River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  And then happened a peculiarity, as if an omen for us to divine: a rough-winged swallow flittered toward Nikawa and alighted on the pulpit rail, looked at us, turned to peer down the river, rode a mile, then was gone, and Pilotis said, “One more thing you couldn’t put in a good novel.”

  The mouth of the Kentucky is at Carrolton; for a river nearly three hundred miles long, it enters modestly, slipping quietly from narrow shores suggesting the perpendicular cuts it makes through the limestone country it drains.

  Twelve miles farther we found a dock alongside an eatery and bar atop an old barge at Madison, Indiana, and we strolled up to town in the humid air, past the women’s softball game, up to the long and historically remarkable Main Street lined with pre- and turn-of-the-century buildings, several peeled of later obtrusive façades and restored to integrity, buildings that made us want to stay. So we walked a block off Main and came across a big antebellum house, now a bed-and-breakfast, and Pilotis went inside to inquire, but there was no room. The proprietor called another place and found a vacancy some distance away and a long hoof up the bluff road.

  Not wanting to start out, I fell into conversation with a carpenter working on the house. I spoke of the trash in the Ohio, and he said, “Don’t tell me. I’m a bank walker. For twenty-five years I’ve walked both sides of the Ohio, forty miles of it, looking for Indian artifacts. That river is an interstate of floating things. I saw an outhouse in a tree once. The trash sorts itself out into levels. Fishing lures and bobbers here, bleach bottles higher, tampon inserters above that. You know, like birds of a feather. When a sewage treatment plant overflows, the riverbanks are full of things you’d hope to see somewhere else.”

  The carpenter, Patrick Kelly, a tall and angular Ichabod Crane of a fellow with a kindly and generous demeanor who tidily flicked his cigarette ashes into his shirt pocket, found his first arrowhead when he was eleven and had stopped along a corn field to pee: there, wondrously at his feet, the point lay. In the following thirty-one years he’d found hundreds more Indian artifacts—stone knives, drills, axes, scrapers, a few pipes—as well as recent coins (“They get recycled fast”) and one gold watch, its interior rusted into a blob (“The case disappeared at the same time as the first Missus Kelly”). To help defray his young son’s college education, he hoped eventually to sell the collection and the careful cards he kept on each find.

  I asked whether he knew about the cabin site of Harlan Hubbard, the Kentucky artist who in 1944 salvaged yellow-pine timbers and planks from an old riverside building and assembled an ark he and his wife floated down to New Orleans, a voyage Hubbard described in his book Shantyboat. Later, after they left the bayous and returned to the middle Ohio, the couple built along the river a cabin out of rocks and trees, an experience he wrote about in Payne Hollow. Hubbard interested me because his undertakings and books are so intensely American: a river journey, turning a piece of woods into a house, finding a tenable existence between wilderness and civilization. I told Kelly about Afloat on the Ohio, Reuben Gold Thwaites’s account of an 1894 voyage, one of the good American river narratives.

  Our conversation went on long enough for him to offer us a lift up the bluff, a winding climb that seemed to go higher than the ridge itself, up to the Cliff House, an 1885 brick and portico mansion named by James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet, who slept there and gave a reading in the parlor. Now surrounded by ferns and big trees, the place had been hit by a tornado a couple of decades earlier, but the damage inspired renovation. Inside, in room after wallpapered room, were elaborations: marble fireplaces, beveled-glass fanlights, gilded mirrors, a grandfather clock, candelabra, oil lamps, two pianos, a foot organ, a breakfront carved with stringers of trout and a brace of doves, a wooden deer-head supporting a whatnot shelf, a dining table set with sterling silver napkin-rings depicting a menagerie of species. Our second-floor bedroom gave a long view down the Ohio beyond the roofs and spires of Madison. Near the window was an antique baby crib holding a doll, its face an unearthly pallor, its eyes evaporated; the thing looked like toy death. Our host said, “Somehow, some way, that doll’s head comes off in the night.” It’ll be nice to have it in the room, I said, and she took me for a man without sarcasm.

  When Kelly hauled us back down the bluff to Main Street, he told of the open construction ditch he’d noticed at the old river landing in Vevay. He said, “If I see a hole, I jump in to look around because I don’t ever dig, and in that one I found this thing stuck in the side, six feet down.” He handed me a small, much worn coin with a hole drilled through, apparently to accommodate a chain or thong. “What do you make of it?” I looked closely and, although some of the legend was gone, I could read CAROLUS IV and make out what seemed a Spanish coat of arms. I guessed it was Charles IV of Spain, king when Europeans started floating down the Ohio. “Take it,” he said. “Write me if you learn any more.” (It proved to be a fifty-centimos piece minted between 1788 and 1808 and quite possibly worn as a medal by an Indian.) “I can’t make a step along those riverbanks without wondering what’s under my feet. That’s where the past lives, you know, underneath. In 1972 I found a broken piece, probably a knife, I mean an Indian stone knife, the kind people would call a spear point. Twenty years later—I couldn’t believe it—I found the other half. When I matched the pieces together, the blade was almost five inches long. Broken pieces I call heartbreakers, but that one was a lifetime maker.”

  Before Kelly left, he directed us to an excellent meal I can’t describe because the amiable café owner, whom I also can’t describe, joined us for an hour or more and gave disquisitions on his life, philosophies, and plutological theories, saying things like, “I just married six days ago. A perfect woman. But it won’t last.” You know that already? “Of course. I’m a skirt chaser.” That can endanger things, I said. “I go down to the river almost every day to clear my mind, get some tranquillity.”

  After the café man returned us to the ridgetop and we were upstairs, Pilotis said, “Add that to the list of ways we use our rivers: purification of skirt chasers. What are you going to do with that conversation?” Save it for my novel.

  The bluff caught the high night wind and moved the curtains into wandering shadows that crossed the room back and forth, back and forth, and they whispered from the dim corners where they went to hide when the currents ceased; then the air stirred, and out they came again to slip over the old crib, ruffle the coverlet, caress the pallid, blind head, and I slept deeply until three. Suddenly I sat bolt upright in bed. Pilotis, alarmed, called out, “What?”

  Listen, I whispered, there’s something coming across the room. A scratching like toenails, tiny claws over the oak floor, stopping, starting, making for the crib. Dry dragging, scrabbling, something small, sinister.

  “Cut it out,” Pilotis hissed. I struggled to find the light. In the brightness, through the bathroom window, a breeze scattered dead leaves across the room. “Put that nefarious crib out in the hall.” You put it out, I said. Neither of us did. After all, we were adults, scorners of phantasmagoria.

  A River Coughed Up from Hell

  AFTER A BRIEF STORM passed over to leave blue sky and let us get on down to the river, we heard the weather might turn again, so we set off to keep from losing altogether the improved day. A rainbow, intensely colored but flattened as if stepped on, lay over Madison when we looked back, and Pilotis sang some ditty, commented that the Corps of Engineer charts for this lower half of the Ohio were far better than those for the upper portion, sang again. I sat happily at the wheel and for the hundredth time delighted in simply steering our course, and I spoke of how I was still almost incredulous the voyage was happening after I imagined it for so many years, and Pilotis said, “A journey long dreamed is the greatest one—even if you don’t reach the destination.” I answered that I wasn’t ready even to contemplate not getting to the Pacific. “Maybe you should.” I know this, I said, I disappoint myself most when I betray my dreams. “Failure isn’t betrayal.” In thi
s instance it is.

  We ran the gentle Ohio, and I offered that it was the longest river in America to have such regularity in the rise of its banks, shores so uniformly distant, its breadth at Pittsburgh only somewhat less than at the mouth. It was a watercourse European explorers could comprehend, unlike a Missouri, that quintessential big American river with a deception around every bend, a wile behind each towhead, a sleight under every bar, the one Mark Twain called “villainous.” When Pilotis took the wheel from time to time, I often went to the welldeck and stood watching the Ohio fall behind, our motors pushing us toward Oregon, and those moments never failed to inspire me.

  Pilotis carried small vials of ginseng made from the root of the wild panax, supposedly taken from the Changpai Mountains in Manchuria, mixed with royal jelly and water, a solution to impart vigor. That day, I felt the need of a roborant after my ghost-ridden night, and I swigged down two doses and, like Dr. Jekyll, waited for transformation, but all that changed was the day. A swarthy sky crept up from behind, crawled up our wake, an eastern darkness that increased at unnatural speed, and the wind began to pick up the river, throwing it, turning it back like a thin blanket, and shredding it and pitching the tatters against the bow, then over it and onto the windows. The noise of the hull against the water increased, and Pilotis asked, “Earplug time?” and I said, No—there’s something different about this turbulence—we need to keep listening. “Mostly what I’m hearing is swearing.”

  We banged on through the worsening. Pilotis radioed an approaching tow to ask about the weather, but the boat refused to respond; when we overtook another, again came silence. From the weather band we got this: Tornado watch/Possibility of large hail/Damaging thunderstorms/Dangerous lightning/Until eleven P.M. The nouns were alarming and the adjectives worse.

  I tried to keep in the lee of the hills as the storm began to run the river, and the chop turned to three-foot swells, and we crested and dropped, but neither of us mentioned Lake Erie. Pilotis said, “There’s a fortune waiting for the guy who invents boat shock-absorbers.” The foudroyant sky overtook us, and bolts began spiking the horizon, each one seeming to zap down closer, and again we could hardly hear each other. We both kept eyeing the steel bow-rail sticking up into the electrified weather. I yelled, Find us a creek! A cove! We’ve got to get the hell off this river!

  But there was nothing, and we were slamming harder, and the clouds were tornado black. I shouted, Find something on that goddamn chart! Pilotis held it up to show me the most uncreeked shoreline I’d ever seen, so on we thrashed, and the Pacific seemed very far away, quite beyond the thrust of our feeble motors and our pummeled hull. The interval between thunderbolt and thunder became briefer, and the river turned to an evil yellowy black like something coughed up from Hell.

  Try the radio again! I called out. An obliterated reception gave us answer. We came around a broad bend, and I asked, What’s that off the port bow? “You’re not going up that sonofabitch, are you? It’s a mudhole!” But I turned and entered the mouth of a twisting creek, and the thundergusts cracked over us, but we were no longer the highest thing within two hundred yards, and the muddy water was quiet. We came to a strand of docks, and I pulled up to one where we put out secure spring lines to hold Nikawa tight against the wind should it sweep down into the hollow. On a slope above, a flag stood straight out from the pole as if wooden.

  “Skipper, that cruise loosened my fillings,” Pilotis said as two domestic geese swam up to hiss and snap at me, miniature versions of the weather. “Appease the darlings of the river gods.” I offered the birds some bread which they gulped between snaps and hisses. We’d made only twenty-nine miles, but we didn’t care: now we had time to write in our logbooks, eat a cold supper, sit back safely in harbor, and perhaps let the storm rock us to sleep. I went up the hill to arrange for the dock, and the lady said, “Oh, heavens. I couldn’t charge you in weather like this.” I said, Ma’am, you should charge us for saving our lives. She smiled. “And how much would you pay for that?”

  A Necessity of Topography and Heart

  NOT LONG AFTER DAWN, when I went to the welldeck to dip up a basin of water for washing hands, Pilotis appeared and, as if addressing no one, said, “Why is a creek like a dog?” And then, stretching, answered, “Because you don’t know where it’s been.” I knew where my hands had been—cleaning the boat—and I sudsed away shamelessly. Eating little, we shoved off early into the overcast but stormless morning, the river quiet, and soon we passed the old Louisville waterworks, its minaret one of the distinctive landmarks on the Ohio. Across at Jeffersonville, Indiana, a boat-building town for more than a century and a half, the City of Evansville, a floating casino, was about ready to slide down the ways.

  Louisville is where it is because the Falls of the Ohio, once the only significant natural impediment within a thousand miles, are where they are. The broad ledge, while not high, was just enough to stop steamboats and necessitate that cargo be hauled overland to a vessel on the other side; around that simple portage of goods, the city grew. During high water, paddlewheelers could execute a thrilling ride through the falls to avoid the haulage, and one nineteenth-century writer reported the flooding river sweeping houses over, occupants crying out from windows and rooftops. McAlpine Dam sits upon much of the ledge now, but near the north side, the base of the Falls of the Ohio is still visible at low water, and from the limestone paleontologists have found a large fossil bed, an album of ancient sea creatures long gone before the Ohio made its first run over the rocks.

  After being blown off the river the day before, we were hoping to have a good run that Thursday, but the McAlpine Lock operator was a man who neither moved us along nor explained over the radio why he made us tie to the approach wall for half an hour. Like many of the lockmen on the Ohio, he refused to give any information, and my attempt to interest him in our long voyage ended with his silence quieter than Rocky Mountain snowmelt. So there we sat, both locks empty of boats. Finally the gates opened, we entered, the gates closed, and—we waited some more. Eventually we began a slow descent, but four feet down the water stopped moving and we sat again. Then we started back up. Pilotis spoke my irrational concern: “Did you violate some ordinance? Are they going to call us over?” Had I left the radio on while we grumbled about McAlpine operators? Then the upstream gates reopened, and I was sure we were going to get some directive. It was as if I’d just glanced in a rearview mirror and seen flashing red and blue lights. Pilotis went aft with the binoculars to look upriver for a police boat, then called out in annoyance, “Oh, good god!”

  I went back, took the glasses, and there slogging up was—what else? The Docktor. We were being held up for her. She came in and took a bitt behind us, and after another delay we started the descent once more, and we talked stern to bow. Cap said, “It’s been raining to the west. That damn Missouri River of yours is starting to flood again. Trees, docks, all hell’s coming down into the Mississippi.” I said, For a minute there I thought you had bad news. “I don’t think we’ll try it,” he said. “Current ten to fifteen miles an hour against us. And the drift. Waterfronts are under. Way too much risk.” Hell, I said, there’s only twenty-five hundred miles of it.

  An hour and a half later we were at last free of the infernal McAlpine Lock and could skim down the pebbled river as if we were a water strider, and Pilotis said, “So that flooding, what do you think?” I shrugged. “I know this—you can’t always go where you want when you want.” But on this voyage, I answered, to go where we want, we have to go when we want. “So then, did you put up that ‘Proceed as the way opens’ just to mock yourself?” I said, The only way to test the waters is to get out on the waters, and, as you know, most of the time it’s too late to turn back when you understand you should turn back. Two years ago the Missouri flooded for half a year. “And what’s six months against your life?” Pilotis said. This voyage is my life—I can’t get along from here without getting to the other side of the country—it’s a necessity
of topography and heart—you know what’s been happening in my life—I’ve put everything into this voyage—my landward life resumes at the Pacific Ocean. “Skipper, you sound like Meriwether Lewis.” I said, Sometimes all you can do is commit to the flood and believe yourself lucky.

  The Ohio, Louisville to Mississippi Confluence, 378 river miles

  The Ohio clicked under the hull, water of happy texture, and we were finding the good run we’d wanted, but of course on the river all things sooner or later come into balance, and our counterweight just then was gasoline tanks nearing empty. Below the reach of Louisville industry, we passed some shoreside houses, new places, then we were again between hills rising from a narrow bench that opened every so often to tilled plots atop eight-foot-high earthen banks. We found no fuel at West Point, Kentucky, and nothing at Brandenburg sixteen miles farther. From there the Ohio takes to meandering through sparsely populated country where horseshoe bends and oxbows make it run an errant seven or eight miles to gain only twelve hundred feet westward. The river turned rough and drift beset us, so we had to slow down here, weave around floaters there, all of it killing fuel economy, and twice we had to stop to clean the props of branches, but the twisting green hills gave recompense in their rumpled sublimity.