River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  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:

  This book is written primarily for those whom a beneficent Providence has permitted to dwell on [the Hudson] banks or in its lovely villages. To less favored mortals, these pages are not expected to possess the same absorbing fascination. Yet a monograph of what is unquestionably the most beautiful river in the world is something the Hudson River man feels mankind should not be without. It is not his fault that everyone cannot live along the river. This volume is, therefore, designed also, as far as may be, to mitigate, to palliate existence away from the Hudson, if that is possible.

  Four miles upstream we pulled into the willowed cove at the foot of Guinan’s store in Garrison, the village that passed for nineteenth-century Yonkers in the movie Hello, Dolly! The temperature was dropping and the mist becoming rain.

  A Drowned River

  THE WOODEN FLOOR of Guinan’s grocery and tavern creaked and leaked the antique scent of oiled wood and foodstuffs, and on the few shelves the few dusty tins and loaves suggested a kind of Old World paucity as if the owner were still in his native Ireland: rough-cut marmalade, custard powder, lemon curd, soda bread.

  We went into the side room, its two walls of windows hung with river mist, West Point across the water disappearing in the grayness. Set into the small hearth was a footworn brass shamrock, and from the cold ashes a scent of burned wood; we had hoped for a fire. My friend the Photographer, who helped me haul Nikawa east and would soon take the trailer on to western New York for the first short portage, arrived at Guinan’s in our tow wagon, a sport utility vehicle, with Jane Bannerman. She had come to Garrison on the train from New York City to tell us about the strange castle on Pollepel Island, a destination I was insisting on. Although our guest, she carried a generous picnic basket with finger sandwiches of ham and romaine lettuce, deviled eggs, a bottle of wine, and, tucked carefully to one side, sketchbooks from her European travels for us to see. A slender, attractive woman in her early seventies, she nodded when Pilotis spoke of our setting out from Elizabeth, New Jersey, her girlhood home. For years, her father had pleaded fruitlessly with city officials to install a traffic light at a particularly dangerous intersection. When she was twenty-five, Jane stepped into the street there and was struck by a car and suffered a head injury that caused partial deafness. Pilotis asked why she smiled telling of the event. “I was wearing black oxfords I disliked intensely, and one of them must have landed in a tree because I never saw it again. That was the end of wearing those shoes.” Pilotis was scribbling notes, and I read, “In exchange for hearing in her right ear, Jane got rid of ugly shoes.”

  I asked her to tell us about that mysterious place we were about to strike out for, and she said, “My son passed the island on the train one evening, and he overheard a passenger tell another, ‘A crazy man built that castle.’ I guess it must look that way to others.”

  Her late husband, the builder’s grandson, was Charles Bannerman, a New York City lawyer with little interest in the place, although he and Jane once took brief vacations there. She said, “I never found it easy to sleep in the residence. It was spooky and things happened at night. Cement cannonballs in the entablatures would come loose and fall. And electricity was never sufficient so we had to turn off one light before turning on the next. The house was dim here and dark there. It wasn’t a place for me.” She thought a moment and said, “I remember each room had an appropriate motto from the Bible carved in stone. In the kitchen, I think, was, ‘She eateth not the bread of idleness,’ and in the big room overlooking the Hudson, ‘Come, behold the works of Jehovah.’” She sat quietly, then said, “I’ve forgotten so much.”

  When we went to the river again, Pilotis said, “She was just what you wanted—a lady to deepen the mystery.” We passed below the high stone breastwork of West Point standing darkly in the weather, then made the sharp turn around the rock wedge that is the actual west point to enter a zigzag Hudson sailors call World’s End, I think because, as you proceed, the sharp bend looks like a giant cul-de-sac. The bottom there is two hundred feet down, the deepest in the Hudson, and eddies and twisting currents and winds constricted by the ridges can create rough passage. Pilotis pressed against the window to watch closely. In the interest of promoting calm, I said, Everyone knows that a West Point freshman is a plebe, but what do you call the other three classes? My friend, keeping eyes on the water, said, “Sophomores, et cetera.” No, I said, They’re yearlings, cows, and firs
ties. “It’s good to travel with someone so full of bar-bet knowledge.” And I: Ask me what major league pitcher won the most games in a season. “Later! I’m navigating here.”

  The Highlands section of the river is distinct, mostly because the tallest hills rest against the deepest, swiftest, narrowest, and rockiest section of the lower Hudson, qualities that set it apart from what is upstream and down where the river widens into something more like a mountain lake. Over the 140 miles between Albany and the tip of Manhattan, the water drops only about five feet, and that means a negligible current if one ignores the tides. Except in the rugged Highlands passage, the Hudson shows itself for what it is today, a drowned river, with mud frequently two to three times the depth of the water. But in a time reckoned in millions of years past, it was then a fierce torrent that cut a deep trough through the hard rock there and onward for some hundred miles into the Atlantic. To see its present cleaving through the Highlands, those roots of higher mountains now washed into the sea, is to visualize the power the ancient river exerted.

  The sounder picked up a large school of fish, perhaps migrating shad, as we approached Constitution Island, these days more of a peninsula because of a marsh that human works have brought about on its east side, a wetland now crucial to fish from the Atlantic that come up here to spawn. These days the Hudson usually looks invitingly clean, and the long efforts to reduce or eliminate filth are evident almost everywhere. But the pollutants that remain, while often less obvious than earlier algae blooms from untreated sewage or pools turned red by dumped paint, are more insidious because of their invisibility. A battery manufacturer once routinely discharged nickelcadmium into a brook feeding Constitution Marsh, and even today the heavy metal comprises thirty percent of some sediments.

  Not long ago, most Hudson Valley residents—except the poor—heeded state warnings and refused to eat anything from the river. Now, a generation after Congress passed the Clean Water Act, many fish, particularly anadromous species spending most of their life in the Atlantic, are appearing again on tables. Yet, at the very time we were climbing the Hudson, the 104th Congress, driven by right-wing extremists, was trying to undo the Clean Water Act, a strange and heinous effort given the effectiveness the law has had in improving American waters. Still, Pilotis and I found lingering a direct correlation between people’s willingness to eat fish from the Hudson and the distance they lived from it: the farther they were, the greater their fear. But both on and away from the river, everyone we met spoke with anger about the deadly polychlorinated biphenyls that General Electric—under a state permit—for thirty years dumped into the Hudson a couple of hundred miles north of us.

  Beyond the numerous biological arguments (such as self-preservation) for clean water and abundant life in the river is the poetry in the names of Hudson fishes. How impoverished the river would be without stonerollers, horny-head chubs, comely shiners, margined madtoms, northern hogsuckers, hogchokers, short-head redhorses, four-beard rocklings, mummichogs, naked gobies, striped searobins, slimy sculpins, and—more rarely—oyster toadfish, gags, lookdowns, four-eye butterfly fish, northern stargazers, freckled blennies, fat sleepers, and whole classes of bowfins, anchovies, needlefish, pipefish, silversides, jacks, wrasses, puffers, and flounders (left-eyed or righteyed).

  We beat along past Cold Spring, a pleasant village with a hospitable waterfront not far from a small source where General Washington quenched a thirst at a spring rising today hard by railroad tracks; despite some decorative stones, few modern travelers would think of drinking from it.

  From the gloom, the massive, almost barren rock that is Storm King rose steeply from the west shore. Entering the Highlands, we were about to cross the Appalachians on tidal water. Close this gap and shut off the historic commerce that came through it, and New York City would be a Boston or Philadelphia. Storm King is significant in American law as the location of a rather recent and successful battle in court over threatened despoliation by a power company, a decision that established the right of citizens to bring suit on behalf of the environment.

  I think no American river per mile is deeper in history, art, and perhaps literature than the Hudson, and some of its varied richness shows in the lore of the toponyms thereabouts. The river itself has been, to name a few, Cahohatatea, Shattemuck, Muhheakunnuk, Mahicanittuck, Mohegan, Grande Rivière, Angoleme, Río San Antonio, Río de Gomez, Río de Montaigne, Norumbega, Manhattan, Mauritius, River of the Prince, Nassau, Groote, Noordt, River of the Mountains, and (even today) the North. Along its banks no name is richer than Storm King, which Henry Hudson knew as Klinkersberg but Dutch settlers called Butter Hill, a description the local nineteenth-century “dude poet” N. P. Willis found not at all befitting its dominance of the lower river. He, according to one journalist, “bestowed in cold blood” the name Storm King. That label has stuck because it is more accurate than the others, given the way the mount twists wind and weather to alter them into afflictions as a heartless monarch does laws.

  Even in the dark sky, the big rock seemed to cast a shadow over our course. I thought this reach a terrible place to die, and that turned me again to the depth finder: under us lay the Catskill Aqueduct, large enough to carry a locomotive and deep enough, were the Empire State Building placed on the tunnel floor, to leave only the top hundred feet of the skyscraper rising above the river surface. Inside the aqueduct each day, transverse to the flow of the Hudson, five hundred million gallons of cold mountain water rush down to New York City. Could tourists see that immense thing under the river, they might visit to gawk there as they do at Hoover Dam.

  Beyond Storm King the Hudson opens again, its breadth more than a mile, and we moved along with little heed of the chart. Atop a wedge of driftwood, cormorants sat quietly hunched between sudden shrugs to throw off the damp day, shakes of beaks, and a settling again into inky stillness. “Okay,” said my navigator, relaxing, “Who’s the pitcher? Mathewson or Young?” Neither. “Koufax? Ryan? McLain?” No, I said, Charles “Old Hoss" Radbourn.

  Abruptly distracted, Pilotis pointed upstream. “What in the hell is that?” Off our starboard quarter, emerging from the mist to menace the river, was the crazy man’s castle. Prudent Pilotis, for the third time, said, “Are you sure about this little foray?” And then, citing Jane Eyre, “Curiosity is a dangerous petition, Jane.”

  Where Mohicans Would Not Sleep

  FOUR MILES UPRIVER from West Point and about three hundred yards off the east bank of the Hudson lies Pollepel Island, a hump of dark granite and gneiss sloping low on one side and rising about a hundred feet on the west, just enough to open to a good view of the river as it enters the Highlands. Across the water from Butter Hill, Pollepel was once Cheese Island, but those benignly bucolic names never fit the history, topography, or, above all, the weather. The Mohicans would not spend the night on the islet, and apparently, until Frank Bannerman bought it in 1900, the only ones to live there were a fisherman and his erratic wife who thought herself queen of England and waged long battles with storm goblins that rent the air with sudden squalls and meteorological occurrences more than passing peculiar. Since the seventeenth century, river travelers have attributed the capricious weather in the bends of the Highlands to elfin malfeasance.

  Lore says old Dutch captains paused to douse their green crewmen in Pollepel water to immunize them against the bedevilment of hobs from Storm King and the dim, wet cloves around it. Another legend holds that the master of the Flying Dutchman, condemned to sail the seas forever, finally and gratefully saw his ship go down just south of the island on a hidden mud flat that today still grips the spars and ribs of the cursed ship to snag shad nets. And on the northwest shore lies an odd slant of rocks that wails like an injured woman when a certain northerly blows over it.

  During the Revolutionary War Pollepel anchored a cheval-de-frise to halt movement upriver of British ships, but, while those sharpened, iron-capped timbers must have looked formidable, the enemy somehow passed through without let. The
inconstants of Pollepel are so great that even warfare cannot properly proceed from it.

  Pilotis and I had heard that Pollepel is sinking. Certainly it’s one of the last islands in the lower Hudson, many others having disappeared not from subsidence but from being silted into peninsulas by human actions. We received warnings about goblins and deer ticks, so we took what precautions we could against the insects but didn’t know how to proof ourselves against imps, and we believed the deep gloom was mere chance. As modern travelers we admitted no faerie to our plans and set out with a friend who had just joined us for a day, a reporter from my first hometown newspaper; he, looking remarkably like Shakespeare, was an earnest man, happier with a pencil than a paddle. We eased Nikawa up the channel east of Pollepel and shut off the motors for a downstream drift that would take us safely over presumed obstructions for a clandestine landing on what was now state land. We mostly discounted rumors of steel spikes and mines, even though one of the buildings carried big letters: BANNERMAN’S ISLAND ARSENAL. Under the grim sky, Pilotis went to the bow with the sounding pole to call out the depth, but the wind began to rise and I had to spin the propellers every so often to keep our course. I could imagine the rocks, invisible as bogies, of Bannerman’s old breakwaters lying inches from our blades. Pilotis liked nothing about this expedition and kept the phrase “holing the hull” bouncing against the pilothouse, but I wrote that off as the cry of a deep-water sailor who feels safe only with six fathoms under a keel. I repeated that we were in a flat-hulled boat specially chosen for river shallows. “Damn but you’re insistent.” I replied that in trying to cross the continent, our strongest ally was insistence, and Pilotis said, “How about intelligence?”