River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (23 page)

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN
, a seller of caskets, found southern Indiana good country. “Lots of old people here. It’s almost ideal demographics.” Pilotis asked whether she ever found her work depressing. “I get equibalance from my other line, homeopathic remedies.” Her system sounded sure-fire to me: if the root extracts and natural tonics failed, one had the comfort of that coffin at hand. She said to me, “Cynicism is a poison, bad for the brain cells.”

Our host drove us up the road to Deer Creek with a stop at Lafayette Spring where water gurgled deep within a long, dark cleft in an eroded sandstone outcrop before emerging to roll a few yards down into the Ohio. Lafayette himself washed ashore there when the steamboat he was aboard struck a snag and sank in 1825; in the river the aged nobleman left his baggage, carriage, and, supposedly, eight thousand dollars in gold. Near that spring Abraham Lincoln and his parents entered Indiana from Kentucky on the way to a new homesite in the woods, an event commemorated by a bronze plate bolted to the rock:
LINCOLN — HUMBLE — HOMELY — LONELY — GIFTED — GREAT.
That peculiar laud somehow reminded me of Lincoln’s joke about the man tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, who replied when asked how he liked it, “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”

The kind of day we’d longed for since setting out fifteen hundred miles ago finally began to happen, although I first thought things were shaping up in the more usual way of weather: challenge, alarm, weari ness. The clouds had lifted, but now the sky was saffron from sulfurous coal smoke, the air botched with stink from a pulp mill, and the river yellow-brown like an Appalachian dustyard dog. When we radioed our request to descend the Cannelton Lock, the operator told me a newsman had heard of our approach and was trying to hunt us down. I told him to forget he’d seen
Nikawa.

An upriver-bound tow, ready to enter the lock, called to ask us to pass him on a two-whistle—that is, to his port—so our diminutive wake would not push him against the bank. That our dory could move anything so massive was indication of the instability of the river road. Beyond the lock the water was as quiet as if in a bottle, and we ran past Tell City, another Swiss town, this one with a floodwall and an arrow-pierced apple painted large on it.

The bottomlands became wide enough to give industry sprawl space, and the entering streams bore names like Lead Creek, Muddy Gut, Big Slough; it was an area for a swift and unhindered run among hills dwindling to a mere rolling terrain as we neared the valley of the Mississippi. I propped back at the wheel, took off my shoes, and steered with my stockinged feet, a stunt to rouse Pilotis who seemed to be waiting for the next perturbation.

The Anderson River, a name my mate thought one of the least interesting in the country, entered at Troy, Indiana, about where seventeen-year-old Abe Lincoln built a small scow to take travelers out to midstream to board passing paddlewheelers. A Kentucky boatman hailed the boy into court for operating a ferry without a license, but Abe argued his scow didn’t cross the river, so it wasn’t actually a ferry and therefore needed no license; the judge agreed, a decision less important than the suit itself, which introduced Lincoln to the law. In that way, the Ohio helped make a President. Farther on downriver, at Rockport, Indiana, Abe hired out at nineteen to a flatboat bound for the lower Mississippi, a tour that revealed to him the vast magnificence of American landscape and the pustulant shame of slavery. It was also in Rockport that he met John Pitcher, an attorney who opened his exceptional library to Lincoln, books that would return later dividends to the nation through the eloquence of addresses, proclamations, stories, utterances.

Pilotis suggested a stop in Owensboro, Kentucky, so we could walk to a lunch spot I’d been talking about, but the rising river apparently interfered with getting docks into the water because we saw no safe place to tie up. A year earlier in that luncheonette I’d met a man, now thickset but as a boy, said he, “skinnier than a tobacco stob.” He’d not had a lucky life, but he’d been in jail just once. “I was bringen in hay bales and got the truck mired down in a wet field. Hell, I was nearly out of it onto the road too. I was in a hurry to see my wife—we was separated because she said I didn’t keep my word or take things serious. God omighty! I had to get out of that slick fast and be on time. So I took off my overhalls and put them under one tire. All I had for the othern was my union suit, so I put it under too. Except for my boots and wedden ring, I was as nekked as man can be, but I drove her out. I wanted Mary to see I’d turned over a new leaf, so I took her some flars. I didn’t have anywhere to buy them so I borried some off a fresh grave. Missus Chalmerses oldest boy, I believe it was. I didn’t borry them all. They was big ol gladiolas. Then, hell, somebody come aholleren after me, but I got away. Being nekked was pretty nippy—and, a course, I was tense about visiten Mary like I was, but there weren’t time to get clothes. So I come to take a couple of swigs on my bottle. Maybe it was three or four, just to ward off the cold. Anyway, when I got to her place and run up on her porch, I held them gladiolas in front of me. Thank god they wasn’t roses. When I give her the flars—well, you can see how things was out in the open then. She looked down and said, ‘Howard, you ain’t never gonna change!’ and she throwed them gladiolas at me. I went to whinen and beggen through the door to hear me out, when up comes a deputy, and he says, ‘Hello there, neighbor. Where’s your britches?’ And I told him out in Peck’s field, and he says, ‘Well, I believe you, neighbor, but I’m agonna have to take you in for stealen off a dead man.’ I said, ‘I cain’t go to jail like this!’ ‘Well then, neighbor,’ he says, ‘you’d better gather them posies up again.’ Hell, they wasn’t posies. Goddamnit, they fined me twelve dollars for stealen and six dollars for public nekkedness. I loved that woman, but I never could do anything right. When it come to her, I was just snake-bit.”

Downstream from Owensboro, we entered a run among several slender islands, each a couple of miles long and giving a sense of the old Ohio and a choice of ways down through back chutes, but when the islands fell behind, the river was again just an expanse in the flatlands. More than any other mode of travel, rivering enforces a living in the present where the moment is nearly all, for to think too much about tomorrow or yesterday is to slip into a distraction that can endanger the boat. We had no wind, saw no tows, so I shut
Nikawa
down and let her drift, and Pilotis laid out a lunch of mozzarella, pumpernickel, roasted peppers, half-sour pickles, Kalamata olives, and a bottle of good cabernet. We sat at the navigation table, repast before us, and floated along at two miles an hour. I began figuring. Could we continue this speed day and night, traveling not on our terms but entirely those of the river, we’d reach the Pacific almost at the same time we were working for. I said so. “Sure, but for that thing called gravity—we’re about to go contrary to it.” Pilotis was correct. Tomorrow the tilt of the continent would be against us for almost three thousand miles before we might find this kind of ease again. But for now the Ohio carried us, demanding only buoyancy, and during that hour we went exactly as went the river.

I talked of the previous night when I tried to get to sleep in the hotel but succumbed to a fierce case of doubt, concerns that now seemed ludicrous as we sat idly on the silent and hasteless river, nothing more required than sipping a California red, all the while floating west. Said Pilotis, “The river’s a clever sonofabitch. It’ll make us pay for every minute of this.” I said, And the price of life is death. So we toasted the old sonofabitch. Then it was time again to get behind the wheel and maneuver around Scuffletown Island and up to Newburgh Lock. We’d had our moment.

The outreaches of the river town of Newburgh, Indiana, gave us a ridge of large, recent houses and then, farther along, in floodlands, a string of trailers and shacks sitting atop twelve-foot posts, their bases plastered with waterborne trash. Seven miles below the Green River, we found a dock off the Ohio near Evansville, tied
Nikawa
in, and walked toward the city. On the big levee we came upon a middle-aged man dressed in a white suit and silver silk tie, sitting cross-legged and looking intently at the river. He glanced up and asked me, “Are you with the Postal Service?” I was wearing an Army surplus shirt, and over my shoulder was the satchel for my logbook. No, I said, but we’re crossing the country at about the speed of a penny postcard. He said, “Look out there,” and waved toward the Ohio. “Isn’t it beautiful? Trees and nothing else. Greenery. Do you know Evansville is the only city in America with no other city on the opposite side of a big river?” I named a couple of others. Trying to rise, he struggled but was unable to get up. He was drunk.

When we reached downtown, we went to the sixth-floor bar of a hotel affording a lovely vista of the seven-mile-long finger the Ohio points at Evansville, and sat through the golden hour with beverages and watched the gleaming water lose the sunset. Pilotis said, “There’s not another person up here so much as even glancing at the river. Only a drunk has the eyes to see it.”

Down on the waterfront, the Ohio Ribber Barbecue Cook-Off was under way, and the evening air was savory with hickory and mesquite smoke, sauces and grilling meats, voices speaking of cookery. From five states they had pulled their big metal ovens fashioned from fifty-gallon drums, propane tanks, home-heating-oil tanks, a World War Two bomb container, and one from a boyhood-home coal furnace. Each carried a banner:
OINK, CACKLE, AND MOO. SQUEAL OF FORTUNE. IF YOU HAVE A BUTT, WE’LL SMOKE IT
.

Everyone had sold out of cackle, so we took some moo on bread, a moist brisket in a sauce that disappeared to leave only the flavor of hickoried meat, and we finished things with a plate of fried Vidalia onion rings. Then we walked around the heart of Evansville, once a lively spot where the Wabash and Erie Canal joined the Ohio, now turned barren and boring by so-called urban renewal—that is, parking lots—a place conceived by the sort of city planners whose most important design tool is a headache ball. Except for the old courthouse and post office, the town center was full of architecture memorable for its shoddy temporariness, a congelation of sameness, an obliviation of time-earned character, a grid to get away from, which indeed the people had done so they could go down to the fecund riverbank with the eccentric and vernacular cookers and ovens, down where traditions lived and histories clearly continued, where city engineers seem never to have walked.

A
THUNDERSTORM
had come in the night and rattled the river and razed trees along it; then a following fog, like a cool hand across a furrowed brow, smoothed the water, but visibility was poor as if we wore steamed-over spectacles. Sweeping up insects, martins and swallows sliced across our bow; there were many of the birds, and for hours they beat through the mist, and I could imagine their narrow wings fanning the air to clarity, but we still struggled to see the distant bends. Blown-down cottonwoods lay slanting off the banks into the muddied water, limbs broken, bark shattered, their leaves not yet withering. Then the wind rose, not strong, just enough to put athwart our course some shallow troughs that hid the storm rummage, logs splintered to wicked sharpness lying darkly half submerged like alligators. We could do little but go slowly, banging into those we failed to dodge. It was a morning of clunks and swerves.

The mist made the tows hard to distinguish from the perpendicular mud banks, and more than once a mass of barges seemed to materialize out of a field to bear down on us. I overtook one long tow and immediately came upon another, an unusual closeness since the boats normally give each other wide berth. We seemed to be gaining on it as though it were dead in the water, but its wake was churning up strange rolls of frothing river. Nothing looked right as the gap between us closed fast. What is this? I said, and then realized we were approaching not the stern of a towboat but the straight bows of oncoming barges. Because a downriver boat (like ours) has less control than one going up, it has right of way, but tows take precedence over small craft for several reasons, two good ones being a line of vision severely limited by several hundred feet of barges in front and a stopping distance of a mile or more. It was not the moment to weigh fine points of river practice. I tacked sharply to starboard, Pilotis went crashing into the bulkhead, and we cleared the monster somehow, but the captain came out to shake an arm at me. He thought I was playing one of those games of weekend boaters.

Below Henderson, Kentucky—where John James Audubon for a few years was an indifferent shopkeeper more interested in hunting, learning to draw birds and beasts, and keeping his pond stocked with turtles for his favorite soup—the Ohio becomes wider, a half mile across in places, and deeper, holes of sixty feet, and the high water created some boils, upwellings that made large shifting circles across the surface. Bean fields reached to the edge of the river, the plow furrows inches from the water, and with no stabilizing line of trees and shrubs to hold the banks, the edacious Ohio easily pulled the earth into it. Farmers, wanting to use each foot of rich bottom this season, would have less next year, and by not giving up a little now, they eventually would lose it all. But where a tree line protected the edges, nest holes of swallows filled the banks.

A bald eagle dropped out of a dead sycamore and took a course directly above the river, and for a couple of miles we followed its draft, on around Cypress Bend, up to Diamond Island, one of the largest on the river, past more low islands big and small, the wooded ones called towheads. Of the six states bordering the Ohio, Kentucky has the most miles of shoreline, and all the islands along its coast, no matter on which side of the river they lie, belong to it, a result of the federal government in 1792 setting the upper boundary against the north bank of the Ohio. Sixteen miles downstream from the courthouse and the industries in Mount Vernon, Indiana, we had speedy passage through Uniontown Lock, and two miles beyond
Nikawa
passed the mouth of the Wabash River and the Illinois line. Before our voyage began, I’d spoken with a couple of boat mechanics living two hundred miles up the Wabash, water they refused to set out on. One said, “The fish in that river got eight tails!” “Sure,” said the other, “but can they swim! Now, if they only had eyes to see where they’re going.” The truth is, the entire Wabash, a biologist told me, “is under a fish-consumption advisory because of PCB and mercury contamination, and the lower river is dangerous to recreationists because of
E. coli
from animal wastes. It’s going to be difficult to get improvement here because the Indiana legislature is deeply under the influence of the Farm Bureau and other property rights organizations. But there are seven states downstream from the Wabash, and that makes pollution here actionable by federal agencies.” So when will the water get better? “When enough people speak out—as always.”