River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (46 page)

Said sardonic Pilotis to the Photographer: “You see, Skipper’s the most luck-dependent man who ever came upriver, and this voyage may be the most coincidence-riddled trip ever undertaken. If Odysseus had experienced our good fortune, he’d have discovered America two thousand years before Columbus.” I said, Will you please watch your expression around this river? Out the window I yelled, Belay that last—it’s all jokes! But I knew I was too late.

The upper third of Sakakawea lies almost as due east-west as the lower section, and its bends are equally broad, but the shore is mostly free of bays that can confuse a pilot unfamiliar with the impoundment, so
Nikawa
skimmed along, and I began to hope Pilotis’s loose talk had gone unheard.

I made sandwiches as we moved toward the end of the lake where it begins to dwindle into natural river again. “Amuse us,” Pilotis said. I told of my aunt who wanted to become a professional dancer. In the late 1920s she saw an ad in a magazine for an instruction kit guaranteed to teach a young, flexible woman the bump-and-grind in five minutes. For two dollars she received in the mail a flimsy wide-brimmed hat, three lengths of red ribbon, two large buttons, a long feather, and directions to attach the buttons and feather to one end of each ribbon and the other ends to the brim of the hat, then put the hat on so the feather hung in front and a button to each side, the ribbons reaching to her hips. All she had to do was crank the Victrola, put her hands on the back of her neck, elbows outward, and rhythmically repeat this phrase while doing it:
Hit
the button,
hit
the button,
hit
the feather
twice!

As Pilotis tried the method, something rose on the horizon, some thing we’d never seen before. I said, What the hell is that? We all leaned forward as if to get closer to identify it. Across the river, shore to shore, lay a faded brown line like a low fog. Pilotis: “What is that thing?” I said, It’s either some trick of light off the water or it’s trouble—if it doesn’t shift, I think we’re in for something. We each took a turn with the binoculars but could distinguish nothing more than a dun gossamer that appeared to be creeping toward us. “What is that damn thing?” The Photographer recited elements from two movies featuring deadly miasma. Whatever it was, it got bigger until it became a rampart, a streak of evil that was not fading away. I said, Bad news—that sonofabitch is no mirage. And Pilotis, “My heart’s pounding again. How far’s Williston?”

I slowed to a stop, picked up the field glasses, and looked a long time. Then I understood. Oh jeezis, I said, oh goddamn! “What is it? What the hell is it?” I shook my head and told them, Trees, a solid wall of trees. We moved forward slowly in water now only six feet deep. Across the entire widely braided river grew slender and almost leafless willows protruding five to seven feet above the surface. We’d found what the woman in Pick City told us to beware. As we approached, we could discern numerous small, twisted channels leading into the flooded underwood, each path looking like a dead end, each seeming more impassable than the others. “We may have to turn back,” the Photographer said. I roved along the stockade, looking, looking, then gave up, took a chance, and just chose a channel. In a moment we could see neither upriver nor down, and in places even the low hills on the distant banks disappeared from us. The depth held at about six feet, so I went slowly on until
Nikawa
was engulfed. After a time, I stopped, climbed atop the pilothouse, but the elevation wasn’t sufficient to let me see far enough over the thickets. The aerial photographs in our chartbook were only seven years old, yet they showed open water, not a willow anywhere, and miles of mostly barren surrounding land.

Pilotis said, “There’s something eerie about this place. I mean, what kind of a place is a place that’s not on the map?” I said, It’s called Willowston. The Photographer again proposed turning back. Sure, I said, just point the way. The river suffered us to slog forward until the willows rasped the bow, sides, and stern all at the same time. I had only an approximate idea where we were, and I feared if we were as many as thirty miles from Williston, we’d play hell pushing through the tangles that far. Hoping the way would open, I proceeded according to the old Missouri River pilot’s
Precept of Last Resort:
There’s no other choice.

From time to time we found a channel with a good current and followed it, only to see it disappear, then we’d scrouge through the trees and eventually find another current that led us on before vanishing. At last I decided we weren’t going to get out like that. I said, If we draw mud in here, we’ve had it—it’s too woody to swim, too deep to walk, and too hidden for anybody to see us. What quicksand is to land, that boscage was to a river.

For the moment, we had three things in our favor: the water seemed to be holding a steady depth, the sky was clear, and the willows had not leafed fully enough to blind us further. When it seemed we were only becoming hopelessly enmeshed in that place which neither water nor earth had yet entirely claimed, I said, In a way, nobody can be truly lost on a stream because it always has two sides, and what we need now is a side. Pilotis: “Even if we get the boat to a bank, how do we get it off the river?” The Photographer: “Would you call this a river?” No, I said, I’d call it the Missouri.

I turned the wheel and set
Nikawa
on a course due northwest in hopes of holding it until we reached a shore we couldn’t descry. If we were forced to keep shifting our route, we might not hit land for miles. Seeing little but sprigs, switches, and shoots, we went on. Six pelicans passed above, their easy, unhurried flaps and glides gibing us. On into that willowy wooden world we went, losing depth, but the trees still slipped aside or under us, a vast pliable wall whispering against
Nikawa
while Pilotis called soundings from the welldeck, the numbers ever declining.

Then it happened. No warning, it just happened: the nose of
Nikawa
popped through to a channel of fair size running along a steep clay bank about eighteen feet high, perhaps elevated enough to let us see an escape if we could get up the overhang. I held our course directly for shore, and as we neared, smack in front of us rose an improbable stair, a long wooden thing not unlike the one we’d found so long ago on the Allegheny. I beached
Nikawa
, and Pilotis and I jumped onto the soft ground and started up. “Do you hear that?” my friend said. “Is it some kind of weird motor?” Atop the broad first terrace was a man on a decrepit sputtering tractor plowing a garden. Surprised to see people emerging from the willowed river, he came up to us and said, “It’s a sonofabitch down there, ain’t it? Them goddamn dirty bastard willas wasn’t there a couple years ago.” Between swear words, the most pleasing I ever heard, he described a route to open water, not a difficult path since we’d already stumbled onto a through channel. “The @!#@*! trees don’t run all the @!@#*! way up to @!#@*! Williston, not @!#@*! yet anyway, but in another @!#@*! year, who the @!#@*! can say?” And so forth.

We went back to
Nikawa
, headed on upstream, and weaved along the twisted channel, and Pilotis said, “We just shoved through a wilderness of willows and came out right in front of a stairway—almost the only one we’ve seen in six days—leading to the only man around for ten miles, and I’m not even surprised. But I am concerned what happens when our luck runs out.” I said, If I flip a coin ten times and each time it comes up heads, what are the odds on the eleventh flip? “Fifty-fifty. I know that, but how much would you bet that you could flip ten more consecutive heads? That’s what you’re trying to do.” I said, I’m not trying to—I’m having to. The Photographer interjected, “I think we should worry about how many more willow flats might be ahead.” Fine, I said, then we can worry whether lightning will strike on Monday or Tuesday.

After some miles we saw a road reaching into the river and stopped to go up it. We found ourselves on a picnic ground. A woman came toward us and said, “Are you the ones going long distance?” It sounded like a preface to bad news. “Your friend was here for a couple of hours, then he hurried away,” she said. “He seemed real agitated, talking about who to call to get out a search-and-rescue unit.” Her husband offered to drive toward town to hunt up the Professor and give him a message. Off we went again, happy in the assurance that there were no more @!#@*! willows between us and the Williston bridge. The braided river re-formed into a good channel of swift current bordered so closely and heavily by trees it looked like a bayou. Pilotis said, “What if the trip had begun on the Missouri instead of the happy Hudson and the easy Erie Canal? Would we have continued?” It was true: the eastern waters gave us the comforting notion that we could make it across the country.

Well before dusk we found the Professor, not glad but calmed and talking to a television crew that had apparently picked up his repeated and fruitless calls to us over the radio. As the Big Contrary would have things, it set against us a swift current and a vicious eddy that twice thumped and spun
Nikawa
before I could get her bow close enough to catch the winch line, the cameramen recording our struggle in water turned nasty by the Yellowstone River not far above. That night in a tavern, as we watched our difficulties on
The News at Ten
, I heard Howard, a man wearing a flowered bow tie, say to the bartender, “Pacific Ocean? Hell, Bert, those clowns won’t make it to Fort Peck.”

Because he might be right, I didn’t tell him I was head bozo or that we jack-puddings passing for jack-tars had come 1,550 miles up the Missouri and 3,500 from the Atlantic, the distance from New York City to London. After all, we still had almost nine hundred miles of the Missouri to go. And then,
and only then
, the Pacific would be but a thousand miles farther. When I lay in bed that night, I wished I’d not heard his words and never done the numbers.

O
NLY SIXTY-FIVE MILES
below Canada, we had reached the most northerly point of our voyage. For a river of such deviousness, the Missouri from the Williston Bottoms strikes a remarkably due-west course of more than four hundred miles until the short detour at Virgelle, Montana, then takes a long and winding southerly route paralleling the Continental Divide. As never before, we would now feel with each day that we were gaining on the Pacific. Ahead of us that Saturday morning was the first segment of waters fully dependent on the June rise to afford passage to any object larger than a washtub. From Williston onward—could we keep moving—the Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative would decline somewhat with every mile.

When we had pried from the natives as much river information as we could, we went down to the water, and I felt the draw of that state whose name is mountain. The current was swift, muddy, and full of stiff clots of brown foam formed from agricultural chemicals running off fields along the Yellowstone which we heard was charging down hard and high, a report that made the Professor uneasy. I tried to redirect his worry to the more real concern of finding a ramp or low shore solid enough to let us get
Nikawa
off the river should we need to. Through cultivated bottoms and anciently eroded uplands the meandering valley ran, four to five miles wide, the depth of the channel holding at about six feet; even against the spring rise and the perturbations put in by the Yellowstone—driftoids and low riders—we scudded along, yet still the Professor stood his watch in tension.

Not since the lower river had I been able to steer from boil to boil to keep depth and current under us; nevertheless, one strange upchurning struck
Nikawa
hard, a teeth rattler. Rhetorically, cussingly, I asked how we could possibly bang something in such a surge, and the unnaturally quiet Professor said, “That takes away the peace of mind boils gave us.” Pilotis, concocting, said, “What’s that Indian name for God which literally translates as the-one-who-now-and-then-but-not-often-understands-the-great-Missouri?”

The Professor remained edgy, no longer even speaking of his garden, and I feared we were slowly losing his continuance. Each thump from a boil or log seemed to hit him in the stomach, and I found myself trying to steer a course, erratic though it was, with the least chance of unnerving him. I asked if he were feeling the miles, but all he said was, “I’m with you.”

As we approached the mouth of the Yellowstone, I began to anticipate that great defining river, another of the ever-westering nineteenth-century boundaries of the white domain, one of the final jumping-off spots before transcontinental railroads negated such places. The water became more embroiled, nothing
Nikawa
couldn’t handle with ease, but the Professor’s mandibular muscles flexed and flexed until I asked him to read aloud Meriwether Lewis’s entry about reaching the confluence in 1805:

After I had completed my observations in the evening I walked down and joined the party at their encampment on the point of land formed by the junction of the rivers; found them all in good health, and much pleased at having arrived at this long wished for spot, and in order to add in some measure to the general pleasure which seemed to pervade our little community, we ordered a dram to be issued to each person; this soon produced the fiddle, and they spent the evening with much hilarity, singing & dancing, and seemed as perfectly to forget their past toils, as they appeared regardless of those to come.

Below the Glass Bluffs on our Saturday, the famous confluence spread out like a lake, half muddy and half greenly and lightly occluded, the Yellowstone pushing brown billows of silt into the Missouri to form underwater clouds that rose and rolled in the river as a cumulus does in the sky. What the Big Muddy works on the Mississippi, the Yellowstone enacts upon the Missouri, so much so that some early rivermen argued it was tributary to the Yellowstone. After John Neihardt passed the joining of waters on his way downstream in a motorboat in 1908, he wrote in
The River and I:
“All unique characteristics by which the Missouri is known are given to it by the Yellowstone—its turbulence, its tawniness, its feline treachery, its giant caprices.” On our crossing, we found some truth to his notion.