River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  I returned to the wheel and tried to fathom the way. Occluded water that doesn’t move is like a face behind a mask—any horrible thing might be under it. Pilotis watched the transom for telltale silt as I eased us weavingly upstream toward several boys playing baseball in the shallows, upright sticks serving as bases. Behind second, in their outpool, several home run balls bobbed around. Over the radio, Pilotis hooted up the Professor who said he could hear Nikawa but couldn’t see her, to which Pilotis replied, “We just rounded first and are going for second, but it looks like we’ll have to slide headlong to beat the tag.” That’s when I realized the home run balls were actually little buoys, and I muddied us along them until the trees opened and there was the orange flag. After we pulled up, the Professor said, “That last transmission was really distorted. It sounded like you were gabbing about baseball.”

  Once Nikawa was on the trailer and we were wiping mud off her nose, someone crabbed, “That damn river’s like a conscientious woman—she keeps you on your toes all the time.”

  Flux, Fixes, and Flumdiddle

  ONE FEBRUARY SUNDAY in 1913, a girl with her classmates was walking around by their schoolground on an arid bluff overlooking the Missouri and Bad rivers near the courthouse town of Fort Pierre, South Dakota, across from the capital; she noticed something strange protruding from the soil and pulled loose a metal rectangle about the size of her reader. So encrusted with hard dirt it was, the children could make out only a date, 1743, and they joked about its origin and threw it down, but one boy retrieved it and carried the heavy plaque to his father who called the state historical society. As the dirt came off, incised words began appearing, Latin on one side, French the other, and the historians grew highly animated; for some time they had been hunting the location of a lead-zinc tablet buried by the Vérendryes on their expedition in quest of a passage to the western sea. The French Canadians gave up in Montana and started home again, stopping for two weeks near the mouth of the Bad River. Wanting to accomplish something of note, they claimed much of the western country for Louis XV and left the plate as proof of possession.

  Sixty-one years later, although a stone cairn still marked the site, Lewis and Clark unknowingly passed by the tablet that the Louisiana Purchase had just turned into nothing more than a rare and curious artifact, a relative of the lead tablets Pierre-Joseph de Céloron buried in 1749 along the riverbanks of the Allegheny and the Ohio. That three of the French tablets claiming about half of the forty-eight states would ever be found again is the stuff of a children’s mystery book.

  The Missouri, Pierre to Garrison Dam, 325 river miles

  Hauling Nikawa through Fort Pierre, one of the oldest white settlements on the upper Missouri, to Oahe Dam north of town, we stopped at a filling station to gas her tanks and the five six-gallon reserve canisters we’d begun carrying since leaving Kansas City. A priss of a man watching us with his young daughter said, “See the men on the funny boat?” and she asked, “Daddy, are they going to die on the funny boat?” When we headed on, the Professor said, “Where in God’s name did her question come from?” Pilotis: “Some parent whose fears take long steps through a short-legged life.”

  Behind Oahe Dam lies Lake Oahe, by several measures the biggest of the mainstem impoundments. Running for 230 miles, almost from Pierre to Bismarck, North Dakota—capital to capital—Oahe has more than two thousand miles of shoreline, and near the dam it is two hundred feet deep (Lake Erie has 871 miles of shore and is 210 feet at its deepest). Today the Missouri there is a river as Atlantis is an island.

  We hoped to reach Mobridge, South Dakota, before sundown, eighty miles due north but 123 by water. From the dam all the way to the Montana line, the middle of the Missouri demarks, but for a notch here and there, the boundary of the Rocky Mountain time zone. The Professor commented, “If we fall an hour behind we can just meander over to the west bank.” Although the Snow Imperative impelled us less fervently as we approached the mountains, another, if lesser, time constraint appeared. Each morning when we departed the tow wagon, we rarely saw it again until our arrival. Waiting for Nikawa to reach her daily destination could be nerve-racking to the trailerman who had to stand by helpless during a delay except to imagine the worst, trying to calculate the moment to go in search of a rescue team. Should we be clinging in cold water to a swamped Nikawa, minutes could make the difference in our survival.

  The country we were about to set out for that June day was more isolated than any we’d yet entered, and there was but one practical place the tow wagon might spot Nikawa, the U.S.212 highway bridge about halfway along our run. The marine radio could operate over no more than about a mile—far less if hills or trees lay between us—and a cellular phone, had we one, would have been useless in that vast noplace beautifully free of relay towers. Because I wanted as much independence from shore support as we could achieve, I disliked having to depend on a tow vehicle to get around the dams, and further, I enjoyed being cut off—it put an edge on the venture that too much safety, too much civilization would kill. On the Plains, that great pot that brews up much American weather, the element most likely to delay us was wind, but we, not dependent on sails, could afford to consider Aeolus a blackguard who surely must despise vessels no longer needing him. Our motors permitted me to love nautical doldrums.

  Although the Missouri contorts to a fare-thee-well on Oahe, the bends are so big and the water so deep I could that morning lay down a sailing line and hold it for five or six miles before having to take a new heading; given that our vessel was something of a tortoise, running straight and steady was a joy no rabbit of a speedboat could understand. The wind puffed in irresolute wafts, and for a few miles we bounced over low waves, the effect something like riding a cart down the ties of a railway, but then even that mild roughness eased, and Oahe sang under our bow, and we were able to focus on a single concern—mistaking one of the huge arms or coves of the giant impoundment for the through river. On a map, Oahe looks like a skinny wiggle of harmlessness, but from its actual surface it is a small main waiting to confuse a pilot. If Galilee is a sea, then Oahe is an ocean.

  Even prairie creeks like Okobojo can open to a debouchment four thousand feet wide and sprawl broadly upcountry for five miles, and the Cheyenne River, which I once waded bank to bank west of Oahe, opens to a mouth two miles across and runs into the hills like that for twenty-three miles before it returns to a Plains stream. In certain places, we could see beyond our bow fourteen miles of open water dead ahead.

  Because I wanted to look at rivers and not instruments, I was happy the morning sun gave me an angle to steer against, a method I preferred to watching the compass. The device below our transom that might have measured mileage had not withstood the battering of Lake Erie and the drift fields of the Ohio, so to try to know our position, I roughly translated rpm’s into miles per hour, and Pilotis attempted to match our chart with the far steep shores, things so distant they looked like coasts and made us feel we had somehow wandered out of the United States. I’d traveled every county in the Great Plains, but I’d never seen them look as they did there. It wasn’t the treeless roll of the hills—that was familiar enough—rather, it must have been the littoral aspect that the grand spread of water gave under a big sky. Like the ocean, Oahe can be a near vacancy of everything except water and air. So we fluviomariners went coasting up along the vast shores of Dakota, where gulls, Franklin’s and ring-billed, hung off our stern or rose before our bow as if Nikawa were at sea, and Pilotis sang a chantey that we happily endured, so apt it was.

  Capable of carrying clipper ships and men-of-war, Oahe could be a portion of the Northwest Passage that Europeans long dreamed of and Lewis and Clark went looking for. That passage, however, leads not to the riches of Cathay but to the fertile abundance of the Plains, which were, of course, once an inland sea, and today, beneath them, lies the Ogallala aquifer, a reservoir of sand and porous rock holding as much water as Lake Huron. Considered truly for what they possess, the Hig
h Plains are as exotic as any oriental realm at the end of the Great Silk Road—their flora, fauna, and their native habitants whose ancestors learned to hunt and sing and chip flint points in Asia long before Great Walls, pagodas, or paddy fields. Those nomads out of Mongolia came in search of a Northeast Passage that led them into a new world where mammoths and mastodons died out and the horse and camel were born.

  If Big Bend looks on a chart like a long-necked turkey, Little Bend resembles a skinny duck, wings ready to unfold, rising to fly. It too is a long peninsula, though narrower, thrusting northwesterly six miles into Oahe; a quarter mile across at the base and about four times wider near its headland, Little Bend is a river run of eighteen miles around. Treeless, half of it roadless, wild, and as isolated as about any place on the Plains today, its broken terrain drew me as plowed-over Big Bend did not. Everywhere, small embayments and snug bights serrate its margin, and Pilotis estimated it has more than a hundred miles of shore. On the back side, I turned into a sheltered cove, eased our bow onto a gravel beach, and we tied Nikawa stem and stern to the only bollards available, two shrubs, and then we broke out a cold lunch and left the boat. The Photographer experimented with our hand-held GPS to see if it might answer our frequent and sometimes crucial question about where we were. Pilotis wandered off, and I went up the slope, looked around, then sat down under the cordial sky and congenial sun, the wind amicable too. Low grasses and scrub dominated, but where they seemed unwilling to grow was nothing except friable, baked clay, the whole rise clearly a place that could be ungodly unforgiving in another season, a different weather.

  I lay back on the warm soil, a pale broken crust, and watched the other end of creation pass above as cumuli dissipated their way eastward, air sailors that would not last long enough to see even the other end of South Dakota. I thought how far I was from where and when this journey began, how I was so distant from that fellow passing for me twenty months ago, the one so eager to learn the secrets of river passage. Could he—the me of that moment—and I sit down together, he would want to know what I knew and absorb what I had experienced, and he would regard me enviously, just as I do those men who have returned from the moon. But there would be forever a difference between him and me: I went and he did not. He set the voyage in motion, but he could not take it. Just as I, who lay on the Dakota hill, could not know whether Nikawa would reach the Pacific, he could never see the outcome of his preparations, unless somewhere, on some far other side, time permits us to meet our past selves, all those we have been. Our physical components change every seven years, so our brains are continuously passing along memories to a stranger; who we have been is only a ghostly fellow traveler. As for me, what might I learn from him who laid out the voyage or from all those others I once was? The eighteen-year-old who wanted to write, the thirty-year-old who wanted to teach, the waiter wanting a paycheck, the sailor boy wandering Port-au-Prince, the husband who didn’t keep a marriage together, the son who heard his ailing father say one night toward the end, “I want to be like Black Elk and go into the mountains and die,” the callow kid who nearly fainted the first time a girl really kissed him, the boy too old to be afraid of sleeping alone in the woods but who was.

  What a report I might deliver to them about where they have sent me! And how they could remind me of first kisses and death, the Haitian mountains at sunset and the Ozark hills at night. They could redraw the faded lines on the long map of my journey here, point out clearly where it was I took a road other than the one they intended, and they could tell me whether they liked that divagation or not, whether they found it a good one or rankly stupid. Were human memory total and perfect, perhaps I’d be only one person from start to finish, but forgetfulness cuts me off from who I’ve been so that hourly I am reborn. To twist Santayana’s words, I who cannot fully remember my past am condemned to proceed without it.

  Close to my ear a voice: “How about a cool, refreshing phroso?” I opened my eyes and for an instant had no idea where I was. The Photographer said, “I’ve walked this GPS all over, and the readout changes with every step. It’s incredibly sensitive, but we don’t have a chart with degrees and minutes so the numbers are meaningless.” He went off down the slope, and I thought, That’s the way it is in life—you get a position or a map but not both at the same time.

  So, where was I? I didn’t really know other than to remember visually much of the way that brought me here. As a Navy recruit, I failed a course in celestial navigation, partly because of my innumeracy and partly because I thought the navigator’s perpetual quest to fix his position created a bad precedent for piloting through one’s life where the course must follow the eternal flux, a grand flowing that turns celestial fixes to flumdiddle. I’ve never been as interested in where I am as in what it was like to get there. On our venture I wanted to learn the rivers the way a pilot must in order to get a license, to see them all and draw them from memory mile for mile. Where I was at any particular moment wasn’t usually that important because a fixed position lasts only a moment, but the times when I remembered a particular run of river and what it was like—remembered her and how she was—moments like those can reappear and last for hours, even until the end. The more miles I put under me, the more those recollections become the very vessels carrying me to the finish.

  I went down to the boat where the Photographer held up an object as if it were of great price—a brass casing of a fifty-caliber machine-gun bullet, something probably ejected from a plane during World War Two when the military used this far beyond for aerial combat training. I had the feeling he would not long remember the GPS hike, but he’d never forget the thing that fell from the sky and lay waiting a half century for him to pick up and connect himself with a past.

  I called out across the long peninsula, and soon Pilotis appeared from the far side, and we shoved off and headed upriver. To occupy miles, one looking much like the next, Pilotis read passages from Lewis and Clark, and I kept listening for the captains’ response to traveling that vast openness which must have been even bigger then, given the way humankind has succeeded in wringing distance out of this planet—a process the Expedition furthered—for nothing is larger than an unknown. The Pacific was not as far away after Lewis and Clark found a route and returned with maps, with astronomical observations of precisely where they’d been, and, perhaps most of all, with stories of the new land. So I steered out the Oahe miles and listened for the captains to speak in their own terms of space and time, but along that section of the Missouri, Lewis (who was to become a suicide three years after he returned to civilization) kept to his astral fixes, his columns of mathematically expressed positions, and Clark stayed with practicabilities.

  We swept around another bend so large it was almost impossible to perceive as a turn, and soon after we saw the U.S.212 bridge. As we closed the distance, Pilotis through the binoculars made out the orange flag, and I called over the radio, and the Professor said, “Where the hell have you been? I thought you’d gone down!” No, I said, we just made a short landing in a long land.

  Nikawa proceeded on, skimming the next miles like a clipper, and Pilotis read not to inform but merely to break what I have to admit was something close to monotony. There are times when the Missouri seems so long, you wonder how it ever manages to flow up and over the curvature of the earth. Then the river helped out by twisting again, regaining some shallows, raising its threats and lifting our grogginess. The Photographer said, “By the way, just what is a phroso?” One ounce ginger syrup, one ounce lemon syrup, dash of rum, dash of bitters, one egg, phosphate to taste; shake over cracked ice, strain, serve with nutmeg.

  We ascended beyond the broad exit of the Moreau River and continued winding north for another twenty miles until, at last, we could make out a thin dark line across the water. “Please let that be it,” the Photographer said, and it was, the span that gave the old ferry crossing a new name, Mobridge.

  Off to port, from atop a windswept bluff, a stone face looked down o
n us. Beneath the rock eyes of the monument lie the remains of Sitting Bull, entombed by his descendants in twenty tons of concrete so that he, the child of nomads, might never again be removed from his land. We tied up in Smith Bay under another monument, this one to Jedediah Smith, whose history is the reverse of the great Lakota: a New Englander who left settled lands to roam the West, got caught, probably by Comanches, and killed. No one ever found his remains to bury them anywhere.

  The Professor helped us fill gas canisters and stevedore them to Nikawa before we crossed the river into Mobridge to find supper in a big old place where, in another room, an Indian wedding rolled along. I recited a verse by Ed Miller:

  The bride

  is groomed,

  the groom

  is bridled.

  I asked our waitress what tribe the people were. Her expression said, “Of what possible interest could that ever be?” but her words were “I don’t know. They’re Indians.” We just looked at her, and, growing uncomfortable, she added, “Sioux, I guess,” pausing, then, “I’ll send some over to tell you.”