River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (61 page)

While waiting for a drop in the water before our federally assigned departure day down the Salmon, we laid over in Baker, Idaho, at a red farmhouse that, so we learned, had also been a stage stop, a railroad “depot,” and a bordello frequented by Al Capone. Other than our quarters, Baker was a couple of small dwellings, a closed-up general mercantile, and two highway signs, one on each end, the distance between them seventy-two yards; I could walk across town in three quarters of a minute.

Our hosts were kindly people, Sharon and Roger Solaas, who came into the valley in the early seventies to raise a family and had spent much time refurbishing the house and its yard, putting in a garden, pruning the ninety-year-old poplars. Mrs. Solaas, a woman of smiles and teasings, kept rabbits and chickens, and to one tree she had nailed a sign,
COUNTRY FRESH EGGS;
she also offered travelers several bedrooms decorated with antiques and curiosities, each chamber opening to a view of the Beaverhead Mountains eastward or the Lemhis westward. During our several-day wait, we sat on the front porch and read or wrote or listened to the narrow irrigation ditch that was in effect a brooklet, or we just looked across the Divide Valley and wondered what it was like when young Sacagawea lived here or exactly where along the Lemhi River William Clark set up camp. Mrs. Solaas’s breakfasts were big spreads of eggs fresh from the cacklers, or French toast, or pancakes, potatoes and muffins, meals that negated lunch and necessitated long walks. Sharon and Roger, she adept in the culinary arts and he in the chase, told many stories, hers occasionally concluding with, “Now don’t write that down,” and his ending with a bang—that is, with a bullet. Across the country, we had met no better people than they.

On our first afternoon there, I sat quietly, happily thinking how we’d at last shed the constraints of the calendar, and once I paused in my reading only to doze off for three hours. Every night thereafter, with the sweet summer air from the Bitterroots coming through my second-floor window, I knew the sleep of a seventeen-year cicada, and indeed, when I awoke, I too felt changed. Sometimes in the evening we went up the road to a café with both a good salad bar and view of the Lemhi, where I watched the tumult pour past and imagined the flow lessening; afterward we would go into Salmon, twelve miles north of Baker, to hunt out a conversation that might lead us to a boat capable of descending the river, but we turned up nothing except refusals. Most of the town soon learned of our mission, in part because of our continual queries and partly because in front of the farmhouse
Nikawa
sat in full view of the highway. A woman, cocking her head like a hen hunting up a morsel, asked me the second day, “Where you trying to get to in that little boat
Nirvana?
”

I went to the public library in Salmon to read about the valley and happened across a nineteenth-century book containing a lexicon of Shoshone; I copied into my log the translations of certain phrases because they amused me and seemed a hidden history of red and white relations here before the Indians moved north and the townspeople named the high school teams the Savages. (Someone said, “You’re surprised? Man, you’re in Republican country. The University of Idaho is the Vandals.”) When I looked at the phrases I’d copied down, a found poem materialized:

Are you good looking?

Stop rambling about.

Both of you kiss.

Your face does not look good.

Got no nose.

You are a great liar.

You think you talk smart.

Let me loose.

Break his toe.

Do your best!

I tried to learn the lines in Shoshone, but the pronunciations surpassed my capacities, so I settled on the last line, rendered as
too-nuts
, then went up the street for a snack of spud fudge made from Idaho potatoes. It managed to taste like both, losing the best of both.

Every morning I checked our company’s resolve not to test the river by using our small kayak and canoe, each time finding their will unshaken, and secretly I was glad because the Lemhi was still ripping at full pelt. One afternoon on the porch during a chess game (the scrounged-up pieces were two sets of salt-and-pepper shakers for royalty, .270-caliber bullets as bishops, shotgun shells for castles, quarters as knights, and pennies for pawns), a fellow rode past on a bicycle, saw
Nikawa
, and turned back toward us. He said, “I knew we’d cross trails. I’ve been hearing you were out here somewhere.”

A native of Long Island, New York, Rob Pike, a forty-two-year-old lawyer, seven years earlier had begun crossing the United States by boat and bicycle, using wheels where his V-hull would not go. Each summer vacation he put in several hundred miles. Except for Fort Peck Reservoir, the solid fellow had pedaled over Montana, and to that Pilotis said, “You’re smarter than some people who insist on struggling along completely by water.” I asked if he were biking through the Idaho mountains, he nodded, and my copilot said, “Worlds smarter.” Pike was bound for the head of navigation on the Snake River at Lewiston-Clarkston. “So are we,” said Pilotis looking dimly at me. I said I admired his soloness, but his concept was different—his was a boat-and-bike. Pilotis: “Ours is a hope-and-hike.” More like a goad-and-gripe, I said.

I asked the lawyer what led him into such an undertaking, and he said, “I watched the wife of a friend struggle through a car crash and its aftermath. I saw her broken body go from an ICU to a hospital bed to a wheelchair to a walker to crutches and onto her feet again. It all made me take a hard look at myself coming into midlife and the way I was spending my time. One of the results is this trip, my American Passage.” He liked our company and the porch and decided to stay for a few days of rest before taking on Idaho. He said, “I’ll tell you, heaven is an ignition switch.”

Because we would travel down the Salmon River with a local outfitter, a man I considered a master raftsman with proper boats for white water, I needed more than our company of three to make the long descent worth his time, so I had lined up several friends to join us on the River of No Return. Toward the end of our layover, they began arriving. To celebrate the start of our run to the Pacific, I asked our hosts to prepare a special and historically appropriate dinner, an idea that came to me when I was reading Meriwether Lewis’s account of a lunch break with the Lemhi Valley Shoshones, one of the most graphic descriptions in the journals:

When [the Indians] arrived where the deer was which was in view of me they dismounted and ran in, tumbling over each other like a parcel of famished dogs each seizing and tearing away a part of the intestens which had been previously thrown out by Drewyer who killed it; the seen was such when I arrived that had I not have had a pretty keen appetite myself I am confident I should not have taisted any part of the venison shortly. Each one had a peice of some discription and all eating most ravenously. Some were eating the kidnies, the melt, and liver, and the blood runing from the corner of their mouths, others were in a similar situation with the paunch and guts but the exuding substance in this case from their lips was of a different discription. One of the last who attracted my attention particularly had been fortunate in his allotment or reather active in the division; he had provided himself with about nine feet of the small guts, one end of which he was chewing on while with his hands he was squezzing the contents out at the other. I really did not untill now think that human nature ever presented itself in a shape so nearly allyed to the brute creation. I viewed these poor starved divils with pity and compassion. I directed McNeal to skin the deer and reserved a quarter, the ballance I gave the Chief to be divided among his people; they devoured the whole of it nearly without cooking.

Mrs. Solaas could dress out farmyard creatures or a grouse or deer or anything else that made an unfortunate wander onto the highway, and Roger kept the family table additionally supplied with game fromthe field and fish from the rivers, as well as filling their large vestibule with taxidermied salmon and heads of mammals (a mule deer, antelope, caribou, black bear, cougar, several sets of antlers, and a bison skull he found). Even though no one in our outfit hunted any longer and some of us gave fair allegiance to vegetable diets (I asked one member to go easy on calling the foyer “The Hall of Death”), I proposed we sit down to a farewell meal the Corps of Discovery might have eaten.

On their twenty-seven months away from St. Louis, the men shot
and devoured at least:

They also ate 190 Indian dogs and a dozen horses, the latter keeping them alive north of the Lemhi Valley. Although they occasionally cooked up smaller creatures, the near absence of rabbits, squirrels, and prairie dogs suggests such game wasn’t worth expending the limited supply of shot and powder. Clark said the company could consume in a day four deer or one bison. There were also meals of various grains and legumes, wild berries, wappato, and enough camas root to give the Corps gastrointestinal upsets.

One morning I read the list to Mrs. Solaas who said her freezer held nearly everything except a bear, wolf, and otter; instead she had cougar, mountain goat, and thought she could get a raccoon and maybe some moose. No coyote? I said. She looked shocked. “I raised a pup from before its eyes opened. It was darling. Our children taught it to howl in the living room.” We’ll forget the coyote, I said. Just then the Solaases’ Labrador, Duke, ambled past, and I commented that although Lewis was inordinately fond of loin of puppy, the only animal the often-hungry Corps refused to eat was the captain’s Newfound land, Seaman. Mrs. Solaas said to the dog something on the order of, “We won’t let the bad man put you in the oven.”

I proposed the menu to Pilotis who has been alleged to weep when passing a meat counter. “So now our participatory history is turning into gustatory history?” Pausing, then, “Okay, but no puppy and no horse.” And I: Explain to me the ethical difference between a fish and a pony. While I drew up a menu, Pilotis, watching over my shoulder, said for both of us, “Mea culpa!” A few days later, early in the morning, Mrs. Solaas began preparing the feast, a shameless festal board. To recapitulate history, she used only the simplest means of cooking, few seasonings, and made no attempt to remove any “wild” tastes. On our last night together, she set out a spread such as I’d never before seen or ever again could condone for myself. Over two tables were platters, bowls, pots, tureens, pans, broilers, and trays, and in them:

Mule Deer Roast

Bighorn Meatloaf

Chicken-fried Cougar

Roasted Mountain Goat au Jus

Haunch of Bison Stew

Grouse in Cream Sauce

Skillet-fried Elk

Roasted Flank of Antelope in Gravy

Baked Leg of Raccoon

Steelhead Trout in Cream

Roasted Beavertail

Boiled Beavertail

*

Salmon River Wild Cherry Pie

I affirm here that what might seem a menu of the forbidden was all taken legally and that we ate it respectfully but with due relish. I proposed the toast: May these critters before us forgive us, and may none among us even once utter the words “Tastes like chicken”—and now my boon friends,
too-nuts!

Our preferences varied. I found the mountain lion the most delicious, the only feline I’ve ever eaten, except perhaps one time in China when the smiling host once too often reassured us, “No, no, American guests, house cat not in soup bowl.” The bighorn was a close second, but I was alone in tolerating raccoon for more than a bite. We were unanimous regarding only one dish—no matter how prepared or how favored by Captain Lewis—our distaste for beavertail, a glutinous mess. About cooking it, even our chef, her face pinched as if she’d sniffed offal, said, “Never again.” In all my days, including China, I’ve never eaten a meal more singular.

Thus full of American history, we moved to the cool porch to look off into the mountains that had abundantly provided most of our supper; toward the north lay the range that nearly starved to death the Corps of Discovery. The Photographer said, “It’s sad that the great river of these valleys, the one we’ve got coming up, can’t any longer provide the fish it’s named for.” That comment about sockeye salmon depressed conversation until I asked whether anyone had noticed in town the shop selling T-shirts imprinted:

THE RIVER OF NO RETURN

WHERE NO ONE HEARS YOUR SCREAM

X