River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  While I pumped in the gasoline, I noticed a new softball floating in a thick mat of flotsam, so I pulled it out, then another bobbed to the surface, another, and one more. It was as if some unknown sport fish were laying them. When Pilotis returned, I began juggling. Now, I can’t juggle even knotted handkerchiefs, let alone softballs, so the spheres were soon hitting me on the noddle, the knees, the foot, and I cried out, “‘Umph!’ ejaculated the squire.” The ludicrousness drew a smile from Pilotis and also a fellow who couldn’t believe my incompetent display; he was a coach of women’s sports at Marietta College and said the softballs belonged to the team. I turned them over, and he took two tired sailors on a convivial tour of the river town. Slowly we got from beneath the burden of miles, and I wondered how the evening might have gone without such adventitious flotsam.

  Enamel Speaks

  SPRING WAS IN profusion that morning—its scent along the avenues of dignified Marietta, its angle of light against the brick shops, its promise in the gait of citizens on Front Street—but the season didn’t draw us immediately to the river. Instead, we walked the town, the oldest (they say here) in Ohio, and we found a couple of conversations, a breakfast, a grocery, a bookshop, all the time my notepad filling:

  — Child to mother in coffee shop: “Do pearls make oysters hurt?”

  — Ayoung woman to her friend after stumbling on curb: “I’m not sure-footed, but I’m not afraid to fall down.”

  — From Francis Galton’s 1867 The Art of Travel: “Neither sleepy nor deaf men are fit to travel quite alone. It is remarkable how often the qualities of wakefulness and watchfulness stand every party in good stead.”

  At last, with a small sack of books under my arm, we walked to the water, boarded Nikawa, and followed the Muskingum into the Ohio, on down past a long run of skinny islands, remnants of the many before the dams drowned them. Mark Twain said, “A river without islands is like a woman without hair. She may be good and pure, but one doesn’t fall in love with her very often.” Under a beneficent sky we did the dozen miles to Parkersburg, West Virginia, where years ago residents had the sense to create on a river hill a picnic garden out of the former hanging-ground and the linguistic courage to call it Nemesis Park; now, if they would only have the courage to stop certain dimwits from turning their historic downtown into a parking lot, a process that makes pointless the big floodwall separating the city center from its rivers, the mass of concrete giving lower Parkersburg the feel of a penitentiary exercise yard.

  A year earlier here, in the quaint Blennerhassett Hotel, I met Enamel, whose name I learned from the grocery store nametag pinned to her shirt. She was forty, of melodious voice, serious, and able to tie a knot in a cherry stem in her mouth using only her tongue, a bar skill she’d learned in her whiskey-sour days. When I asked how her name came about, she corrected me: “It isn’t Enamel—it’s Enna-mell. My grandmother, who couldn’t read too good, saw the word on a fancy brooch in a jewelry store and thought it was classy, maybe like Tiffany. It’s a good name because I can tell if people know me or not. One gal was claiming to be my friend but making up tales about me, but everyone knew she was lying because she called me Enamel like I came out of a paint can. But I took her boyfriend from her—then we broke up when he started writing the date on dusty furniture. Of course, he couldn’t ever help clean. He wasn’t any good anyway. All’s he wanted is you-know-what. And a dust lady.”

  The Ohio turns directly west at Parkersburg, and two miles along lies the island where a wealthy and eccentric Irish immigrant, Harman Blennerhassett, settled in 1797 to conduct experiments in the natural sciences. After shooting down Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr arrived there in 1806 to seek underwriting for his design of setting up an empire somewhere southwest of the lower Mississippi. Convincing Blennerhassett he would be surrounded by a utopia of intellectuals, Burr got the Irishman to join the treasonous plan, and on a dark December night he started down the Ohio to join the conspirators, but President Jefferson learned of the schemery and dispatched militia who caught them near Natchez, Mississippi. The traitors were charged but never tried. Had the plot succeeded, the United States might have been smaller by a third.

  Nikawa slipped between green shores, the day happening easily, and Pilotis hummed a strange barcarole just before we entered a section of the Ohio which appeared to lose its urgency to reach the sea; it twisted and bent and bowed, often traveling a curving eight miles to gain only two straight ones. That day we hoped to cover about a hundred river miles, but the crow-flight distance was only about half that. Still, the Ohio, partly from its current, although much hidden in the dam pools, and partly from its sinuousness, gave us proof of its infixed destina tion, its destiny to lose itself when at last it loses its way in the begetting sea. Its gravity-driven motive moved us powerfully, if blindly, in a way our engines could not, and it seemed we and nature became a single intention, and we were but a small message in a corked bottle thrown to the current, to wash up someday on a far shore. All of this yielded a concord, one strong enough to put Pilotis into a doze I presently interrupted by quoting Francis Galton on the qualities of wakefulness.

  When we descended Belleville Lock, I heard my mate singing quietly on the bow, playing the mooring line back and forth, and then we went on through the afternoon with Pilotis sometimes at the wheel, sometimes me, sometimes conversation, sometimes not, but always a contentment in our clement travel; even the drift was benign, pieces of it actually getting out of our way and taking flight as we kept misreading slender, dark cormorants for floating sticks. Then Racine Lock, then around the big northern bend with little Pomeroy, Ohio, perched atop it like a feather in a cap, the late sun casting over it a flaxen light. Because the village opens to the river to show inviting front sides of buildings, we almost hung up the day there, but the pull of the Ohio was greater, and we rolled on a few miles more to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a place surely named on an afternoon like ours, although in the earliest days of the settlement Henry Clay described it and its excellent setting as “a beautiful woman clad in rags.” The first white man known to see the point between the Ohio and Kanawha rivers was Pierre-Joseph de Céloron. In 1749 he came from Lake Erie on the same route as ours to la belle rivière to claim it and its tributary country for Louis XV by burying along the Ohio four inscribed lead plates. Incredibly, two of them have turned up, the one at the Point coming to light exactly a century after the Frenchman left it.

  I knew of a well-situated bed-and-breakfast there, one with a good river view and near Céloron’s hiding spot, so we turned into the Kanawha (river folk pronounce it Kah-NAW) and searched for a tie-up, but we found nothing suitable or even safe, so we went back into the Ohio another four miles to Gallipolis and passed the riverside town square where the citizens remind themselves of the 1878 arrival of yellow fever in the village with a monument made from the broken rocker shaft of the steamboat that brought the disease. We entered silty Chickamauga Creek, bounced over a sunken log, and came upon a quiet little backwater harbor with a gasoline pump and an owner who let us moor for the night. We had joked the Dry Docktor would be there, and indeed she was, Cap and Mr. V—as mellow as we, a mood we polished with supper together at a grill across from the river park where teenagers swarmed Saturday night like a glom of mayflies during a hatch-out.

  Along the Track of the Glaciers

  MY FIRST MATE said, “This is the kind of day airline pilots call ‘severe clear.’ It seems you could jump in and take a swim in that blue sky.” We left Gallipolis and made our way around the big loop of river marking out the southernmost tip of Ohio, the first half running nearly cardinal compass points: south, west, south again, then a series of slightly less true courses up the other side of the great bend. The Ohio country between the stretches of river is largely national forest, and the West Virginia shore also is wooded all the way to the bottom of the loop, where industrial Huntington spreads out along the flats.

  A fifth of the distance across the continent, we
had traveled few leagues not shaped by the last Ice Age and its several glaciations. Moving generally transverse to the flow of ancient snowpacks, we were at that point—as elsewhere—virtually following a sea-to-sea route cut or deformed by great chisels of ice: if you trace over a map of America the southern limits of the last few glaciers, you have a reasonably accurate chart of our entire course. Our passage depended absolutely on water, ancient and modern, frozen and otherwise.

  More than any other kind of travel, floating a river means following a natural corridor, for moving water must stay true to the cast of the land, and we liked knowing our way was so primeval and, what’s more, that in every mile we were recapitulating human routes of the previous eight thousand or more years. No other form of travel can do that, for no trail, no road, is so old, so primordial, so unchanged in its path. The river, alone in nature, makes its own destination, and we enjoyed feeling that the high-banked Ohio, its course as untransformed as any long river east of the Rockies, was taking us there; not even the locks and dams much altered the perception. In our search for the essence of American water passage, this retrocognition was of the first order.

  A strand of ring-billed gulls rose from the smooth surface and skimmed it, and we overtook a line of barges in hopes of getting through Byrd Lock before they arrived, but it wasn’t necessary; for our first time, the tender sent us into the auxiliary lock, the one half the length of the twelve-hundred-foot main tank. Even so, Nikawa in the chamber was but a cockhorse, and some of the Sunday visitors smiled and waved to us, to give underdogs courage, yet the faces of others betrayed a wistfulness, as if their lives were little more than anchors.

  We had a long, slick-water, bridgeless run down to Huntington and its nine-mile shore with Riverfront Park, a greensward that somewhat ameliorates the big ugly floodwall typical of towns on the “new" Ohio. When Huntington, the largest and newest West Virginia city, was about to spring up in 1869 next to the settlement of Guyandotte, a newspaper published a list of attributes the older village offered, and a future citizen of Huntington conceded those advantages but said it would “take a search warrant to find them in the annual crop of dog fennel, popcorn, and empty pint bottles.” Soon after, an eastern visitor described Huntington as “a right big little town.”

  A few miles beyond lies Kenova at the mouth of the Big Sandy River that separates West Virginia from Kentucky. Then, for twenty-five miles, tows pounded the water, and barge terminals and repair facilities, cement plants, refineries, floating harbors stacked with big containers, aerial power cables, and heavy truss bridges lined the banks. It was the kind of place an automobile traveler gets depressingly snagged in, but Nikawa bounced over the chopwater and soon had us free again.

  I’ve not said much about towboats and their massive train of barges (the earliest vessels actually towed, that is pulled, their loads, but today a more accurate name would be pushboats); I’ve been silent about how they bulldoze the river for miles, about how we had to keep out of their way, about our necessity to take an oncoming one, sometimes nearly a quarter mile long, on the inside of bends (where the shallows are), so that the violent prop wash and tons of barge swept away from our little jug. While I’ve found captains and pilots to be polite on shore, in a wheelhouse they usually ignored us when we radioed our intention to pass them port or starboard, and when we waved, our arms seemed invisible to them. What the hell, they’re the big boys of the river, and they act it; but once out of their sailing line, given the millennia of seniority tiny boats have earned, we refused to accept the river as theirs only. We figured we were doing something they could not do, and we believed our transcontinental quest gave us equal right to passage.

  The Ohio, Huntington to Louisville, 295 river miles

  It may have been the several large carp carcasses floating in Greenup Lock that led Pilotis to ask after we exited, “If all the millions of fish were pulled from this river, how much lower would it be?” We’d be dragging sand, I said. “Do you think as much as an inch?” I hoped it might be more because I liked the idea of the fishes helping keep us buoyant, and that in their absence we’d find the way harder, perhaps impossible without banging one gravel bar after another. Pilotis: “Carried across the country on the backs of fishes.”

  At Portsmouth, the Ohio yields most of its southerly course to run much more directly west for better than a hundred miles; that kind of topographical detail gave us a sense of accomplishment and a small boost to our will to continue—a determination challenged whenever we looked at a map of the United States and saw how much country yet lay before us. At times we talked about explorers, settlers, early travelers, wilderness, of how America perhaps more than any other nation built itself and many of its cherished myths around westering, a concept then and now most evident and the source of the greatest theme in our history: the journey. Westering is only logical from a country whose people all have ancestors from the eastern hemisphere, whose leaders considered Westward ho! a manifest destiny to be executed for the good of humanity—never mind those already dwelling there who sometimes got in the way. The American fate was to drive on to the sea where the sun sets, to take up the land, remake it according to our own images. We, so goes the gospel of our historiography, we descendants of the purported ancient Garden, were foreordained to create a new one. Whether that impulse was noble I leave to others, except to argue that our destiny would look considerably more estimable had our ancestors—and we—conceived the New Eden in terms less those, to keep the biblical context, of Mammon. Whenever I found myself faulting something along the river, I was usually, as I heard a professor once say, “deprecating mercantilistic esurience.”

  So, that afternoon, on we westered atop the remade Beautiful River to Portsmouth, a town with a first cause deriving from the Ohio itself, born of it, but now making itself into something else, a leopard wanting to become a lion. Portsmouth seemed bent on forgetting, denying, and hiding the river, turning itself into a place where the land voyager cruises up in the family sport utility vehicle, ties to a parking slot, and rafts the aisles of the megamall. I don’t intend curmudgeonry toward Portsmouth, for I consider the flatboat as one of the ancestors of the window van. From river rats to mall rats. Nevertheless, a traveler on the Ohio doesn’t see the town but rather a high, long, and forbidding concrete floodwall like a medieval rampart; lettering WELCOME across the fortress alleviates nothing, and the huge mural on the city side, while a tour de force, is painted history substituting for the reality of the river beyond.

  Below the mouth of the Scioto River (with its tributary Peepee Creek), we came upon the Docktor, but there followed no response to our hailing. Five miles farther we found a cove with a good pier, gasoline, and food, and we ceased our run. Twenty minutes later, in limped Cap’s boat. We took mooring lines from Mr. V—who looked disheveled and dispirited, and we asked how it had gone, but he only shook his head. When the boat was secure he finally spoke: “This thing has turned into a hell ship.” I said to Pilotis, Beelzebub.

  Later, after attitudes got redressed with a glass of rum, the sanctioned beverage of our fellow voyagers’ vessel, we learned they had run afoul of a drifting towboat hawser that wrapped around their propeller and shaft like tentacles of a giant squid and left them dead in the water again. Cap, amazingly, had managed to summon a fleet diver from a towing company, but he was unable to cut through the tangle, and the Doctor Robert had to be lifted out of the river by a crane to remove the line. The story struck a chill in us because their ill-luck monkey could jump to our horse, but all I suggested was Cap might swap boats with a worn cruiser tied next to him, the one named Why-U-Ask.

  From Humdrummery on down toward Tedium

  SLEEPING ABOARD Nikawa was a choice between a straitjacket and claustrophobia, the first coming from a mummy bag on a narrow bench where a turn in the night could mean ending up on the pilothouse deck, the other from the cuddy requiring a bent recumbence beneath an overhead resting virtually atop one’s brow. Night to night,
our only relief was to change places. Still, I liked sleeping aboard, lying snug if nothing else, and listening to the lap of water against the hull and sometimes being rocked easily into a slumber that came quickly but demanded patience in tolerating frequent wakings from cramped muscles or near rolls onto the deck.

  When I was home I’d dreamed of the river, but on the river I dreamed of home. That Monday morning, well past sunup, my sleep had me trying to write an article on food, although I couldn’t find the precise topic. Then, at last, a brilliant breakthrough: I came up with something! I got the title: “How to Make Theater Air in Used Olive Bottles.” I awoke in exhilaration, sat up, hit my head, crawled out of the cuddy, washed, and found my copilot already in the café. I shared the dream, then listened to another from that night: Pilotis browsed in a grocery and avidly read labels on soup cans; on one low-calorie chowder, “Only two servings per teaspoon.” I said, Have we been at this river stuff too long?

  Filling our fuel tanks before we set out, the young pump girl, hearing of our voyage, said to me, “Oh, God, I want your life!” Had I an urge to savage youthful dreams of a nobler sort than of soup tins or used olive jars, I might have told her what it took each day to earn the good moments. While a river can offer the adventure and romance of slow-moving freight trains you can board almost anywhere to let them take you who-knows-where, it otherwise is demanding, restrictive, exhausting. For every hour of excitement, for each sublime riverscape, there can be three or four hours of humdrum repetition that makes merely staying alert a mental tussle.