River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  At Fort Peck, I called the agent to tell him we were about two days out, but he needed more time, so we decided to spend the unexpected free day in the lodge rather than in a tent upriver. I had not had more than forty-eight hours off the water in two months and was visibly showing the wear, and I thought I saw a nearly commensurate fatigue in my mates. We didn’t need sleep so much as change. After a nicely quiet Saturday breakfast alone, I went to the long front porch to sit and transfer notes into my logbook, study maps, and sometimes just lean back and listen to the robins and magpies. I liked that old porch because it was solidly still, not once rolling, yawing, or pitching. The Photographer, the most diligent of companions, spent the morning getting our motors adjusted and ready for the last quarter of the voyage. In the afternoon we all walked around to restore our legs, and I went to the Corps of Engineers office to ask about the reservoir and the river beyond. I knew our days in Nikawa were about finished until we could reach the far side of Idaho, but how much farther she could ascend I didn’t know, nor could anyone tell me.

  The Missouri comprised more than two fifths of our transcontinental miles, but emotionally it took up greater space than that, and once again an enforced layover repaid us even though the snowmelt question still loomed and would until we were far down the western slope of the Continental Divide.

  That evening at our supper table in the lodge, while flitting critters bumped the window screens and night sounds and the scent of pine sap seeped in, our talk showed the effects of time off the river. Pilotis, who had been somber for several days, rose to the surface of the conversation like a hungry pike and pursued thoughts as if they were mayflies, but it was the Professor who started things when he asked if I’d gotten the idea for our voyage from John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” where a man swims home by way of a string of sixteen neighbors’ pools that form a kind of intermittent stream through his suburban neighborhood. I’d not thought of the influence although I had long considered Cheever’s idea a clever one. I said something about liquid challenges, and the Photographer commented, “It takes time to see that a river is not just about water.”

  That’s when Pilotis began talking. I couldn’t get all of it down, but this is the gist of much of it: “I didn’t know when I left home that I wanted something bigger than people and their little gods and small catechisms, their damned certainties and covered-over confusions. The Missouri is bigger. It’s like a Roman deity—powerful, playful, cantankerous, lusty, profligate, changeable, dangerous, yet still interested in the humanity that approaches it. I’m not deifying it, just comparing it, but anyone who doesn’t believe it’s a living force—something far more actual than any divinity in any religion—is innocent.”

  About the time our pie reached the table, this: “That river isn’t about people—it’s too primeval. When I see an ocean, I don’t see time, but on the Missouri I see time everywhere, along the eroded banks, down in the shallow bottoms in those worn and rounded stones, even in the current. Flow and erosion, flow and erosion. The valley is the face of a clock, and the hour hand’s the moving river, always showing how our days are ebbing, getting washed downstream. Civilization will run out long before the sun burns up and turns rivers back into interplanetary gases.”

  And later: “Stand on the water’s edge and see how easy it is to imagine a valley before you existed—then imagine it in a time when you’re long gone. That river scours existence, pulls solidities loose and flushes them away. To it, our days are no more than cottonwood fluff. Our little selfish ploys and conceited aspirations are just so much sediment. People are about cleverness. A river’s about continuance. We talk about dams and wing-dikes, but we don’t need to fret about that Missouri. It’s not endangered—we are. When I’m out on the water, I don’t worry about it. I worry about me. I’m just too small for that river.”

  Eating Lightning

  JUST ABOVE the big dam, we put Nikawa into the water the next morning and set off onto the Fort Peck impoundment, one of the most isolated big bodies of water in the lower forty-eight states, a lake reached, beyond the dam, by only about a half-dozen unpaved roads. As we launched, a fellow said, “Are you going out in that?” The antecedent to “that” was a darkening southwesterly sky coming on apace once we had committed to the deeps. Across the fifteen-mile-wide water the wind quickened and kicked up the lake and sent Nikawa into her crash-and-bang mode. Before an hour was done, lightning began slicing the growing blackness to spread it everywhere, and Pilotis’s face flickered as if illumined from within, eyes candescent, things even more eerie than the ravening sky. The Photographer said, “It looks like we’ve been eating lightning.”

  I changed course and made for the nearest shore which just happened to be Grave Point. Against a black-violet overcast, the lake glowed greenly as the Caribbean can do on certain nights rich with phosphorescent plankton, and the day turned to an unearthly spectacle of bizarre firmament and waters that seemed a foreboding of doom, an assemblage of unnatural occurrences that can take small boats to the bottom. The treeless surround appeared to recede from us as Nikawa breasted the waves, the wind and the very darkness itself thick with the smell of ozone and voltage. When she at last did reach land, there was nothing to tie her to, so I set her nose up on a low bank of pulverized black shale that would hold us if the wind didn’t come about. Our bow railing, ever the lightning rod, was the only metal anywhere around, but we remained in the pilothouse nevertheless and watched the storm thrash the water and mess the sky, a blasting that had no good in it for anything of the earth.

  The Missouri, Fort Peck Dam to Virgelle, 262 river miles

  Said Pilotis, perhaps to distract us, “How long would this lake last if the engineers cut off its feeder streams and let it empty at the rate it filled?” It took eleven years to fill it. “Then we have here eleven years of river in the bank.”

  Twenty minutes later the worst weather had rolled on to violate the east, and we set off again across short-spaced troughs and ridges about two feet high that slammed us hard, and the wind bore across us so steadily Nikawa proceeded with a decided list to starboard, an angle that made standing difficult and the motors drone in a disconcerting way. But such a nautical lean through the whitecaps, with the high headlands on the horizon, gave me a sense we were on a small and cozy sea rather than a large and blasted lake. In that manner, we moved along for some time.

  Pilotis turned on the marine radio to the weather band to find predictions of “cold air funnels,” things inimical in name, but what they were we could only guess. We proceeded on, trusting in the fickleness of the Missouri Valley skies. To be sure, the clouds soon began shredding, and in the rents a fine blue appeared, and the wind eased but not before tearing open the long horizon to let in shafts of sun that showed the way like searchlights. Our course shifted enough to permit Nikawa to go down along the wave troughs rather than across them, and the noisy banging gave way to a silent rolling that briefly wambled Pilotis’s stomach, and again we were more mariners than lakers: port to starboard, starboard to port went our little bark.

  Then, about forty miles out, near Hell Creek Bay where the impoundment narrows to less than two miles and runs due east-west, we came to a reach that let Nikawa, without any assistance from me, run the water like a bread-wagon horse that knows the route.

  In early afternoon, under the broken and bare hills near Snow Creek, I pulled into one of the thousand coves of the lake. We tied off to a big sage and climbed a hill to eat sandwiches, walk our legs loose, and sit back happily knowing we were about to enter some of the most striking geological areas of the Missouri. The Photographer had brought along a big, magnificent book, Karl Bodmer’s America, to help us identify locations the artist painted for Prince Maximilian, sites high enough to be unaffected by the impounding of the river a century later. There were few things we looked forward to more than discovering the painter’s subjects and matching actuality with his peerless Montana watercolors.

  The weather s
truck again soon after we were under way, an inky slanting rain but insufficient to obscure completely a horizon of blue ahead, a watery rainbow behind, and two other weathers to port and starboard; it was as if we were passing beneath a spigot, dryness everywhere but directly under it. We entered a realm of steep shores topped by low peaks and sharply angled buttes, spires, pinnacles, blunt pyramids, and squat trapezoids—a veritable catalog of solid geometries done in sandstone and shale and clay stratified into russets, buffs, grays, and white. To generations of travelers going west along this route, the Great Plains here begin to give themselves up in spectacular fashion as if all the delights of a thousand miles had been hoarded so they might be yielded in a final, grand bravura performance. Could they speak, the hills might say, “Ask in vain the mountains to show you these prospects.” From there on, verticality would become increasingly a part of our days.

  The long lake, its miles of shoreline equal to the coast of California, jogged northwest at Billy Creek, then opened to a six-mile reach due south to Seven Blackfoot Creek where we came upon one of the first Montana views unquestionably recognizable in a Bodmer painting. Maximilian wrote on July 25, 1833:

  A thunderstorm with high wind suddenly caused our vessel to be in great danger; but the same wind which had at first thrown us back, became all at once very favorable when we reached a turn in the river, and sailed for some time rapidly upwards. This brought us to a remarkable place, where we thought that we saw before us, two white mountain castles. On the mountain of the south bank, there was a thick, snow-white layer, a far-extended stratum of a white sandstone, which had been partly acted upon by the waters. At the end where it is exposed, being intersected by the valley, two high pieces in the shape of buildings had remained standing, and upon them lay remains of a more compact, yellowish-red, thinner stratum of sandstone, which formed the roofs of the united building. On the façade of the whole, there were small perpendicular slits, which appeared to be so many windows. These singular natural formations, when seen from a distance, so perfectly resembled buildings raised by art, that we were deceived by them, till we were assured of our error. We agreed with [Captain] Mitchell to give to these original works of nature the name of “The White Castles.” Mr. Bodmer has made a very faithful representation of them.

  We coasted to a halt, jubilant as if we had matched a lottery number rather than a painting to a geological formation. For some reason, the 16o-year-old watercolor seemed more antique and exotic than the ten-million-year-old bluff, but being in the presence of those two renderings of the remnants of an ancient sea was like discovering a window in the long curtain-wall of time. We might have been standing on the keelboat Flora herself, with the prince’s pen noisily scratching away, the artist laying down his washes, and somewhere beyond the hills roamed bison so thick it seemed that the plains themselves had gained legs, got up, and begun running, and from the high rocks red men watched the little thing-that-walks-on-the-water, part of the vanguard carrying in a new people who would inundate the old ways as the big impoundment one day would the river.

  The clement weather held for the last thirty miles through the U. L. Bend Wilderness, a name that started the crew passing time by guessing its meaning: Upper Lake, Under Lake, Under Litigation, Utmost Length, United Limited, Utterly Ludicrous. We heard later it derives from a cattle brand. The vales coming down to the coves in that piece of the Mauvaises Terres were Killed Woman Gulch, Devil’s Creek, Deadman Coulee, Lost Creek—a place of nefarious names that expressed some European-born fear of godforsakenness in a sublime landscape. Had the first nomenclature been put down by less narrow and acquisitively hell-bent newcomers (who wouldn’t recognize God if It stood up in their bowls of slumgullion), the places in those Bonnes Terres could just as easily have been Sweet Angel Gulch, Transcendence Ridge, Playful Omnipotence Coulee, Surpasseth Understanding Creek.

  We reached the long, slender peninsula creating the big bend at the mouth of the Musselshell River which we followed for a mile to a broken-down wooden dock at the foot of a steep slope of dark clay. Atop the hill was our tow wagon and the Professor, he much relieved to see us arrive at last at a place that must be high on any list of American remotenesses. I thought it possible, given the season, there might be no other humans within twenty miles.

  As the crew set up a tent and I secured Nikawa, the weather snapped around again into a hard, cold downpour to turn the banks into the notorious Missouri Breaks gumbo, impassably slippery slopes that trapped me on the boat. At the next turn of the sky, Pilotis called down from the hilltop, “Do you need anything?” and I yelled back, How do you propose getting it to me? I ate as mice do, an ort here, a tidbit there, whatever flinders my scavenging uncovered in our larder, including a bottle of ale someone had overlooked. I went to the afterdeck and sat contentedly solitary in the great remove and watched a day of forty weathers close down to discharge the long western glimmering and give the night over to the scent of wet sage, the buzz of nighthawks, the far sorrow of coyotes, and then one of the strangest voices in all of wild America, a bittern in the reeds: gulping air, inflating throat, pumping out mellow, cavernous, liquid gurgles, wobbling notes seeming to rise from beneath the river itself, a voice made from the bittern world of slow marshy waters.

  For all I knew, that lone bird, sometimes known as a thunderpumper, called down the lightning and wind which drove me into my bunk to lie in the easy rocking of the river, the Musselshell ticking the hull and putting a slow creak in the mooring lines. For a few minutes I knew all the reasons I was in that farness, why I’d come nineteen hundred miles up the Missouri. At such times, sleep is but a thief in the night who far too quickly steals what we’ve so justly earned in the day.

  Imprecating the Wind

  ON THAT TEMPERATE Monday morning we knew we were going to run out of impounded water and enter natural river again, but we didn’t know where it would happen, an ignorance that made us set out with two boats, the canoe tied across the afterdeck of Nikawa in an unwieldy and unsailorly manner. Off we went up the west side of U. L. Bend where the fifteen-foot-deep water was half what lay on the downstream side of the tongue of open land that is too narrow and straight to be properly either an oxbow or a horseshoe. The bottom rose steadily but remained flat enough to allow Nikawa to ascend due north for ten miles until the Missouri became a river once more and turned sharply to give us a westerly run. The broad and broken uplands, part of the Charles Russell National Wildlife Refuge, showed no evidence of ever having seen anything human and encouraged our expectations of finding birds and animals we’d not yet come upon.

  Islands, chutes, and sandbars began reappearing to force us continually to change courses and speeds, and after an hour I had only a guess where we were or how far we’d gone. At what I thought was just short of twenty miles, we saw the dread thing again. I groaned out a god almighty, and Pilotis looked at me instead of upstream and said, “Are you sick?” Up there, I said, dead ahead. The Professor: “What the hell is that?” Pilotis stared, then, “That’s what it is—hell.”

  Across the river lay a thin miasma of brown that turned into a line of saplings as we approached, and once again we were into the willows. I weaved Nikawa up channels that became progressively narrower, shallower, until she was doing no better than the canoe could, so we stopped, untied the Grumman and put it onto the river, fired up the motor, and putted away, slipping between gaps in the trees until Pilotis and I lost sight of our mates who were to return Nikawa to the camp at the mouth of the Musselshell and haul her on to the next place a highway crossed the Missouri, thirty-five long miles upstream.

  The unadorned beauty of the arid Missouri Breaks helped us face the distance ahead, and even more to our relief, we soon passed out of the willows into open river, not deep but at least free of any bulwarks of shrubbery. A big Canada gosling, almost fledged, crossed our bow in a movement that was a combination of paddling, waddling, and flapping, a chaos of feathers that set up such a wake it rocked the canoe and set us
to laughing and made us look forward to more wildlife in the refuge. The spring melt was reaching its peak, but the Missouri, although hardly a torrent, gave just enough depth to proceed without hunting out chutes, and often we could take a direct course and cut across bends; nevertheless, if that was high water, we didn’t want to see it low. Coulees of many sizes interrupted the humpy hills, and here and about grew pockets of stunted junipers and little ponderosas, the whole scene beginning to look not so much like the plains but the farther American West.

  Our progress was slow enough to allow mosquitoes to hover alongside and sorely beset us, particularly on our defenseless backs. We pulled on rain suits until the sun steamed us out of them, and we had to let the insects have at our posteriors, but on arms and legs we could kill three and four of the devils with every swat, a game that helped pass a few miles. When we stopped on a grassy flat for lunch, I took up my binoculars for a hike to spot some new species of anything, but as soon as we landed, the stench of cattle manure made us hurry our snack, and I found no pleasure in spending more time watching where I stepped than in scanning the bushes. The foul flat was barren of birds. We had landed in the Russell Wildlife Refuge, a narrow strip that boxes the river, a comparatively few square miles surrounded by thousands upon thousands of acres of grazing lands in every direction. In what way cattle, those Jaws That Ate the West, qualified as wildlife was beyond me, and I execrated the refuge managers for allowing such an abuse.