River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (34 page)

Few small-boat facilities lay along the lower Missouri, and most of the ones we did encounter were closed, flooded out, or their docks pulled off the river altogether. We began to lose the afternoon once again to deep overcast in the west, and the prospects for a good mooring within reach of daylight were poor, and I said, Here the hell we go again. “Rulo, Nebraska, is just ahead,” Pilotis offered. I said, You could put little Rulo in a boxcar—we’d better start looking for a deep creek. The other choice (and an excellent one it could be), beaching on the inside of a shallow chute of a big sandbar, was impossible because all the bars, those few yet remaining in the channeled river, were under the high water. With the binoculars, Pilotis scanned the banks ahead, up and down, up and down. Desperation time? I said. We continued until, “Hold on! Hold on! Off to port, at eleven, isn’t that a dock?” Indeed it was. In front of a cabin bobbed the smallest dock we’d seen, not even the length of the kayak. Our Hobson’s for that day. I warped into the thing tied tenuously by slender ropes to a pair of cottonwoods well chewed on by beavers. When I said we could put our own line from
Nikawa
to the trees for safety, Pilotis said, “Do beavers gnaw rope?”

I snubbed the boat to the dock while my mate tiptoed across a narrow, bouncy plank to shore and went up to the cabin. A man in his forties stepped out with a rifle in one hand. There was an exchange, and the fellow laughed and came up to me. “I’m just putting the gun away. I was shooting beaver last night, literally. Got nine of them in four hours. You can see they’re taking my trees.” Other than toward beavers, Ron Hoagland was an amicable man who was stripping and refitting the old cabin; he couldn’t stay the night but was pleased to let us use it. When he left, he said, “There’s a bounty on beavers here because they burrow into levees.” Pilotis said moments later, “Nature knows best,” and we talked of how the bucktooths were the teeth of the river, the gnaw of creation to return the Missouri to its native condition, a sprawling of nurturing waters. I said, If nature undoes immediately what we work years to do, then we’re not doing it right.

The drizzle came on again, but robins took up their melodious evensong anyway, apparently no longer able to wait for a proper spring evening to arrive, their territorial courtship born not out of a pleasant dusk but from mere genetic necessity, and it seemed their hearts were not in it. That night a farmer told us rainfall around the Big Nemaha River was 120 percent above the yearly average: “We’re starting to call our chickens field perch.”

The heavy sky pushed Pilotis into the thrall of a spiritual skid demon like mine of two days earlier. Following the lead of Captain Meriwether Lewis when his Corps felt low, I issued an order for grog, and we walked a few yards to Club Rulo for a brace of ardent spirits, a pass at the salad bar, and plates of fried carp. We took up a position of good vantage by the Missouri, perhaps an error of judgment, and I continued to speak of the river, another error. I should have talked about prairies, or mountains, or baseball, or our Atchison morning when I heard a man ask a young woman, “What’s going on with you?” “Oh,” she answered tiredly, “I’m just doing life.” It sounded like a judge’s sentence. Then the waitress, who queried us while dispensing motherly care, delivered the fish and said, “Do you want some water, or have you seen enough of it?”

B
Y EARLY
the next morning, we’d seen enough water of a certain kind. Accepting Ron Hoagland’s offer to put our sleeping bags on the floor of the cabin, I woke at seven to a thunderstorm, dozed on in the sweet rumblings and patterings until I became aware of an icy flow creeping along my outstretched arm. We grabbed up our bags and manned mops and swabbed for an hour before the storm ceased and the flow under the doorsill stopped. We went to
Nikawa
to bail out the welldeck and make logbook entries, then resumed our quest under a grand cumulonimbus sky pried open by long shafts of sunlight.

The way was beleaguered by drift, much of it large stuff different from the whole trees we’d been dodging earlier. Now old timber, fat trunks smoothly shorn of limbs and turned into waterlogged submarines just barely visible and weighing a half ton or more, moved down at us in the potent current, and at every moment they jeopardized the journey. A following wind pushed us upstream as it beat against the down-bound current to raise a rough river, but black terns came up and formed a vanguard to break us through the weather.

Pilotis said, “Have you noticed when river people learn we’re not Sunday boaters, their attitude changes and they’re ready to help? It’s good
Nikawa
doesn’t look like a runabout. She’s a workboat, a vessel of passage. She’s our ambassador.” I suggested our wayworn faces also set us apart from weekenders.

We were in almost isolated country, the river a uniform breadth of about three hundred yards, bound in by willows and maples punctuated by tall and wonderfully irregular cottonwoods that made a straight trunk seem a deformity. As elsewhere on the lower Missouri away from cities, there was virtually no industry other than an occasional grain terminal or even less frequently a power plant; the route did not appear like wilderness but neither did it look settled like the farm-and-village landscape lying beyond us. The most removed way to cross America is by her rivers; usually secluded and often sequestered, they give a sense of an untrammeled, peaceable nation, even when they themselves are in turmoil.

The Tarkio River, really a big creek, poured in its muddiness from overcultivated fields, and Pilotis said, “What in hell did you do that summer you lived up along it in that college town?” I said, Taught my classes, played tennis every evening, ate ten-cent boxes of popcorn, sat on the porch to read or watch the elm-lined street. I told Pilotis about the elderly woman living on the corner in a big Queen Anne house: each morning she came out to sweep her walk to let neighbors know she was still alive. Some eighty-year-olds phone a friend once a day, but this one just appeared with a broom. Always she said something to people passing by—locals or strangers—and often all she could come up with was churlishness. She didn’t want friendship; rather, she was simply staking out the territory, claiming a corner in our memories so that after she was gone it would be years before anyone could pass without remembering her and perhaps telling a grandchild how the broom lady used to toss off her scoldings. One afternoon a boy sassed her, and I heard, in tremulous response, “Ohhh, mustn’t get saucy, young chum!” In all her life, I’d heard, she had done nothing worthy of recognition except her objurgations, and I came to believe she was trying to turn that quiet street corner into her living epitaph. Said Pilotis, “I guess it worked.”

The nuclear power station outside little Brownville, Nebraska, had a concrete floodwall plastered with mud-jug nests of cliff swallows, and the river was aflitter with their wings climbing into long ellipses, scimitar swoops down and around
Nikawa
, sunbeams gleaming off their iridescent heads as if that hot avian blood were radioactive. Brownville is an old steamboat village that wanted to become the state capital but couldn’t manage to hold on even to the county seat. Pilotis, looking as we passed: “Speaking of epitaphs.”

About three leagues above the Nishnabotna River (a Siouan name with several lively meanings but no certain one), we crossed the Iowa line after more than seven hundred miles along or inside Missouri borders, the most, with Montana, we’d see of any state. I use the word “see” advisedly because a river isn’t a place of wide or deep vistas; its valley and usual border of trees and its ceaseless bendings so confine the view that we never saw more than a couple of miles at a time. The prospect of an ocean, a lake, a mountain, those you can gorge on, but a river you take in piecemeal. Of the twenty-five hundred miles of the Missouri, we could see in the longest reaches no more than about a thousandth of it; since a river is continuous in a way few things in nature are—its beginning is soon its end, its source water becomes its mouth—it can defy comprehension even more than an ocean. At sea, the North Atlantic looks much like the South Atlantic, but the Missouri in western Montana looks nothing like the Missouri in Iowa. Yet, as with an ocean, most of a river lies beneath, out of sight, crawling invisibly to disappearance in the sea, that ultimate source of its source. We were looking at only the top half inch of the Missouri, and, had that been all we wanted to view, we could have anchored at its mouth and watched every bit of it pass before us in about a month, the time it takes in average flow for a drop of it to get from the Continental Divide to the Mississippi, one of the quickest, long river journeys in the nation. The mountain may come to Mohammed, but stay-at-home travelers can have a river come to them.

At Nebraska City we would have appreciated a restricted view to cover some of its riverside ugliness, or, had we arrived a few minutes later, the weather would have blotted out the scene. A fat water snake crossed in front of our bow, an Osage portent of storm, and the sky fulfilled the reptilian forecast by occluding, the wind rising, and on farther, near the mouth of Weeping Water Creek, the river turned turbulent and muddy, full of natural debris, so that
Nikawa
banged along and silenced our conversation.

Every few miles I had to stop and go back to the pitching stern to clear the propellers. Minutes after one untangling, a cannonade of water shot forward from the motors and into the pilothouse window, wetting us and our sandwiches, and I stopped and cussed my way aft again to unwind a plastic trash bag. On we labored, beyond the mouth of the Platte, just about the last braided river of length in the West, the one Oregon Trail pioneers followed across the Great Plains so they would have water and forage. At Bellevue, its name right then ironic, we came upon the first riverside billboard we’d seen since the Atlantic Ocean. “Damn!” Pilotis yelled in the banging. “Suddenly things have gone to hell!”

It was true. Nothing had given a sense of beautiful passage as had the absence of signboards; without them, long stretches of the country appeared to us, if not pristine, then at least no worse the wear for half a millennium of explorers, settlers, descendants. The bullboard boys and others who see landscape only as a means to grab a fast buck without returning anything but ugliness have so degraded the view from so many American highways and so numbed us to the blight that we, especially the young, often silently accept the unsightly as a requisite of our economic lives and do nothing more than turn a blind eye to it.

As if to purge the hellacious miles, the sky blustered in rain so thick we could see little past our bow, and things became worse when hail drummed
Nikawa
hard and smote the waves flat, turned the surface white, and knocked the daylights out of the afternoon. But the downpour didn’t bother me so much as the lightning. Our bow rail was a conductor supreme, so I moved us close to shore, where cottonwoods stuck their wet branches high into the fulminations. We thought falling limbs less deadly than ten thousand volts. It was a storm to appall the devil.

By nature, prairie storms are sprinters, coming on fast, exploding with often dreadful energy, then soon spent. After some miles, the weather changed again, and by the time we reached the sunlit outskirts of Omaha, the western sky made it seem we had dreamed the water snake and its consequences, and Pilotis was laughing and pointing out our location on the chart, a curve labeled Florence Bend Lower, and I said I’d always heard old Flo was a tall woman.

It was at about that place where H. Hussey Vivian, who only
crossed
the river in a Pullman car, complained in 1877: “The Missouri is the dirtiest, ugliest river I ever saw in my life. Its valley is a wide dreary mud flat with which it plays all kinds of tricks, altering its course for miles at a bound.” Later in his trip, this member of Parliament, his ill humor surpassing even the measure usual to the British traveler overseas, wrote, “Two hideously ugly Indian squaws are looking in at the [train] window as I write, for we are now halting at a station, and I will be revenged by describing them.” On behalf of the women—and perhaps the river—I hope recitation of his own words reveals where true ugliness lies.

The Missouri separates Omaha from Council Bluffs, Iowa. In the quieting water between the two cities, a Coast Guard Auxiliary patrol boat pulled alongside us, and Pilotis whispered, “What did you do?” I didn’t know. From the patrol came,
“Nikawa
, are you all right?” Through the river grapevine, a surprisingly efficient system, the Auxiliary had learned of our approach in the storm. We talked rail to rail for a few moments, then followed the patrol to the north side of Omaha and into a good slip in the dockyards at Dodge Park where we found waiting for us two reporters who also had tapped into the grapevine.

They drove us into the city to a long-established Italian restaurant, Mister C’s, that grew room by room over the years, slowly filling with a sediment of brummagem: plaster statuary, plastic flowers, ceramic figurines, vinyl-padded doors, and enough Christmas mini-lights to rig out the Brooklyn Bridge. We ordered up martinis, the best ever to touch my palate, but the bartender declined to divulge the formula. Salvatore Caniglia, the proprietor, asked how we liked his place, and Pilotis said, “We’ve come all the way by boat from New York to eat here.” He said, “That’s nothing on me. I came all the way by boat from Italy to New York,” then took us into yet another room, this one with a diorama covering an entire wall, a re-creation of his village piazza peopled with little figures painted with faces from his boyhood: his five brothers idling, his aged mother bent to fill her urn at the village fountain, the mayor politicking down from a balcony. “The Eighth Wonder of Nebraska,” one of the reporters said. No, I said, that’s the martinis, but the bartender won’t reveal the secret. “Tell him,” Caniglia called to her. “It’s okay to tell him.” She looked hard to make sure, then answered, “There
is
no recipe. Just a straight gin called Barton’s, an inexpensive one you can get at about any store around here.”