River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (51 page)

Said Pilotis, perhaps to distract us, “How long would this lake last if the engineers cut off its feeder streams and let it empty at the rate it filled?” It took eleven years to fill it. “Then we have here eleven years of river in the bank.”

Twenty minutes later the worst weather had rolled on to violate the east, and we set off again across short-spaced troughs and ridges about two feet high that slammed us hard, and the wind bore across us so steadily
Nikawa
proceeded with a decided list to starboard, an angle that made standing difficult and the motors drone in a disconcerting way. But such a nautical lean through the whitecaps, with the high headlands on the horizon, gave me a sense we were on a small and cozy sea rather than a large and blasted lake. In that manner, we moved along for some time.

Pilotis turned on the marine radio to the weather band to find predictions of “cold air funnels,” things inimical in name, but what they were we could only guess. We proceeded on, trusting in the fickleness of the Missouri Valley skies. To be sure, the clouds soon began shredding, and in the rents a fine blue appeared, and the wind eased but not before tearing open the long horizon to let in shafts of sun that showed the way like searchlights. Our course shifted enough to permit
Nikawa
to go down along the wave troughs rather than across them, and the noisy banging gave way to a silent rolling that briefly wambled Pilotis’s stomach, and again we were more mariners than lakers: port to starboard, starboard to port went our little bark.

Then, about forty miles out, near Hell Creek Bay where the impoundment narrows to less than two miles and runs due east-west, we came to a reach that let
Nikawa
, without any assistance from me, run the water like a bread-wagon horse that knows the route.

In early afternoon, under the broken and bare hills near Snow Creek, I pulled into one of the thousand coves of the lake. We tied off to a big sage and climbed a hill to eat sandwiches, walk our legs loose, and sit back happily knowing we were about to enter some of the most striking geological areas of the Missouri. The Photographer had brought along a big, magnificent book,
Karl Bodmer’s America
, to help us identify locations the artist painted for Prince Maximilian, sites high enough to be unaffected by the impounding of the river a century later. There were few things we looked forward to more than discovering the painter’s subjects and matching actuality with his peerless Montana watercolors.

The weather struck again soon after we were under way, an inky slanting rain but insufficient to obscure completely a horizon of blue ahead, a watery rainbow behind, and two other weathers to port and starboard; it was as if we were passing beneath a spigot, dryness everywhere but directly under it. We entered a realm of steep shores topped by low peaks and sharply angled buttes, spires, pinnacles, blunt pyramids, and squat trapezoids—a veritable catalog of solid geometries done in sandstone and shale and clay stratified into russets, buffs, grays, and white. To generations of travelers going west along this route, the Great Plains here begin to give themselves up in spectacular fashion as if all the delights of a thousand miles had been hoarded so they might be yielded in a final, grand bravura performance. Could they speak, the hills might say, “Ask in vain the mountains to show you these prospects.” From there on, verticality would become increasingly a part of our days.

The long lake, its miles of shoreline equal to the coast of California, jogged northwest at Billy Creek, then opened to a six-mile reach due south to Seven Blackfoot Creek where we came upon one of the first Montana views unquestionably recognizable in a Bodmer painting. Maximilian wrote on July 25, 1833:

A thunderstorm with high wind suddenly caused our vessel to be in great danger; but the same wind which had at first thrown us back, became all at once very favorable when we reached a turn in the river, and sailed for some time rapidly upwards. This brought us to a remarkable place, where we thought that we saw before us, two white mountain castles. On the mountain of the south bank, there was a thick, snow-white layer, a far-extended stratum of a white sandstone, which had been partly acted upon by the waters. At the end where it is exposed, being intersected by the valley, two high pieces in the shape of buildings had remained standing, and upon them lay remains of a more compact, yellowish-red, thinner stratum of sandstone, which formed the roofs of the united building. On the façade of the whole, there were small perpendicular slits, which appeared to be so many windows. These singular natural formations, when seen from a distance, so perfectly resembled buildings raised by art, that we were deceived by them, till we were assured of our error. We agreed with [Captain] Mitchell to give to these original works of nature the name of “The White Castles.” Mr. Bodmer has made a very faithful representation of them.

We coasted to a halt, jubilant as if we had matched a lottery number rather than a painting to a geological formation. For some reason, the 16o-year-old watercolor seemed more antique and exotic than the ten-million-year-old bluff, but being in the presence of those two renderings of the remnants of an ancient sea was like discovering a window in the long curtain-wall of time. We might have been standing on the keelboat
Flora
herself, with the prince’s pen noisily scratching away, the artist laying down his washes, and somewhere beyond the hills roamed bison so thick it seemed that the plains themselves had gained legs, got up, and begun running, and from the high rocks red men watched the little thing-that-walks-on-the-water, part of the vanguard carrying in a new people who would inundate the old ways as the big impoundment one day would the river.

The clement weather held for the last thirty miles through the U. L. Bend Wilderness, a name that started the crew passing time by guessing its meaning: Upper Lake, Under Lake, Under Litigation, Utmost Length, United Limited, Utterly Ludicrous. We heard later it derives from a cattle brand. The vales coming down to the coves in that piece of the Mauvaises Terres were Killed Woman Gulch, Devil’s Creek, Deadman Coulee, Lost Creek—a place of nefarious names that expressed some European-born fear of godforsakenness in a sublime landscape. Had the first nomenclature been put down by less narrow and acquisitively hell-bent newcomers (who wouldn’t recognize God if It stood up in their bowls of slumgullion), the places in those Bonnes Terres could just as easily have been Sweet Angel Gulch, Transcendence Ridge, Playful Omnipotence Coulee, Surpasseth Understanding Creek.

We reached the long, slender peninsula creating the big bend at the mouth of the Musselshell River which we followed for a mile to a broken-down wooden dock at the foot of a steep slope of dark clay. Atop the hill was our tow wagon and the Professor, he much relieved to see us arrive at last at a place that must be high on any list of American remotenesses. I thought it possible, given the season, there might be no other humans within twenty miles.

As the crew set up a tent and I secured
Nikawa
, the weather snapped around again into a hard, cold downpour to turn the banks into the notorious Missouri Breaks gumbo, impassably slippery slopes that trapped me on the boat. At the next turn of the sky, Pilotis called down from the hilltop, “Do you need anything?” and I yelled back, How do you propose getting it to me? I ate as mice do, an ort here, a tidbit there, whatever flinders my scavenging uncovered in our larder, including a bottle of ale someone had overlooked. I went to the afterdeck and sat contentedly solitary in the great remove and watched a day of forty weathers close down to discharge the long western glimmering and give the night over to the scent of wet sage, the buzz of nighthawks, the far sorrow of coyotes, and then one of the strangest voices in all of wild America, a bittern in the reeds: gulping air, inflating throat, pumping out mellow, cavernous, liquid gurgles, wobbling notes seeming to rise from beneath the river itself, a voice made from the bittern world of slow marshy waters.

For all I knew, that lone bird, sometimes known as a thunderpumper, called down the lightning and wind which drove me into my bunk to lie in the easy rocking of the river, the Musselshell ticking the hull and putting a slow creak in the mooring lines. For a few minutes I knew all the reasons I was in that farness, why I’d come nineteen hundred miles up the Missouri. At such times, sleep is but a thief in the night who far too quickly steals what we’ve so justly earned in the day.

O
N THAT TEMPERATE
Monday morning we knew we were going to run out of impounded water and enter natural river again, but we didn’t know where it would happen, an ignorance that made us set out with two boats, the canoe tied across the afterdeck of
Nikawa
in an unwieldy and unsailorly manner. Off we went up the west side of U. L. Bend where the fifteen-foot-deep water was half what lay on the downstream side of the tongue of open land that is too narrow and straight to be properly either an oxbow or a horseshoe. The bottom rose steadily but remained flat enough to allow
Nikawa
to ascend due north for ten miles until the Missouri became a river once more and turned sharply to give us a westerly run. The broad and broken uplands, part of the Charles Russell National Wildlife Refuge, showed no evidence of ever having seen anything human and encouraged our expectations of finding birds and animals we’d not yet come upon.

Islands, chutes, and sandbars began reappearing to force us continually to change courses and speeds, and after an hour I had only a guess where we were or how far we’d gone. At what I thought was just short of twenty miles, we saw the dread thing again. I groaned out a god almighty, and Pilotis looked at me instead of upstream and said, “Are you sick?” Up there, I said, dead ahead. The Professor: “What the hell is that?” Pilotis stared, then, “That’s what it is—hell.”

Across the river lay a thin miasma of brown that turned into a line of saplings as we approached, and once again we were into the willows. I weaved
Nikawa
up channels that became progressively narrower, shallower, until she was doing no better than the canoe could, so we stopped, untied the Grumman and put it onto the river, fired up the motor, and putted away, slipping between gaps in the trees until Pilotis and I lost sight of our mates who were to return
Nikawa
to the camp at the mouth of the Musselshell and haul her on to the next place a highway crossed the Missouri, thirty-five long miles upstream.

The unadorned beauty of the arid Missouri Breaks helped us face the distance ahead, and even more to our relief, we soon passed out of the willows into open river, not deep but at least free of any bulwarks of shrubbery. A big Canada gosling, almost fledged, crossed our bow in a movement that was a combination of paddling, waddling, and flapping, a chaos of feathers that set up such a wake it rocked the canoe and set us to laughing and made us look forward to more wildlife in the refuge. The spring melt was reaching its peak, but the Missouri, although hardly a torrent, gave just enough depth to proceed without hunting out chutes, and often we could take a direct course and cut across bends; nevertheless, if that was high water, we didn’t want to see it low. Coulees of many sizes interrupted the humpy hills, and here and about grew pockets of stunted junipers and little ponderosas, the whole scene beginning to look not so much like the plains but the farther American West.

Our progress was slow enough to allow mosquitoes to hover alongside and sorely beset us, particularly on our defenseless backs. We pulled on rain suits until the sun steamed us out of them, and we had to let the insects have at our posteriors, but on arms and legs we could kill three and four of the devils with every swat, a game that helped pass a few miles. When we stopped on a grassy flat for lunch, I took up my binoculars for a hike to spot some new species of anything, but as soon as we landed, the stench of cattle manure made us hurry our snack, and I found no pleasure in spending more time watching where I stepped than in scanning the bushes. The foul flat was barren of birds. We had landed in the Russell Wildlife Refuge, a narrow strip that boxes the river, a comparatively few square miles surrounded by thousands upon thousands of acres of grazing lands in every direction. In what way cattle, those Jaws That Ate the West, qualified as wildlife was beyond me, and I execrated the refuge managers for allowing such an abuse.

The place has come for me to say it: the antiquated Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 and two later modifications allow “ranchers”—many of them wealthy individuals living far from Montana and huge corporations like Anheuser-Busch and Hewlett-Packard—to run cattle almost anywhere on public land in the West, including wildlife refuges and nearly every mile of flowing water. Simply by paying an absurdly low $1.36 per animal per month (less than many fast-food burgers), these operators assault some of our most beautiful and diverse lands as well as American taxpayers who annually give a $500 million subsidy to corporate cattle operations. The very year we took to the rivers, the Republican-controlled Congress was considering changing the law even more to the liking of the industry. Considered against declining species—birds, plants, animals—the need for more meat in this nation is ludicrous; considered against the soil erosion and siltation that cattle create, the consumption of more beef is stupid; considered against the fecal pollution of our waters, the sale of more franchise burgers is criminal. For the past several years, big-spending cattle corporations have killed attempts in Congress to revise the grazing act to give a proper return to taxpayers and to control the degradation of our land and water. Yet what ordinary citizen would find it unfair to fence cattle and sheep away from our creeks and rivers just as we keep them off our roads? Windmills and pumps should water stock, not natural waterways. In the arid West, streamsides support three quarters of the wildlife, but Americans still unwittingly accept profligate and outdated laws that primarily benefit the wealthy while permitting them to poison the rest of us downstream.