River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (37 page)

Pilotis asked, “How can you navigate looking backwards?” Billy said, “It’s the same river.” I told him of our friend, old Ed Miller, who once answered when I’d asked whether he returned the same way he’d gone to Colorado: “No, I came back on the other side of the road.” “Sure,” Billy said. “Get closer to the bank.”

I asked him what his tribe was. “Santee. I’m part Santee. Santee and white.” His work was delivering diesel fuel to farmers in the field. “I used to box,” he said and turned forward for a glance. “Cross over now and don’t slow down. I couldn’t be beat. Nobody.”

When we reached Goat Island, three and a half miles long in high water and even longer in low, I pulled up at a small tavern, a spot, to my surprise, I’d phoned the night before. The Professor was waiting to change places with the Photographer. Billy said, “I’ll get out here.” Whoa! I called, we’ve got twenty more miles of this. He shrugged. “Okay, but I don’t know the run up to Yankton so good. But, you want to try it, I’ll try it.” Off we went. “Faster! You got to get your boat up.” She’s as up as she gets, I said. “Sure.” Billy nodded. “You want a beer?” Not too thirsty right now, I said. “Anybody thirsty?” Billy whispered, “I’m ninety-nine percent drunk myself, but I’ll get you through. Come on over left. You know, I’m not responsible if we hit something up here.”

Hey! I called to Pilotis and the Professor, help Billy with that beer—we’ll buy him some more when we get there! I motioned for them to drink a couple fast, and I took one and faked sipping it. “I’ll get you through,” Billy said. “See that ripple up there? That’s nothing. But that other one, stay off it.” Pilotis said, “They look the same to me. What’s the difference?” “Sure,” Billy said, “they’re different. Better believe it.”

His voice became so soft I had trouble hearing him, and I began saying loud, pointless things to keep anyone from nodding off, and Pilotis helped with, “Tell us about your boxing.” Billy, slurring, almost inaudible, “I couldn’t be beat. Nobody. Cross over now.” Pilotis, fortissimo: “Boxing’s a great sport!” Billy: “Not if you get beat.” Then he turned forward and stood up so he could see past the mouth of the James, and he motioned me to stop. “I don’t know this up here so good, but I know that way there is stumps and that over there is rocks. Take your pick.” I stared too, then headed for stumps and said, This one we’ll do slow. Pilotis went to the bow to watch for trees. Finally Billy said, “Okay, we’re through it,” and I throttled forward and the props banged something hard. Within sight of Yankton luck ran out. I raised the motors, and the Professor went aft to look and shouted that the blades were still sound, so we went on, past a shore lined with junked cars used for revetment; otherwise, Yankton showed well from the river. Four miles farther we reached Gavins Point Dam, and below the spillway was our man waving the orange flag to direct us to the ramp. When we had
Nikawa
on the trailer, I looked at Billy, and he said with pride, “I got you through.” You did indeed, I said, you’re one terrific guide, the best I ever saw. I pressed on him our thanks but he declined it, so I put it in his pocket and said, This isn’t for you—it’s for your dog. I gripped his hand. “Sure,” he said, “but you better remember to look ahead.”

O
F SEVERAL IMPEDIMENTS
I evaluated from the wrong end, the great staircase of reservoirs on the Missouri was paramount, but when I was planning, my concern lay with their lower sections, the downriver ends where the dams are, and how to get around those massive pilings of earth and concrete without losing any significant water mileage. I neglected to consider that a dam on a river like the Missouri causes it eventually to remake itself into what it once was—a broad and shallow and frequently changing braided flow. Like a living being, an impoundment has a lifespan, and it starts moving toward its demise the moment it begins; when the currents of a silty river get slowed, they start to release sediment, and few things impede a river more than a deep lake, especially one behind a dam that can be closed to stop the flow altogether. The Missouri “mainstem lakes” are filling in from upstream down, and the time will come when the reservoirs will have to be massively dredged (at an economic and environmental cost beyond calculating) or removed. Left as they are, the Missouri will one day wash them away or turn them into spectacular cascades. This is another problem our era—we who believe in the mastery of nature and the supremacy of human desires—is bequeathing to another generation, not to some distant one, but possibly to children living now.

Sitting at supper in a place just behind the Gavins Point Dam, we began hearing about heavy siltation at the upper end of the impoundment blithely called Lewis and Clark Lake. One fellow told of Nio brara, Nebraska, our next stop, being flooded from time to time after the closing of the dam thirty-eight years ago and of a mass of silt that “backed up into town like one of those big-blob science fiction movies.” But the news that concerned us was about the reed beds. Said he, “Did you see that
African Queen
movie when Bogart and Hepburn get lost in the tules and give up? That’s what’s there for you below the Niobrara River. If you don’t know the place, you could spend days finding your way out.”

I liked the notion of discovering a hidden passage, and I’d learned weeks ago to listen to and then largely discount difficulties residents described.
Rule of the River Road:
The more authoritative the adviser, the less reliable the advice. I expressed as much to Pilotis who said, “You’re too cocky. No, not cocky—too assured. Assured of your luck.” I’m not that assured, I said, but most of the time I do believe in the way opening. “All well and good,” Pilotis said, “but let’s get some reassurance.” The Professor agreed, so he went off to find a man I’d heard about who knew the thirty miles up to the Niobrara.

The next morning at a café we met Jim Peterson, a retired teacher of business law who had spent most of his life around the Missouri and its people. I tried to glean from him everything he knew about the reed beds. He was articulate and informed, and I invited him to join us for a day. We stopped by the Corps of Engineers offices to ask questions all over again, and the words were disquieting. The next dam, at Fort Randall, sixty-nine miles upriver, was keeping back its water, letting little pass, to avoid exacerbating the flood in Missouri. The river above the mouth of the Niobrara, a natural section, was virtually dry but for pools. I asked whether our canoe could carry us through, and the Corpsman said, “Yes, if you want to drag it between wet spots and then risk tearing it open. There’s a lot of Detroit riprap up there, junked cars that have washed off the banks into the water. That run is just damned dangerous.” We can undertake danger, I said, but a stove boat is something else.

I disliked losing those river miles, few as they were, and I said, I love when engineers rebuild nature—in this year of near-record high water, a section of the Missouri is impassable because it’s dry—since I want to do every mile of it, I guess I’ll have to come back during a drought. Then, in a couple of sentences more laded with river language than necessary, I said something that boiled down to this: That engineers could build such colossal dams credits their intellect; that they actually built them discredits their foresightedness.

“You think you’re miffed?” the Corpsman said. “Go to the tailwater below the dam and watch the fish swarming. Their gonads are telling them to swim upstream to spawn, but all they can do is beat their heads against the concrete. It’s heartbreaking to see them massing up. Projects like this turn a natural system ass over teakettle. It was just imbecilic to think we could dam off one of the biggest rivers on the planet in fifteen different places and not upset balances.”

Never before had I encountered, face to face, the heralded greening of the Army Corps of Engineers. He knew that many old mossbacks, like those who still called the river “the canal,” did not agree with him, and he spoke at some risk to himself, but he was young and smart, and I told him I hoped he was the future of the Corps.

“With every flood,” he said, “views like mine become less heretical. I’m not really an enviro, but if I were, I wouldn’t be running scared. Green thought has the whole natural system on its side—that’s about three billion years of trial and error posed against a couple thousand years of human engineering.”

We went down to
Nikawa
and set off in fine weather, Pilotis and Peterson aboard, and headed up the long and “temporary” impoundment, fifty feet deep behind the dam and at that moment within twelve inches of the top of the spillway. Those inches were now critical because the snowpack in the northern Rockies was as much as 150 percent above normal, melt-off that would soon be on its way toward the oceans. Pilotis said, “Too much water above us and too much below, and in another few miles we’re going to run out of it in the middle.”

At first we took a due-west course, ignoring the old river channel at the bottom of the reservoir, but after ten miles of smooth running we began using the charts to try to follow the submerged Missouri and avoid shallows full of upright and broken trees that, within memory, stood living along the river. The reservoir has some beauty to it, largely because the Corps controls developers and requires them to cluster their buildings and leave miles of green and open shore.

Pilotis: “A tree at the edge of a river is a thing of elegance, but one
in
the water is a potential boat eater.” Looking at the map and counting aloud, the first mate said, “Over these twelve miles of river, there are fourteen hazard areas marked on the chart.” That was the reason we were winding our course over seemingly open water. Peterson said, “Fishermen love those fourteen places. The good aspect about snags, besides fish, is you can see between them and find your way through, but they’ll break your props. The reeds won’t likely break anything, unless it’s your will to go on because you can’t see the way out.”

He talked of the Missouri he remembered from his childhood, before the dam. “Back then, the old river would take a farmer’s land, but there was a fifty-fifty chance he’d get it back in his lifetime, and a hundred-percent chance his descendants would, and what they got back was fresh, rich topsoil ready for bumper crops. Now, the river here puts the topsoil underwater, where tractors and combines don’t run too well.” He paused, then said, “I have two photographs taken below the dam fifty years apart. The first is of my dad standing by a chute of the Missouri flowing north to south. The other is of my son in the same place, and the chute goes east to west.” He paused again. “And my great-great-grandfather’s homestead was a mile from the river—now it
is
the river.”

The Santee Reservation lay along the south side of the impoundment and extended to the tail end of the lake where the water went from two and a half miles wide to just a half mile. Above Springfield, South Dakota, we reached the freshly remade ancient river and began twisting out a course among the stumps and sandbars, a piloting exercise to stir us alert. The Missouri became progressively shallower until the depth finder was useless, and I looked to our guide, and he said, “I can’t believe how much this end has filled in. It all looks so different.” His directions at first proved sound, and we moved through expeditiously until the reeds became heavy and the strands of water numerous; then we had to slow and guess. Because that section was more swamp than river, the current was again imperceptible. Our charts, older than the reed beds, proved nearly worthless, and the winding channels turned compass bearings to nonsense, so I tried to steer a course ninety degrees off the angle of the sunlight to avoid getting turned around and going back downstream. If a boat could be said to stumble, that’s how we went. Jim shook his head. “I’m sorry I can’t remember all of it, but the reeds are so much bigger than the last time I saw them. Maybe a good flood would scour them down.”

We guessed onward, surmising here, conjecturing there, and some times
Nikawa
advanced, usually circuitously, and other times we had to retreat. The way became harder, and we began running aground, poling off, trying somewhere else. We were simply too low to see a route, and I said, If only we had a hot-air balloon and a thirty-foot tether, you could send me up to spy out the way.

The bewilderness went on. Then I made a mistake by proceeding too quickly and had to throttle down fast in front of a narrow shoal, and a splendid thing happened: our wake rolled under
Nikawa
and carried her over the sand. Asked Pilotis, “Did you do that deliberately?” Just an old riverman’s trick, I said. “Well then, do it again and get us the hell out of this labyrinth.” Flushing over the small bars was fun, and I would have enjoyed it more if I’d been certain I was flushing us in the right direction. The nightmare of reed beds is that we could travel miles up a dead end, then have to return to an entry point we were unlikely to recognize. I thought it possible to make the same mistake again and again, never to escape until we became the Phantom Ship of the Missouri Reeds, celebrated in story and song. We tried to memorize the stalks, attaching imagined resemblances to the bend of a leaf, the twist of a cattail, but it was like attempting to commit to memory ten million sticks of spaghetti standing on end.

Pilotis, working to match the charts to the distant hills we could see in places, said, “I think we just passed Lost Creek,” to which I grumbled, Even the damn creeks around here can’t find the way. And Pilotis: “I don’t remember how Bogart frees the
African Queen
from the tules.” A storm washes them out, I said. “What’s the forecast? Where’s your famous rainstick? Or maybe we can get the engineers to irrigate the Missouri.”

At what I guessed to be the ninety-eighth meridian, the reeds began thinning, thinning, until we had open river, and we went on more easily, the water deeper, the current apparent, all the way to the mouth of the Niobrara (Ponca for “river spreading,” oh yes), above which lay only the parching bed of the Missouri. The boat ramp nearby was a mudhole, so we radioed the waiting Professor to meet us back downstream at the old Running Water ferry crossing. That ramp was gravel and mud, and the current swept past so swiftly the Professor had to wade in to hook the hand winch to our bow so
Nikawa
could swing around and climb onto the trailer for the portage to Fort Randall Dam. I was equally relieved at being off the river and displeased with giving up those thirty-seven miles, but I vowed to return one day and canoe that section.