River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (31 page)

Item:
Doug Elley, former mayor of the village of Lupus, invented a two-storey outhouse jocularly called the Sky Crapper that employs solar energy to turn human waste into desiccated and odorless crumblings, an innovation to reduce sewage in the river and one that will surely have its day, even though a senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire (who spent only $145.10 on his 1982 reelection campaign), cited the thing as a fleecing of taxpayers.

Item:
Plowboy Bend bears the name of a sternwheeler sunk there in the mid-nineteenth century, one of more than four hundred steamboats to go down in the Missouri, half of them from hitting snags. The average life of a nineteenth-century paddlewheeler on the river was less than two years.

At Rocheport, a village of singular charm, we turned up Moniteau Creek, and while Pilotis held
Nikawa
to the old railroad bridge, the Reporter and I ran for sandwiches. It was near the mouth of the Moniteau (the name is a Frenched-up corruption of the Algonquian word
Manito
, “Great Spirit”), the winter I was twenty, that I got the idea of crossing the Missouri on ice floes just to see what it was like. One warm February Saturday, I started over the frozen chunks about the size of bathtubs, crusty and jagged pieces loosely locked together. Several yards out, I heard a rifle shot, and another, and I paused. Then I realized the reports came not from a gun but the ice itself as it snapped under stress from the current. I could hardly believe how loud the sound was. I felt the floe I stood on begin to shake, then wobble, and before me the ice parted to reveal the cold, muddy swirl twisting below—a more fearsome thing I’d never seen. The frozen river wasn’t locked in place as I’d supposed but was being forced slowly downstream, buckling, snapping, opening, closing, ready to swallow whatever came onto it. That’s when common sense and terror hit and I headed for shore, unsure whether to go gently and slowly or hard and fast. How did Eliza do it? When I reached land, I looked back, incredulous that I’d thought I could actually make it across. After I finished recounting that imprudence, Pilotis said, “The way closed by opening and saved you.”

About twenty-five years later, almost exactly at that spot of my near demise, I encountered a thing of another sort. I was hiking along the old M-K-T Railroad, today the beautiful Katy Trail, in search of ancient pictographs William Clark mentioned on the way west in 1804. He wrote, “A Short distance above the mouth of this Creek, is Several Courious Paintings and Carveing in the projecting rock of Limestone inlade with white red & blue flint of verry good quallity,” and between the lines in his journal he drew three of the figures. Over the years, steamboat travelers continued to note the numerous pictographs so close to the river, but railroad construction at the turn of the century blasted most of them away. I walked along in search of what might be left, and from time to time glanced at the river and wondered whether I’d ever discover a water route across the country that would allow me to ascend the Missouri to its farthest source. I finally gave up on finding any figures and stopped to watch the darkening water roll past. When I turned to take a last look at the rocky bluff in the falling light of that July evening, my gaze, as if it were an arrow put in flight by an unseen archer, landed directly on a rust-colored image, and I froze in disbelief, my skin crawling. There was a pictograph, but not just any pictograph—that one was the precise image Plains Indians drew to indicate the seventh lunar month, the Blood Moon, or the Moon of Heat. On that eroded limestone was a drawing of my name. I realized William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, whose names I also bear—William Lewis Trogdon—had seen it, the only piece of Indian “picture writing” all of us—red, white, mixed—ever encountered.

A few months later, I moved to an old farm near the river bluffs, and I began seriously hunting a water way across America.

“Is all that true?” the Reporter asked. I pulled
Nikawa
close to shore, handed him the binoculars, and pointed to the bluff twenty feet up. He lifted the glasses, searched, then, “Whoa!” he murmured, and Pilotis, who knew the story, said, “Treat it as remarkable but don’t encourage his belief in coincidences.” Clustered coincidences, I corrected, and then I told a third story.

The final anniversary gift my spouse made me, a few months before she went on to another life and I to the rivers, was a big Hopi rainstick. For several days, I often turned it back and forth to listen to the pebbles trickle down like droplets inside the hollow cholla limb. By the end of the week, a serious dry spell broke, and the rain and snow fell throughout the winter, not just along Perche and Moniteau creeks but across the entire Missouri Valley well into western Montana to end an arid decade and create just the kind of snowpack a cross-country voyage would need.

The Reporter said, “You’re taking liberties with this story.” I answered I was taking nothing, every detail verifiable. Call it all clustered coincidences, luck, or what have you, I said, but fabrication it is not. “Well,” he mused, “we
did
escape New Haven a few hours after the woman gave us the four-leaf clover.” Pilotis, who admits no gramarye into anyone’s philosophy and grows vexed with those who might, said, “What? Not again!” and scowled at me. “Where’s your native Missouri skepticism? This is the land of Show Me.” I said, Done been showed. Then we reached the Boonville Bends.

Item:
Near the north bank once was Franklin, briefly an important village and, in 1819, the destination of the first steamboat to ascend the Missouri which washed the settlement away soon after it became the head of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, a starting point that moved progres sively west with the years, finally ending up almost halfway across Kansas.

Item:
Arrow Rock, a village vying with Rocheport for historic quaintness, sits too high for the river to flush away, so the Missouri pulled its other trick, abandoning the place for the opposite side of the valley. Indians mined chert from the bluffs there for tools and weapons, and it was in Arrow Rock that Dr. John Sappington developed anti-malarial quinine pills, and in 1844, relinquishing a fortune, he published his formula for the world to use.

Item:
Not far away in a barbecue joint, a place of excuses and poor food, two friends and I ordered sandwiches. I wanted a truly hot sauce, Jim wanted medium, and Bob mild; when I asked for the three, the ornery waitress pointed to a small squeeze bottle on the table and said, “There it is.” We need three, I said, which one is this? “All of them,” she glowered. “You want hot, put more on.”

Under the Glasgow train bridge, on the site of the first all-steel railway span in the world, the later one knocked loose from an abutment by the previous flood, the current was fierce enough to put us on alert, our edginess compounded by an approaching storm. I searched the riverfront for a tie-up, but everything lay horribly exposed to current and drift, so I doubled back to look again. “Rub that clover,” Pilotis mocked. Above Stump Island, although it is one no more, I eased in behind an earthen bank, where the flood had turned a sunken spot into a shallow, quiet pond, and we moored to a dead tree. Ever circumspect, Pilotis said, “If the river drops, we’ll be high and dry in the morning,” and I answered, As a novitiate into the Church of Procrastianity, I’ll think about that later. The Reporter, staring out the window, said, “Are we going to walk through that muck?”
Rule of the River Road:
When you have a choice, it will be Hobson’s.

We rolled up our pant legs, debated another Hobson’s—muddy shoes or feet—then went over the bow and into six inches of classic Missouri-bottom gumbo, stuff that adheres as does guilt to a novice sinner. Not happy with such rank adventure, Pilotis spoke in Henry James: “There’s a constant force that makes for muddlement.” We slogged to a road and up to little Glasgow and into a farmers’ tavern, Hartung’s Inn, widely called The Hard Up Inn, and ordered plates of broasted chicken and peach pie. When dessert arrived, so did what may prove to be the acme of Pilotis’s empty-fortune-cookie existence, a moment my friend had waited for since first hearing an old Yiddish joke years earlier. Noticing the cutlery had disappeared with the chicken bones, Pilotis said to the young waitress, who had humored and charmed us, “Taste my pie.” Surprised, she answered, “I cain’t do that.”
“Please
taste my pie.” She looked at the table and said, “Cain’t—they ain’t no fork.” Raising an index finger, Pilotis crowed, “Ah ha!” To ease her embarrassment, I turned to her and offered, You just made someone’s evening. Said Pilotis, “Evening? No! My life!”

T
O MAKE SURE
an ebb in the river would not leave
Nikawa
stranded on the mud, I Tom Sawyered the Reporter’s cameraman—he liked to be called a “shooter”—into sleeping aboard. Of course the Missouri, hearing all that happens along its shores, behaved with expected contrariety and helpfully rose four inches from the rain that came down without surcease through the night. Of the past thirty days, it had rained on all but two. The Shooter had bailed the afterdeck three times, and slept poorly in the cramped pilothouse even after he found my full bottle of rare sourmash, but he was young and pleased to join the expedition for a few hours. The Reporter, Pilotis, and I slept passably well in quarters large enough for us, and we brought the night-watch breakfast and told him of our café conversation with a retired farmer who had seen
Nikawa
tied to a tree in a place he usually parked his truck while he fished. He asked, “How far you going? Up to St. Jo?” I said the Pacific Ocean. “Well, that’s a piece futher,” he said, “but why would you want to do that?” Pilotis, having the gift of summary, answered, and the man, perhaps thinking of the many crops he’d taken off the bottoms, said, “I could do me a book about the Missoura, and I’d call it
That Dang River
, but I don’t spect I will, so if you want that name, you go ahead and take it. If the wife would let me, I’d even call it
That God-dang River.
Take that one too.” Said Pilotis, “It sounds like something in China.”

We went down to the river Dang and bailed out
Nikawa
and struck off into the alternations of drizzle and mist, the Missouri full of drift that gave us
something
to watch since the shores lay hidden behind the gloom. We’d heard more rumors of the river being closed, but I believed if we could reach Kansas City and get beyond the mouth of the Kaw then pouring in tons of floodwater, we would be able to proceed without further legal let or serious fluvial hindrance. Should the rain continue along the upper Missouri Valley, the engineers upstream would have to begin releasing water from the six immense reservoirs nearing record capacities, and when the overflow came down, we’d be driven from the Missouri for days without a chance of reaching the West Coast that year.

“What are you going to do if an Army patrol boat stops us?” the Reporter said. I mumbled I’d try to persuade them with the romance of our voyage. “That’s it?” No time for supporting letters from senators, I said. And on we went.

We passed by without seeing the mouths of the channelized Chariton and Grand rivers, wedded as they were to the wet air. To relieve ourselves of the drudgery of keeping watch for drift bearing down on us, we spoke of things having nothing to do with our situation. Pilotis, who had recently completed a draft of a novel not yet satisfying, said, “I wish I were blessed with the language of Shakespeare, the theme of Tolstoy, the plotting of Dickens, the humor of Twain, the industry of Balzac, the precision of Dickinson, and the swing of Babe Ruth.” Said the Reporter, “If you had the last one, you wouldn’t need the others.” Just then I veered hard to miss a nasty dark log, broken and worn into an uncanny likeness of a shark—tail, eye, dorsal fin—and everyone went silent in the alarm. Then Pilotis added, “And the longevity of Shaw.”

We passed below the bluffs of Miami, Missouri, where, during highway construction, archaeologists found a mastodon skeleton they dated to be 36,000 years old. Nothing unusual in that, except the bones—lying fifteen feet below the surface in undisturbed loess, a rock-free soil deposited only by wind—had been carefully arranged and with them lay crude stone scrapers and knives, and one
cut
tusk. Because of the construction, the dig had to be hurried and a later fire destroyed the bones, so the discovery could not be documented fully, a find that might have proven human presence along the Missouri 24,000 years before the currently accepted date.