Doctor Robert.

  We motored through Lockport and under what may be the widest short bridge or the shortest wide bridge in America—it looks more like a parking lot than a bridge—and into another rock cut, this one through the stone ledge that extends twenty miles west to Niagara Falls. On we went, down the canalized portion of Tonawanda Creek flowing an unnatural color of pale turquoise, past a long line of somewhat tired waterside retreats sporting miniature windmills, lighthouses, and plastic gulls, on through the twin Tonawandas and beneath five bridges, blowing our whistle in celebration under each, and then we entered the Niagara River, ten miles above the falls. The grand Erie, at 338 miles, the longest canal in America, lay at our backs.

  The Niagara River is thirty-six miles long, a length hardly commensurate with its fame, but above the falls it’s rather broad and would be more so were it not split by Grand Island. The current was swift, but no other boat traffic was bucking it, so we let our river horse run, and she fairly skimmed past the built-up shoreline under the overcast, and Pilotis cut loose with snatches of song. All was joy as we went beneath the Peace Bridge where the “headwaters" of the Niagara constrictedly flowing out of a full Lake Erie piled three feet up against the big piers, an unnerving display of power. Nikawa bounced up over a veritable rampart of lake water, but we figured it nothing more than fitting, since four fifths of the Great Lakes was rushing seaward underneath us; besides, our harbor was only three miles distant. The Black Rock Canal, offering protection from the open water at Buffalo, was closed for reasons we didn’t know, an ignorance that was about to cause trouble.

  The lake became progressively meaner, with ceaseless rises and falls (things I’d call neither waves nor swells) that began to thump us with a severity Nikawa had never encountered. Downtown Buffalo lay quietly a half mile off her port side. She labored up the crests, crashed into the troughs, and Pilotis couldn’t stand without holding on; reading the chart to find a course to our harbor was nearly impossible, and the binoculars were of no more use than were we in a demolition derby. We had to shout over the tumult, and Nikawa was making almost no headway against current, waves, and wind. When I tried increasing the rpm’s to counter, the violence turned intolerable. After fifteen minutes of torturing her over the assaults, the hull shivering with every drop, Pilotis yelled, “Can she take this?” I shrugged and struggled to hold the wheel on something like a course, but things only got worse. “It sounds like the hull is splintering!” It did indeed, but I shouted, It can’t! “How do you know?” I don’t, goddamnit! “I think we’re in trouble!” That’s when I knew my deep-water sailor was also scared, and that unnerved me even more.

  Buffalo sat blithe and impassive to our plight, even though as the only boat under way anywhere near, we must have been quite visible. How could those citizens let us capsize in full view of safety? I called out that I was going to head for downtown whether or not there was a small-boat dock, and Pilotis shouted, “It’s too goddamn shallow! You’ll reef us!” Sounds good to me! Turning from a transfixion with the water ahead, my friend shook the chart at me: “For once be a prudent goddamn mariner!” So I fought my urge to park us up on Church Street, and to control my fear I tried to despise it.

  After almost an hour we’d gone only a couple of miles, and in the falling light we couldn’t find the entrance to our harbor at the mouth of the Buffalo River. I said nothing, but before dark would cover us, I’d determined either to reef the boat or hit the nearest shore. We hand-cranked the window-wiper to clear the spray, and Pilotis kept watch on our bilge-pumpless cockpit to see whether we were taking on water. We quit trying to speak in the noise and rode in grave silence as the wind-driven lake tormented us with only an illusion of forward progress.

  Then in jubilation Pilotis shouted, “The breakwater!” I made the happiest left turn of my life, and we
quartered the swells so that Nikawa rolled madly but no longer fell into the troughs. Behind the wall it was merely less rough as we found our way into Erie Basin, once the terminus of the canal, a long-gone exit that avoided such turmoil. Even with several turns in the channel, angles that usually baffle waves, our first chance to dock was impossibly rough, and we had to continue until we ran out of water and choices, and there we tied up our horse while she thrashed in her reins as if wanting to come ashore with us.

  Standing on the solid wharf, we were sure it was moving, but it was only the wobble in our legs, and I laughed at my pigeonheartedness, and Pilotis laughed, and we threw our arms around each other like dancing bears, and little Nikawa banged her fenders, but there wasn’t a drop of water in her pilothouse. We climbed a slope affording a good overlook of the boat and went into a restaurant with phony nautical decorations that seemed to jape us, and we spliced the main brace like sailors just pried from the maw of a deadly sea.

  After supper we walked down to the dock to check our spring lines, found a bumper torn loose, and resecured things. We’d just heard there had been a three-day blow over Lake Erie, a body of water that yields its turbulence only slowly, but tomorrow there likely would be less wind. As we went to find a stable bed, Pilotis murmured, “I think we have a little rendezvous coming up.” That night I slept with apprehension as if it were a bad-tempered woman tossed by fever.

  III

  THE LAKES

  NEAR DUNKIRK, NEW YORK

  Iconogram III

  The shallow basin and the position of Lake Erie make it the most tempestuous and choppy of the Great Lakes. The wide frontal storms roaring down over Lake Huron from upper Canada and Hudson’s Bay strike Lake Erie with great force. The subtropical highs press in from the south. They engage in conflict over and around Lake Erie, and its shallow waters plunge and toss furiously. The winds can whip up tremendous seas on the surface almost without warning. The navigation charts are figured on a low-water datum 570.5 feet above sea level. The actual level fluctuates widely from half a foot below this datum in winter to four feet above it in certain summers. And the wind alone, sweeping up from southwest to northeast along the axis of the lake, may lower the level at Toledo by eight or more feet, while the depth of the harbors at the east end may rise by several feet. Likewise a strong east wind lowers the water at Buffalo and has, at times, actually laid bare the rock bottom of the lake near Fort Erie.

  All through its maritime history Lake Erie has been unpredictable. Uncounted numbers of disasters, tragedies, and shipwrecks have overtaken men who have sailed over her blue surface. Time and again ships have put out from Buffalo under friendly skies only to be turned back or beaten to pieces by a raging sea before they reached Erie, Pennsylvania, or Long Point, Ontario. More voyagers have been seasick on Lake Erie than on Lake Superior. But with all her moods and whims, Lake Erie remains the most intimate and happy of all the Great Lakes.

  Harlan Hatcher

  Lake Erie, 1945

  Hoisting the Blue Peter

  THE LAST TIME I’d felt such apprehension as the one upon me that Saturday morning happened the day I got out of a dismal hotel bed to report for active duty in the Navy. Now I studied Pilotis but couldn’t determine whether I saw fearlessness or a façade of insouciance, nor could I decide which response I wanted. Sometimes the chicken-hearted love the lily-livered. I needed a good rousing Sousa march, maybe my favorite, “High School Cadets,” but a thumping version of “From Maine to Oregon” would have been more apt. Although I’d been seasick only once during my naval tour, Pilotis and I ate almost nothing before we made our way to Nikawa, where I hoisted a blue peter of the soul to announce she would sail. The sun was just appearing in a cloudless sky, the wind a moderate fifteen knots, and our little boat lay quietly in her lines. So far, so good. Off we went, down behind the long, high Buffalo mole, ready to take on the second smallest of the Great Lakes which the old Jesuit explorers called “seas of sweet water,” but I think they had in mind only potability. We kept to the smooth, protected channel as far as possible before turning into the open lake. It was splendidly blue and not fraught with whitecaps—all we needed was two hours of such sweet water. Barcelona, New York, our destination, lay fifty miles southwest, where the Photographer, who had been off on his own assignment since Pollepel Island, would meet us with the tow wagon and trailer in order to take up our first inescapable portage. Life was good.

  And so also were the first four minutes. Then Nikawa rose, rode down, up again, higher, down farther, continually building until we were soon into the violence of last evening. Goddamnit, I yelled, not more of this! Pilotis, struggling to keep upright, said, “Do you want to turn back?” In the increasing racket we talked it over: these conditions might hold for several days or they could get worse, but were they likely to improve soon? After all, this was Lake Erie, with a comparative shallowness that leaves it prone to rapid and violent changes from wind, one of the reasons a recent book about the lake called the section we were about to enter “the graveyard of the Great Lakes.” We banged along in ambivalence, hoping that beyond the next swell somehow would lie peaceful water. We did know one thing: we didn’t want to turn about and put Nikawa broadside to the rollers. And, as always, we had to weigh the Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative.

  Buffalo to Lake Chautauqua south, 93 lake and portage miles

  And so, under innocuous skies, the lake beautiful in its menace, we bashed on, our motors laboring against wind and waves to push us forward, Nikawa rising up the swells so steeply we could see nothing ahead but the blue yonder and behind only the deep. After a while we were, in nerve if not mileage, beyond any point of no return.

  If you’ve ever made the first slow climb up the initial ascent of a rollercoaster, when it’s too late to disembark and before you is only heaven and fear, and if you remember that godawful pause before the cars drop into the screaming abyss, then you have a notion of what it was like that Saturday on that inland sea, except for one thing: we didn’t roll down the watery hills because they were too steep and close together. Instead of broad backs they had sharp crests which held us a moment before the engines drove Nikawa off the edge into the trough to a crashing, splintering, shattering collapse. We weren’t cruising on Erie so much as falling down it, and during any given hour we were airborne a not insignificant portion. At first the drops were three feet, then four, then six, and after an hour a ton of boat was falling seven feet every couple of minutes.

  The navigation table almost immediately got jerked out of its locking mechanism and pitched to the deck, and charts, dividers, and pencils became missiles until Pilotis stumblingly caught and stowed them. My friend could only try to grip a small coaming above the entry to the cuddy, a poor purchase indeed that forced Pilotis into a simian squat to cushion the shock of the crashes. I had the wheel to grasp, but that did nothing to keep my skull from banging the overhead, and there was no end to hand-cranking spray off the forward window.

  At every moment we watched for an indication that things were lessening, that the worst had passed, but in fact they went the other way. As we hit the bottom of troughs, the lake rose above the transom with only our forward movement keeping that crucial gap of air between us and the water, and I imagined some rogue wave breaking over into the welldeck (oh evil name) to snuff the motors. Without power, we’d be through in every sense of the word.

  When I took my eyes from the compass, Nikawa instantly veered off our bearing, but with a choice of watching sky or nine-fathom water, I found the instruments almost a solace, and I was glad not to have a clinometer, but I did wish for a lethometer, a gauge I was inventing to show when conditions change from naughty to lethal. Where are the tocsins of life when one needs them?

  On we crashed through the surge and plunge, making invisible headway, the indurate towers of Buffalo bobbing into view when we crested yet seeming to fall no farther behind. The south lake shore lay only five miles off, but over an athwart-the-swells course, s
o it might as well have been fifty miles. Still, I offered we edge closer to land in case of a capsize, but my deep-water sailor, so accustomed to a six-foot keel, would have none of it, and shouted out the hazards: shoals, sunken cribs, rocky shallows, dumping grounds, a wreck, sewer outlets. In one pause atop a crest Pilotis read the chart aloud: “Due to periodic high water in the Great Lakes, some features shown here as visible may be submerged, particularly near shore.” In the early nineteenth century there was a proposal to build a canal from Buffalo to Portland, New York, along our very route, but the idea never went beyond a sketch.

  It so happened that a direct course required us to hit the swells perpendicularly, the most violent way, and Pilotis argued for quartering them—that is, taking them at less than a ninety-degree angle to allow us effectively to broaden the backs of the rollers and come closer to sliding down along them; all well and good, but that tactic would nearly double our mileage. I held to the shorter bearing of head-on violence. Take it in the teeth and get it over with. As for power, to use too little would leave us standing still or being driven backward, and to clap on too much would almost assure the boat breaking up.

  From time to time it came to me that this wasn’t really happening; it had to be the insubstantial wandering of a sleeper who merely awakes in a sweat—nothing more; one good scream and surely I’d find myself in a Buffalo hotel room. But there was no waking. Never had I been frightened so long. Of the unwelcome emotions, I most hate fear.