River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (29 page)

The next morning after a big breakfast we learned the Corps was going to close the river to boats, and the Piper announced he wanted to leave a few days early. I felt the voyage starting to unravel. Next to me stood the Reporter, my newspaper friend from the
Kansas City Star
who had just been speaking of his time of terror on the Hudson River when he kept storm watch aboard
Nikawa
while Pilotis and I explored Pollepel Island. He had returned for an update to his story, and now he was going to get one as a shanghaied sailor. The Piper, in youthful haste, failed to proceed until the sky opened and insisted on getting gear from the boat just as black clouds rumbled in, and, helping him, the Reporter and I got soaked in the rain, then took shelter in town until the weather passed, and it was afternoon before the two of us could set out.

The truant Missouri sprawled everywhere, flaunting its mastery of the valley, and we had to follow tree lines that delineated the river from the inundated everything else.
Nikawa
, as if recognizing her baptismal stream, ran atop the boils and eddies so slickly I had to restrain her, hold her back since the current wasn’t doing it. No boat can be built for all waters, but I was beginning to see that
Nikawa
—although she was almost certainly the first C-Dory ever on the Missouri—might prove herself a match for this most cantankerously challenging of American rivers, a good thing because the long Big Muddy was
the
key to reaching the Pacific.

New Haven, Missouri, only thirteen miles from Washington, sits behind a modest levee, and in front of it was Nick’s barge-dock, the
Penelope
, a simple contraption—two fuel drums at the rear, a sodapop machine, a withered potted plant, a television antenna—the entire rig secured at the edge of the roiling channel by nothing more than a slender cable wrapped around an old cottonwood and another tied to a skinny post, both of those stanchions in ten feet of moving water. “That’s it?” the Reporter said. “Somehow he made it sound better. Can that thing hold?”

The current put the mooring lines under a keen tension, enough to make me wonder how long the roots of the cottonwood might keep their grip in the saturated bottom. I could hear Pilotis speaking of “the prudent mariner,” but I couldn’t think of an alternative. Nick came out, hailed us, and I asked, Is that tree going to be there in the morning? “Captain! Captain! It held
Penelope
through the ’ninety-three flood, the big one. Bring your boat in!” I knew of no means to test the cottonwood, and once again I had to give us over to chance. We secured
Nikawa
on the inside of the dock, out of the way of direct hits by floating trees, barges, chicken coops, oil drums, or any of the freak debris that floods bring down.
Nikawa
would remain as long as the cottonwood, and for the next hours our trip would depend on tree roots; if they pulled loose, so would our voyage.

When’s the crest supposed to hit? I asked. “Maybe tomorrow,” Nick said, “maybe later, but when it does, the dock will still be here.” The Reporter said, “How do you know that?” And Nick: “Hey, my friend! How do you know you’ll be here tomorrow? Hey! I got more crucifixes inside than a church.” I muttered, Now I’m reassured. I could only hope that his
Penelope
was as steadfast as Odysseus’s.

Nick ran us to shore in his johnboat, and we walked along the levee to a two-storey bed-and-breakfast, a clean and pleasant house sitting at the base of the dike and affording a good view of our boat. The caretaker answered the door but tried to turn us down, saying conditions were too dangerous to stay there overnight, what with the river only fifteen feet away and rising and now actually above the ground floor. I pointed to
Nikawa
and told her we’d come from the Atlantic Ocean in that thing, so a house seemed a citadel to us. She studied the little dory, then said, “If this is what you really want.” I took the upstairs room so I could lie abed and look out onto the cottonwood holding everything that then constituted my life.

After dinner, the Reporter and I walked along the levee, the Missouri only a few feet from topping it, and we tried to estimate the awesome weight rolling past the village, by our beds, under our boat. The windless night had filled with stars, and the river—you must understand this—although capable of sweeping away a town, the river made no noise whatsoever. The water moved hard and fast and in utter silence as if nothing were there, nothing at all.

T
HE TORNADO
was bearing down fast with terrific noise, and the Reporter had us on high ground. I yelled for him to get the tow wagon to the creek, and he did as I awoke to find a blank wall inches from my nose. Then I remembered where I was and whirled in the bed to face the window. In the early sun the cottonwood still stood, and
Nikawa
rode securely against the little dock.

The Reporter heard me come down the stairs. He sat up in blinking astonishment, bigger eyes I’ve never seen, and pointed beyond the window. That’s called a river, I said, and he, “I couldn’t see it from the bed yesterday. It was too far below the levee.” He hurried himself ready as if about to be swept away, and we went outside. The Missouri was up considerably, and by seven
A.M.
sirens called citizens to the shore, trucks were hauling in sand to be hoppered into bags, and soon people began arriving to form a long line on the levee and start laying down several courses of bagged sand only recently, and ironically, sucked from the river bottom. They hoped their two-foot barrier would be sufficient to thwart the rise. Hand to hand the sandbags went along, and the barrier rose only slightly faster than the river. A boss called out, “No slackers!” and they laughed at him, paused when the town siren sounded again, returned to their good humor, one woman saying, “Two years ago we had to do this in the rain. Today this is picnic weather.” I walked the line, filled in when the brigade got stretched thin, listened to the talk. There were as many women as men, but the females, perhaps revealing some innate affinity with water unknown among males, treated the occasion as if it were an annual festival of spring: jokes, queries about so-and-so’s divorce, what was wrong with Lendon’s elbow.

Our man Nick arrived, nervous, less assured of his dock, tired, and he grew vexed when I asked again about the cottonwood holding on. He said national television networks were now showing the “raging Missouri” and announcing the month likely to become the wettest May on record. His agitation caused everyone to avoid him, but I couldn’t shake free for some time. He pointed to the river gauge, a plain wooden post inscribed with numbers and notches, and he said it might go under, something it had not done in the record flood of ’ninety-three; if it did, the river would top the sandbags soon after and begin pouring into New Haven, first filling the cellars of the buildings on Front Street a block away before doing the real damage.

Trucks backed up to the stores as merchants selected which goods to haul out. I found their decisions unaccountable: a broken desk, a box of cheap dolls, two pieces of stained plasterboard. One man said he knew things were serious last night when he found mice moving to high ground, in that instance up into cabinet drawers.

The proprietor of The Christmas Shop, a woman in her seventies and noticeably bent in the upper spine, refused to move this time after shuffling items out two years earlier; frail and indomitable, she sat steady on her stool behind the cash register on the off chance someone might need a festive decoration just before the deluge. She said, “Why else do I have flood insurance? It’s expensive, you know.” The old barber in the old one-chair shop snipped away at old heads who had no fear of the old Missouri, and he talked about old topics, old Edna’s old limp, the squirrels bagged that time in ’forty-eight, the durn price of corn. The beverage distributor, the richest man in town according to several reports, hurriedly wheeled soft-drink machines onto a flatbed; unlike the others, this younger man worked with little equanimity. With even less composure was he who most required it, the town Emergency Management Director, a loud, cigar-gnawing bantam who fretted his way around, relished his moment of authority, barked at his neighbors; people mostly humored or mocked him because they already knew what to do, one of them saying, “For us, this is a ‘Been there, done that.’” The martinet’s temperament grew fouler as the baggers, toiling hard in the sun while he strode about accomplishing nothing, responded to him with hand gestures and recommendations on where his despotic lips might be less annoyingly and more usefully employed.

New Haven, population 1,500, sits just below a narrow bend, a curving stricture that even in low water creates strong currents against the forty-year-old levee. In its first century and a half, the village never saw the two lower streets flooded because the river had room in the miles of wide valley upriver to spread out and get absorbed. But as the Army Corps of Engineers gradually turned the once richly twined river into a trough and eliminated a half-million acres of meanders below the South Dakota line, and as the Army and farmers built more and more levees, the Missouri lost an innate capacity to absorb its frequent excesses, and floods became more virulent. (An Osage man, a descendant of the people who lived here at the arrival of the whites, once told me that in the native tongue there was a word for “great flow” but nothing really for “flood.” He said, “Floods are white man’s things.”) That’s why New Haven, like other intelligently situated river towns, for a century remained dry without floodwalls or levees. But now, after the big rise of two years earlier, bottom farmers near Treloar (rhymes with “Seymour”) across the river had raised their earthen dike several inches, making it slightly higher than the one at New Haven; an inch difference, of course, is all it takes to top a neighbor’s levee.

The jolliness along the bagging line ceased only when a new rivergauge reading was passed along: “It’s up another notch!” The people would pause, look out at the Missouri rolling past and quietly carrying down trees like doomed pinnaces, and the workers’ sweating brows wrinkled, but I heard no one execrate the river; each just went back to passing along stories and sandbags. No one said so, but I think they understood the Missouri provided purpose to certain idle days, excitement to a place where such was rare, a chance for community and contribution in an era of self-servers. The river invigorated them, renewed them, gave of its power and life, and that was the reason they did not curse it but chose to live beside it.

When, about noon, word came that the gauge was at a record height, a man told me, “If the Treloar levee doesn’t give out, somebody’ll blow it to save our town. What are fields compared to buildings?” Another whispered, “Better do it soon.” There was the rub: damaging a levee carries a long prison term, so destruction must happen after dark, probably too late to save New Haven.

I spelled a bagger here and there. A woman said to me, “Are we providing enough entertainment for you here in little old New Haven?” She looked out at
Nikawa
still clinging to the cottonwood and dock, and she said, “You couldn’t pay me enough to go out on that river.” I said we’d learned that morning the Corps had closed the Missouri to all boats, and I’d called a friend to bring our trailer down so we could get
Nikawa
off the water. It was lucky my home was only ninety miles away.

Bumblebees buzzed garden blossoms blithely, and swallows slipped back and forth over the river as if things were just as they ought to be, and, of course, they were. It was only the foolishness of trying to control the Missouri that was not as it should be. A man said so: “Our life would be easier if we’d grant the river its rights.” And a woman next to him said, “What in hell are you saying?” And he, “I’m saying there isn’t any way to manage the Missouri because only
it
can manage itself. In ten thousand years, who do you think’ll be managing the river? Taxpayers have spent billions so we can stand out here and sandbag. My grandfather never had to do this, and old What’s-his-name over there at Treloar never had to fertilize that bottomland—the river did it, and with no chemicals to get into our drinking water. So now we got levees and rock dikes and we’ve seen two five-hundred-year floods in two years. Just tell me how any of that makes sense.” “I can’t,” said another, “but I think it makes us a thousand years old.”

Along came an admonishment: volunteers in one section had laid bags with the open ends upriver, a flaw the Missouri would likely discover soon, but there was no time to correct it. Already water was finding ways into the levee through small rodent burrows now turning to trickles that for the moment a finger could plug, but in two hours even a sandbag couldn’t stop. Should there be any woodchuck or muskrat dens and tunnels, the consequences would be more immediate. Then a new gauge reading—“Up another inch!”—and a fellow said, “Go down, Treloar! Go down!”

Nikawa
rode only inches below the height of the levee, and I could but guess at the force the river was exerting on the cottonwood. I’d never before thought so much about tree roots. Where was our trailer? At three o’clock, the last message came down the line: “We can’t keep up. Everybody go home. We’ve done what we could do.” The Missouri was eleven inches above the record high-water mark. The citizens, tired and hungry and demoralized, looked over the low sandbag wall to see the brown water against the first course, the river creeping innocently, invisibly against the sacks, clover heads and grass stems wafting gently as if in a puddle, and there was nothing threatening or sinister whatsoever in the way it rose; it was utterly mild; only the uprooted trees sailing toward the Gulf gave indication of what loomed. The volunteers went slowly off the levee, no longer talking, futility saying it all.

I thought, If I hear
Nikawa
break loose, I’ll swim for her. Can I make it? Futility indeed. This was the river that denies a drowning person the usual allotment of three times up and down. We all were caught in a village no longer a haven. The Reporter and I walked toward the Levee House—there’d be nobody in it tonight other than Old Man Muddy—and gathered our gear. A neighbor came out to greet us; as we stood talking in her yard she said, “Well, look at that!” I wheeled around toward the boat.
Nikawa
was still there. The woman reached down into the grass and pulled a four-leaf clover and handed it to the Reporter. “I don’t know who needs it more, you or us,” she said.