River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (18 page)

We passed several strip-pit coal mines and their high tailings, the kind of mounds industrial people leave, massive cicatrices symbolizing not mystery or an honored death but rather nothing more than extracted power and consequent exhaustion, corporate barbarity and final uselessness, with an appendant poisoning of land and water. Yet a few of the tailings recently had been “reclaimed,” their new slopes trying to come into kindly disposition with the landscape once again.

At the Mason-Dixon Line, the wind came on as if to cuff a couple of Yankees, and where the direction of the hills and river let it get at us, it bashed the water into a jogglety, noisy course that intervening quiet stretches served not to give relief so much as to point up our banging discomfort. It was then Pilotis identified the worst of a windhammered river, a small and crucial discovery: “It’s not the jarring that wears me down—it’s the din, the racket. In this fiberglass we’re riding inside a big snare drum.” On and on, the corrugated water beat its tattoo into our bones. The next day I bought earplugs.

The enclosure of Hannibal Lock gave us a brief reprieve and added a soothing music from its floating bitts, as melodious and plaintive as American Indian flutes. And then we were back to an open twenty-three miles down the throat of the wind, but we complained little because the way was free of boils and rocks. About every hour we came upon a big sycamore or cottonwood making a long and eventually fatal lean over the river, and sometimes from a large limb dangled a rope swing, a heavy, knotted cord for swimmers to drop from. Even in the cool air, the lines tempted us. On one sycamore that had completed its tilt and joined the Ohio to become a sawyer—a bottom-stuck tree breaking the surface to saw up and down in the current—stood a great blue heron in leggy elegance, aloof as if the suzerain of backwaters. Old steamboaters believed the birds embodied the souls of river pilots, for who knew the chutes, channels, and shoals better than a heron?

Steep, wooded bluffs lay close to the banks, creating a section of beauty that, at last, fully deserved the lost French name of the Ohio. Then came Paden Island, a mile-long cluster of trees, its upper ends swept back to a point, an overgrown sandbar generations ago when Obadiah Paden got it from Chief Munsie who dwelt there and one night dreamed the white man made gifts of his rifle and engraved powderhorn. Following an alleged native custom that holds a person appearing in another’s sleep responsible for fulfilling the dream, Munsie, upon waking, went to Paden and told him of the vision; the white man, wishing to keep the peace, turned over the gun and horn but then went silent for several days. Some days later he found Munsie and related his own dream about the chief giving him the island. After that, they say, dreamers hereabouts kept their sleep to themselves.

The island marks the head of the Long Reach, at sixteen miles the farthest straight run on the river and also the beginning of a sixty-mile stretch of slender islands that survived canalization, although several of them lie so close to the banks they can hardly be distinguished as separate from the shore. To starboard was an Ohio settlement whose first residents, a number of them undoubtedly illiterate, years ago wanted an utterly simple name: Dog? Wet? Pot? Elf? They settled on Fly—insect or verb, I don’t know. Across the river is Sisters-ville, a village of some late-nineteenth-century quaintness, once called Ziggleton, where Charles Wells and his wife had twenty-two children, the eighteenth and nineteenth the sisters of the present name. The Wellses called their next child Twenty and the following Plenty, but when the last arrived they lost their humor, and she was merely Betsey. Having tired of creating names, they just flat gave up procreating children.

Nine miles down the Long Reach, on the West Virginia shore, we passed Friendly, the name from the Quakers and not a description of local demeanor, despite some cheerful citizens treating it as a daily reminder. On the opposite bank lies what’s left of New Matamoros, which the Ohio WPA
Guide
describes as “now a stilled community of old, severely simple business structures and shuttered houses,” a possibly inevitable fate for a place named “killer of Moors" (even if the slayer, Saint James—Santiago—happened also to be an Apostle).

Because we were running smoothly and I wanted to try to gain a little on the Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative, Pilotis served up sandwiches while we moved, although I was tempted to stop at St. Marys, as agreeable a town as there is on the Ohio. In the 1830s Alexander Creel, an inconstant man, came down the river on a steamboat, allegedly in the company of the Virgin who appeared at the rail, pointed to shore, and advised (in language that, to my ear, sounds notably uncelestial, although I must confess never to have heard it spoken): “There you behold the site of what will some day be a happy and prosperous city.” Creel bought the land in 1834, but perhaps for the same reasons as mine, or maybe having eaten one too many Goonieburgers, he came to doubt the divine flea-in-the-ear. He sold his holdings and moved a couple of miles downstream where he stayed for fifteen years until he learned a county seat was about to be selected, whereupon the Virgo Sapientissima again apparently proffered her presagement; he bought back the site, platted it, and named it after his realty adviser, a better decision, history suggests, than a link with any apostolic swordsmen.

Above Willow Island Lock, Pilotis, scanning downriver with the binoculars, said, “Here it is again,” and soon we were behind a boat tiredly trudging the current, and I said over the radio, Prepare to launch torpedoes. There came no response from the
Dry Docktor
, and when we overtook her, no whistle of recognition, only a weary Cap bent over her wheel. Once in the lock together, Pilotis hailed Mr. V—, who simply lifted a weak thumbs-up. We were wayworn too, ever the more so when our exit got us entangled in floaters, and we had to raise the motors to unwind branches and monofilament fishing line. Ten miles farther at Marietta, we entered the muddy Muskingum River and tied up at a small fuel dock. Pilotis jumped off to find us a room in the old rivermen’s hotel, the Lafayette, but slipped on the pier, went down hard, and while decumbent yelled, “Goddamnit to hell!” While the day had not been difficult, we felt our thousand miles as if we carried them on our backs, and all I could think to do was get off
Nikawa
and help my friend up.

While I pumped in the gasoline, I noticed a new softball floating in a thick mat of flotsam, so I pulled it out, then another bobbed to the surface, another, and one more. It was as if some unknown sport fish were laying them. When Pilotis returned, I began juggling. Now, I can’t juggle even knotted handkerchiefs, let alone softballs, so the spheres were soon hitting me on the noddle, the knees, the foot, and I cried out, “‘Umph!’ ejaculated the squire.” The ludicrousness drew a smile from Pilotis and also a fellow who couldn’t believe my incompetent display; he was a coach of women’s sports at Marietta College and said the softballs belonged to the team. I turned them over, and he took two tired sailors on a convivial tour of the river town. Slowly we got from beneath the burden of miles, and I wondered how the evening might have gone without such adventitious flotsam.

S
PRING WAS IN
profusion that morning—its scent along the avenues of dignified Marietta, its angle of light against the brick shops, its promise in the gait of citizens on Front Street—but the season didn’t draw us immediately to the river. Instead, we walked the town, the oldest (they say here) in Ohio, and we found a couple of conversations, a breakfast, a grocery, a bookshop, all the time my notepad filling:

—   
Child to mother in coffee shop: “Do pearls make oysters hurt?”

—
   A
young woman to her friend after stumbling on curb: “I’m not sure-footed, but I’m not afraid to fall down.”

—   From Francis Galton’s 1867
The Art of Travel:
“Neither sleepy nor deaf men are fit to travel quite alone. It is remarkable how often the qualities of wakefulness and watchfulness stand every party in good stead.”

At last, with a small sack of books under my arm, we walked to the water, boarded
Nikawa
, and followed the Muskingum into the Ohio, on down past a long run of skinny islands, remnants of the many before the dams drowned them. Mark Twain said, “A river without islands is like a woman without hair. She may be good and pure, but one doesn’t fall in love with her very often.” Under a beneficent sky we did the dozen miles to Parkersburg, West Virginia, where years ago residents had the sense to create on a river hill a picnic garden out of the former hanging-ground and the linguistic courage to call it Nemesis Park; now, if they would only have the courage to stop certain dimwits from turning their historic downtown into a parking lot, a process that makes pointless the big floodwall separating the city center from its rivers, the mass of concrete giving lower Parkersburg the feel of a penitentiary exercise yard.

A year earlier here, in the quaint Blennerhassett Hotel, I met Enamel, whose name I learned from the grocery store nametag pinned to her shirt. She was forty, of melodious voice, serious, and able to tie a knot in a cherry stem in her mouth using only her tongue, a bar skill she’d learned in her whiskey-sour days. When I asked how her name came about, she corrected me: “It isn’t Enamel—it’s Enna-
mell.
My grandmother, who couldn’t read too good, saw the word on a fancy brooch in a jewelry store and thought it was classy, maybe like Tiffany. It’s a good name because I can tell if people know me or not. One gal was claiming to be my friend but making up tales about me, but everyone knew she was lying because she called me Enamel like I came out of a paint can. But I took her boyfriend from her—then we broke up when he started writing the date on dusty furniture. Of course,
he
couldn’t ever help clean. He wasn’t any good anyway. All’s he wanted is you-know-what. And a dust lady.”

The Ohio turns directly west at Parkersburg, and two miles along lies the island where a wealthy and eccentric Irish immigrant, Harman Blennerhassett, settled in 1797 to conduct experiments in the natural sciences. After shooting down Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr arrived there in 1806 to seek underwriting for his design of setting up an empire somewhere southwest of the lower Mississippi. Convincing Blennerhassett he would be surrounded by a utopia of intellectuals, Burr got the Irishman to join the treasonous plan, and on a dark December night he started down the Ohio to join the conspirators, but President Jefferson learned of the schemery and dispatched militia who caught them near Natchez, Mississippi. The traitors were charged but never tried. Had the plot succeeded, the United States might have been smaller by a third.

Nikawa
slipped between green shores, the day happening easily, and Pilotis hummed a strange barcarole just before we entered a section of the Ohio which appeared to lose its urgency to reach the sea; it twisted and bent and bowed, often traveling a curving eight miles to gain only two straight ones. That day we hoped to cover about a hundred river miles, but the crow-flight distance was only about half that. Still, the Ohio, partly from its current, although much hidden in the dam pools, and partly from its sinuousness, gave us proof of its infixed destina tion, its destiny to lose itself when at last it loses its way in the begetting sea. Its gravity-driven motive moved us powerfully, if blindly, in a way our engines could not, and it seemed we and nature became a single intention, and we were but a small message in a corked bottle thrown to the current, to wash up someday on a far shore. All of this yielded a concord, one strong enough to put Pilotis into a doze I presently interrupted by quoting Francis Galton on the qualities of wakefulness.

When we descended Belleville Lock, I heard my mate singing quietly on the bow, playing the mooring line back and forth, and then we went on through the afternoon with Pilotis sometimes at the wheel, sometimes me, sometimes conversation, sometimes not, but always a contentment in our clement travel; even the drift was benign, pieces of it actually getting out of our way and taking flight as we kept misreading slender, dark cormorants for floating sticks. Then Racine Lock, then around the big northern bend with little Pomeroy, Ohio, perched atop it like a feather in a cap, the late sun casting over it a flaxen light. Because the village opens to the river to show inviting front sides of buildings, we almost hung up the day there, but the pull of the Ohio was greater, and we rolled on a few miles more to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a place surely named on an afternoon like ours, although in the earliest days of the settlement Henry Clay described it and its excellent setting as “a beautiful woman clad in rags.” The first white man known to see the point between the Ohio and Kanawha rivers was Pierre-Joseph de Céloron. In 1749 he came from Lake Erie on the same route as ours to
la belle rivière
to claim it and its tributary country for Louis XV by burying along the Ohio four inscribed lead plates. Incredibly, two of them have turned up, the one at the Point coming to light exactly a century after the Frenchman left it.

I knew of a well-situated bed-and-breakfast there, one with a good river view and near Céloron’s hiding spot, so we turned into the Kanawha (river folk pronounce it Kah-NAW) and searched for a tie-up, but we found nothing suitable or even safe, so we went back into the Ohio another four miles to Gallipolis and passed the riverside town square where the citizens remind themselves of the 1878 arrival of yellow fever in the village with a monument made from the broken rocker shaft of the steamboat that brought the disease. We entered silty Chickamauga Creek, bounced over a sunken log, and came upon a quiet little backwater harbor with a gasoline pump and an owner who let us moor for the night. We had joked the
Dry Docktor
would be there, and indeed she was, Cap and Mr. V—as mellow as we, a mood we polished with supper together at a grill across from the river park where teenagers swarmed Saturday night like a glom of mayflies during a hatch-out.