River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (67 page)

William Dietrich

Northwest Passage
, 1995

H
AD WE NOT BEEN
so lucky as to have a Coast Guard station next to our dock at Clover Island, we might have been spared what lay ahead, the kind of encounter that teaches one the nature of a river as climbing a rockface does a mountain—so my words would come back to me. While I filled the fuel tanks on
Nikawa
, I asked the Photographer to step next door and get a reliable weather forecast from the Guard. The wind of the night before persisted into the grum and unpleasant morning, and I thought it a good time to lay over, take a nap, try to find an interesting dinner, read something other than charts; after all, we were only a little more than three hundred miles from the ocean, a run we surely could make on the navigable Columbia in three or four days. Those numbers got me thinking of destination rather than of daily navigation and caused me to neglect other figures. The Photographer had been many days absent from his wife, and I should have considered his urge to get the tow wagon and trailer to Astoria, Oregon, where I planned to put
Nikawa
aboard it for the haul back to Missouri once the voyage was over; the quicker we finished, the sooner he could see her; perhaps that colored his report. Men who keep bachelor’s table forget such things and can believe everybody else lives in independence.

So, when the Photographer returned with an inexplicably rosy forecast—winds about fifteen miles an hour, waves to three feet—I thought, What the hell,
Nikawa
can handle those numbers, and found myself happy to trade repose for a batch of river miles. When we set out under a gray sky, I checked the time and discovered it was more than an hour later than I thought; because wind tends to increase as day progresses, we had lost what little morning calm there was. The first four miles gave us only chop, but once we passed below the mouth of the Snake where the Columbia widens to two miles across in an impoundment called Lake Wallula, “many waters,” the river began showing one of its natures.

Pilotis was unwell that morning, quite off the mark and fearful of a recurring “fouled gyroscope in the inner ear”; such an onset of vertigo could turn my friend into a lump of flesh incapable of even standing properly. Failing to match that condition with those on the river was my third error of the morning. When we turned south and shifted the wind from athwart our course to one head-on, we saw the currents in a like way directly counter the blowing as the gusts tried to pull the river upright, make it run toward the sky instead of the sea, working to stop it dead as if an Aeolian dam. It was a blast to blow the lights out of heaven.

But the Columbia, driven forward by nearly a thousand miles of itself and an equal length of the Snake, simply got vicious and smashed forward, its passage not to be denied, and let the air batter it open. I’d heard that water spouts occur on Wallula.
Nikawa
began rearing and plunging like a horse confronting an old terror, and she threw wobbly Pilotis. A saddle has a pommel for a terrified rider to grab, but the pilothouse of
Nikawa
had not so much as a nubble. Then she bucked the navigation table into the air and sent dividers, straightedge, pencils, and a smashed cup flying. Suddenly the cabin was full of daggers and razors. As on Lake Erie, the swells were too close together for us to rollercoast, and
Nikawa
could only drive forward, rising, hanging, crashing thunderously into the troughs, poor Pilotis trying to stand and keep eyes fixed on the stable horizon, fighting fear of vertigo while being pitched against the bulkheads. We were dice in a gambler’s cup, shaken, rattled, thrown, and the wager was our lives. Trying to brace in the opening of the cuddy, Pilotis was gasping. Breathe slowly! I shouted in the mayhem. Slowly! Mate’s ashen face locked on to a beyond that must have looked more like the edge of some hereafter than a horizon. Yelling, Can you secure the table? No answer. It’s dangerous like that! No response. Shouting, If I have to give up the helm, I’ve got to cut power and we’re going to get turned broadside! It’s going to be hell! A nod. Okay! Here we go! You’re not going to like this!

Freed from my grip, the wheel spun wildly, and the river took naked
Nikawa
and wrenched her around to molest her and set her rolling so that to starboard all I saw was trenched river and to port only menacing sky. If the welldeck shipped enough water, we’d founder; if the motors drowned out, we’d be less than a broken-winged duck. I got pitched down, my arms now bleeding like Pilotis’s, and from my knees I worked to secure the table and grab up loose objects and stow them, all the while getting clanged from side to side like a bell clapper. When I tried to get to my feet, I saw what a brutal broadside thrashing our helpless steed was taking, and I had no problem imagining the black bottom waiting for us below. I struggled up and made a lunge at the insanely jerking wheel, trying to grab it without breaking my fingers, and then working to wrest control of it from the river. My whole body went into cranking us back to meet the swells head-on, and when I did, Pilotis went down a second time.
Nikawa
climbed, hung, fell, then again, and again. So much water was coming across the windows, I could see little of the shore even when we crested. Those waves were hoodlums bent on kicking in the ribs of a flattened victim, and each shattering impact was a shout of worse to come.

I yelled, We’ve got to get off this bastard river! Pilotis stood unresponsive. You’ve got to read the chart! Nothing. To hell with the vertigo, pick up the goddamn chart! Nothing. You’ve got a goddamn choice—dizziness or drowning! Move! You can do it! Slowly bending, thrown down, seizing the chart, clawing back up only to find it impossible to read the thing. Hold the wheel! Give me the chart! But it was hopeless—I might as well have tried to look up a number in a phone book from the back of a Brahma bull. All I could make out was map colors, yellow and white—land and river. In the pounding I’d lost track of where we were, so the chart was useless anyway. I threw it down, wiped at the forward window, tried to make out the shoreline, but it was unbroken, without an inlet anywhere, and I wondered whether I should just head toward the bank and hope to wash up on a shoal. We were making only the slowest headway against wind and waves, so on we plunged, how long I don’t know, but I’d guess twenty minutes short of forever.

Finally I yelled, What the hell is that off to starboard, about two o’clock? Pilotis turned slowly to follow the horizon around but said nothing. I yelled, We’re down to hope and luck! I crashed out a course toward what seemed an opening. As we closed the distance I could see that it indeed was a small inlet, the kind of place that eats motor stems, but I was willing to trade them for our lives. It would be better for us to say tomorrow, “We almost made it,” than for some undertaker to announce it a week later. We got hammered into the cove, a long crescent of quieting water, and made for the far shore.

Then I said, without having to shout, We’re the hell okay. Pilotis nodded. That’s when I saw a line of dancing water. In the seconds it took for me to remember such motion means trouble, my pull on the throttles was too late, and
Nikawa
coasted onto a rocky shoal, props dragging, hull scraping, noises only slightly better than the splintering crashes of moments earlier. For a minute I was even relieved to draw gravel—from that we at least could walk away.

Pilotis spoke: “Those stones make the sweetest music I ever heard.” Indeed, I said, and now we can fiddle our way off them. But there was no prizing free from that reef; neither trying to rock an immobile
Nikawa
nor pushing hard with the poles would loosen her. If you’ve ever attempted to get a terrified horse to face its terror again, you can imagine how securely she held to that shoal. “Why can’t we just wait here till the wind lets up?” When the big dams on the Columbia release water, I said, the impoundments drop so fast you can almost see it—I don’t want to be sitting here next week, and that means we’ve got to go over the side and try to shove her off.

Pilotis didn’t move. A debilitating vertigo last happened right after my friend got heaved off a dock into the Atlantic to celebrate a softball game; cold water seemed to cause the problem as readily as violent motion. I couldn’t help except to remind Pilotis there was no dizziness yet. I said, If the Corps has opened the gates at McNary, we’ve got no time to discuss things.

Off came our jeans and over the side we went, deep chill in the feet and belly, hard heaves and shoves, but
Nikawa
would have none of it. I waded atop the narrow reef to size it up and saw it was apparently a relict railroad grade running the length of the inlet, and worse, the rocks seemed to be rising from the water by the minute. I cursed back to the bow; one moment there was too much goddamn river and the next not enough. I guessed we had about fifteen minutes to set
Nikawa
free. We pushed, shoved, groaned, swore, slipped down, and went nowhere.

Then the wind, the coy wind, shifted a little and sent wavelets toward us, under the transom, enough to rock the boat a bit. We watched for a good ripple, let it ride beneath, then shoved mightily, and
Nikawa
edged sternward a few inches. We watched for another wave, pushed, and she moved again, then one more and she slid into float-water, and we scrambled aboard and I fired the engines to keep us from being washed back. Pilotis went to the pulpit rail to watch for obstructions as we headed toward the only possible shore, one that at the moment let the wind hold
Nikawa
against the black-sand beach. The slope was so gradual we had to wade to dry ground, and the trees were only scrubby Russian olives, all of them too far away to be of use as bollards, but Pilotis stumbled across a promising post, and with our longest line we tethered
Nikawa.
We dropped onto the sand as the overcast started to break up, and Hell-Gate-Grinning Pilotis said, “All of that beating didn’t stir up any vertigo. If that thrashing didn’t cause it, and neither did the cold plunge, then I’m free to do things I used to avoid.” One of the gifts of the river, I said, is liberation. “If you survive to use it.”

We lay on the beach, and I tried to see the wind against the sky, but it was as invisible as the mind of God. I quoted, “There’s nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” especially if those boats are on the toy waterways of England. I got up, walked down to the point at the entrance to the cove, and watched the manifestly infelicitous river, still wrecked by the imperium of wind. I couldn’t identify any pilot mark to help me figure our position other than we apparently were somewhere on the far side of the River Cocytus.

As I came back around the crescent beach, a darkly pretty thing, I saw a Jeep drive up at the west end and an elderly couple get out. They made no move in our direction. I hiked over, spoke to them, asked where I was. They seemed leery, but he gave an uneasy smile. “This is Hover, or it used to be before McNary Dam flooded it out.” He pronounced the name to rhyme with “Dover.” “It was just a whistle stop on the old Great Northern. That’s the railroad grade you reefed on. Nothing else left except some foundations out there under the water and that pole you’re tied to. If there’s such a thing as an underwater ghost town, that’s where you are.”

The couple lived a mile up the long slope, part of the Horse Heaven Hills, an appropriate place for
Nikawa
to find shelter. His shirt, unbuttoned all the way, revealed a long vertical incision running down his bare chest, and he pointed to the fresh sutures. “Triple bypass. Just got home yesterday. I was sitting on the porch, you know, recuperating, eating a sandwich, looking at the river when I saw you come into view. You were really getting beat.” She said, “He called me out to watch, and I was so afraid for you, I said, ‘God, don’t let that little boat sink.’” He nodded. “Then we saw you turn into Hover, and I thought you’d made an even bigger mistake.” He looked at me closely. “Did you get a weather report this morning? They were calling for winds of fifteen miles an hour, gusting to forty-five, and swells of three feet building to six.” I said, We got half a weather report—the front half. “You got away with a bad move then. Is this your first day on the river?” I said, I think it’s our ninety-sixth. “Where in the world could you be coming from that takes ninety-six days? Or are you just lost?”

I explained, and they may have believed me. I asked how long the wind might keep at it. “It can go on like this for a couple of days, but this time of year and coming from that direction, I think it’ll play out by sundown.” He pointed to the trackless railroad grade, now high and dry. “You can tell they’re letting water out down at McNary. Don’t get yourself stranded in here, son.”

When I returned to the boat, I said to Pilotis, We’re caught between a grounding and a drowning in a ghost town called Hover under the Horse Heaven Hills. Pilotis: “Isn’t there a poem or at least a good metaphor in there somewhere?” We waded out to push
Nikawa
farther into the dropping cove, and I wondered whether the inlet would run out of water before the day ran out of wind. I said how odd it seemed that, in the midst of our peril, two people sat watching us from on high, the woman praying from Horse Heaven, the man recovering from having just shown the world his heart.