River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  A river traveler cannot see all the seventy high and slender falls that drop off the deeply green and precipitous edge of the Cascades on the Oregon side, but the several that are visible, delicate white tails and veils, caused Pilotis to say, “In six miles we’ve gone from whoa! to ahh! From woes to Oz.” The cascades are stunning enough to cast doubt on their authenticity, as did a child I once overheard, whose vision of natural America perhaps owed too much to Disney falsity, ask, “They’re not real, are they?” And her mother, “I think so, sugar.”

  We went on, on past Phoca Rock stranded in the middle of the wide river like a pedestrian caught between streams of five o’clock traffic, and then to port another upthrust of once hot magma, a tall phallic rise today called Rooster Rock, but to the early rivermen it was Cock Rock. The later name, while making no topographical sense, may have come about not because of any urge for decency but rather by a mere preference for alliteration over rhyme—simply a matter of poetics, wasn’t it?

  On the precipice above the Top of the Cock is the celebrated view from Crown Point, the cliffs there a kind of portal between the mouth of the Columbia Gorge and the broad Willamette Valley to the west. Soon we gained the outreaches of Portland. At the bend where the Sandy empties into the big river and has built up a delta, I tried to steer a straight course and ran Nikawa onto a gritty reef that we had to pole off of. It was here, wrote William Clark, that he “arrived at the enterance of a river which appeared to Scatter over a Sand bar, the bottom of which I could See quite across and did not appear to be 4 Inches deep in any part; I attempted to wade this Stream and to my astonishment found the bottom a quick Sand, and impassable.”

  Free of another encounter with history, we went on to a good dock and stepped ashore to greet the Photographer waiting for us. Away we went to nearby Troutdale on the Sandy River and into the Edgefield Inn, perhaps the most merrily eccentric in America, a hostelry once the county poor farm but now well refurbished, its walls painted by artists with phantasmagoria from nature, history, and dreamlands of the drugged—doors done as windows, pipes as trees, six-foot pigeons beating against skylights, angels in wheelchairs riding the Milky Way and plucking stars as if they were daisies. I hoped such jolly lodgings would lift a tiring crew for our run to the sea. Like smolts, we were wearing down.

  Robot of the River

  THAT NEXT MORNING was my hundredth day of the voyage, eighty of them on the water, and when I woke I decided to leave the river for a Sunday on the old poorhouse porch so I could work on my logbook and sit rocking in a chair like a pilot retired from boats who spends his days just watching the water; down the long slope from the verandah I could see the Columbia making its way oceanward free of us. When I announced a holiday to the crew at breakfast, to my astonishment there were hats in the air, and it came to me that our recent difficulty in getting out of bed had more to do with exhaustion than apprehension of the Bar or anything else. But, as the day would reveal, I was only half right. Things unacknowledged were about to claw into the light like moles desperate in a flooding field.

  A young friend, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, joined us for the push to the Pacific; having such a wordsmithing crew about, I offered to take them in the afternoon to downtown Portland and that Beulahland of bibliolatry called Powell’s City of Books. Despite my forewarnings, my sailors lost their bearings in the place and did not again heave into view until four hours later, whereupon I led them a couple of blocks away to a century-old seafood house, Jake’s Famous Crawfish, with an excellent menu and a bar that is one of the historical sights of the city. We took a table by a window blessedly free of any views of water, but I soon went to the brass rail to stand against such good bibulous history and mull over a voyage nearly done. Next to me was a couple, he reading The New Yorker and she a worn copy of Fear of Flying. Readers are to Portland as musicians to New Orleans—everywhere. The woman was winsome but wore a mute sorrow that seemed to admit no hope, an expression painted by Modigliani. She turned to me and without prologue or preamble began speaking openly about her life as if I’d been present on all but a few days of it. I grew uneasy and finally said, Your friend here may be missing your attention. He, who had not turned a page since she began talking, was deep into a Pisa-like lean toward the conversation, a tilt ready to topple him onto the floor. He said emphatically, “I’m not with her.” She: “Don’t you two guys talk over me. I’m too much of a bitch for that.” Her conversation, devoid of humor and wholly and relentlessly about her life, nevertheless compelled me as honest words usually do. She suggested we go someplace quieter, and I pointed to the crew and mentioned our long tour. “A hundred days?” she said. “I think they’ll understand.” I must admit I suddenly felt the deprivations of river travel as I hadn’t before and considered the invitation. After all, none of my jolly jack-tars, even Pilotis, had gone the entire five thousand miles; they had found respite, escaped the river, seen family, bussed a spouse, so maybe they really would understand.

  I turned back to say something to her, I don’t remember what, and she threw her arms around my neck and pulled herself close and gave me a smashing, open-mouthed kiss. I had to pull hard to extract my agape face. She stepped back, stared angrily, and said for all to hear, “You’re a robot! A robot!” In that instant I was indeed an automaton incapable of speech, my machinery fully engaged in putting every ounce of internal propellant into a blush that even a hundred days of wind and sun couldn’t hide. Then it got worse. “You need a cure!” Now we had the attention of management. It was a moment to decide fast whether to treat this as conscious comedy or to dive for cover, so of course I did neither. “Get yourself a cure!” Can we drop the word “cure”? I whispered. The crew, figuring I’d provoked things, watched impassively. Before she could lash out again, I ordered her a drink, excused myself, and fumbled back to our table. I said, Let’s not any of us ever throw a frigging life ring to a drowning friend.

  When we returned to the quondam poor farm, I found a quiet rocker in a dark corner of the porch, but there was no escape any longer from a certain unacknowledgment. The bar incident had nudged me, not for what happened but for what it shook free in me, something kept in restraints for the last months. The woman was unwittingly correct: I had become a robot, a robot of the river. What it commanded, I did to the exclusion of almost everything else. Seventeen years earlier, I’d passed through Portland on a long trip I’d set out on largely because my marriage had failed; here I was again, this time on a long trip that flattened another marriage. On that hundredth night I understood that I had gone and had entered a place, and I knew where I’d gone, but where I’d entered I had no idea. When our voyage was only memory, where would I wash up? Just where is the great delta of old river travelers? When the journey is done, quo vadis? That’s a question adventurers leave out of their accounts, and if you read of their later days you can be glad, because often their after-life seems to be aftermath. From the poor-farm porch, I couldn’t see the Columbia rolling on in the night, but I could feel it—and all the other waters—as if they ran in my veins. Why not? The backs of human hands are nothing if not pulsing river maps. It then came to me to read the writing on my own bulkhead: Proceed as the way opens.

  The next morning we set out under fair skies over a course free of Sunday boaters. We followed the big bend past industrial tailings and then on north beyond the mouth of the Willamette, above which, ten miles up, lies downtown Portland. The city on the Columbia is Vancouver, a smaller town but older, the descendant of the Hudson’s Bay Company trading station and a later military post, a place in its earliest days once described as the New York of the Pacific. As we rolled northward up the forty-mile deviation the Columbia makes from its westering, the last we’d do, we could see four of the big Northwest volcanoes, an astounding view: behind us Mount Hood, and to starboard at various bearings Adams, Rainier, and St. Helens, the last still charry, its symmetry blown away fifteen years earlier, the result of things kept too long under restraint.r />
  We passed docks with marine cranes swinging their cables and hooks through the August morning, passed broken pilings of dilapidated and dead industries, and we overtook freighters both under way and moored, the empty ships with Plimsoll lines far above our pilothouse, but Nikawa, a fingerling among leviathans, held her own in the deep-water lane and showed them a sassy stern. Against the Oregon shore lay the biggest island in the Columbia, Sauvie, fifteen miles long. Beyond, we entered into reaches of smaller islands, bosky and full of ponds and sloughs, each a lure to exploration. The Coast Range trailed down wooded hills and approached the river on one shore only to fall away on the other, then reverse itself to give an equality of ridgeland to both states, and along the riverbank here and about lay narrow beaches—one of them, Hewlett Point, the place where picnickers in 1980 turned up a decaying boodle of twenty-dollar bills, some of the two hundred thousand dollars stolen nine years before by the soi-disant D. B. Cooper who had parachuted from a hijacked airliner into the night only, according to one theory, to be swallowed by the black cold of the Columbia and flushed out to the Bar. On we went in a rising wind, on under the courthouse cupola of St. Helens, Oregon, high on a bluff, on past stick nests of herons, our approach sometimes stirring a bird from the shallows into a slow flap upstream; behind us, gulls dipped to inspect our wake for whatever gnawables it might thrum up.

  By afternoon the wind and water conspired to pound Nikawa, so after a spell of nasty bouncing, I made for protection in the small-boat harbor at Kalama, and we left the Columbia. The town was gritty, drab, and overwhelmed by the roar of Interstate 5, a place only blasted river could drive us into. When we found quarters for the night in a motel Elvis Presley once used—photographic proof of the miracle everywhere like crutches affixed to walls of the grotto at Lourdes—I spent some time apart from the crew.

  The winter before I had heard, “Are you going to trade a boat trip for our marriage?” an impossible question for me since to walk away from the river, once the idea of crossing took hold of me, was to walk away from a long dream, a deep aspiration. The voyage was not more significant than the marriage because it had become one pillar of it—or, at least, one pillar of my life. Either way, I believed the long rivering necessary to my continuance as a man. To the question I said, If I fail even to try the trip I won’t be worth being married to. And I heard, “Then you’ve made your life contingent on rivers.” To that I could say nothing.

  When I found the crew for dinner, one so poor it got us to laughing in the way desperate people laugh, the Reporter said, “If the wind keeps us here tomorrow, you’ll find me hanging by my neck from the shower rod,” to which someone said, “One more Kalamaty.”

  A Taproom Fit for Raggedy Ann

  JUST AFTER SUNRISE—an occurrence I knew from the clock rather than the dark sky that was neither fog nor mist but the heart of a deep cloud—I went down to the river to see how it ran. The surface was like cobblestones, nothing more, so I hurried back to wake the mariners with coffee and pastries, and they turned out readily but for Pilotis. I called out, The wind’s on its way! Nothing. The men are here to launch your mattress! Groaning, no movement. How about a swell little cruise on Lake Wallula? That’s what’s going to happen! Grousing, rising at the rate tectonic plates make their subterranean way along, sulking to the shower.

  Before seven we were under way and beyond the gloom of the stilled Trojan nuclear power plant, on beyond the mouth of the Cowlitz River which fifteen years earlier poured into the Columbia tons of heated ashen mud from the Mount St. Helens eruption and for two weeks dammed in ships upstream. The Cowlitz, so I heard, flowed with enough warmth to make salmon try to jump out of it. When it comes to a great river coursing through a land of fire, the Columbia is almost a Phlegethon, and for eons it has treated magma as other rivers do silt. No matter how the earthen plates shove, shift, slip, and melt the earth beneath and send it back up in massive violences even humankind has yet to match, the Columbia, like a patient lover, crawls over and feels out the hot country, finds its crevices and gaps, and then thrusts its wet way in, penetrating the rock to shoot it full of life.

  We couldn’t see Longview despite its name, a double-entendre from lumber baron R. A. Long of Kansas City, Missouri, who, inspired by Pierre L’Enfant’s elegant (if sometimes incomprehensible from the ground) hub-and-spoke plan for the federal capital, had his milltown similarly laid out in the 1920s. What we did see—and smell—was riverside timber industries and freighters being loaded with pulp and logs cut for a pittance in national forests and now ready to become Japanese newspapers and hot tubs. The nickname of Washington is the Evergreen State, but a few days earlier, in front of one large clear-cut, we saw a hand-lettered protest: WELCOME TO THE WAS-GREEN STATE. Nevertheless, west of the marine facilities the way was green indeed, with conifers and a ground cover of ferns and salal, and the river was full of marshy islands that are its beauty as crags and cliffs are farther upstream.

  In my dawn hurry to check the water, I had banged into a bulkhead and put a lump on my forehead, a defect the native people here a couple of centuries earlier would have found nearly hideous before they gave up the head flattening that could turn a human profile into a perfect forty-five-degree slope from the tip of the nose to the hairline. They achieved the effect by a several-month compression of a newborn infant’s skull between a cradleboard and another strip of wood, cushioned by moss, pressing down across the brow. Meriwether Lewis made several sketches of their peculiar profiles, and the naturalist-explorer John Kirk Townsend in 1834 wrote:

  I saw today a young child from whose head the board had just been removed. It was without exception the most frightful and disgusting looking object that I ever beheld. The whole front of the head was completely flattened, and the mass of brain being forced back caused an enormous projection there. The poor little creature’s eyes protruded to the distance of half an inch and looked inflamed and discolored, as did all the surrounding parts. Although I felt a kind of chill creep over me from the contemplation of such dire deformity, yet there was something so stark-staring and absolutely queer in the physiognomy that I could not repress a smile; and when the mother amused the little object and made it laugh, it looked so irresistibly, so terribly ludicrous that I and those who were with me burst into a simultaneous roar which frightened it and made it cry, in which predicament it looked much less horrible than before.

  We passed around the rock-stacked bend known as Cape Horn, a label repeated at least twice on the river and a place that compares to the real Cape as an Iowa snow field to the Antarctic. Perhaps, given the likes of names just north of here—Queets, Oyhut, Humptulips, Duckabush, Dosewallips, or a wilderness called Colonel Bob—early residents just wore themselves out with naming and found emptily derivative toponyms a refreshing change.

  The Columbia was now two miles wide, but it let islands large and small nearly fill it and thereby hide its size and character so we had no sense we were moving atop an American river that discharges into the sea more water than all but the Mississippi. I once knew a woman, a dancer with erect carriage, who managed always to keep her shoulder blades pointed forward so that her full breasts could disappear in the drapings of blouses; as the Columbia approaches the sea, it too does its best to disguise the truth of itself. I, an appreciator of small bosoms and gentle waters, had no special urge to encounter either the woman or the river in such a potential reality, so we took the islands leeward and fairly skimmed along up to Cathlamet, the tiny seat of Wahkiakum County, smallest in Washington, the village encompassed by the woody rumples of the north end of the Coast Range, a darkly and deeply forested area of only three highways, two of them dead ends, but with more logging roads than Seattle has streets.

  Cathlamet carries an aura of being hidden away, the kind of place one might abscond to with the company payroll or the neighbor’s spouse instead of, say, Bolivia or Tasmania. We went up tree-lined Elochoman Slough (no shortage of good names here) and put out our docking lines
in a quiet and secluded harborette surrounded by damp evergreens and gray weather, the air full of the scent of each, a combining that made the place a veritable image of the Pacific Northwest: blindfold me, spin me around four times, throw me willy-nilly across the country, then ask me where I am. Were I to land here, I could tell you.

  It was just nine in the morning, and my mates urged me to press on to Astoria, but they had never before seen the Columbia estuary, the one that made William Clark think he had reached the Pacific when he was still three leagues away. My plan for our last fifty miles was to find a route “behind” the string of islands and through shallow but protected sloughs and channels, and thereby turn the flat hull of Nikawa to advantage rather than otherwise. Soon enough we would reach unforgiving water where we’d have no choice but to set out on it and take our chances against not mere river winds but the greater ones off the ocean. I said to Pilotis, Consider it—the estuary of the Columbia by itself could hold half a dozen Lake Wallulas.