River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Of the twelve hundred books on my home shelves containing accounts of exploration and travel in America, a number are about river journeys. That Monday, as we reached the quarter-way mark of our try at crossing the continent, I realized I would hereafter read them in a new light: those with never a dull moment were suspect, if not mendacious, for to travel a river that is not white water is to go slowly, often drudgingly. One of the reasons the voluminous journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition have power lies in their honest portrayal of frequent tedium, often conveyed by the simple phrase “we proceeded on.” Because moving water is—and I do not overstate this—death waiting, the pilot cannot just put the boat on cruise control, sit back with two fingers on the power-steering wheel, and daydream through a spell of monotony. The river is no blue highway because a river removes reverie. I think that’s the reason, at the end of a day on the water, Pilotis and I were more tired than events usually seemed to warrant. Our most reliable and consistent antidote to humdrummery, in other words, was risk, and at every moment it called us, impelled us to heedfulness when nothing else did, even as it wearied us.

  My usual remedy for tedium on a highway is to stop and walk a place, but on a river that’s harder to do. The Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative aside, many villages called to us, but a landing and tie-up was frequently unwise or impossible, especially so early in the season, with uncertain weather and rising waters keeping docks from going in or being open. We loved the isolation available on a river in spring, something harder to come by in July, but we had to pay for it. In one place the problem could be as simple as an impassable bank of grease-mud lurking with skid demons, or an impenetrable scrub, or in another it might be security. Pilotis had a clear vision of naughty boys covertly undoing our mooring line to watch an unattended Nikawa drift downriver, over a dam, onto rocks, under a barge; indeed, a small boat is a difficult thing to secure by any means other than one’s presence.

  And so it was that day as we passed allurements. Vanceburg, Ken tucky, shone in the sun, the brightly red roof of its courthouse against blue sky; and Maysville, as pretty a town as there is on the Ohio, appeared even more inviting, the golden dome of its courthouse gleaming like high justice, steeples like slender fingers beckoning the miserable and fallen, Federal-style orange tin roofs, white antebellum columns, green lawns bright with May, and all of it climbing the narrow river flats for a few hundred feet before the rise became too steep for anything but oaks and hickories at last in full leaf. Here on the rim of the South we had reached midspring through both time and space, and at last we wore short sleeves. Often, where we could not stop I tried to relate memories from my other travels in the place, or Pilotis swept a village with binoculars and concocted a tale of what might be there.

  At Ripley, Ohio, the spot Eliza carries her baby to freedom over the river ice-floes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we found that rare combination, a village showing historic and handsome waterfront buildings, a stairway up the slick bank free of floodwalls, and a dock with a little barge café and a sign we thought might be missing letters:

  FRI D CH CK N TOD

  Said Pilotis, “It could mean Friday Chuck and Todd, whoever they are, will be here, or if the food’s German it could mean on Friday they serve chicken and death, but I hope it means Fried Chicken Today.” And it did. Chicken Jim cooked up five thousand pounds of barbecued bird a season, but not just then as he tried halfheartedly to clean out the café, a place deeply piled and waiting for either spontaneous combustion or a lawsuit. I estimated the sprucing could take until the river froze over, especially if he continued to use paint and a paintbrush instead of a shovel and broom. A quiet, polite man, he asked where we were coming from, and I said New York City. Expecting Pittsburgh or Wheeling, he stopped in mid-drag on his cigarette and said, “What?” Pilotis nodded, and Jim asked, “Can you do that?” I said, This is the easy side of the Mississippi. “Yes,” he said, “I hear the water’s rising real good on out west there.”

  We climbed the terrace to town. Trucks hauled to market cured tobacco, and we walked Main Street in quest of worthy food, but the recommendations required wheels, so we settled for a bland sandwich, a sorry thing compared to what Pilotis might have assembled aboard Nikawa. Worse, we couldn’t find a good conversation; the best I did was overhear a wrinkled gentleman, long a member of the Borrowed Time Club, whose drooping patty melt did not match his erect posture, say to his lady, “Would you make a pudding tonight, plum blossom?” Like an army, I travel on my stomach, and I told Pilotis my only disappointment on our voyage was the frequent unmemorable food we’d had to accept, and Mate asked, “Did you ever consider carrying bikes?” and then answered, “Of course. Where would we put them?” I said, The river giveth and the river taketh away.

  Filled but not satisfied, on down the Ohio we went, through its wooded shores, past Augusta, another appealing village with a century-gone aspect, then a line of house trailers disfiguring the north bank for some miles. Meldahl Lock we descended with ease, although Pilotis became intrigued with a floating boat cushion and tried to fish it from the water and would have missed the mooring bitt had I not said, Do you remember talking about tedium and risk this morning? The response, in sarcasm, “Aye, Captain.”

  Along the nearly thousand miles of the Ohio, perhaps nothing in our generation marks it out more than the regular appearance of big power plants and their high smokestacks leaking into the sky. Many barges haul coal to those places, and even in this day more than half of the deadly mercury released into the air of Ohio and other nearby states comes from yellow smoke like that rising innocuously above us near Meldahl, an effluent that ends up in the water and makes even occasional eating of local fish dangerous for children and pregnant women. Utility companies still are not required to control airborne mercury and a number of other pollutants, and corporate people making a living from the river have shown the same likelihood of changing their ways voluntarily as turnips to sprout feathers.

  Then came Point Pleasant, Ohio, birthplace of Ulysses Grant, and we followed a long bend northwest to New Richmond with its historic river hotel, and on around the curve to the bluffs of east Cincinnati where we began searching out a night mooring. Always thinking of ourselves as boatmen (a genderless term) but never boaters, we continually tried to avoid marinas, preferring a more natural experience of finding an inlet or some odd cranny, even in tough tie-up areas at city centers. Much of the bank of Cincinnati is, as it has been since paddlewheel days, given to a sloping stone and concrete landing use less to a small boat, so we motored back and forth in the declining light on water beat up by towboats. At last, near the mouth of the Licking River in Newport, Kentucky, we found a square of quietness on the inside of a big restaurant barge, and I asked permission to stay overnight, taking a chance on security.

  As we tightened mooring lines, Pilotis called out, “I can’t believe it!” Swimming up to Nikawa and eyeing her intently was a beaver. There, under the shadows of skyscrapers and interstate bridges, was the economically preeminent beast of westering America, the creature that drew in most of the first white people, an animal once eradicated from this river through numerous causes, not the least of which was massively polluted water. She dived under the barge where, we learned, she had built a lodge.

  We took quarters nearby, showered, and went out but could find none of that peculiar and highly local delectability called Cincinnati chili within foot distance, so we walked back to the River Café and watched the Queen City across the Ohio light up and turn it into a wet and wavery kaleidoscope. Underneath us was a beaver lodge, and I said, I need to be careful—these rivers are starting to make me optimistic.

  A History of the Ohio in Three Words: Mastodons to Condoms

  THE MORNING DOWNPOUR came on so heavy it turned the window glass into a curtain, nothing visible beyond, and the I room was still dark an hour after dawn, so I went back to bed —there would be no rivering in that weather. At ten, when the rain eased but didn’t cease, we sogged do
wn to the barge café and ate club sandwiches and watched the oldest overnight steamboat on American waters, the Delta Queen, arrive and tie up at the Cincinnati landing. Through what was now just dreary air, we saw but couldn’t hear the steaming notes of the calliope tootle and warble up to dance the mists, and a man watching next to me said, “She’s the most beloved boat in America.” He’d taken a six-day trip on her a year earlier, a voyage he chose after somebody told him a person living in daily view of the Ohio as he did should know the differences among a towboat, tugboat, and barge. “I used the words interchangeably, and I’ve probably seen that river six days out of seven for the past forty years. So I took the Delta Queen to learn what the river is really like, because you don’t know anything from just crossing on a bridge a dozen times a week. Cincinnati is, or was anyway, a river city. In 1860 that commercial waterfront was six miles long. Today, I’ll bet not one person in twenty knows the depth of the channel, the average speed of the current, or who’s in charge of the dams. People in Denver go up Pikes Peak. People in Cincinnati try to stay off the Ohio.”

  We went down to Nikawa and found her still tidily tucked in, but the welldeck was just that, a well with two inches of water, so I bailed her, tightened the little canopy, and we struck off into the gloom and passed under Roebling’s great suspension bridge of 1856, the noblest on the Ohio. Cincinnati has four nineteenth-century bridges, the most on the river, but the others, all truss spans, lack elegance and romance. From there to the mouth at Cairo, Illinois, the Ohio takes no more long turns northward, content to permit only seven small humps in its passage southwest. The narrow bottoms were full of industry—oil, asphalt, cement, chemicals, coal piles, railyards, transformer stations. It was the kind of place bombardiers draw a bead on in wartime, and the overcast day made things even grimmer, so we motored on in silence. Twenty miles out, Nikawa reached several benchmarks at once: the Indiana line, the Central time zone, and the halfway point of the Ohio. As if to dramatize it, the sun broke through and Pilotis said, “I know you’ve planned the voyage with due process, but sunlight at this very moment? Are we flaunting our powers?” Better that than to speak of our luck, I said.

  Lawrenceburg, Indiana, almost two hundred years old like many of the other river towns and villages along there, has an appealing main street which a highway traveler misses because of the bypass and which the Ohio traveler also misses because of the big levee (the 1937 flood still topped it) built on what was once Gamblers’ Row, a place of boisterous vice infamous from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Today things have settled down to a casino boat and whiskey making, legal vices in the minds of certain brow-dripping evangelicals. A half century ago a reporter wrote an anonymous squib about this piece of the Ohio:

  The river banks are peopled with families who live in shacks or houseboats. They raise a small patch of tobacco for their own use, and subsist mainly on catfish and greens, accepting the periodical high waters with philosophic calm. They move up the hills into deserted barns until the water recedes, and then return to their shanties to resume their usual occupation of gazing dispassionately at the river.

  The heavy rain and rising water had flushed from the leafy hills much drift and flotsam, mostly the two things of greatest buoyancy, pieces of trees and objects of plastic, but there were also several Emblems of the Ohio—floating automobile tires—as well as less danger ous mats of maple seeds we could churn through. Atop one drifting log sat a pair of migrating terns, wing to wing, doing nothing as is the wont there but gazing dispassionately at the river; even when we passed, they just watched like visitors getting to know the Ohio.

  The air warmed, the wind rose, and we moved from glassy water to ripples, the changing conditions more apparent to the ear than the eye: the hull of Nikawa, with its sensitivity to the surface of water, conducted sounds like a crystal goblet and registered the river, slicks to slaps, each tinkle and trickle, gurgle and gulp, whack and whomp. Nikawa spoke the river, gave it tongue, and said how to proceed as the clattering chattered, nattered, jabbered out a course. Leagues back we’d learned to heed the hull—not that I always remembered—and on that day I moved us along according to my eye only, over the gleaming water toward a western horizon whispering, Hurry, sundown soon, and I obeyed it, even as the wind stiffened, the water rattled, and I began to grouse about conditions. Pilotis tapped the plaque above us and said, “Does Captain wish to proceed as the way opens or just bang us the fuck through?” I throttled down, put in earplugs, followed the sounder to deeper—that is, easier—water where things were better. An exotic scent of marigolds and eucalyptus wafted into the pilothouse, although either odor had to be impossible then. Because we saw no dock out yet, we didn’t stop at Rising Sun, Indiana—across the river from Rabbit Hash, Kentucky—although it looked good in the afternoon light and we needed a bracer, maybe a phroso; perhaps somewhere in the village was a relict fountain and an ancient sodaman who knew the secrets of a Tenderfoot Punch (2 ounces rum, 1 tablespoon Nesselrode pudding, grape juice, dash of bitters, shaved ice). Traveling a prairie creates strange hungers, but a river brings on peculiar thirsts.

  We went on down, down past the mouth of Big Bone Creek. A mile or two over the hills was a spring where beasts of another age—mastodons, Arctic elephants, three-toed sloths—came to lick salt from the margins and sometimes mired themselves in the bog. Late eighteenth-century travelers reported heaps of bones embedded or lying about, and people made tent poles from mastodon ribs and footstools of vertebrae, and they carried off souvenir ten-pound molars, ivory tusks the length of two squatty men, femurs as long as one tall woman. Hearing of the incredible prehistoric boneyard in 1805, Thomas Jefferson sent out an expedition to gather a large and repre sentative collection; in the next thirty-five years diggers removed skeletons of twenty elephants and a hundred mastodons to stock American and European museums until the salt lick was all but empty of fossils. By the start of the Civil War the spring was little more than a spa for young ladies “gone into decline,” whatever that meant, and obese seniors seeking a cure for adiposity in the sulfurous water. As for the Jeffersonian collection, an unwitting servant ground it into fertilizer. Underneath Nikawa now was salt and a saline history from Big Bone Lick.

  By the time we reached Patriot, Indiana, we were convinced this stretch of the Ohio was by far the most littered water we’d seen. Except for pockets here and there, from the Atlantic our route had been surprisingly free of floating trash, even the East River, but that section of la belle rivière seemed to be a drain where debris from the past five hundred miles came to go down. For about an hour we kept a list, almost everything on it plastic:

  miscellaneous pails up to five gallons (4)

  lard buckets (3) milk jug cases (2)

  laundry baskets (2)

  fabric softener bottles (8)

  Thermos bottles (3)

  ice chests (2)

  dock floats (3)

  mounted auto tires (4)

  rubber glove (1)

  prophylactics (2)

  doll heads (3)

  toy autos (2)

  Big Wheel tricycle (1)

  football helmet (1)

  balls, you name the sport (17)

  Playtex tampon applicators (gobs)

  motor oil quarts (galore)

  bleach jugs (more than galore)

  juice and sodapop bottles (a gazillion)

  disposable lighters (whatever happened to Zippos guaranteed for life?)

  cigarette filter tips (now we’re talking depressing)

  We reasoned that few of these things had been tossed directly into the river, but rather most had washed into it from places some distance off the Ohio, probably the preponderance from the old Appalachian method of disposal I call OTHOOS—over the hill, out of sight. The rafts of cigarette filters came from people pitching butts out car windows onto highways and town streets where rain washed them down creeks. What Pilotis called “crotch rot,” tampon applicators and condoms, came from those who would, were
it possible, flush their broken Hoovers and Maytags down the toilet.

  When we got into Markland Lock—the disharmonic noise of this one was excerpts from a John Cage score—I commented over the radio about the trash, and the tender said, “It’s okay—Ohio Clean Sweep people will be out next weekend.” The Sweep is a noble annual effort by volunteers to pick the shores clean, but as in all things, a new attitude is the only lasting solution: to educate people so they connect spiritually with rivers is to change what goes over the hill, onto the street, down the toilet. Pilotis proposed that all commodes be imprinted PLEASE CONSIDER THOSE ON THE OTHER END—US. I said, To a Zen Buddhist, flushing is a spiritual act.

  Off to starboard lay Vevay (pronounced VEE-vee), an Indiana village founded by Swiss who once made wine from rootstock brought from the Cape of Good Hope but gave it up when they realized a bushel of potatoes—requiring only planting and harvesting—traded for as much as a demijohn of their claret-like red. Thinking of phrosos (forgotten), Vevay vino (gone), or water one could drink straight from the Ohio (unwise), I told Pilotis we ought to storm onto the courthouse lawn and do what J. D. Salinger said Lincoln should have done at Gettysburg: simply stand up and shake a fist at a self-destructive people.

  Holding the Indiana WPA Guide and ready to read aloud, Pilotis said, “Here’s a Vevay story to quell your dudgeon, another sad tale but of a different sort, one that sounds like the seed of a novel. There was a woman here, Mary Wright, an ironic name as you’ll see, who owned a fine Clementi piano. She was, and I quote, ‘the daughter of an aristocratic but impoverished English family that came to this country in 1817 and settled on a land grant near Vevay. Deserted by her English fiancé, she lived bewildered and heartbroken in this wild, rough country. An accomplished musician, she found outlet for her grief and loneliness in weekly concerts she gave for the pioneer folk of the community. On each occasion she descended the ladder from the second floor of her father’s rough log cabin, attired in court dress and jewels, and with a gracious bow seated herself at the piano and played her entire repertoire. Then without a word she would retire to her second-storey room, and the guests would quietly depart. These concerts continued for forty years without the piano ever being tuned, or the introduction of a new composition. The dress grew faded and the jewels tarnished, but the same dignified procedure endured year after year. The only time Mary Wright ever left the house was to wander alone in the moonlight. She was found dead in her room in 1874, at the age of eighty-two.’”