River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (33 page)

Twenty minutes later, under a lifting sky and light breeze that pushed away the dampness, we backed
Nikawa
into the Kaw, let the current turn her, and went again into the Missouri to start our ascent toward the next great bend, the one that would take us nearly into Canada. We pushed up along the Quindaro Bottoms, past the Kansas City water intake sucking in nine thousand gallons a minute to fill their fountains and make it easy for citizens to forget the river. Above the Kaw mouth, the Missouri was much less flood-struck, and we unconcernedly went up among the green hills. Park College sat atop its bluff, marked by the tower I used to visit in 1965 to look at the river and try to write poems about it; the reminiscence gave me confidence that I’d safely passed a point of no return in the heart. Then came Weston, a delightful old tobacco and whiskey town the river moved away from, leaving it high and dry (“Divine justice!” a preacher once stormed). Even with frequent stops to clear brush from the propellers, we moved easily through the peaceful afternoon, a calm enhanced by our having heard that the crest of the flood was now below Kansas City. The Army would not have to close this section.

We followed a broad curve of river and went under the long Kansas bluff that holds Fort Leavenworth, the preeminent post in the West after it replaced Fort Osage in 1827 and still today the place where the military writes its doctrine and incarcerates the most nefarious federal prisoners. In the first five years of the cantonment, disease and alcohol so troubled it that General Winfield Scott issued an edict:

Every soldier or ranger who shall be found drunk or insensibly intoxicated after the publication of this order will be compelled, as soon as his strength will permit, to dig his grave at a suitable burying place large enough for his own reception, as such grave cannot fail to be wanted for the drunken man himself or for some drunken companion.

And it was at Fort Leavenworth that a young officer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote the initial draft of his first novel,
This Side of Paradise.

Dividing Missouri and Kansas, the Missouri River valley is a rather uniform two to three miles wide. Channelizing by engineers, coupled with the inconstant character of the river itself, have filled the bottoms with horseshoe and oxbow lakes, old meanders of the Missouri that create an abundant chain of pollution-cleansing wetlands underneath the Great Central Flyway used spring and fall by millions of migrating birds: bitterns, godwits, dowitchers, phalaropes, terns, grebes, widgeons, buffleheads, coots, herons, rails, soras, plovers, snipes, willets, ibises, sandpipers, dunlins, yellowlegs. Three quarters of American bird species depend on wetlands for rest, food, or nesting, but over the past two centuries Americans have destroyed sixty acres of wetlands every hour.

With the floodcrest downstream,
Nikawa
could no longer simply follow the curve of the river, so to avoid tearing her open on a wing-dike, we had to observe the navigational day marks attached to trees and poles; we tacked northerly along zigzags that are the hallmark of piloting on the Missouri, a procedure Mark Twain would recognize. It became necessary on bends to keep to the outside, often only a couple of feet from the bank, where the deepest water is, and everyplace we had to watch ripples to see whether they foretold merely wind or a rock dike or something worse. There is nothing more challenging or necessary than reading the surface of the water, and no pilot does it flawlessly all the time, for the only thing more fickle than wind is a river. An auto rides on top of a road, but a boat rides
in
a river, down in the usually invisible heart of it. People who do not like to swim in water that obscures their feet do not make for jolly river boatmen.

As we approached the old railroad pivot bridge at Atchison, Kansas, Pilotis stiffened. “Can we get under that damn thing?” I slowed, my mate went to the bow as we crept forward, nosing beneath while Pilotis called out the clearance. “Ten inches! Seven! Easy, easy!” I waited to hear a scrape or collision, but all was quiet except for the aerial soundings. “Six! Okay! Seven! A foot! Clear!” Had we arrived two days earlier, had I not been forced to lay over in my homeport, we would not have made it under that bridge. During the months planning the voyage, I’d forgotten to consider this lowest span on the navigable Missouri, and I wondered what others I might have overlooked.

At half past seven, we found at Atchison only the second dock since Kansas City, a small, friendly float although quite exposed to river drift. There wasn’t enough daylight to continue. Another Hobson’s. But for once the drift gave us something beyond consternation and broken props: a massive tree trunk, an ancient thing the river had pounded down to a heavy forked log, lay hooked under the front of the dock to form a V-shaped breakwater against the platform. After some shoving on the trunk, I slipped our horse between as if putting her in a stall. Could the timber hold,
Nikawa
had a chance to lie during the night safe from marauding drift. Pilotis: “What would we do without that tree?” Toss here sleepless or wake up in Kansas City.

The dock gangway was underwater, and we were not in the mood to get out the kayak, so we stayed aboard, but people came down to call their questions: “Why are you out there? Where you going? Aren’t you scared? Need anything?” Pilotis set up a small supper of smoked herring, Kalamata olives, pepperoncini, Branston pickle, and sourdough bread, and by the light of a candle I poured out glasses of merlot. We toasted, and while the Missouri rocked us softly by the Kansas shore, we sat in the little pilothouse, now our dinner club, and supped and said we’d not gone far on that day fraught with hindrance, but nevertheless we’d done the important thing—we had gone. Now we could hope to be above the worst of the flood. I relished how such an atrabilious morning led to the sweetest evening aboard we’d yet found. Months earlier, in my hopeful innocence, just so I’d dreamed of our voyage happening. The best part of that day was the night.

W
E BROKE OUT
the kayak that morning to get to shore, learned we had slept under the bluff on which Amelia Earhart spent most of her childhood, and found a man willing to take us into town to fill our gas canisters. Then we went to eggs and hash browns in a building not far from where Horace Greeley, on his great tour in 1859, ate his first dinner in the West. We found conversation with a fellow who had put his twenty-four-foot boat on many different American waters but had never succeeded in getting it up the tricky sixty miles of the Missouri from Ponca, Nebraska, to the first dam near Yankton, South Dakota. I told him we were determined to keep river under us, and he said, “In the right conditions, I hear some of the natives do it, but your boat will be at risk.”

When we returned to
Nikawa
, I laid out plans for our last miles on the open Missouri before we would encounter the Fort Randall Dam, and Pilotis turned to on the bow and afterdeck to make things shipshape. By noon we were under way, the sky clouded but the river smooth yet still full of debris, a sign the water was not dropping, since a rising river flushes out flotsam and a falling one clears itself by beaching floaters. We stopped often to unclog the props and motor stems, glad each time we found only entanglements rather than redesigned blades.

At St. Joseph, Missouri, one of the great jumping-off places of the nineteenth century,
Nikawa
crossed the route of the 1861 ferry that hauled the Pony Express over its first barrier; the little city has replaced expressmen with expressways in a web of ugliness that made it impossible to imagine the riverfront of pony days, but the opposite shore, grown up in a verdant line of trees, we could better picture as once the edge of settled country, the start of Indian lands. For the next week we would follow the great coast of the West lying on our port side, the East to starboard—a long skirting of the rim of the Great Plains before entering them in South Dakota. Onward from an old channel of the Missouri called Lake Contrary, we saw numerous beaver-gnawed tree trunks, an imprint returning to the valley after years of near extermination. The pair of stout ten-foot poles I carried along to use in sounding shallows and pushing off from shoals were lengths of ash sent into the river by beavers, the ends bearing marks of their chisel teeth. Pilotis said, “The symbol of the Army Corps of Engineers is a castle, but a more appropriate one would be a beaver.” Yes, I said, the first engineer on the Missouri, the creature that knows how to dam without damning.

The overcast became mist, became drizzle, became downpour, and then reversed as the wind rose and churned the river to chopwater, and we seemed to make slow headway north. The Missouri gave gentle turns and a narrower width, creating beauty and a kind of cozy comfort. Said Pilotis, “I’ve heard that cattle being driven to slaughter calm down in a narrow chute with a curve in it. Maybe it’s the security of not seeing ahead, not seeing your doom.” The Blind Bend of Happiness? “Why not?”

I stopped in midriver, let the current work its will and take us in its nearly invisible grip, while I put into my logbook a sketch of the Mount Vernon Bends. Pilotis: “It’s one of the most captivating sensations a traveler can know, drifting on a river.” And then, watching us lose the mile we’d just gained, “We keep hearing about this guy or that coming down the Missouri last year or some other year, but nobody talks of anyone going up it. I see why now.” When I finished drawing, I heard, “So why aren’t we going these twenty-five hundred miles downstream?” It was a rhetorical question of weariness, for Pilotis knew we couldn’t ascend the westward-running Salmon River in Idaho without a jet boat, hence its name, River of No Return. I said, This is America—who ever heard of eastering explorers?

I spoke of recently reading an account by a Washington newspaperman who made a quick two-week trip across the nation and came to believe America was “a big country that impresses one most when experienced overland.” Pilotis growled, “Let me make a note of that profundity.” It’s true, I said,
until
one does it by water—then America isn’t a big country but hundreds of smaller ones. I meant, moving as slowly as we were enunciated differences that scarcely matched the political geography west of the Mississippi. Indians developed their concepts of the land by going afoot and carrying away in their heads detailed images like maps, yet that wasn’t how Thomas Jefferson went about it: his map was one of imaginary grids, of true latitudes and longitudes free of the rise and fall of the territory. Indians dreamed rivers and mountains, Jefferson dreamed township and range, things necessary to ownership. Traveling rivers and lakes as we were, only rarely did we see the manifest evidence of the Great Jeffersonian Plat —section-line roads and fields. I said, I’d love to see how William Clark might have laid out the West.

We proceeded on. To our port side lay the eastern boundary of our first Indian lands, the Iowa Reservation which abuts the Sac and Fox reserve extending a few miles north into Nebraska. Just below the state line is the village of White Cloud, Kansas, named after an Iowa chief whose wife was Strutting Pigeon, both of whom George Catlin painted and described. The artist wrote at length of the year-long tour in England and France that fourteen Iowas made. In the fall of 1845, when pressed by a roomful of London preachers—“black-coats”—to take up the white man’s vision of the sole way to salvation, Chief White Cloud, not feeling well, perhaps from the merciless sermonizing, called on his war chieftain to respond. Neu-mon-ya (a name that does not mean what it sounds like), who had puffed hard on his long pipe throughout the lecturing, stood and spoke carefully so the translator could get it right:

My friends, you have told us that the Son of the Great Spirit was on earth, and that he was killed by white men, and that the Great Spirit sent him here to get killed. Now we cannot understand all this. This may be necessary for white people, but the red men, we think, have not yet got to be so wicked as to require that. If it was necessary that the Son of the Great Spirit should be killed for white people, it may be necessary for them to believe all this. My friends, you speak of the good book that you have in your hand; we have many of these in our village; we are told that all your words about the Son of the Great Spirit are printed in that book, and if we learn to read it, it will make good people of us. I would now ask why it don’t make good people of the pale-faces living all around us? They can all read the good book, and they can understand all that the black-coats say, and still we find they are not so honest and so good a people as ours. This we are sure of. Such is the case in the country about us, but here we have no doubt but the white people who have so many to preach and so many books to read are all honest and good. In our country the white people have two faces, and their tongues branch in different ways. We know that this displeases the Great Spirit, and we do not wish to teach it to our children.