River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Frederick Way, Jr.

  The Allegheny, 1942

  An Ammonia Cocktail and a Sharp Onion-Knife

  THE MORNING came on sour with a sky working itself into a rain, the sort of weather a cynic would expect now that we had to leave Nikawa and take to our canoe for a couple of days. We got oilskins ready when we went to the Allegheny just above the mouth of Brokenstraw Creek, six miles downstream from the courthouse town of Warren. I had failed, weeks earlier, to execute a shakedown cruise in the canoe with its tiny motor, thereby violating the two most reliable, if homely, words of advice I’ve ever received, these from an Ozark cousin: Assume nothing. The bank down to the water was slick, but we soon had the canoe afloat, the motor mounted, and we assumed ourselves aboard. On the third pull of the starter rope, the new engine turned over, on the fourth it fired, and we waved to the Photographer who would haul Nikawa to the head of navigable Allegheny water.

  The Allegheny, Lake Chautauqua to Pittsburgh, 203 portage and river miles

  The air was nippy but windless, and the river ran clear, visibility to about four feet, a good thing because the bottom was chock-a-block with rocks and boulders, although most of them were rounded and not likely to shear open an aluminum canoe, another fortunate circumstance since we immediately began cracking the propeller and motor stem over them, hard hits that kicked the engine nearly out of the water. Each time, I cut power fast and examined the plastic prop with trepidation, but we had nothing more than scrapes, and we quickly learned to float into the rock gardens and take up our paddles. At first, Pilotis would plunge one to measure the water from the bow but soon became proficient at seeing shallowness: like an old river leadsman, Matey cast out a glance instead of a weighted line and called the depth in feet, not fathoms, but later took simply to holding up fingers: when I saw only two digits I shut off the motor. Even so, the current and overcast made the dark bottom difficult to read, and we whacked the prop again and again, but it withstood the stones. I’ve always believed that two-cycle engines—lawnmowers, chainsaws, outboards—exist primarily to keep humankind from loving internal—infernal—combustion any more than we do. Those jerks on a starter rope are there to vex us into remembering we were never meant to use any tool requiring a spark plug. Yet each time, our baby motor started with a single pull, a dozen or more yanks every hour.

  For some miles I gave myself a refresher course in reading currents, riffles, and changes in water color, and our descent slowly became easier as I began to understand the particularities of the Allegheny chutes and channels. Helped along by current and intermittent paddles and motor, we were doing about six miles an hour, a progress that relieved me of misinformation I’d heard about the northern end of the Allegheny. Rule of the River Road: A section within five miles of an informant’s home is always passable, but ten miles farther, forget it. We had good canoeing, made better because I’d long wanted—an impossibility if one begins from an ocean—to start our voyage by letting a river itself take us downstream, pull us by its own native force into the country. Now, at last, we and the river were of one mind, both of us in quest of the Father of Waters. As I felt our lovely drift atop the Allegheny floating us in the right direction with few radical twists, carrying us on its back toward the Mississippi, I sat easily in the stern in full belief that we could reach the Ohio by water.

  Given our fore-and-aft positions and the off-and-on noise of the motor, talking was difficult, so we watched the bankside theater and fell into musings, another river gift. Even though U.S. 62 follows the Allegheny closely on the east shore for many miles, the highway was rarely visible, and despite numerous and often shabby “fishing" cottages, we had a world to ourselves. Wooded hills cradled the narrow river, with interruptions only from the merge of small runs and by slender islands splitting the channel. All the way to Tidioute, sixteen miles, we passed under not a single bridge, and—never mind the dumpy houses alternating from bank to bank as the river terrace shifted east to west—we could almost believe ourselves slipping down through some eighteenth-century morning. The way was virtually free of debris and flotsam, a ditched washing machine the lone piece of junk, and the sky held steady, the pools slowly became slightly deeper—slightly was all we needed—and we had to paddle less and less.

  Until now, we’d known few hours permitting idle reflection. For years I’ve been given to culinary dreaming whenever my travel slows or when I need occasional breaks from observing; that day I fell into remembrance of my perpetual hunt across America for genuine soda fountains once abundant but now as imperiled as a Topeka shiner. A friend had recently given me a small volume first published in 1863, American Soda Book of Receipts and Suggestions, that I pick up as the devout do a missal. Among the suggestions: “Don’t use too much syrup; it makes a sickening drink,” which I weigh against, “Remember that women like a little more syrup and three times as much foam and froth as men like.” Among the receipts is this one:

  Ammonia Cocktail

  Aromatic Spirits of Ammonia 2 Dashes

  Orange Syrup 1 Ounce

  Bicarbonate of Soda ½ Teaspoon

  Serve quickly!

  I was trying to recall the admixture for that peculiar refresher called a phroso when we floated around a broad westerly bend and came upon tiny Tidioute (rhymes with “city boot”), the birthplace of Standard Oil, the ancestor of several of the largest corporations in America. Over the ridge lay the valley where the American oil industry began when “Colonel” Edwin Drake, a railroad conductor too debilitated to stand upright in the swaying aisles of a train, arrived in 1859 to explore black ooze leaking into Oil Creek, stuff then used mostly as a patent medicine. Claimed one advertisement:

  KIER’S GENUINE PETROLEUM! Or ROCK OIL!

  A natural remedy possessing wonderful curative powers

  in diseases of the

  Chest, Windpipe and Lungs;

  Also for the Care of

  Diarrhea, Cholera, Piles, Rheumatism, Gout,

  Asthma, Bronchitis, Scrofula or King’s Evil;

  Burns and Scalds, Neuralgia, Tetter, Ringworm,

  Obstinate Eruptions of the Skin,

  Blotches and Pimples on the Face,

  Biles, Deafness,

  Chronic Sore Eyes, Erysipelas!

  Five years later, a ne’er-do-well actor came into the valley to establish the Dramatic Oil Company, but he ruined his well by trying to increase its output, and a few months later John Wilkes Booth went off to ruin other things.

  On the second terrace of Tidioute stood a clapboard hotel with a two-storey porch giving a historic view of the Allegheny. That Sunday it was closed, so we walked down to an ordinary place where I told Pilotis about my encounter in the hotel restaurant a year before when I’d come through by road to reconnoiter our route. In had walked an old fellow, pale as if he’d been partially erased, and ordered a sandwich. He looked so forlorn I spoke to him and bought him a mug of beer. He told me, “My wife was ten years younger than me, but she died last year.” I commiserated, said I knew about losing wives, and he said cryptically, “A sharp onion-knife leaves a dry eye. No, I don’t miss her so much. What I miss is my butt. I’ve got no butt anymore. It’s like it fell off somewheres along the line. You get old and your butt disappears. Now, you take my balls, they’re bigger than ever, hanging like a champion bull. It’s Mother Nature’s trick. It’s all backwards. These days, what do I need them things for? What I need is my butt. That’s what I do now—sit, just sit.”

  When we returned to the Allegheny, the glum sky remained such that every dry hour seemed like deliverance. The river carried us again into forested slopes for long and rather straight runs, and islands created chutes where we guessed out the deepest water, the through lanes. To the west, the hills began dropping, their far sides opening to agriculture and small oil fields we knew were there only from the map.

  We passed a settlement called Trunkeyville, just down the road from Fagundus Corners. Pennsylvania, of course, has the most famous naughty tow
n-name in America—Intercourse, a little south of Blue Ball—although for raciness I prefer Shy Beaver, Bareville, Desire, Tally Ho, or Mount Joy; and there are those renowned nonesuches Punxsutawney, Shickshinny, and Bird-in-Hand. But the toponyms I really like here are of another sort, partly because Pennsylvanians have sometimes acted as if there were a shortage of good and distinctive names. For their foremost university town the best they could come up with was State College, and for two other seats of higher learning they merely, and confusingly, appropriated nomenclature better left farther west—Indiana and California; they may have, however, gone too far into eccentricity, given it’s an ivory tower, when they named one not too distant from our route Slippery Rock. Pennsylvanians have three Centervilles and eighteen other Center-somethings; there are four dozen towns with the key descriptive word of West, and three dozen beginning with New; and they must hold the national record for places suffixed with -burg and -ville, including one named, long before anyone had ever heard of a franchise burger, McVille. Citizens of one village just gave up and called it Hometown, and another community, in a fit of literalness, labeled theirs Factoryville, and yet another settlement apparently seeking the most perennially accurate name ever thought of, Airville. Perhaps erring too far on the side of plain humility are Rock, Paint, and Transfer.

  It’s this flatness of imagination that makes me love other Pennsylvania town names. Take those that seem to come from some lost list of the Seven Cardinal Virtues of Commerce: Frugality, Prosperity, Economy, Industry, Enterprise, Energy, Progress. Or those from residents who couldn’t quite remember either the Boy or Girl Scout laws: Brave, Effort, Endeavor, Fairchance, Rough and Ready, Good Intent, Patience. Or those villages in need of the Junior Chamber of Commerce guys: Drab, Drifting, Distant, Drain Lick, Grimville, Leechburg, Scalp Level, Waddle, Cyclone, Panic, Fear Not, Little Hope. Couldn’t they learn something from Lofty or Starlight or Acmetonia or Wampum? I admire the logic of putting in opposite corners of the state, like boxers in a ring, Drinker and Dry Tavern, or keeping Virginville well away from Hooker. But the places here I like most are the loony ones, those that make you ask, “What in God’s name were they thinking of?” Moosic, Blawnox, Nanty Glo, Orbisonia, Porkey, Mundorf, Equinunk, Coupon, Loyalsock, Paxtang, Wapwallopen, Turnip Hole, Shunk. And, of course, old Zelienople, once the “Chicken Dinner Capital of Western Pennsylvania.”

  That I had the quietude to look at the map and realize just over the west ridge lay Walkchalk and Whiskerville suggests our gentle descent of the Allegheny—a toponym, by the way, that led the New-York Historical Society in 1845 to advocate changing the name of the United States to the Republic of Allegania, mountains which “bind the country together.” A committee of eminent men cited Washington Irving:

  We want a national name. We want it poetically, and we want it politically. With the poetical necessity of the case I shall not trouble myself. I leave it to our poets to tell how they manage to steer that collocation of words, “The United States of America,” down the swelling tide of song, and to float the whole raft out upon the sea of heroic poesy. I am now speaking of the mere purposes of common life. How is a citizen of this republic to designate himself? As an American? There are two Americas, each subdivided into various empires, rapidly rising in importance. As a citizen of the United States? It is a clumsy, lumbering title, yet still it is not distinctive.

  The proposal brought other suggestions: Columbia, Fredonia, Vesperia, the Republic of Washington. South Carolina novelist William Gilmore Simms helped send the idea, no matter the logic of its arguments, to the dustbin of historical footnotes: “I conscientiously believe that if the nation was called Squash, [Americans] would not be conscious of any awkwardness.”

  Our Allegheny passage let us repair ourselves from the bruising of Lake Erie, and the river showed us mergansers, canvasbacks, teal, coots, an osprey, a bald eagle. Big fish, as silent and dark as shadows, moved slowly away from us, but I saw only their backs and couldn’t identify them. Much of this natural plenty was the result of citizens working recently to clean the upper Allegheny, and we were in their debt.

  On the east bank we passed a village once called Goshgoshing and later Saqualinguent, Indian names doomed on the tongues of Euro-Americans, so it became the simpler but still tricky Tionesta (rhymes with “my ol’ Vesta”), but in the dropping temperature and darkening sky we kept to our course as the river began bending, although its happy trend was westward. The rain finally found a way through the thick overcast and prevented us from reading the river and seeing far enough ahead, so near Eagle Rock we went ashore where the Photographer could find us. We pulled the canoe up to an outbuilding and asked permission of a startled woman to leave it overnight, then we drove the tow wagon a few miles to Oil City, only to discover the 1924 Petroleum Street Bridge lying bank to bank on the river bottom; just days before, the highway department had blasted it off its piers to make way for a new one. In the dampness, our course abruptly dismantled like the bridge, we stood staring, disappointed, and dismayed. We walked the river edge to find a pull-out, but the steep banks gave no accommodation.

  My prudent mariner, of all people, said, “Let’s run it. We can get between those trusses.” Cautious Pilotis, growing improvident, seemed suddenly infected with my passion to keep water under us for every possible mile. I reasoned what we must have, both now and later, was not two rash people but one ardent mind in compromise; nevertheless, I looked long for a route through the twisted girders. At last I said, If the bridge doesn’t get us, the sheriff will—the area’s buoyed off. With that somber decision, we hung up the day like an old wet coat. But we were satisfied to have found the sometimes rampaging Allegheny so friendly and to have floated it so easily so far.

  A Flight of Eagles, an Iron Bed, and So Forth

  MAY DAY—not the distress signal, but the date. We retrieved the canoe from upriver and took it to the other side of the blown bridge being raised from the bottom a few feet at a time and torched into pieces of scrap to sell at four cents a pound. A farmer came along to buy a couple of half-ton cubes of collapsed steel to make into a garden bench, even though he didn’t really want one and had no garden; he just loved the old bridge. He said, “I wanted to turn some of it into a barn and house, but I already have a house and two barns.”

  Pilotis was unusually willing to shoulder the canoe to the water, and I understood why when I heard an intoning from under the aluminum: “Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life.” Anyone happy to tote burdens just for a chance to recite Shakespeare is always welcome on such an undertaking as ours.

  In the cool air, light wind, and broken sunlight, we were but five minutes onto the river when we hit the first rapids of note, and we bounced, took water over the bow, rode through to a deeper channel and on down past Franklin with its well-preserved Liberty Street, and then the river again took to the wooded hills. Gradually, pools became longer and more frequent, we paddled fewer riffles, the little motor pottering us between them, but the bottom of the Allegheny, now less lucid, still held many stone sleepers visible only as the canoe passed over their mossy backs. Large slabs of rock here and there slanted from the banks into the river, and we stirred ducks into long skittering withdrawals, their deep wingbeats dimpling the water.

  River travel commonly makes this country appear as it ought to be: a sensible number of people blending their homes, barns, and businesses with a natural landscape free of those intrusive abuses junked up alongside our highways. Despite the continuous physical threat in moving water, going down a river can put travelers into a mellow harmony and make them believe all is not yet lost to the selfishness and private greed that so poison our chances for a lasting and healthy prosperity. To follow a river is to find one’s way into the territory because a river follows the terrain absolutely—it cannot do otherwise. I’d come here in the belief that I could never really know America until I saw it from the bends and reaches of its flowing waters, from hidden spots open only
to a small boat.

  At Kennerdell we stopped under a bridge to stretch our legs. I told Pilotis about my preparations for our venture, about scanning my shelves and shelves of accounts of exploration and travel in America. One of the books I pulled down was Journey to Pennsylvania by Gottlieb Mittelberger, a German who came to the state in 1750 to deliver a church organ and remained four years. He was a man of common cloth but nonetheless with insight into the hard life of immigrants often exploited by agents and employers. He saw much in the new settlements to displease him. As I neared the last chapter and read his angst over the wilting of religiosity among new Pennsylvania Dutch, I was astonished to come across an anecdote about one of my grandfathers eight generations back, Conrad Reiff. Mittelberger wrote:

  I cannot pass over yet another example of the wicked life some people lead in this free country. Two very rich planters living in the township of Oley, both well known to me, one named Arnold Hufnagel, the other Conrad Reiff, were both archenemies of the clergy, scoffing at them and at the Divine Word. They often met to pour ridicule and insults upon the preachers and the assembled congregation, laughing at and denying Heaven and future bliss as well as damnation in Hell. In 1753 these two scoffers met again, according to their evil habit, and began to talk of Heaven and Hell.