River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The forty miles of canal from Amsterdam to Little Falls was easy running through softly cambered terrain of wooded hills that become larger and more deeply timbered as they recede from the Mohawk Valley northward. Only ten miles away they rise to become the Adirondack Mountains, a tract big enough to clean the slow wind that rode over us on its way down along the great Appalachian corrugation. In several places the canal berms are low, and we found good views across the narrow valley. Here and there, Interstate 90, the New York Thruway, came within a few yards of the Erie, and drivers waved as if we were locomotive engineers, and we saluted, since their Thruway tolls underwrote the operation and maintenance of the State Canal System: we could boat across New York because they drove I-90.

  In the morning sun, Pilotis at the helm, I sat back, feet propped up, and watched the canalmen putting out buoys for the new season, a farmer turning a fallow field, buds on the frosted bushery beginning to thaw; but the willows and sycamores, playing the vagaries of a north ern spring more cautiously, had only bare branches as if winter had just gone, and that made me imagine we had a world of time to reach the snowmelt of the far Rockies.

  Our conversation was doodling items of the sort people fall into when they are on water and content to believe they’ve earned an easy moment: as we passed Otsquago Creek I began rattling on how I liked American Indian toponyms and the manifold and usually fanciful translations attending them. I offered that Hudson was a better name for an automobile than a river and wished it were still the Mahicanittuck or the Mohegan; I said I wished the spelling of some upstate names looked more Indian: Skanektadee, Skoharee, Kanajoharee. After all, how much more native seems Tennessee than were it, say, Tenisi. And how about my state as Mazooree? “Not elegant.” It’s true, I agreed, one can carry even an Indian name too far. Take the Massachusetts lake due east of us, the one called, in its entirety, Char-goggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaug, the longest American place name I knew, now changed to, if you will, a watery and weak Anglo one: Webster. I didn’t actually speak the Algonquian name because my tongue couldn’t make it through those forty-three letters. I tried to recite a piece of old verse (which I here give correctly):

  Ye say they have all passed away,

  that noble race and brave;

  that their light canoes have vanished

  from off the crystal wave;

  that mid the forest where they roamed

  there rings no hunter’s shout;

  but their name is on your waters,

  and ye cannot wash it out.

  We stopped at Fort Plain to wait for both Cap and the locktender, and we sat in the sunny welldeck and talked of whatever came to mind. I asked Pilotis what face of an American, other than a president or perhaps Ben Franklin, was the most reproduced visage. Pilotis cogitated. I hinted, Consider where we are. Pilotis ruminated. A New Yorker, I said. An answer: “Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill.” I didn’t think so and gave a punned clue: A man of the first water. Pilotis cerebrated. I said, The person carried a keg of Lake Erie water over this very route to pour it into New York Bay. Pilotis said disbelievingly, “DeWitt Clinton? Come on now.” I asked, Do you remember the little blue federal tax-stamps stuck to every pack of American cigarettes for almost ninety years? That face looking at the smoker was the Father of the Erie Canal. How many packs of cigarettes had there been in those years? Ten billion? A zillion? Sighing, Pilotis said, “This is what happens to people released from the necessity of mundane toil.”

  We ascended Lock Fifteen and went on beyond St. Johnsville, the old milltown where the citizens formerly made whiskey, cigars, player pianos, and knitted underwear, a village I called Goodtimeville and Pilotis St. Longjohnsville. A mile west, the canal leaves the Mohawk and follows a four-mile cut, then rejoins the river three miles downstream from Little Falls and Lock Seventeen, at forty feet the biggest elevation change on the Erie. Through the locks and up the slightest slope of waters we had risen above the Atlantic the height of a thirty-two-storey building; traveling at only eight miles an hour makes even modest altitudes take on significance, much as they do with a hiker.

  The lockmaster arrived early and happily let Nikawa through without the convoy, an accommodation to allow us to tie up at the tiny wharf opposite the river from Little Falls. We walked the bridge just above the remains of an 1822 aqueduct, at one time another distinctive canal structure. Part of it still stood when I’d seen it a year earlier, but too few people had cared to preserve it, never mind that it helped make the village what it is, and the arches now lay a hopeless pile of broken stone in the shallows. Little Falls sits along the narrow gorge of the Mohawk, the Erie paralleling the river but forty feet higher. The route here has shifted only a few yards from Clinton’s day, and the dark waterside cliffs have long been one of the often painted scenes on the canal. Were Little Falls more alert to its history and setting, it could be the gem of the Erie. On Ann Street we found a café where we washed up and tucked into breakfast, then went back to Nikawa in time to catch the convoy passing, and as we overtook it, received a scowl from Cap.

  A couple of miles west, the waterway leaves the Mohawk briefly, rejoins it west of Herkimer for four miles, and then departs from the river for good, although it’s rarely more than a half mile away. Across the Mohawk from Herkimer, the old nutcracker and BB-gun burg, is Ilion, one of the canal towns named after ancient Mediterranean cities—Troy, Utica, Rome, Syracuse. Like its predecessor, it has a long association with war, weapons, and words through the Remington Arms factory whence emerged not only guns (famous models and ones less so, like the Mule-Ear Carbine, the Zig-Zag Derringer, the rifle-cane) but also the creation of a practical typing machine. I said to Pilotis, The first typewritten manuscript accepted for publication came from a Missourian who wrote about a river, and he did it on a contraption made in Ilion. “That’s got to mean Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.”

  The Erie now lay in long straight segments with only occasional warps from the engineer’s transit line. As we left the big hills of the Adirondack rumpling, Pilotis and I fell into the drone of the motors, once more thinking how easily we were moving along and wondering how long it might last. At Lock Nineteen the tender kept us back until the convoy could come up, and even then we had to hold further for the chamber to fill, but we had a simple mooring to a concrete wall with good rings for our lines. We went aft to watch the water follow our course of the last days, and then Cap’s boats arrived to tie up for the wait. The tourist tub lumbered alongside and began attempting a tricky and needless flanking maneuver, a showoff move, to ride in ahead of us. I was in the pilothouse to check fuel and looked up as the monstrous stern of the tub swung toward our forward quarter. Nikawa was about to be torn open and ground into the wall. I grabbed the radio and shouted for the helmsman to stop, but he just kept on flanking toward us, stupidly believing he had enough clearance. This was it—after only five days, our voyage was about to end.

  Pilotis leaped to the rail, ran to the bow, and sat down to thrust out feet just as the heavy butt-end came up. With a shove made powerful by desperation, my mate moved us taut against our lines and by luck gained just enough inches to let the baneful tub clear our prow.

  I stood in disbelief, shaking, still thinking the expedition ruined. On the water, the time between the easy life and disaster is but a moment. Blanch-faced Pilotis looked at me, and I said, You are one damn prudent mariner! Then I jumped off Nikawa and onto the wall, and in a voice of only a little less volume than the infamous loudspeakers of the tourist bucket, I dressed down the slovenly man and shouted something to the effect of wishing to see him never again on the same water with us. He only stared in feigned innocence.

  I went back aboard and said to Pilotis, You saved this voyage by twelve inches and two feet. Thinking how months of preparation and thousands of dollars nearly went under, I got angry once more and started again for the wall, but Pilotis grabbed me. “Let it go. Let it go. He heard you—everybody heard you,” and then,
smiling the Hell Gate Grin, said, “By the way, exactly what is a ‘moronic piss-brain’?” The gates opened, we locked through and left the convoy behind, and it felt good to show them our stern at Oriskany Flats. It was Thucydides, I think, who wrote two thousand years ago, “A collision at sea can ruin your entire day.”

  Between Utica and Rome, only fourteen miles, industries came down to canalside, although a screen of scrub trees camouflaged most of them, effectively creating an appearance of ruralness so that we slipped past downtown Utica before realizing sixty thousand people were moving just beyond the woody scrim of narrow bottomland. In river travel today, perhaps nothing is finer than arrival in the center of a town without having to undergo those purgatorial miles of vile sprawl, hideous billboards, and reiterated franchises where we become fugitives of the ganged chains in an endless surround of noplaceness, where the shabbiest of architectural detritus washes up against the center of a town. To come in by canal or river is to see a genuine demarcation between country and city and to fetch up in the historic heart of things the way travelers once did when towns had discernible limits, actual edges, and voyagers knew when they had entered or departed a place. To approach Boston or San Francisco by the bay or New Orleans or St. Paul by river is to arrive suddenly and merrily like Dorothy before Oz—out of the woods and into the light.

  Years ago, engineers moved the canal from the center of Utica, Schenectady, Syracuse, and Rochester so that now the waterway skirts the hearts of towns, making it more a barrier than a boulevard, and the traveler no longer glides right through the nub of gaiety and commerce, no longer able to float along and look from a boat deck into shop windows, or see hustling clerks on a street errand, or pick up the scent from a lunch counter, or hear the newsboy’s hark. What was once the Erie through these downtowns is today paved streets; only villages have kept the waterway close. Although the canal is unlikely ever to return to its earlier urban courses, city rivers everywhere across America still offer opportune avenues to enchant wayfarers.

  Lock Twenty was full of drift and broken timber as though the woodchoppers’ ball had been there the night before. Cap, perhaps thinking himself again at the helm of his Navy tug in World War Two, came on the radio: “I’ve made a command decision: we will all resume fleet order.” It was my penalty for having earlier overtaken him too quickly—a wake from another boat drove him mad—and I grumbled until I noticed the clutter of logs in the water west of the lock; then we were content to have the trawler plow the way open.

  We saw only the industrial edges of Rome from the canal, they too obscured by brushy trees as if nature were trying to hide human affronts. There the watershed changes, the flow no longer toward the Atlantic via the Hudson but now toward the St. Lawrence by way of Lake Ontario. The Indians knew that topographic detail well, for at that place, where the narrowing Mohawk turns north, they pulled out their canoes and carried them a couple of miles over a barely perceptible rise in the swampy country, to Wood Creek for a run down the twisting brook into Lake Oneida, the only major lake in New York to lie east and west, a fortuitous circumstance for early travelers and commerce. From the Hudson we’d been following a route as ancient as the Ice Age, a course later used by humankind for at least ten thousand years.

  For us there was no portage-and-float down entangled twists of a boggy creek but rather a perfect alley of canal slicing through the lowland for fourteen miles of skunk cabbage and perched kingfishers, all the way to Sylvan Beach, the carnival village on the western edge of Oneida. The sun evaporated into an obscuring grayness hanging over the water, and our hope for a fuel-up before crossing the long lake tomorrow against a probable headwind also disappeared when we learned the waterside pumps weren’t working. Pilotis found us a ride south a few miles to a room and hot shower which we followed up with a couple of drafts of a certain Irish stout of renown. While we guessed over the possibilities of lake wind and water, a scowling man came in from the rain, didn’t bother to wipe off his spectacles, hat dripping into his double shot of rye intended to ease “a chill on the liver.” His wife soon followed and asked why he was drinking whiskey. I didn’t pick up his answer, but I did hear him break wind in something of a forced manner, and she said, “Don’t you do that durn flatulitis at me, mister!”

  Like Jonah, We Enter a Leviathan

  FIVE IN THE MORNING. Light wind, cold, no rain. We arrived to board Nikawa and, to our pleasure and consternation, found the convoy gone; should she run out of gasoline on Lake Oneida, we’d be on our own. The first lock west was thirty-three miles away, so, could we quickly find gas near there, the flotilla might still be within reach before we got locked out. Pushing for our independence, we received it at the worst time, and I wondered whether Cap had deliberately put our passage at risk. Pilotis said, “Is he competing against us to get to the middle Missouri first?” I don’t know. Then, “Can Nikawa make it to the other side?” We’ve got no choice, I said, either we try a run now or get trapped until the navigation season formally opens.

  On a map, the lake resembles a great sperm whale, complete with fins and flukes, swimming toward the Atlantic. Like Jonah, we entered at the front end, swallowed by a near darkness that couldn’t entirely hide the fog, and Nikawa started down the sombrous gullet into the gut of the leviathan. We crept through the thick morning, passed the breakwater and onto open water and somehow immediately lost the buoys marking a route safe from shoals, so I set a compass course and tried to hold it against the chop and northwesterly that shoved and banged the boat and made us pay the price of a flat hull. I said nature seemed bent on using up our remaining fuel. Pilotis watched the obscurity ahead and I the compass and the depth finder fluctuating wildly in the rough water. Oneida hammered Nikawa hard, but to throttle back to ease the pounding would lessen fuel efficiency and reduce our chances of making the lock in time. Worse, the wind was certain to rise with the light—Cap’s ostensible reason for leaving early.

  Thirty minutes out, the sounder showed a much-reduced range of depths, and I had to slow to a creep. We began to half expect that sickening crack of propellers against rock, even though our chart indicated water just sufficient. Isolated in the murk, we couldn’t be sure whether we were slightly north or south of Messenger Shoals, so trying to hook around them would be just as risky as holding our course, would use more gasoline, and slow us further. Feigning nonchalance, Pilotis tried not to let me see surreptitious glances at the fuel gauges, and I kept quiet about the last heap of snow melting in the Rockies, but I did say how the lake was supposed to be a cupcake of a run. One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea. But trying to cross the American continent in a single navigational season disrupted that pretty illusion and put a live vinegarroon in my contemplative cap.

  Pilotis, sweeping the fog with the binoculars, not an easy thing in a thrashing boat, shouted, “There’s one!” and I eased in close to get the designation off the buoy, then replotted our course through the grayness and plowed forward, on and on, our ears suffering from the noise as much as our minds from the tension of going dead in the bad water. Nikawa edged past submerged pilings, then Shackleton Shoals, then a canal-dredge dumpground, then Frenchman Island, more piles, and finally we saw the western shoreline. As if we approached a great window, sunlight slipped under the drapery of fog, and we passed beneath Interstate 81 and went into the Oneida River to Brewerton. The crossing had taken not one hour but two, and there was no chance to catch the convoy before the lock. Said Pilotis, “We either find gas on the river now or we take a sixty-gallon hike for it.” And I: If we get locked out, we’ll have plenty of time to walk for gas, time as in weeks.

  On the edge of the village Pilotis pointed to a boatyard and chandlery with a pump. As I hosed the gasoline in, the fellow asked where we were coming from, and Pilotis said, “A better question is where we’re headed,” and the man asked,
“So where the hell are you going?” My friend answered, the man scoffed a laugh and said, “Send me a postcard if you make it.”

  The Erie Canal west, Lake Oneida to Buffalo, 224 miles

  We followed the river on through a two-mile canal cut and Lock Twenty-three. Because tenders sometimes work a couple of locks and must drive from one to the next, I expected that operator to follow the convoy and was prepared for bad news, but the gates stood open and waiting: Cap had told him to expect us. “The nature of this voyage,” said my copilot, “is to encounter shit alternating with sugar so we keep getting sucked into continuing.” And I said that was one more way a voyage was a metaphor.

  We were beginning to enjoy locking through and the way it interrupted hours of mere steering, and Pilotis liked discovering whether the operator was one to give information and lore or only annoyance at our disrupting his oiling of machinery. Lock Twenty-three is in the middle of a woods and, like all the New York barge canal locks, kept in Bristol fashion: bollards painted, brass polished, shrubs trimmed. The valves and gates of every lock have a distinct voice, each giving a different performance: a basso profundo, a vibrato soprano, another not singing at all but only clattering and clanking as if drawing heavy chains across a dungeon floor, and everywhere the deep chamber walls amplify all of those harmonics and phonations into fine resonance. Twenty-three was our last descent on the Erie before we once again began the climb to Buffalo.