River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (28 page)

I submit my last thought on the matter: given the American mania for rankings, the United States could still have today—even after the shortenings—the third-longest river in the world simply by dropping three letters and changing three others to make Mississippi spell Missouri. Failing that, then perhaps a grand compromise: the Missourippi. Try it: Mizza-rippi.

After the storm of the previous night, I had hoped for propitious weather to start us out on our lengthy climb up the continent, our entry into the Louisiana Purchase, but that Wednesday was nearly as ominous as the evening before. Until then, I’d not seen on the voyage a morning I less wanted to venture into. My interior was strung with gloom as if I’d inhaled the weather, a day with neither the adventure of storm nor the romance of the moody dismals; it was merely drab and drizzly; like a poor novel not bad or outrageous enough to be remembered, it was memorable only for what it wasn’t. Absence defined the morning in another way too, for Pilotis had to leave to handle affairs at home and would rejoin me upstream in a few days. Our young musician became a midshipman and assumed copilot duties, yet I much felt the absence of my great friend.

We heard that rain was coming down along the Missouri Valley out of eastern Kansas, causing the river to continue to rise, perhaps higher than the record flood of 1993, the most costly American alluvion ever. By departure time, a lone piece of good news—but an important one—suggested our route over the Great Plains at least should be well watered.

We pumped nearly four inches of rain out of the afterdeck, tightened down the canopy and kayak, set out onto the Mississippi, and headed toward the landing where began St. Louis, obscured that day in a rise of vapors, and on beyond the high Arch, the symbol of the city and the Missouri as Gateway to the West. Passing tows tore up the water, and
Nikawa
went into a violent rocking—pitching, yawing, rolling all at once—a varied chaos even Lake Erie had not worked upon us. We dodged drift and barges, jangled ourselves north through the hullabaloo morning, passed under the great Eads Bridge of 1874, a piece of engineering above all others that made St. Louis what it is. To the northwest on the Missouri ridge of Bellefontaine, “beautiful fountain,” sleep the bones of William Clark; had they eyes, they could look across the river toward the place where the great Expedition began. We reached quiet water behind Gabaret Island on the dug channel that leads to the Chain-of-Rocks Lock, the final—or first—on the Mississippi and our last one for almost three thousand miles.

While securing our line in the chamber, the Piper fell hard enough on the drizzled deck to stun himself before he could recover and execute the mooring. In the lock with us was a big towboat. The pilot apparently saw the fall and took it as evidence that we were novices, and warned over the radio, “In this high water, you boys better know what you’re doing or you’ll find yourself in a tree.” His tone was not one of concern but superiority. I radioed our thanks and said we’d had to chainsaw our way out of treetops only twice since leaving New York City.

We returned to the Mississippi a little below the mouth of Wood River from where the Lewis and Clark Expedition embarked in 1804 on another day in May of similar wet and cheerless weather. We crossed the Mississippi, and there before us opened the great Missouri charging down fiercely a flood that bulled into the other river, hit
Nikawa
, shimmied her, bounced her in the confusion of waters, a violence that fulfilled my long wish for such an assertion of force. The moment had come, and my excitement to see our ascent begin quite purged my glooms. Facing the river that more than any other would decide whether or not we would make it to the Pacific gave me so much adrenaline and exuberance, quickened further by apprehension, I felt almost as if we were starting afresh. Herman Melville wrote, “He who has never been afar, let him once go from home to know what home is. For as you draw nigh again to your old native river, he seems to pour through you with all his tides, and in your enthusiasm you swear to build altars like milestones along both his sacred banks.”

I’d waited for this moment not just since Elizabeth, New Jersey, but since I was ten or eleven years old when I wanted to know what it felt like in a small boat to enter the maw of the Missouri, the ruction of rivers, and I was glad for the high waters because I wanted it to deny us nothing. At last the river I grew up near, the one whose water I drank from birth until I went off to the Navy. The Big Muddy was in me, the source of my first blood, the humour in my bones, my definition of a river, a winding trickery that once nearly took me down, a flowing whose farthest stream is Hell Roaring Creek and which leaves the mountains under the shadow of a peak named Nemesis. We were about to go against it all the way to the mountains, to that place nine thousand feet above the sea where we could stand astride it and drink straight its native purity.

In 1841, the Reverend John Clark passed by the confluence and wrote in his book
Gleanings by the Way:

We witnessed one of the most interesting sights in all our journey—the meeting of the waters of the Mississippi and the Missouri! I cannot attempt description. The imagination alone can conceive it. If I ever had feelings of sublimity waked up in my bosom, it was when our boat stood off just abreast the Missouri, and I looked up its mighty channel, and thought of its source between two and three thousand miles distant, amid those mountains whose tops are covered with eternal snow.

Befitting its nature, the Missouri comes snaking into the Mississippi on a bend five miles long before straightening perfectly into a reach that leads to another set of big bends. To hold in place this particular configuration at the confluence and to create a stable navigable channel, engineers have built along the first four miles thirty-five rock wing-dikes, structures that usually force even small boats to keep to the winding channel, but the stones were now well below the surface, and we were free to go nearly anywhere we saw wetness. The Piper took a position on the bow and played “Mist,” “My Home,” and, to make sure I was truly stirred to the challenge, another round of “Garry Owen,” the Irish quickstep Indians like to whistle, the one that led George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry into the tombs of history.

The Missouri is one of the fastest navigable rivers of length in the world, but as historian Stanley Vestal wrote, “The trouble with going up the Missouri River in a boat is that you have to take the boat along.” For years a certain popular recreational cruising guide dismissed the river with the curt warning that it was “very hazardous to all boaters,” but in the year of our ascent, the book at last included it, toning down the direful to a mere grousing “navigation [on the Missouri] is more a game of chance than a skilled profession.” Reading that caution a day earlier, Pilotis had said, “Sounds like a perfect match for your brand of skippering.”

The Piper had just come off the bow when
Nikawa
dropped into a virtual hole with a banging that shook our jawbones. It wasn’t a true whirlpool but a large and ferocious eddy turning water, something a little less common than the numerous boils pushing currents upward, a less unnerving direction. I knew then, whatever else the Missouri did, it was not ever going to disappoint us; we could expect it, like a cross-grained grandfather, to do anything but bore us. We had the wind on our nose but only enough to ripple the water and leave the jouncings to the erratics of currents. And that’s the way we started up the Missouri.

We passed through the extensive inundated flats called Spanish Bottoms where Hispanic troops in 1767 built facing fortresses, both long ago taken by the Big Muddy, a river that has always, given how it sweeps away the works of human hands, seemed to want its past written as myth rather than history. That morning I’d made arrangements to meet friends at the bankside park near the big gambling boats and below the hills of St. Charles, Missouri, once the westernmost white settlement, the last stop in “civilized” territory. If the Mississippi kept to its southerly course just north of town, the great confluence of rivers would happen below Main Street, and St. Charles might now be the city with the Gateway Arch and a statue of Stan Musial. When we arrived, the park and casinos were empty, evacuated because of the flood.

I circled
Nikawa
awhile, then pressed on as the western sky slowly worked itself into ever more darkness. We rounded the big turn at what was once Catfish Island before engineers attached it to the shore, and then we passed under the paired bridges of U.S.40 where the river even in its darkening became a fine stretch of heavily wooded hills, many of them sheared into rocky exposures by thousands of years of scouring water laden with grit carried down from the far granites of the Rockies. We were in the quiet territory of mid-nineteenth-century German immigrants who, using an excellent native grape, the Norton, made the area the preeminent wine country in America, an enterprise that Prohibition and California finally wiped out. It was from those hills that rootstock went to France to help restore louse-devastated vineyards; to drink French wine today is to take in a little of the Missouri Valley. For a hundred miles along both shores were roads running the green hills of woods and, once again, wineries. We continued beyond Defiance where, on a low rise above the bottomland, Daniel Boone built his last home, this one a solid stone place still holding the bed he died in, his chamberpot yet beneath.

As the weathery western sky drew in the last light,
Nikawa
went around the most southerly point of the long river and approached Washington, Missouri. At the edge of the flooded waterside park, a couple of dozen people under bright umbrellas watched our little white boat emerge from the drizzle, and we heard shouts. We were in serious need of a safe landing for the night. The musician went forward to pipe them a tune, and I moved in close to search out a berth near the shore. From the crowd we heard
“Nikawa! Nikawa!”
It was friends pointing toward a small assemblage of docks now cut off from land and exposed to the open river. I didn’t like the precariousness of them, but the other choices were even poorer, so I picked out one protected by a few trees, and my midshipman tied us in. We took down the kayak, attached a long line for retrieving it, and paddled ashore one at a time, and from among the curious strangers came our friends to clap us on the back, their worry gone. A woman, who seemed to steam in the cold rain, approached and scolded, “We heard there was a boat out there! I was ready to call the sheriff about two wacko drunks out on such a flood!” Madam, I said, we may be crazy, but we’re not crocked.

Washington is one of the good places right on the Missouri, the lower town still possessed of much of its past, its streets coming down like creeks to the water; because of judicious location, it is without a blockading levee or floodwall. By the old corncob-pipe factory where a worker once could light up a bowl in full view of passing steamboat decks loaded with tobacco, whiskey, and hemp, cobs lay strewn on the sidewalk. Next door we took supper, an occasion for toasts and stories, a rousing time, and then in
he
walked.

O
UT OF THE WET NIGHT
he came, blown into the cellar café where our meal was, blustering in like an actor overplaying his entrance, a soggy cap on his head, oilskin pants and jacket, a cigarillo clenched under his white mustache, and he rasped out across the room, “Where’s the captain? The one crossing the country. Where is he?” Surprised, thinking him perhaps unstable, no one spoke, the diners silent and guarded, watching. He scanned the place, approached our table, the several of us, and settled on me. “Are you him? You’re the man? It’s your boat?” I said it was, and who was he? “I can help you. You’re tied out on that dock. That’s no good in this bad water. You come up to my dock—it’s a good dock—gas, everything you need. It’s no good here. I’m your man on this river.”

Maybe tomorrow, I said. “Hey, Captain! Captain! Trust Nick. I know this river—no one here knows it. You’re down here, and you’ll have problems.” Maybe tomorrow. “Maybe, maybe! Captain! There’s no gas on this river till St. Joseph—five hundred miles! Come up to New Haven, up to my dock. You think maybe, maybe, so maybe tonight your boat gets loose and you never see it again. There’re punks on this river—pirates. They find a loose boat, and they strip it. You want a hull? Just a hull? That’s what they’ll leave you. Take a hull across the country! Try it! Scavengers are worse than the flood. Or maybe your boat just floats off and hits a bridge pier and damages it. Who’s responsible? The captain has to maintain control of his vessel at all times. You got a lawsuit. But up at Nick’s nobody bothers anything. And this river, it ain’t through rising. I’m a Greek—I know water.” He was a small man, in his late sixties. He stood too close, talked too loud, too relentlessly, pointed his index finger too often, but I liked Nick Kotakis. Maybe tomorrow, I said.