River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (3 page)

We took the Wards Island channel into the Harlem River, the other one with two mouths and no source. Like the East River, it too is a strait, although partly manmade, but even shorter and narrower with twice as many bridges as nautical miles. (A geographer might insist that Manhattan has no rivers at all; what it does have is an estuary and a pair of straits.)

It may have been Pilotis’s comment about the two Astorias so far apart: suddenly I never felt luckier in my life. For the past sixteen months I had searched out and studied charts and maps of a potential transcontinental course. One evening, after poring over them with a magnifying glass and dividers to make a coast-to-coast voyage on paper with Pilotis at my shoulder, I finally went to bed exhausted. The whole night I dreamed of the twisted route with its leagues of unknown threats only to awake at dawn to the conviction we couldn’t possibly complete such a trip, surely not in a single season, definitely not without long portages. That afternoon, Pilotis, ever-cautious Pilotis, revealed a similar dream and reaching a similar conclusion and a parallel belief that the voyage looked like a six-month venture over two years. How, I cannot explain, but that twin nightmare canceled mine, and I figured what we’d encountered in the dark was not foreshadowing but merely fear. I realized, while I
might
lack the nerve to undertake the trip, I was
certain
I didn’t have the courage to tell friends I was backing out: with an audience below, once you’re up on the high diving board you must at least jump.

So there we were, the four of us, river,
Nikawa
, Pilotis, and I, my friend wearing a strange smile and looking back toward the skirmishing waters of the East River; that smile of a small conquest was about to become known as the Hell Gate Grin. To a workman sipping from his Thermos under the Third Avenue Bridge I called through the window, We’re bound for Oregon! His surprise was but a moment, then he yelled back with delight, “You’re headed the right direction!”

Beyond the decay of Harlem and the South Bronx, Yankee Stadium and the football field of Columbia University, the riverside began to seem less fallen, not lovely but pleasant as if all had not yet been abandoned or destroyed, and the water appeared clean enough that, were Pilotis to go overboard mishandling a line, there’d be no cry to be put out of a poisoned agony. The shores there looked benign perhaps because the cold water, like a moat, lay between us and littered alleys and dilapidating warehouses. A friend, a woman forced into boating by her former husband, told me the evening before I hauled
Nikawa
east from my home in Missouri, “Follow two rules: Stay between the banks, and try not to ditch.”

Ahead lay the wide Hudson. I cut the engines and we bobbed in the Harlem to wait for the railroad bridge, so low that waves sometimes lap at the tracks, to open. It was river engineers cutting through here years ago that turned Spuyten Duyvil Creek into a canal and the Harlem into a little strait.

The bridge soon pivoted to let us pass, and we entered the Hudson and turned north again, happy to have a river with a navigable portion that is naturally regular, an almost symmetrical shaft except for its run through the outreaches of the Appalachian Mountains called the Highlands. For two hundred miles upstream where it makes its grand turn out of the Adirondacks, the lower Hudson never shows an oxbow or even a truly twisted bend, in part because it is actually a fjord, the only one in the contiguous states, with a tidal reach of 140 miles north, as far as we would take it. At Yonkers, we moved below the statue of Henry Hudson high atop his column from which he looks
down
river and not
up
, the direction he was interested in, the one he hoped would take him to the far western sea. Pilotis said, “In a way, we’re attempting what he failed in.” And, after a moment, “I hope we make it beyond where he did.” Yes, I said, we didn’t come this far just to reach Albany.

To the west, across from Yonkers, rose the sheer basalt walls of the New Jersey Palisades, once the home of the movie business: from those cliffs hung Pearl White, her perils as Pauline playing in picture-show houses for a third of a century. One of the surprises of the Hudson, partly because the river sits deeply in its narrow valley, is the way New York City quickly disappears to leave a boat traveler suddenly in a world almost sylvan with more leafage and rocks and river than anything from human hands. It was hard to believe we had so easily passed through the length of a city with six thousand miles of streets by sailing right through its watery heart.

To starboard, separated from the river only by railway tracks, stood Washington Irving’s home, Sunnyside. We could nearly have thrown out a line to tie up to the great wisteria he planted in the 1840s. It was he who wrote, “I thank God I was born on the banks of the Hudson! I think it an invaluable advantage to be born and brought up in the neighborhood of some grand and noble object in nature: a river, a lake, or a mountain. We make a friendship with it; we in a manner ally ourselves with it for life.” As we approached Tarrytown, the western sky began to smear over, and we turned in to dock at the eastern foot of the huge Tappan Zee Bridge. Pilotis, whose daughter and a friend had come down to greet us, went forward to snub in our bow. The dock was high and strung with a web of crossed mooring lines of other boats. In an instant, a tangle of stretched cordage went taut and wrapped and lifted Pilotis off the deck into near strangulation. I jerked back on the throttles to keep the boat beneath the struggling feet, the lines slackened, my mate wriggled free and dropped back to
Nikawa.
In bemused calmness, pointing to Pilotis, the daughter said to her friend, “
That’s
the experienced one who’s supposed to know how to do things.” Pilotis said, quoting our old mantra from Anthony Trollope’s
Small House at Allington
, “‘Umph!’ ejaculated the squire.”

With
Nikawa
secured, I whispered, The prudent mariner will not become entangled in docking lines. Pilotis said only, “We’re thirty miles upriver.” That’s all it was, but the morning in New Jersey already seemed another existence away, as did the whole continent lying before us. Our feet securely on land, I put my arm on Mate’s shoulder and said, We’re well begun, my sailor. And we went up the hill to have a nice glass of stout.

T
HE MORNING
came on damp and befogged, and the big bridge across the wide Tappan Zee seemed anchored on the west to nothing but clouds, its trusses and girders mere cobwebs. Pilotis and I rose from our cramped bunks and walked the long dock to a shower room only to find as we dripped across the floor a few minutes later we had no towels. Said Pilotis, “We’ve taken too far your dictum that we’ll carry not what we can use but only what we can’t do without.” As we dried on our shirttails, I heard muttering: “If you were a woman, you’d never forget towels.”

I fired up the motors, hummed them to synchronicity, and in the lifting fog we pulled onto the quiet river just above where it goes from three quarters of a mile wide to two and a half across. The Tappan Zee, an Algonquian-Dutch name meaning “cold stream sea,” is the first of two grand irregularities in the navigable Hudson, and its fourteen-mile length leads into the other, the Highlands. Our pilothouse windows fogged over, so we were glad to have the wide berth, although only someone from a small country like Holland would ever call this a sea. We ran against the ebb tide, but the broad water diffused the current, and we could hardly discern its movement to the ocean. Having no major tributaries below the Mohawk River, the Hudson is a remarkably constant thing, and to me who learned to boat on the vagaries of the Missouri, the Hudson is pleasantly predictable. On my home river in high water, a floating stick can travel two hundred miles downstream between one sunrise and the next, but here a piece of drift will ride two ebb tides a dozen miles down and catch two flood tides that will carry it back up eight, so that its 140-mile voyage from Troy to the Battery can take—if it stays out of eddies and backwaters—three weeks.

Pilotis, thinking of our showers, said, “Sixteen months of preparation let us forget something as necessary as towels, so what else are we without? Maybe the next discovery can’t be solved with shirttails.” I said that adventure was a putting into motion one’s ignorance. “I’ll remember that when I go down for the third time.” I said I’d looked long but had been unable to find a book of directions for crossing America by boat; for where we were going, there was no rutter. Digging into a bag of gear, Pilotis pulled out a sheet of paper and said, “That reminds me. We do have directions, a bon voyage gift from old Ed.” Edwin Miller was our nonagenarian friend.

“It’s a found poem,” Pilotis said of the directions. “Ed picked it up in Japan in 1935. It’s nothing more than a notice explaining rules of the road to foreign motorists. He hasn’t changed a word except to title it and set it in stanzas.” Pilotis read aloud:

Beware the Festive Dog

At the rise of the hand

of policeman, stop rapidly.

Do not pass him by

or otherwise disrespect him.

When a passenger of the foot

hove in sight, tootle the horn trumpet

to him melodiously at first.

If he still obstacles your passage,

tootle him with vigour

and express by word of the mouth

the warning “Hi, Hi!”

Beware the wandering horse

that he shall not take fright

as you pass him.

Do not explode

the exhaust box at him.

Go soothingly by

or stop by the road-side

till he pass away.

Give big space

to the festive dog

that makes sport

in the road-way.

Avoid entanglement of dog

with your wheel-spokes.

Go soothingly on the grease-mud,

as there lurk the skid demon.

Press the brake of the foot

as you roll round the corners

to save the collapse

and tie-up.

We moved north past Sing Sing sitting close to the water and affording prisoners a similar riverscape as one gets from the mansioned estates of the Goulds, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and others not far upstream. Pilotis, believing that half the multimillionaires in the country should be serving time, found the shared view only just.

Across the water lay the broad, flattened convex shore aptly called Point No Point; resident author James Kirke Paulding in 1828 likened it “to the speech of a member of Congress, which always seems coming to the point but never arrives at it.” Opposite was a topographic reverse, Croton Point thrusting its rooster beak well into the Zee. Then the river narrowed again at Stony Point where General “Mad Anthony" Wayne directed a peculiar encounter in 1779. George Washington asked him whether he would attempt an attack on the British garrison there, to which Wayne famously replied, “I’ll storm Hell, sir, if you’ll lay the plans.” Washington allegedly said, “Better try Stony Point first, General.” Preparing for the night attack, the soldiers, so the story goes, killed every dog within three miles to prevent a bark that would alarm the enemy, and they even unloaded their muskets to ensure a silent approach as they slogged across a marsh and climbed the heights to level a most spirited bayonet charge. Too late, the Redcoats began pouring down a steady fire of musketry and bad language. In twenty minutes the garrison surrendered, and the Yankees had one of their few decisive victories in the Revolutionary War-encumbered theater of the Hudson Valley.

Above Stony Point, the river passes through the Highlands, a kind of older wing of the Appalachians, where granite hills rise to only about fifteen hundred feet, but their bulk and situation right along both banks make them appear loftier. The Hudson makes three major turns there, each one distinguished by water, rock, and history. As we passed under the first, which the chart tautologically calls Dunderberg Mountain, the sky went back into the glooms again as lore holds it typically does. Dutch settlers believed their “Thunder Mountain,” shoving the powerful Hudson a mile eastward, was the source of strange and nasty storms that struck ships sailing the Highlands and that this stretch lay under the mischief of other beings who haunted the forested dark cloves and the angled river, venting their spleen and indulging wicked humours by besetting boats with flaws and headwinds, countercurrents, rocky impediments, and unexpected mud flats. In truth, as we rounded below Dunderberg, the wind rose to smack our pilothouse and the current raced between the constricted shores and whopped the hull as if knocking for entry in a reach named the Devil’s Horse Race. In that land—Washington Irving called it “the fairy region of the Hudson”—a prudent mariner will beware the Skid Demon, especially one of the heart.

Then we came under the looming of Bear Mountain. At its base, just above the Hudson, is a kidney-shaped lake once known as Sinnipink, and later after the bodies of British mercenaries turned the water incarnadine, it became Bloody Pond, a name changed to Highland Lake when a company in the nineteenth century cut ice from it to sell in New York City. Now it has returned to its history, although a bit cleansed: Hessian Lake.

At Bear Mountain Bridge high hills drop directly to the Hudson, and I slowed to an idle to see the location of one of the two great chains Americans stretched across the water in 1776 in an effort to keep British ships from using the river to cut the northern colonies in half. The two-foot-long links each weighed 140 pounds and lay on a huge boom of floating logs, but when the forts guarding the river fell to the enemy, the English broke open the chains, later shipping some links to Gibraltar, others eventually ending as exhibits in Hudson Valley museums. The combination of a lovely landform against a thickly historied river, all so close to the most powerful city in the world, is singular and, as such, has furthered the New Yorker’s famed hubris into fatuous flights like this one from Henry Collins Brown in his inanely titled 1937 work,
The Lordly Hudson
, perhaps the biggest American river tome ever: