River-Horse: A Voyage Across America
William Least Heat-Moon
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Boat
THE HUDSON RIVER
Iconogram I
A Celestial Call to Board
Up Rivers Without Sources
There Lurk the Skid Demon
A Drowned River
Where Mohicans Would Not Sleep
Snowmelt and a Nameless Creek
THE ERIE CANAL
Iconogram II
The Pull of a Continent
Released from the Necessity of Mundane Toil
Like Jonah, We Enter a Leviathan
Knoticals and Hangman’s Rope
We Sleep with a Bad-Tempered Woman Tossed by Fever
THE LAKES
Iconogram III
Hoisting the Blue Peter
How the Sun Rose in the West to Set Me Straight
THE ALLEGHENY RIVER
Iconogram IV
An Ammonia Cocktail and a Sharp Onion-Knife
A Flight of Eagles, an Iron Bed, and So Forth
Unlimited Sprawl Area
Zing, Boom, Tararel!
THE OHIO RIVER
Iconogram V
Proving the White Man a Liar
The Day Begins with a Goonieburger
Enamel Speaks
Along the Track of the Glaciers
From Humdrummery on down toward Tedium
A History of the Ohio in Three Words: Mastodons to Condoms
A River Coughed Up from Hell
A Necessity of Topography and Heart
Nekked and Without No Posies
Eyeless Fish with Eight Tails
The Great Omphalos in Little Egypt
THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER
Iconogram VI
A Night Without Light on a River Without Exits
The Ghost of the Mississippi
Of Swampsuckers and Samaritans
To the Tune of “Garry Owen” We Get Ready
THE LOWER MISSOURI RIVER
Iconogram VII
We Start up the Great Missouri
I Attach My Life to the Roots of a Cottonwood
A Language with No Word for Flood
Looking the River in the Eye
Clustered Coincidences and Peach Pie
Gone with the Windings
Pilotis’s Cosmic View Gets Bad News
The Dream Lines of Thomas Jefferson
A Water Snake across the Bow
Sacred Hoops and a Wheel of Cheddar
THE UPPER MISSOURI RIVER
Iconogram VIII
We Find the Fourth Missouri
The Phantom Ship of the Missouri Reeds
How to Steal Indian Land
A Conscientious Woman
Flux, Fixes, and Flumdiddle
Sitting Bull and the Broom of Heaven
How to Be a Hell of a Riverman
Yondering up the Broomsticks
Chances of Aught to Naught
We Walk under the Great River
Why Odysseus Didn’t Discover America
Pilotis Concocts an Indian Name for God
Trickles, Dribbles, and Gurglets
My Life Becomes a Preposition
Little Gods and Small Catechisms
Eating Lightning
Imprecating the Wind
Into the Quincunx
Planning for Anything Less than Everything
Over the Ebullition
Ex Aqua Lux et Vis
Weaknesses in Mountains and Men
A Nightmare Alley
No Huzzahs in the Heart
THE MOUNTAIN STREAMS
Iconogram IX
We Meet Mister Eleven
Eating the Force that Drives Your Life
An Ark from God or a Miracle of Shoshones
A Shameless Festal Board
THE SALMON RIVER
Iconogram X
Bungholes and Bodacious Bounces
THE SNAKE RIVER
Iconogram XI
My Hermaphroditic Quest
Kissing a Triding Keepsake
Messing About in Boats
THE COLUMBIA RIVER
Iconogram XII
The Far Side of the River Cocytus
Place of the Dead
Theater of the Graveyard
A Badger Called Plan A
Robot of the River
A Taproom Fit for Raggedy Ann
Salt to Salt, Tide to Tide
THE PACIFIC OCEAN
An Afterword of Appreciation
If You Want to Help
About the Author
Copyright © 1999 by William Least Heat-Moon
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Heat-Moon, William Least.
River-Horse : the logbook of a boat across America /
William Least Heat-Moon.
p. cm.
“A Peter Davison book.”
ISBN 0-395-63626-4
1. United States—Description and travel. 2. Heat-Moon, William Least—Journeys—United States. 3. Inland navigation—United States. 4. Boats and boating—United States. 5. Dories (Boats)—United States. I. Title.
E169.04.H43 1999
917.304'929—dc21 99-31517 CIP
eISBN 978-0-547-52368-2
v1.1013
Text maps by Ray Sterner and Stephen M. Archer.
A landform atlas of the United States is available at http://fermi.jhuapl.edu/states/.
Title page lettering and endpaper map by Ed Richardson.
Endpaper drawing and painting on page [>] of Nikawa by Rod Guthrie.
Photo credits: Robert Lindholm: pages [>], [>], [>],[>], [>], [>], [>]. David Pulliam: pages [>], [>], [>], [>].
My Lotic Mates
Without a copilot, there would have been no voyage, and so this book is for Pilotis who was these seven: Motier Duquince Davis, Robert McClure Lindholm, Linda Jane Barton, Jack David LaZebnik, Peter King Lourie, Robert Scott Buchanan, Steven Edward Ratiner.
The Boat
If you want the specifications: she was made of fiberglass laminate over an end-grain balsa core two inches thick, with a flat hull aft a V-shaped bow; just under twenty-two feet long and about eight in beam, approximately seventeen hundred pounds empty, with an eight-inch minimum draft and about thirty inches when motored and loaded; called a C-Dory and built near Seattle in January 1995. The boat readily fit onto a small trailer.
She had only essentials: a compass, a depth finder, paired tachometers, and gauges for each of the two fifty-eight-gallon tanks that fueled the twin forty-five-horsepower, four-stroke Honda engines (efficient and environmentally advanced). The single window-wiper worked by hand-crank. Our radio was an Apelco marine-band pocket model. To save weight and increase range, we did not fill the freshwater reservoir, and to avoid head duty and have another reason to stop in river towns when we came across them, we left behind the chemical toilet.
Forward in the cuddy was a cramped V-berth, and in the pilothouse (headroom, six feet two inches) we could make a second, if narrow, bunk by lowering the small navigation table. Aft the pilothouse was an open cockpit or welldeck covered with a blowsy canopy, a nice place for sitting, sipping, and watching when we moored.
The hull, with molded lapstrakes to throw off spray, derived from the classic American dory perfected in the eighteenth century to ca
rry fishermen into the rough coastal waters of the northeast Atlantic. Our C-Dory was not fast, but she was stable, sturdy, maneuverable, re-sponsive, and yare. The fusion of her fiberglass upper and lower parts in effect made the boat a single unit. (Atop the pilothouse we carried a nine-foot, one-person Keowee kayak for places even the flat-hulled dory couldn’t enter. For the shallowest rivers, we had a square-stern, seventeen-foot aluminum Grumman canoe and a tiny four-horsepower Evinrude motor which, when off the water, traveled with the trailer.
If you imagine a Maine lobster boat crossed with a turn-of-the-century harbor tug, you have our C-Dory, Nikawa, a name I coined from the Osage words ni, river, and kawa, horse, and pronounced Nee-KAH-wah. Indeed, she was a tough but sweet little river horse.
On the forward bulkhead, near the helm, I attached a wooden plaque, a proverb from the Quakers: PROCEED AS THE WAY OPENS. Aft, above the door to the welldeck and motors, I put up another, this one from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the advice Marlow receives before ascending the Congo River: AVOID IRRITATION. I have spent my life trying to practice such simplicities, and when I fail, paying the costs; in April of 1995, we, my copilot and I, set out to test those admonitions in a venture of some moment and considerable chance.
I
THE HUDSON RIVER
NIKAWA IN NEW YORK HARBOR
Iconogram I
The bulk of the water in New York Harbor is oily, dirty, and germy. Men on the mud suckers, the big harbor dredges, like to say that you could bottle it and sell it for poison. The bottom of the harbor is dirtier than the water. In most places, it is covered with a blanket of sludge that is composed of silt, sewage, industrial wastes, and clotted oil. The sludge is thickest in the slips along the Hudson, in the flats on the Jersey side of the Upper Bay, and in backwaters such as Newtown Creek, Wallabout Bay, and the Gowanus Canal. In such areas, where it isn’t exposed to the full sweep of the tides, it accumulates rapidly. In Wallabout Bay, a nook in the East River that is part of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it accumulates at the rate of a foot and a half a year. The sludge rots in warm weather and from it gas-filled bubbles as big as basketballs continually surge to the surface. Dredgemen call them “sludge bubbles.” Occasionally, a bubble upsurges so furiously that it brings a mass of sludge along with it. In midsummer, here and there in the harbor, the rising and breaking of sludge bubbles makes the water seethe and spit. People sometimes stand on the coal and lumber quays that line the Gowanus Canal and stare at the black, bubbly water.
Joseph Mitchell
The Bottom of the Harbor, 1951
A Celestial Call to Board
FOR ABOUT HALF A LEAGUE after we came out of the little harbor on Newark Bay at Elizabeth, New Jersey—with its strewn alleys and broken buildings, its pervading aura of collapse, where the mayor himself had met us at the dock and stood before a podium his staff fetched up for him to set his speech on, words to launch us on that Earth Day across the continent as he reminded us of history here, of George Washington on nearly the same date being rowed across to New York City on the last leg of his inaugural journey—and for the half league down the Kill Van Kull (there Henry Hudson lost a sailor to an arrow through the neck), we had to lay in behind a rusting Norwegian freighter heading out to sea with so little cargo that her massive props were no more than half in the water and slapping up a thunderous wake and thrashing such a roil it sent our little teakettle of a boat rolling fore and aft. I quickly throttled back, and the following sea picked up our stern and threatened to ride over the low transom into the welldeck. We had no bilge pump to empty it, and the cabin door stood hooked open to the bright blue April morning and the sea air of New York Bay.
My copilot roared, “Don’t cut the motors so fast when we’re riding a swell! You’ll swamp us!” Only ten minutes out, we were nearly on our way to the bottom, sixty feet below. I turned toward the stern to see the bay rear above the transom just before the water raised Nikawa high enough to let the next wave ride under and shove her fast toward the chopping props of the freighter. Then her bow slipped down the other side of the swell, we pulled away from the big screws, and I idled to let the deep-water tramp move ahead until I got an open lane on her port side. We pushed past, cut through the wake of the Staten Island Ferry, and headed on toward the Atlantic.
The Hudson, New York Harbor to Troy, 143 river miles
“And that’s how it begins,” said my friend, a blue-water sailor, one whom I shall call Pilotis (rhymes with “my lotus”). It wasn’t, of course, the beginning, for who can say where a voyage starts—not the actual passage but the dream of a journey and its urge to find a way? For this trip I can speak of a possible inception: I am a reader of maps, not usually nautical charts but road maps. I read them as others do holy writ, the same text again and again in quest of discoveries, and the books I’ve written each began with my gaze wandering over maps of American terrain. At home I have an old highway atlas, worn and rebound, the pages so soft from a thousand thumbings they whisper as I turn them. Every road I’ve ever driven I’ve marked in yellow, the pages densely highlighted, and I can now say I’ve visited every county in the contiguous states except for a handful in the Deep South, and those I’ll get to soon. Put your finger at random anyplace in this United States atlas, and I’ve either been there or within twenty-five miles of it, but for the deserts of Nevada where the gap can be about twice that. I didn’t set out to do this; it just happened over forty years of trying to memorize the face of America. When someone speaks of Pawtucket or Cross Creek or Marfa, I want an image from my travels to appear; when I read a dateline in a news story about Jackson Hole, I want the torn Teton horizon and a remembered scent of pinyon pine in me. “Have you seen the historic tavern at Scenery Hill?” the Pennsylvanian may say, and I want to ask, How goes the ghost, and are the yeast rolls still good? No words have directed my life more than those from venerable Thomas Fuller, that worthy historian of olde England: “Know most of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof.”
Twenty years ago I had been down enough miles of American road that I could visualize the impending end of new territory to light out for—as my fellow Missourian, river traveler Huck Finn, has it—and that’s when I noticed the web of faint azure lines, a varicose scribing of my atlas. They were rivers. I began tracing a finger over those twistings in search of a way to cross America in a boat. At first I was simply curious whether one could accomplish such a voyage without coming out of the water repeatedly and for many miles, but later I grew interested in the notion of what America would look like from the rivers, and I wanted to see those secret parts hidden from road travelers. Surely a journey like that would open new country and broader notions, but I could find no transcontinental route of rivers that did not require miles and miles of portages and heavy use of border waters—the Gulf of Mexico or the Great Lakes. For my voyage, I wanted only an internal route across the nation.
I’ll skip details of how, during those two decades, I discovered inch by inch a theoretical route a small vessel might, at the proper time of the year, pursue westward from the Atlantic an interior course of some five thousand miles, equivalent to a fifth of the way around the world, ideally with no more than seventy-five miles of portage, to reach the Pacific in a single season. Travelers have boated across America before but never to my knowledge under those requirements. One night sixteen months earlier, in a thrill of final discovery, I found what I believed to be the last piece of this river puzzle, and at that moment I understood that I had to make the voyage at whatever cost. If a grail appears, the soul must follow.
In my excitement I phoned my great friend to join me, teach me the bowline and sheepshank, remind me of the rules of the road, to be my copilot, my pelorus of the heart to steer me clear of desolation, that fell enemy of the lone traveler. Pilotis said, “When my father was dying a few months ago, in his last days when he was out of his head, he lay murmuring—I had to lean close to hear him—he said again and again, ‘Can you
make the trip? Can you make the trip? Better be ready.’ It was his celestial call to board. Now you ask me the same question, and I don’t know.”
My friend mulled things for some days and then phoned. “I can make the trip. I’ll be ready. Find us a boat that can do it.” And that’s how we came to be, on the twentieth of April, sliding past the Norwegian freighter on our way to the Atlantic Ocean. Pilotis—my Pylades, my Pythia, my Pytheas—writes well, values memorable language, quotes it as I can never do. After I had nearly sunk us within sight of our departure dock, in the ensuing embarrassed quiet played to good effect, Pilotis said as if lecturing, “Nautical charts carry a standard warning addressed to ‘the prudent mariner.’ Revere that adjective above all others.”
I, whose boating life to that moment consisted of paddling about in a thirteen-foot canoe and standing below-deck watches and chipping paint on a nine-hundred-foot aircraft carrier, realized more than I wished to admit why I wanted Pilotis along, but I only pointed out the worn stone walls of Fort Wadsworth on the north end of Staten Island near the Narrows. Frédéric Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, considered that passage the Gate of America, an opening through which four centuries of ships have sailed for the Canaries, Calcutta, the southern capes, Cathay, but few for the Pacific via inland waters. Then we crossed under the lofty, six-lane span of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the great Silver Gate looking improbably thin and fragile hang ing above us, and pushed east beyond Coney Island and Gravesend Bay, on into the ocean. We paused at that western edge of the Atlantic so it might set in us a proper watery turn of mind and reset us from lubbers to sailors. Then, in the spindrift, Pilotis leaned over the side to fill a small bottle with brine from the great eastern sea, cork it up and stow it safely in the cabin until, we hoped, I could unstopper it and pour it into the Pacific just beyond the treacherous bar at the mouth of the Columbia River a continent away.
