River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Bannerman’s castle began to emerge from the dismals, veil after veil falling away, and slowly we could make out the turrets and crenela-tions, parapets, embrasures, and battlements, some built from nineteenth-century New York City paving blocks. The shadowy aura silenced us, and we drifted closer as though being pulled in. The Reporter put his pencil down and whispered to me, “Are you ignoring good advice?” and Pilotis raised four fingers to give me the depth, then it was three feet, and then came a godawful shattering whack, then another, as if we too had snagged on the Flying Dutchman. Pilotis, face full of alarm, whirled toward me and shouted, “You’re on the bottom! You’re on the goddamn bottom!”

  I raised the stilled motors, and my prudent mariner yelled, “You just can’t enter these places like Farragut charging into Mobile Bay! What’s on your sign? ‘Proceed as the way opens’?” I said the hitch in such advice was that much of the time we would have to proceed to learn whether the way was indeed open. When the motor stems came out of the water, we could see an anti-ventilation plate had snapped off. To fix it would be a major repair, and I knew we’d somehow have to continue over the next months without it.

  I guessed we’d suffered the hit as we passed over one of Bannerman’s breakwaters into what had formerly been a small harbor. The sounding pole indicated as much, so I started the engines, got up some headway, shut them off, raised them, and put us into a glide I hoped would let us reach deeper water. We’d have to use the canoe. A hundred yards south of the submerged breakwater, Pilotis went forward again and began working to set the anchor, but it took half a dozen tries before it stuck. We couldn’t find the abundant Hudson mud and finally had to trust a less sure grip on rocks.

  The Photographer was bringing the trailer up the river road from Garrison. I managed to reach him on the marine radio and make arrangements for our canoe to come out to the anchorage. We pulled on our rain suits, all the while explaining to the Reporter how to move the boat to safety should the weather change and the anchor slip. He said uneasily, “What if I can’t remember all of this?” Pilotis mockingly answered, “Rely on your insistence.” The Photographer, noticeably disturbed, told us a man had just committed suicide by walking into a tunnel as a Metro-North train rushed through. He added, “Ironically, quite close to the Breakneck Ridge stop.” Pilotis said, “Nightfall’s got more light than this day.”

  We boarded the canoe and struck out for a landing on the north of Pollepel, just above the old arsenal. Indeed, when we reached shore and started up the slope toward the fractured buildings at two P.M., the wind seemed to blow in not air but dusk. Pilotis carried a large corn-knife—allegedly only for brush—and kept one hand on it, allegedly only to prevent it from slipping from the belt. Forsythia blossoms, casting an unearthly yellow into the gray air like little jack-o’-lanterns, seemed to light our path more than the afternoon as we walked up under the tall shell of Bannerman’s derelict dream. Years ago, his grandson Charles wrote, “Time, the elements, and maybe even the goblins of the Highlands, will take their toll of some of the turrets and towers, and perhaps eventually the castle itself.” Seven years later, a night fire of unknown cause turned that eccentric structure—one of several along the storied Hudson—into a skeleton, and the immigrant Scot’s most American longing for an instant ancestral dwelling became a romantic ruin, a fit end, some people thought, for a thing built on war profiteering.

  We crossed the remains of the wharf in front of the arsenal where Bannerman used to store black powder, bombs, torpedoes, cannons, and more, all of it guarded by armed men, nasty dogs, and mounted Gatling guns. Now the seven-storey building was open to the sky, and trees and vines grew inside, right through heaps of cinders, broken glass, fallen brick, and steel girders serpentined by the fire. It had become like what it dispensed—a ruin of war.

  After the First World War, the federal government tried to enforce the beating of sabers into plowshares by assuming greater supervision over secondhand arms merchants, and Bannerman’s business following his death in 1918 became more of a big—very big—army-navy store with a fat illustrated catalog published well into the 1950s. It was full of uniforms and cannonry that outfitted Buffalo Bill’s road show, movie regiments, courthouse lawns, and ten-year-old boys’ imaginations: Civil War battle-rattle ($3.75), German bear-hunting sword ($14.00), Gatling gun barrels ($2.00), Spanish morion ($22.00), stone cannonball ($15.00), defused torpedo warhead ($20.00), as well as pith helmets, military ribbons and medals, buttons from the coats of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and enticing descriptions: “Tree trunk from Civil War battlefield. Log is 42" long, 12" in diameter. Has 3 Minnie balls and one cannonball embedded. Packed for shipment.” Everything sold only for spot cash.

  Frank Bannerman, whom the New York World-Telegram described as a “one-time seller of death in wholesale lots,” wrote in an early catalog: “St. John’s vision of Satan bound and the one thousand years of peace is not yet in sight. We believe the millennium will come and have for years been preparing by collecting rare weapons now known as Bannerman’s Military Museum, but which we hope some day will be known as The Museum of Lost Arts.” And, in fact, some years later a portion of his immense collection did go to the Smithsonian. Bannerman’s logic echoed that of Richard Gatling himself: “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—that would by its rapidity of fire enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, it would to a great extent supersede the necessity of large armies and, consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.”

  We walked up to the old residence, across the drawbridge, under the portcullis, and through the sally port. From the scorched and ruptured shell hung eroded stone armorial shields, cannonballs, and other architectural details no longer identifiable. Inside were floorless upper chambers, crumbling fireplaces clinging to the walls, stairs leading into space, and a litter of broken radiators, snapped pipes, exhausted dreams. As we wandered, we separated in the mist, and I found myself alone in a low, brick room like a dungeon. The ceiling dripped, darkness seemed to gnaw at the beam from my flashlight, and before and behind were cobwebbed corners and who-knows-what coiled under fallen plaster. I played the light over the chamber, across a rotting table and onto a thing that froze me: on top lay a wet face. I fell back, dropped my light, scrabbled about to grab the rolling beam, played it again toward the horrid visage and then onto a chair holding a sagging skeleton. As I backed up, I realized the face was a painted mask of the kind a Mexican might wear on the Day of the Dead, the image seared by one of the fat and moldy candles. The skeleton was a deflated piece of soft plastic. On the floor lay a stretched-out condom.

  What in hell had gone on in here? I picked up the mask, one of several, tried it out. The temptation was too much. I went to the window and waited till I heard my friend, who believes not at all in goblins, crunching toward me. I lifted the mask to my face, stood low in the narrow window, and groaned. Pilotis looked up, recoiled violently, and jerked out the cornknife. I rasped out, Hello, Mate.

  Too relieved to curse, Mate later recounted the incident with relish, since there’s nothing a person of words likes more than an incident of survival.

  We climbed to a second-storey room still possessed of its floor, or most of it, and sat down amid the rubble and rusting bedsteads to wait out a wind quickly turning vehement. It was one of the black squalls off Storm King we’d read about, and it beat the river relentlessly. Even from this high point on the island, we were unable to see through the pounded air, and we could only trust Nikawa was holding anchor or that the Reporter had moved her to safety, if there were such here. Said Pilotis, “Was this side expedition a good idea?”

  I answered to the effect that there was little better for a traveler than reading about a distant place, absorbing its past, its legends, and then arriving to walk smack into them. For us, it wasn’t just the old Scot’s castle and his faux barony nor the strange island with its hobbed history; it was the whole aura of a weirdly weat
hered and demonic stretch of the Hudson Highlands. We’d taken chances to encounter something with an aspect beyond the probable, and we’d found it, perhaps by losing a boat.

  Pilotis said, “You’ve always tended to equate caution with cowardice. I never knew a man so afraid of cowardice.” I said that, at times, only risk could bring about such an intersection of books and life, tales and actuality, history and current moment, and it was for all that I’d come; surely we both knew that our time on the blasted island would long hold in our memories. But you’re right, I said, if only we also could be sure of Nikawa.“Sudden, violent things never endure,” Pilotis said.

  The sky at last began to open and the wind drop, and we went down and pushed through the brush for a view of the river, and there, sweet and white in the quieting water, tidily at anchor, lay our little river horse, and soon we heard the canoe approaching to take us off odd Pollepel.

  An hour later, Nikawa was sliding over a glassy Hudson and under the wondrously high and now abandoned 1888 railroad bridge at Poughkeepsie, the whilom home of brewer Matthew Vassar who proposed building a monument to Henry Hudson on Pollepel but, fortunately, failed to find support and founded a college for women instead. We moved past Hyde Park and the riverside mansions of Vanderbilts and Roosevelts. The cruise gave the Reporter a chance to recover from having been severely shaken in body and mind as he tended Nikawa through the squall. He said several times, “I thought she was going down. Capsizing on your second day out.” We came, I said, to encounter the rivers. And he: “But not death.” I mentioned I knew of a good glass of nerve-settling porter up on Rondout Creek, along what used to be the old Delaware and Hudson Canal, and Pilotis said, “Now there’s something I’d like you to insist on.”

  Snowmelt and a Nameless Creek

  AT KINGSTON we were able to follow our plan of staying in riverside towns when possible and found quarters up the hill from Rondout Creek in a large old house with a yard full of maple trees our host each spring tapped for sap to boil down to a fine syrup that we dripped over breakfast pancakes just before we heard the bad news. We were a day from the Erie Canal, the route to carry us across New York to Buffalo. There are thirty-seven locks on the canal, and at nine in the morning we learned repairs on the first one, of all places, were not complete. Three days out, and already we were going to lose a day.

  “So what’s twenty-four hours?” our host said. We wished he were right, but the facts of a continental voyage in a single season change the meaning of time. In order to find enough water in the western rivers, especially the upper Missouri, we would have to catch the snowmelt off the Rocky Mountains, that brief but somewhat predictable flushing in June which we hoped would enable us to float our canoe rather than drag it across Montana. We wanted a voyage, not a hike. Timing the snowmelt is rather tricky if one starts from, say, Iowa or Nebraska, but to try it from the Atlantic Ocean is quite something else, and the greatest problem in the East is the Erie Canal. In winter the locks shut down, parts of its course are dry, and it doesn’t open until early May, too late to let us arrive with the June rise in the Far West.

  Other water routes westward require miles and miles of overland travel, and some necessitate skirting along much of the perimeter of the nation; we were bent on traveling through the heart of the country with water under us in a measure never before achieved. To reverse directions and go from west to east presented knottier problems, the crucial one the Salmon River which is not passable upstream except by jet boat. We were, if you will, locked into our chosen route.

  Using tables that show the usual peak of spring runoff on the upper Missouri and then figuring in a few days to accommodate a breakdown, an injury, or an illness, I knew we needed to enter the Erie Canal, if possible, no later than April fifteenth, three weeks prior to the official opening. Months before starting out, I had gone to the Office of Canals to ask permission to pass through as soon as the Erie was completely watered. I brought in support from my friend Schuyler Meyer who had served on the Erie as captain of the old state tug Urger and hoped to join us. The authorities, recognizing the challenge of such a transcontinental endeavor, deliberated and finally agreed to let us set out on the twenty-fourth, but they warned of contractors not completing repairs on time.

  I then reworked our itinerary, compressed it to the point of the nearly impossible, and removed virtually all capability of waiting out a force majeure, so we ended up with a schedule likely to try us nearly as much as the rivers would. Every day was now critical, and time became the unseen captain of our boat. I knew no way to circumvent it.

  At Rondout, we could do little but deplore contractors and wonder whether a twenty-four-hour delay might turn into a week. Pilotis, not wishing to haunt me with my own advice, said nothing about proceeding as the way opens, but I couldn’t stop myself from hearing the words of Manuel Lisa, the early Missouri River fur trader: “I go a great distance while some are considering whether they will start today or tomorrow.” As I looked over our route, I thought how a jet plane could accomplish it in about four hours, a car in four days, a good bicyclist in four weeks; but we—if the staggering welter of things all fell into place hereafter—we would need almost four months before winter closed the mountain passes and froze the waters.

  Helpless, Pilotis and I went off to the east side of the river to search for smoked shad whose Latin name means “most delicious.” We heard their run from the Atlantic to spawn in the mid-Hudson flats was good that spring. Above Rhinecliff we found a little fish house, a family business for more than a century. The cutting room, redolent of fresh shad, stripers, and sturgeon, was next to a mechanic’s garage filled with broken machinery and dusty mounted animals. A toothless old fellow dressed the shad and carried a tray of them to a small smokehouse where racks of fish, after a two-day soak in molasses and vinegar brine, lay coloring in the clouds rising from the hickory coals. I said, Is it true poached shad testes are delectable? He said, “What?” and wrapped six fish for us to take upriver, and we went off to buy towels, returning to Rondout by suppertime.

  Our enforced layover seemed to relax Pilotis and gave us time to work on our logbooks before we went to eat. After the meal, we propped back, and I talked about the creek—I never knew it to have a name—that ran near my boyhood home in Kansas City. One afternoon, when I was ten and messing about in it, I suddenly realized it wasn’t a dead end: that flow around my ankles actually went somewhere. Just like a road, it had a destination far beyond my sight. At home I dug into my father’s maps and discovered that the creek, no wider than I was tall, meandered into a succession of ever-larger ones, all leading to the Missouri River and on to the Mississippi, the Gulf, the open Atlantic. I determined to put a note in a bottle and launch it nearly from my back porch on a voyage to Huck Finn’s river, to New Orleans, perhaps the Mosquito Coast, or the mysterious Sargasso Sea, Casablanca, the very shores of the Sahara. I was woozy with a child’s excitement as I realized that nameless creeklet was the first leg of a long voyage to Cathay, the Coral Sea, the Arctic. The waters of the world were one! Water linked the earth! The street in front of our house ran to the ends of two continents, but that creek led to the darkest jungles up the Congo, around the Cape of Good Hope, to the Ganges and bathing Hindus, even to the mountains of Tibet. I began planning voyages and reading about far places, books like The Royal Road to Romance by Richard Halliburton. Our creek was a threshold beyond which lay the realms of poesy.

  Looking around the battered tavern where we’d just finished pitiful plates of potatoes and cabbage, lifting a chipped mug, Pilotis toasted, “To the realms of poesy, matey.”

  The next morning, we hoped the Erie Canal would be ready in another day, so we cast off from the small wharf on Rondout Creek, motored past the brick lighthouse, one of four remaining on the Hudson, and turned again upstream. The weather was fine and the water gave us only mild chop in a reach called the Flat. For the rest of the morning, the river showed us sand and mud shallows but little stone, and we
clipped along, almost free of our greatest fear—underwater rocks that could abruptly end our voyage. As if an old tar, Pilotis sang pieces of song, some of them one chorus more than necessary, but I knew the river was at last full upon my friend.

  By midday we reached Catskill and went up the tree-lined creek, a place not yet leafy, to hunt a beverage to go with our smoked shad. We found a winsome waitress named Rhoda whom Pilotis insisted on calling Rhonda, and, motioning toward me, said to her, “We have an unattached man here headed west in that boat tied up below. I’ll leave the expedition if you’d like to join him.” And she answered, “Last week I’da took you up on it.” We went back to the river, got under way, and I said, You, Mate, are not yet expendable, even for the lovely likes of Rhonda, but one more chorus of “Blow the Man Down" may change that.

  But Pilotis sang on, three runs of the Beach Boys’ “Help me, Rhonda.” We passed under the town of Hudson high on the east bank and on to Coxsackie to our portside. As the ridges began to recede from the river, kills flowed down to expend themselves in the Hudson, and then the water widened into the turning basins just below Albany, and industry lay here and there along both banks. Not long ago, that stretch of river was so severely polluted a public hearing on the Albany Pool, according to one report, caused men to grit their teeth and women to leave the room. Today, with improved sewage and industrial waste treatments and increased monitoring by ordinary citizens, conditions are better, but still that portion, like much of the Hudson, is an unfunded Superfund site.

  The state government towers of Albany show well from the river, and they reminded me of traveler Clifton Johnson’s comment near the turn of the century about the city: “One of its claims to distinction is the fact that it existed for over a century without a single lawyer.”

  Near there, Henry Hudson found a warm native reception—among several other violent ones—during his brief exploration of the river he called Manhattes. After sharing a meal of pigeon and plump dog with the Indians, he wrote (in one of the few passages extant from his missing journal): “The land is the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon, and it also abounds in trees of every descrip tion. The natives are a very good people, for when they saw that I would not remain, they supposed that I was afraid of their bows, and taking the arrows, they broke them in pieces, and threw them into the fire.”