River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (47 page)

To say it simply, reaching the Yellowstone was splendid not for its flat shores or distant terrain but for its textured waters. I circled us twice that we might take it in, watch its try at overmatching the Missouri, and a good effort it made, not pretty but powerful. The Professor asked whether I’d considered the Yellowstone for our route west, and I said I had. While its smaller meanders make for a somewhat more direct route than that of the Missouri, the portage it requires over the mountains would be much longer than ours, but that’s not all: after nine hundred miles of crossing the western plains, a traveler on the Yellowstone must still pass through days and days more of country only rattlesnakes and right-wing militiamen can love. Worst of all, highways and railroads bind in most of the river. I said, How could we have a sense of adventure with an interstate at our shoulders for two hundred fifty miles? Despite its wild grandeur in the mountains and the national park, the Yellowstone all too soon yields to civilization. While the Missouri suffers from big dams, something the Yellowstone is free of, the Missouri is the greatest and oldest highway of the Near Northwest, a river that flows through two latitudes and eight longitudes of remoteness, beauty, and unsurpassed history.

At the confluence, fishermen were snagging in the river for one of the most peculiar and ancient of its big creatures, the paddlefish, or spoonbill cat, a species that survived the rising of the Rocky Mountains, the drying and decomposing of Cretaceous forests of tree ferns now become coal beds, and the demise of dinosaurs. But paddlefish may not be able to withstand those new things called dams that block their spawning runs and drown the gravel bars their eggs require. Spoonbills continue today very much because of captive breeding in test tubes; although now it’s rare to find one of such size, they can grow to six feet long and two hundred pounds, large enough to give credence to old tales of even greater ones jamming the paddles of steamboats. Since the fish are strictly slurpers of plankton and will not take bait or a lure, fishermen drag big treble hooks through the murky water the fish prefer in blind hope a spoonbill will get in the way; the catch there usually goes to a small caviar enterprise nearby that report edly puts its profits back into local conservation projects. Pilotis said, “Call me retrograde, but I’m pulling for the paddlefish to mistake one of those guys for two-legged plankton and swallow him. ‘Jonah and the Spoonbill.’ Why should a New Yorker or Muscovite get to eat up the eggs of a species that watched the last diplodocus go down?”

Opposite the mouth of the Yellowstone once stood Fort Buford, now partially restored. During its construction in 1866, Sitting Bull made camp across the Missouri to observe and wait for completion, then he attacked and made off with a large circular saw he turned into a war drum. But the Buford soldiers got their revenge fifteen years later when the chief returned to hand over his rifle, his face covered by a blanket.

Not far beyond the old garrison, we came upon a man in a motorboat that had lost power and was being washed toward the swirling mouth, so we tossed out a line and towed him back to the Buford ramp and then headed again upstream. Four miles above the juncture of rivers is Fort Union, perhaps the greatest outpost along the once widely forted Missouri. The original stockade and buildings disappeared long ago, but recently archaeologists excavated the site before the National Park Service reconstructed most of the structures with stunning precision, so that in the midst of a vast, near barrenness, where perhaps the finest trade station on the river once cheered tired travelers with its high whitewashed plank palisades and gaudy red roofs fluttering flags and banners, it does so again. Upon reaching that location in 1833, Prince Maximilian wrote:

Fort Union is built in the territory of the Assiniboins of whom a certain number generally live there. . . . Among the amusements and festivities are their eating feasts when the guests must eat everything set before them if they will not give offence. If one of the guests is not able to eat any more, he gives his neighbour a small wooden stick and the plate with food, the meaning of which is that he will make him a present of a horse on the next day if he will undertake to empty the plate; the young men do this in order to gain reputation.

Although we still had much of the afternoon left, to have missed ending the day at Fort Union would have been an affront to historical precedent, even if the place no longer took in rivering folk and set them down to full mugs and laden trenchers, and the only Indian involved in trade there was a park ranger in the bookshop.

I
N MY WRITING
, when it comes to intuition versus advice, if the former is mine and the latter another’s, I unfailingly choose intuition, but when the issue was the Missouri River on our last day in North Dakota, I did the opposite and followed the counsel of two government officials who said the high water should carry
Nikawa
well upstream. That ended the Canoe Debate for the morning and, nearly, the expedition. We started easily enough over those first miles above Fort Union, and took comfort in knowing the course of the Missouri for some distance was one of rather long reaches after we got past a trilogy of oxbows. The day was fair, the wind but a breeze.

We immediately crossed the Montana line and entered Mountain Time, congratulated ourselves, said how we had only one more zone to reach, and the crew spoke of the Rockies as if they expected them on the horizon at any moment. I reminded them that the only contiguous state wider than Montana was Texas with its eccentric borders; I said that even dawn took almost an hour to cross Big Sky country, and that our route to Idaho was anything but direct.

The old Great Northern railway bridge, one of the few in the nation where locomotives and automobiles share exactly the same roadbed (but not at the same time, we hoped), is a vertical lift span, its design evidence that steamboats really did ascend two thousand miles up the Missouri on their way to Fort Benton—a bit of the past otherwise hard to believe the farther we went. I thought, If a paddlewheeler can make the run, so can
Nikawa.
It is such insistent optimism that leads travelers into continuing up the Missouri against the evidence of the river itself which for two centuries has gone to great lengths to indicate its general unwillingness to be navigated by anything other than schools of the finned and gilled.

Even before we were beyond the oxbows, the lake-like river created by the joining of the Yellowstone and the Missouri disappeared, and the depth dropped from sixteen feet to six, and sandbars began breaking the channel into trickles and dribbles and gurglets, a piece of river so unmitigated I could use my century-old chart to steer through bends and even around some shallows. But the glare off the water at times made reading it most difficult, and I soon ran us onto a bar, a beaching that held
Nikawa
as if the shoal were adhesive; neither poling nor wallowing her by shifting our weight from side to side could free us. It was a grounding beyond any we’d yet had. As life must go, so it did in that moment of our struggle: a motley flotilla of young blades, their heads tied up in red bandanas as if ready for the bounty main, came canoeing around the bend to witness and comment on our predicament. Seeing they flew a jolly roger from their beer boat, Pilotis whispered, “Prepare to repel boarders.” We heard a buccaneer sneer to his fellow picaroon, “Don’t offer them help. They don’t know how to read the river.” To that Pilotis called out, “Try it
upriver
sometime, O jolly canoemen!”

When they had passed from view, my mates stripped down and went over the side to push and groan against the bow until they overcame the shoaly grip on the hull and I could steer
Nikawa
back into four feet of water. On we went, struggling against a river that rewrites mile by mile every law of hydraulics yet advanced by science. Where there should have been current, there was sand; where there should have been a deep, there was sand; where there should have been sand, there was sand. All the same, I thought I might be slowly catching on to the Missouri chop-logic for those particular bends and reaches, but not before we had to pole off twice more. The erratics drove the sounder mad, and I glanced at it only to remind myself that even an electronic intelligence couldn’t quite fathom the Big Naughty. As I steered back and forth trying to keep to a good channel, trying to avoid an alluring and more direct route, Pilotis said, “It’s hard to escape an asphalt mentality that makes a straight line look like the right way.”

The worst part of a grounding was not the labor in escaping but the afterthought of wondering whether a strand of shallows was an anomaly or an indication the river was deteriorating into impassability and the June rise insufficient. On that day, the answer was six or seven miles of shoals followed by something worse, something that could not merely slow
Nikawa
but stop the voyage entirely—the archenemy upon whose nether church our venture could founder, Old Scratch-of-the-Rocks. By afternoon we were having to squeeze through narrow bankside channels where we clanked against stones, each time stopping for those dread moments of waiting to discover whether we still had props and motor stems. Even the halting was tricky, for if I proceeded too far after a hit, I might damage the engines, and if I didn’t go far enough beyond a rock chapel, the current would carry us back over it. In all this I found a single favorable aspect in our edging, grudgingly granted progress, another feint a Missouri River traveler uses to keep from submitting: just such an ascent was the way boats passed up the great stream for two hundred years; since I was there not simply to learn American rivers but to learn the
rivers in their histories
, I tried to accept how that one was teaching us in spades.

Where rocks and bars played out, we passed through shallows of dark silt the props stirred up and the engines sucked in with the cooling water, but that too had historical precedent in the number of steamboats that came to explosive grief because of suspended sediment clogging boilers.

The consequence of our travailing that day was we could not make our destination, Poplar, Montana, where we’d heard there was a boat ramp good enough for the trailer to reach
Nikawa
and let us use the canoe. With the afternoon wearing on, we grew apprehensive with the realization we would likely have to get the dory out at Culbertson. As unruly, illogical, shifty, and willful as the Missouri is—here’s one more river traveler’s gambit—it nevertheless gives recompense, and in that country of long reaches and mild bends it returned to us some of the finest riverine landscapes we’d seen since leaving central Missouri. Plunging right into the shallows, the steep and high Bighorn Bluffs exposed banded banks of yellow and faded-ocher clays and soft rock eroded into cuts and washes and pinched coulees. We knew we were approaching the far edge of the Great Plains, and that on some afternoon, if we didn’t founder, on the horizon a blue smear like an approaching storm would appear, but it would be the foothills of the Rockies.

From time to time we passed portable irrigation pumps sucking the river, and toward each of those I would mark out a heading because they indicated deeper water as a lighthouse does a shoal. On two occasions, beaver lodges built against the banks revealed where the river ran at a swimmable depth, and wherever we saw geese or ducks floating I made for them, knowing if there were enough water for goslings and ducklings to take their protective dives,
Nikawa
also had safety; but where we saw shoal-loving herons and pelicans, I took a different course. Still, since we were on the capricious Missouri, no method of piloting was without flaw.

By late afternoon, the Culbertson Bridge came into view, and Pilotis picked up the radio in hopes the Professor was there at the only checkpoint for miles, but we received no response. More calls. Nothing. Then a crackling that slowly modulated into a voice, and with the binoculars we could see him waving the signal flag. He radioed, “There’s no good ramp here, just some muddy slopes that look bad for
Nikawa
and worse for the trailer. Which do you want, an earache or a toothache?” We searched the shore and finally settled on a place near the northern foot of the bridge that attaches to the Red Bluffs. It took some doing to get
Nikawa
over the rocks, and the Professor had trouble maneuvering the trailer around the worst of a quagmire. The boat struggled against things of earth, and the tow wagon against those of water. It was a match made in hell, a union the Missouri, no less than the Styx, makes a specialty of.

After I squirmed us into position and then partway up the cradle, the trailer wheels sank to the hubs, and I had to back off, beach the bow, and jump ashore to study the muddle we were in. All we could do was try to make the quaggy ground passable, so we went in search of stones, driftwood, branches, flotsam lumber, and then we began wading, digging, and laying down two narrow tracks. Pilotis paused to say, “On the Hudson, do you remember the line in old Ed’s poem, ‘Go soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk the skid demon’?”

When the trailer was again more or less in position, I went back onto
Nikawa
and brought her up, but now the trailer was too high. I asked the crew to come aboard and stand all the way aft to raise her bow. I gunned the engines for a second, the nose lifted, rode forward partway onto the cradle at an alarmingly steep angle, then could go no farther. She was so precipitously inclined, as if again on Lake Erie, I could see only sky ahead. I called toward the stern, Walk forward slowly, one at a time! The big Photographer came up last, and as he did the bow gently teeter-tottered down into position, but the props came out of the water and could push no more, so with much sweat we hand-winched her the rest of the way. Pilotis went to the tow wagon and put it in gear, but it couldn’t overcome the poor traction and dead weight of
Nikawa
which moment by moment was forcing the trailer wheels through our cobbled-together ramp and into the mud. In another few minutes they would be locked in. With every inch they sank, so did our chances of getting out.