River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  And there is yet one more strange and unaccountable peculiarity, which can probably be seen nowhere else on earth, nor on any rational grounds accounted for, other than it is a freak or order of Nature for which she has not seen fit to assign a reason. There are very many of both sexes and of every age from infancy to manhood and old age with hair of bright silvery grey, and in some instances almost perfectly white.

  This singular and eccentric appearance is much oftener seen among the women than it is with the men, for many of the latter who have it seem ashamed of it and artfully conceal it by filling their hair with glue and black and red earth. The women, on the other hand, seem proud of it and display it often in an almost incredible profusion which spreads over their shoulders and falls as low as the knee. . . . By passing this hair through my hands, as I often have, I have found it uniformly to be as coarse and harsh as a horse’s mane, differing materially from the hair of other colours, which amongst the Mandans is generally as fine and as soft as silk.

  We passed Fort Abraham Lincoln, the post the Seventh Cavalry rode out from to their rendezvous at the Little Bighorn. Four miles farther, we motored slowly through a scad of sandbars on the southwest side of Bismarck, the river glomerated with Sunday speedboats and water scooters, those aquatic motorcycles widely disliked except by the sports roaring them in circles leading nowhere. A few days earlier we’d heard a radio ad for the contraptions: “You’ll own the water with bold thrusts of power!” River-weathered Nikawa looked like the Santa María arriving at a Caribbean beach party, but we looped around a long bar and tied up at the dock of a rockabeatinboogie grill where we hoped to find the Professor. Columbus’s crew was hardly less baffled than we as we stumbled into Sunday at the Beach, and the partying made our long crossing seem something we’d only imagined, and I said so, and Pilotis said, “It’s the bikinis doing it to you.” I realized our isolation on the river during the day narrowed our lives to critical focus and, in a way, made continuing easy since alternatives were so few. But at that place, what choices, what allurements without the “excessive modesty of demeanour” of the Mandans! Pilotis watched me, and said to the others, “We’ve got to get him back on the river quick.” I said, Get me back on the river quick, otherwise I’m going to call North Dakota the Pacific Ocean and drop our final anchor.

  The Professor, exercising his talent for finding guidance, said two fellows named Randy could tell us about the treacherous channel ahead. Pilotis: “We’re going to take advice from two beach boys named Randy?” On the dock, we found them togged out in tank tops and iridescent swim trunks, beers in hand, their radio thumping, and Randall One said, “Where you’re going, people lose their lower units up there. It’s bad and it gets worse.” They so struggled to describe the route through, Randall Two finally said, “Oh, what the hell, dudes, just follow us. We’ll get you started,” and they roared off in their bright speedboat of a design meant to restore self-esteem to men with small penises and attract young women in search of a mobile tanning bed. They left Nikawa behind, waited for us by opening more beer and heavy-metaling along to “Symptom of the Universe.” The Missouri has listened to Teton war chants, cavalry bugles, Mandan courting flutes, Arikara eagle-bone whistles, reels of Lewis and Clark’s fiddler, Pierre Cruzatte, and now Megadeth. Perhaps that’s what set Pilotis to muttering, and I said, A guide is a guide, so just consider the Randys Twain our Charbonneau and Sacagawea. “I’m considering going home.”

  We were soon beyond the beach parties and their roaring boxes, into a stretch where a thick cover of trees lined the quiet river and a high bluff rose from the east shore, dense bottoms to the west; the way was shallows split by channels of moderate width. Our Charbonneau ran aground once, then again, and it was apparent the Randallmen were trying to proceed by memory rather than by reading the river. Narrowly escaping another shoal, they wheeled about, waved, and headed back to the safety of beach-blanket bingo. Said Pilotis, “They must have gotten out of range of their radio station.”

  We pushed on cautiously, everyone on watch, I listening to the water against the hull for telltale changes in depth, and we slowly moved into more and more isolated country. After another ten miles, I noticed a spot of orange on a high bluff; it was, surprisingly, the Professor at one of the few places where a road, if for only a half mile, runs right alongside the upper Missouri. Over the radio he said, “About twenty miles more to Washburn and River Relief.”

  The pilothouse was still full of cheer and the expectation of ease when the Missouri reminded us how long its miles are. The water split into three broadly bending channels, one down each bank, one down the middle, all of equal size. I figured things couldn’t be that easy, but for once we had a pilot in the sky, and I asked the Professor to assay our position from the blufftop. His was a long expounding ending with, “I’d recommend the middle channel, but I’m not sure. It’s your boat.” Those last three words I’d come to detest.

  I considered and chose to follow the old piloting standard and take the chute on the outside of the curve where centrifugal force usually throws the most water. The current was fair and dark, the surface almost untroubled. Up we went, not fast. I asked over the radio, How do we look? “Okay, I guess.” On we went. Farther. Each of us quiet, concentrating. Then: a loud cracking, shattering, horrific smashing that slammed us against the bulkheads, jammed forward my right arm, the one on the throttles, and the engines began racing to destruction, and my elbow bled over the levers. I jerked the power back, killed the roaring motors. For a minute, nobody could move or speak. We had met the Grand Terminator, and we were his. We knew it. Our lower units had to be on the bottom of the river. Already the Missouri was pulling us downstream.

  One at a time, I raised the motors, my heart flattened, as Pilotis waited in the welldeck to see what was left. “Port stem there! Prop half gone!” I raised the other. “Starboard stem is there! Prop torn all to hell!” The Photographer: “At least it’s just the propellers.” We’re done, I said, we can’t run on unbalanced props or we’ll ruin the engines. We stared at the river, then I went to the helm, fired the starboard motor, spun the prop just enough to turn the bow around, and radioed the Professor, We’re dead in the water, and I have no goddamn idea whatsoever how we can get off this river. On down we drifted, helplessly. I remembered a fellow a day earlier asking me, “You know what ‘Missouri’ means in Indian?” I answered with a couple of popular interpretations, but he said, “You’ve got that wrong. It means river-that-eats-your-lunch.”

  The Photographer, in a consternation that may have surpassed mine, said, “Can we drift all the way back to Bismarck?” What the hell, I said, let’s just drift all the goddamn way back home. I thought, This time we’re in deep, deep trouble.

  Every so often I spun the starboard propeller to keep little wounded Nikawa from being turned sideways by the brute river. Just as we were about to lose sight of the Professor and radio contact, I noticed a fisherman who had not been there twenty minutes earlier, and I called out to ask where there was a road down to the water. “There isn’t!” he yelled. “Not around here!” Then an afterthought: “Unless you call that track over there a road.” He pointed to a steep and curving dirt cut down a crumbling, treeless bluff. Pilotis looked at me in alarm. “There’s no way the wagon can get down that dangerous sonofabitch, let alone haul a ton and a half up it. If that ground gives way, we’ll lose more than just props—we’ll be out a boat, trailer, and wagon. We’re talking worse than destruction—we’re talking death.”

  I said, Radio the Prof before we lose contact and tell him we’re heading for it—tell him he’s absolutely got to find it somehow. Pilotis: “Oh, jeezis.” I brought Nikawa close to shore, but rocks kept her off, so the Photographer, an anchor of a man, took the bow line and waded to the bank to hold us. We waited. Pilotis was probably right: the track would be impossible. The Professor was probably right: the middle channel might have been better. The Photographer was probably right: this was canoe country. Believing
in my experience, working from my insistence, I had put us out of commission. The fisherman came up after a while, looked at the props, and said, “You really done it.” I did, I said. “If it makes you feel better,” he added, “yours ain’t the only blades out there. There’s whole lower units and about two hundred of my lures.”

  “What did we hit?” the Photographer said. It had to be a rock, a big rock, a big invisible rock, a big invisible bastard rock. About then the tow wagon appeared, small atop the bluff, and warily started down the track, and I wondered whether I was about to turn a bad situation into the end of our voyage. Pilotis said, “Hold, earth, hold!” Down came the wagon, the Professor effecting a skillful descent, showing no fear of rolling over and over into the river. Slowly onward, lower, lower, and then he was down. He maneuvered here and there before we could find a boulder-free place for the wagon, shallow enough for the trailer, deep enough for the boat. I ran Nikawa up onto the cradle, and we tied her in. I stayed aboard in case we slipped back into the river, and Pilotis, relieving the Professor who wanted no responsibility should our rig go over the edge, got into the wagon, switched to four-wheel drive, shifted into gear, stepped on the accelerator, but the wheels turned and went nowhere on the slick, loose rocks. Now we had all our equipment imperiled.

  I stood on the bow and shook my fist at the river, at the track. Then the Professor yelled, “It’s Arlen!” I said, What the hell’s an arlunn? “Arlen Simons. This is his ranch.” Excellent, I said, now we’ve got trespass trouble. Simons crept down the track in a big, brand-new four-wheel-drive pickup. The Professor had just met the rancher as he was returning home, and now there he was to offer help.

  We ran our chain from his truck to the tow wagon, and with eight wheels pulling, pulling, Nikawa slowly came out of the water onto the rocks. We undid the chain, I walked up the track and came down to take the steering wheel of our tow wagon, studied the track again, then started up with the boat immensely behind, everything under incredible strain. If the wheels began spinning, disaster was next. Backing that rig down would be a nightmare. The tow wagon had the biggest engine available, and it took all of its power to drag Nikawa up, slowly up, the wheels not spinning, not yet anyway, not yet, slowly up, up, up to the top, the ever-blessed top! I got out, looked at her a hundred feet up on the bluff, an improbable place for a boat, and I thought, This is a pre-departure fear, and any minute someone will nudge me and I’ll be home, the voyage not even begun.

  Laughing, disburdened Pilotis clapped me on the back, and I said, Let’s do it again to prove it wasn’t just another stroke of luck. Then I changed the props, Arlen helping, smiling, telling of his ranch where his people had been since 1882. We pulled Nikawa, again river-worthy, on across the bluff to leave it for the night next to his barn, thanked him profusely, and went down the road to the edge of Bismarck for dinner and River Relief.

  Sitting in a grill with a good view of the Missouri, we cracked open peanuts and offered toasts, the abstemious Professor raising his mineral water, and Pilotis said to the crew, “You boys are new at this, but here’s what just occurred: Ignoring the advice of each of us, Skipper makes two bad decisions, risks a third, and brings us to grief in an isolated stretch of river without a real access road for miles. Drifting helplessly downstream, he finds a fisherman who wasn’t there a few minutes earlier, who points out the only possible escape around, which just happens to be exactly where we are. The tow wagon, which we almost never see during the day, happens to stop at that rarest of places, a good-visibility pull-off right against the river, but a spot high enough for the radio to work. Prof goes to find the most hidden track in North Dakota and just happens to catch the only resident in miles, who just happens to live near the track and who just happens to return home in the nick of time. The wagon somehow makes it down an eroded dirt trail a donkey would shy from, and the dangerous cut happens to be dry enough and solid enough not to give way. When loose stones make it impossible to move the boat, just then the curious rancher happens along in a new truck powerful enough to help pull our trapped contraption off the rocks. In an hour, Nikawa is safely high and dry and outfitted with new props. Now, here before you Skipper sits, mellowed out and watching the great Missouri as he sips a martini, and you’re thinking he’s a hell of a riverman, but he’ll probably claim you don’t have to be a hell of a riverman if you’re lucky.” No, I said, it was either clustered coincidences or destiny, the result being the same.

  Yondering up the Broomsticks

  THAT EVENING so many months ago when Pilotis and I studied inch by inch the maps and charts of our entire route and nearly concluded we couldn’t make the voyage in less than a couple of years because of several concerns, perhaps the greatest was whether a boat small enough to navigate the shallowest sections of the Missouri could ascend against its spring current, especially in a time of high water. On the fifth of June we prepared the canoe to learn the answer.

  We returned the next morning to the place we’d come off the river, descended the narrow track again, unlashed the canoe, rigged it out, and struggled to get its four-horsepower motor, idle since the Allegheny, started. When I finally noticed we’d reversed the gas line from the six-gallon tank, we reconnected it. The Evinrude sputtered, caught, hummed its two dinky pistons, and off we went, Pilotis in the bow of the canoe, I at the stern, the others watching us head slowly out before they hauled Nikawa on to Washburn where we hoped to end the long day, although it was only twenty miles upstream. We carried a spare three-gallon gas tank because we had little notion how far nine gallons would take us against the current and twisting channels within a meandering river; because of his weight and the absence of checkpoints over that segment, I asked the Photographer to take his turn after we learned the range of the canoe. We tried to establish an arrival time, but all the unknowns made it conjecture, so we agreed that, should we not be able to make Washburn by dark, I would try to get off the Missouri to a ranch and leave a phone message on the Professor’s home answering machine. To save weight, we carried the radio but no tent or sleeping bags and only enough food and water for two frugal meals.

  The good weather of the past days, now that we were totally exposed in a seventeen-foot canoe, changed from overcast to massive clouds threatening a storm.Rule of the River Road: Take to an open boat—bring on bad weather. Even with its bouldery bottom, the Allegheny had been a delight in the Grumman, but now we faced something else; the difference between the two rivers was as descending a ladder is to climbing a sequoia. Still, to hunt out the elusive Missouri chutes, to go up them and discover slowly that the small engine (a woman had called it “a little pisspot of a motor”) could move us forward, would give me pleasure and an increasing belief that the slender up-bound canoe could take on the big down-bound river.

  We entered the channel that did in Nikawa, but we couldn’t discover our enemy, so hidden it was. The water, carrying only a modicum of sediment, flowed lightly green with clarity varying from six inches to about three feet, a gift of mud-trapping dams, and its depth was thumb-deep to over our heads. The motor stem and prop bounced off rocks and snags concealed by glare or murky pools or mild turbulence, but after each hit I quickly pushed the engine back into place, so we scarcely lost headway.

  Passing through a nearly recumbent country of modest elevations and declinations, treeless except along the river fringes, we crossed and recrossed the Missouri to follow what I deemed the best channel. Our weaving course was like that of blind worker ants returning to the colony: a zig, a zag, a zigzag, a triple zag, an oops, wrong way. If only we, like them, could have smelled the trail. Were it possible to follow the center of the river, Washburn was just twenty miles distant, but the frequent crossovers added almost half again that mileage. Pilotis: “We could make better time on foot,” and I said, A hiker has to go up and down—at least our path is flat.

  We guessed we might be doing four miles an hour, less the distance the current carried us backward, but our opposed directions gave the i
llusion we were moving faster, something I was happy to have since I thought the long hours in a canoe, seated in the same position and unsheltered from sun, wind, rain, heat, cold, insects—the usual ap purtenances of such travel—might wear the crew into rethinking their commitment. The map was so inadequate I tried to measure our ascent by time elapsed, although I was careful to underestimate the mileage we’d done, because to arrive “early” is more an inducement to continue than to go on well past an expected arrival. These considerations—and more that will soon become apparent—explain why, of all the people I’ve heard about who traveled the Missouri in this century, I knew of only one other who claimed to have gone from mouth to headwaters against the current.

  Pilotis dipped a paddle to check depth in places with invisible bottoms, and, spotting an obstruction ahead, would duck so I could see it. We called the practice yondering, as in “to see up yonder.” Because the lower end of a chute can be quite unlike its head, and because often we couldn’t see the whole thing, making it up one required equal measures of luck and experience, and for a while the luck held. Then I chose a small channel that turned into a slough, and we had to retreat and try another, not a difficult task, merely one that tripled time and distance. Miles of that piece of the Missouri were more riverbed than river, wet sand splattered with puddles and isolated pools, and it was obvious that little water was flowing through massive Garrison Dam fifty miles above us. The chutes into the shoals were sometimes only marginally wider than the canoe, and I could reach over the gunwales right or left and touch dry sand. On those segments, the longest river in America was also the coziest.

  Pilotis at first resisted trying those skinny troughs and began calling them broomsticks. We made our way up one, drawing sand several times but scraping on, only to proceed till we grounded out. With no room to turn the canoe around, I raised the motor and let the chute wash us slowly back down. We got out, stretched our legs, studied the river, and decided that same trough was the only possibility. We started up again. Pilotis said, “A cow pisses a wider stream than this.” I steered a more careful course, applied what I’d just learned about the channel, tried to avoid irritation, and, with hard assists from the paddles, we accomplished its length even though the difference from the first attempt was but a few inches here, a foot there. Then we reached a dark pool—darkness usually indicating deeper water—a stretch as quiet as a millpond that we ran so easily I could take my arm from its wrenched position on the tiller and steer us by slightly shifting my weight side to side. On came another slew of sandy strands, and the struggle to wrest a course from the river began again.