River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The Oneida River in its brief sixteen miles manages to flow to almost as many points as there are on a compass rose and follows the most ambagious part of the canal. The undeveloped wooded banks and marsh the river passes through made us feel an isolation not really there—downtown Syracuse lay just twelve miles south—but the trees enclosed us cozily after the windy and battering expanse of the lake. Where the Oneida joins the Seneca River stood a sign and an arrow pointing west: BUFFALO → 192 MILES. Such a marker, uncommon on American rivers, gave us a surge that life at eight miles an hour relishes. The Seneca took us in the opposite direction from our destination for a spell but then turned Nikawa again westward, where we found another sign, a realty one: townhouses on the river. Pilotis said, “Here they come.” Yet for us it was only a chilly Wednesday in early spring on a forlorn waterway.

  A whistling swan greeted us outside the lock at Baldwinsville, and this was the way we ascended: the big portals closing us into a near dark, thousands of pounds of flowing river pushing against the forward gates, leaking out a pattern in splatter and spray of a liquid angel, wings spread as if to fly out of the Stygian tank, cracks in the side walls funneling and dripping grace notes into the water, sounds in a deep cistern (nasal deeblook-deeblook, guttural gahblunk-gahblunk), a sense of foreboding and being trapped in a place not meant for humankind, a waft of fish, Nikawa bobbing atop the paused water, voices from unseen people above as if speaking from another realm, everywhere the fecund dampness of a boxed river waiting to sunder the concrete imposition, the valves below grating open and the upsurge churning and deepening and darkening itself, fathoming up, working to turn us like a twig, our almost imperceptible rising atop the boil that collects detained and inevitable flotsam and twists it in circling menace, chunks of log thunking the hull, the revolve of a bloated carp, eyeballs bleached and full upon us and its rot in our nostrils, an empty soda bottle pulled down to show us buoyance is but temporary, the nasty suck of a dozen whirlpools that would jerk us to the slimed bottom in retribution for this human outrage stopping the river, and the angel still unflown and drowning in the flood, and we are now in half-light, Nikawa straining against our holds, Pilotis calling something I cannot hear, and then our heads level with the pavement, the caution line of yellow paint (Don’t fall in here, bub!), then we’re above ground, and the machinery stilling to numb the water, the forward gates shudder against the river insistence, a vertical shaft of light splits them, widens like a theater curtain parting to reveal the mystery of the waterdance waiting ahead to draw us into the masque, the lockhouse horn sounding us free, and we breast off from the wall, the engines turning over, and we’re again in the river, and the lockman calls something, but all we can make out is, “Oregon, you lucky bastards!”

  Around a bend, we came upon the slow convoy, and, appealing to Cap’s old Navy persona, I radioed for permission to overtake, and the formality pleased him into welcoming us back. We saluted, passed him slowly, then twisted on alone toward Cross Lake, a piece of natural water peculiar in its seeming to have a river pass athwart it. Rivers, of course, don’t cross lakes. Usually, the best they do is to flow in with one name and flow out, enlarged, with another, but the Seneca appears to treat Cross Lake as a trolley does an intersection.

  Then: there: the dire sound of the props striking something hard, a below-surface floater that rose to break the surface behind us and, in mockery, to disappear again, and with customary dread I stopped and raised the motors to look. All was well. We’d escaped again by pure luck. And so on we went. The river kept its meanders, the bigger ones dissected by canal cuts, but even still our compass swung fro and forth. In the afternoon, near the upper end of Lake Cayuga, Nikawa entered Montezuma Marsh, at another time a sanctum for highwaymen but today a national wildlife refuge that is one of the largest sheltering grounds for migrating birds in the Northeast. The leafless trees held cormorants raising their big, tenebrous wings in the manner of Draculas taking flight. Then followed several miles of shabby houses and fish camps, a large corn-processing factory in the middle of not much of anywhere, and then the marsh became heavy with willows, alders, maples, and winter-withered cattails. Near the heart of the swamp we came upon the grandest remains of the old canal, a romantic ruin waiting for its Wordsworth, a capital piece of nineteenth-century engi neering: the eight remaining stone arches of the Richmond Aqueduct; fifteen feet above our deck, the packet boats once floated their passengers and kippage across, drawn by the aerial clop of mules.

  Nikawa ran a long stretch of marshland and little else, nearly steering herself, gliding beneath the hover of an osprey, and to starboard a bullhead turned over violently in a quiet backwater, and the solitude put us in good fettle. Outside Clyde, we entered the lock and passed through expeditiously and gained enough time to tie up in town but saw no suitable place, so on we pushed to Lyons. We tied up to a fine little dock and went ashore to a laundry and waited for our wash in the Bridge Tavern, its interior somehow managing to draw enough light from the dim afternoon to gleam. We took seats at the end of the bar, not to drink but to eat and look out onto the canal as if we were making our way west in the tavern. We sat almost dozing until startled by a phone ringing like a death knell. When the annoyance ceased, Pilotis said, “Now I realize how away we are.”

  After retrieving our clean clothes, we returned to Nikawa, and still the convoy hadn’t arrived, so we sat under the canopy, tilted back into a small libation; it was six o’clock, and I trusted we’d be spending the night at the dock. How good. Up motored the boats at last, we raised our glasses to them, and over the radio came Cap, furious about something that our toast and comfort only exacerbated. Another command decision: the flotilla would not stay here but would continue to the damnably high docking wall at Newark. Through the lock we wearily went, our sixth of the day, grumbling on west, and I waited for the time when Cap’s demand for an electrical outlet would cease to shape our nights.

  Knoticals and Hangman’s Rope

  FOR SOME DISTANCE west of Newark, the view alternated between that of a goodly land and a faulty one. Twice an osprey clutching a fish passed overhead to lead us down the Erie; almost a rare species some years ago, the bird is a good omen because all things living along these waters evolved in the same riverine system, and to benefit one native creature is to benefit them all. But the route was banks bashed with litter and beat-up houses and slow pools sliming our hull with algae. To pass the degraded miles, we began listing the various seats fishermen brought to the canal: a concrete block, metal lawn chair, wooden folding chair, chopped log, cut telephone pole, upturned lard bucket, milk-carton case, soggy easy chair, soggier velveteen sofa, automobile wheel, auto rear seat, two stacked tires topped with a board, café booth (minus table), half an oil drum, theater chair, Windsor chair (missing a leg but propped with rocks); every one of them was empty. I called up Cervantes’s words: “There’s no taking trout with dry breeches,” and Pilotis said, “True, but what about suckers and carp?” Wedged atop one stump was an old bicycle, mangled and bent, fished from the canal and encrusted with dried mud and dead mussels, a thing so skinny and misshapen it looked like a Giacometti sculpture.

  That morning at breakfast with Cap and his men in the Newark Diner of traditional lines, a sailor’s discussion broke out over, said a crewman, “a knotical topic”: a knot is any lump in a rope, but precisely what is a hitch, loop, and bend? I, still trying to memorize the rabbit-hole-and-tree mnemonic story to help a novice tie a bowline, kept quiet. Our waitress had eyes of different dispositions, the right drooping in sorrow, the left warm and sultry; one would close to suggest this passion, the other to emphasize that. She too only listened, but as we paid our checks she said to a couple of us, “Now you boys keep your mast up and your keel down.” On the street, a crewman said, “Was that sexual?” and I asked which eye she had open.

  For two miles around Port Gibson, the Erie artery forms a thrombus called the Wide Waters where a bed of the old canal joins the later pri
sm to create a turning basin. Westward, smack beside State Route 31, the embankment is low enough so that Nikawa cruised along as if she were merely in another highway lane, and the faces of the surprised motorists nudged us out of taking our voyage for granted after only one week. We guessed they must envy our freedom, but they didn’t see the tyrannies of wind and water. By running for seven days from sunup to sundown, we’d not yet gone four hundred miles over the easiest legs of the whole voyage. I thought of the nearly five thousand miles still lying in wait, of snowmelt, of evaporating waters, and I pushed the throttles forward only to remember the canal limit of ten miles an hour and pulled them back. A strong walker could do half that speed, and, without the many bends away from an intended course, and free of meanders long and short, a hiker could reach the Oregon coast three weeks before us. That, of course, was pernicious thinking a good water traveler avoids.

  Pilotis complained about there being no chart available for the western half of the Erie; what we had was a photocopy of a third-of-a-century-old, hand-drawn pilotbook we hoped was trustworthy. I said I had wanted to assemble for our entire route a master atlas made from U.S. Geological Survey 7.5’ maps, the best existing topographic series for the whole country, but the cost was inordinate and making them compactly portable nearly impossible. Besides, I rationalized, poor maps, like muffed weather reports, make for adventure. Said my friend, “And failure.”

  At Palmyra, a town so cut off from the canal we knew we were there only from the chart, I stopped Nikawa to wait for the convoy and poked around the pretty ruin of the stone aqueduct over Ganargua Creek. The other boats arrived, and we got under way again, once more leaving behind the plodding Doctor Robert and the infernal tourist tub.

  Zebra mussels covered the chamber walls of Lock Thirty, masses of them, and I warned Pilotis that canalmen took pains to avoid getting squirted in the face by the little striped things because they absorb and concentrate toxins. The exotic bivalves, about the size of a pistachio shell, filter more than a quart of water a day, and three quarters of a million of them can occupy a square the size of a small kitchen table; such efficient engines in their current numbers are able to filter Lake Erie in less than a month, even as they clog pipes and valves of water treatment and power plants. The mussels, ingesting organic detritus, have apparently clarified canal waters, a process that appeals to the eye but can disrupt ecological balances, as their proliferation does already endangered native clams and mussels. Within a decade after their arrival in America, around 1985, they spread from the western end of Lake Erie into the other Great Lakes and on into the Ohio and Mississippi from Duluth to New Orleans. Like kudzu on the ground, zebra mussels will cover almost any underwater surface and can sink docks, buoys, and long-neglected boats. Unlike native species, say bison or passenger pigeons or native clams, the extirpation of zebra mussels is now probably impossible. They, not us, are the exterminators.

  At Wayneport—the first of the eight “port towns,” a description carrying fossil history of the traffic once riding the Erie—we found the water down three feet and exposing lengths of wide mud banks mired with debris, but this wretchedness was good news since our concern—one of them anyway—was springtime flooding closing the canal. In contrast to our far western route, here the enemy was not drought but deluge. If the Genesee River, seventeen miles ahead, had not forced managers to close the big guard gates that protect the Erie against flood damage, we could likely set aside one more worriment. But, things always having to stay in balance, now we were hearing rumors of another construction blockage ahead. Pilotis: “We move in a perpetual foreboding that around the next bend the way will close.” For a canal or river traveler, there is no such thing as a detour.

  Fairport is an affluent suburb of Rochester, its prosperity evident in the excellent public dock next to the quaint lift bridge. We tied up again so Pilotis could phone the manufacturer of our depth finder to get unfathomable sentences in the instruction manual interpreted. I walked up Watson Street to buy sandwiches. As I waited, I listened to a somber man telling another this: “I was in the hardware store last week, and Langley came in, mad as all get-out. He threw a length of rope down on the counter and started in on Jenkins about the quality of it. He said it snapped on him. ‘What were you using it for?’ Jenkins says. And he says back, ‘You know I been real down since Betty left. What do you think I was doing? I was hanging myself, if you have to know.’ Of course, Betty leaves him about once a month. And Jenkins says, ‘Hell, Langley, you never told me what you wanted it for. If I’d known, I could’ve sold you that heavy nylon stuff.’”

  The day began to gloom up as we passed Bushnell’s Basin and the old Richardson’s Canal House, a restaurant and inn and one of the most beautiful restorations on the Erie; had we been free of the convoy, we’d have pulled in for the night. We startled a couple of mallards into the air, and a bicyclist passed us on a biking-hiking trail that will one day cross New York atop the towpath. Rochester sprawl has metastasized into Pittsford, another affluent historic canalside town, where we traversed a section of fine houses that Pilotis referred to as holding “the homefires of the urbanities.” Then came rear ends of industries, parking lots, piles of rock and dirt—the usual sad unmitigations—but the wind rose and hit Nikawa and diverted us from further lamentation.

  Lock Thirty-two held us for the convoy, then we entered the chamber first to avoid a shuffling for proper position. Perhaps we’d become cocky over our new locking expertise: I went in with enough headway to prevent the wind from working its wonted mischief, but our speed was too much for Pilotis to catch the mooring cable, and then the gusts had us, and in a trice they turned Nikawa sideways. As I cranked the wheel and struggled to realign, Cap started in over the radio at us, a flurry of impatience and a distraction I failed to brook when I heard for the third time, “Nikawa! What are your intentions?” Still well off the wall, I grabbed the transmitter and yelled, Cool it! You know very well the goddamn wind got us! A crackling, commodorial, and offended Cap said, “Nikawa! That is no way to talk over marine radio!” and he put his big trawler into gear and charged right in at us. Our bow got rocked toward the wall, close enough for Pilotis to snag the cable with the boat hook to pull us clear just in the nick. I respected Cap too much to say anything, but Pilotis hissed through the window, “Really, mate! You must stop harassing Admiral Hockle.” The name was a knotical wisecrack to settle me down. When I settled, I said, Lend the admiral our AVOID IRRITATION plaque.

  Except by means of aqueducts, it would seem as impossible for a canal to pass through a river as for a river to cross a lake, but not far south of downtown Rochester, the Erie traverses the Genesee at nearly right angles, as one avenue does another. If the guard gates were open, we should likely be free of high-water problems on the rest of the Erie, and one more potential trap would lie behind. We waited in keen anticipation. The gates came into view, both of them raised, the way open.

  Near the intersection of canal and river are several small, graceful bridges designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, spans that give elegance to the old laboring Erie. Beyond to the north we could see the high buildings of Rochester. West of the far guard gate we started into the Long Level, a sixty-four-mile stretch without locks, the first portion of it cut through an immense stone ledge once an ancient seabed. The shale walls, rising to eighteen feet, closed off any prospect other than the cloven-rock channel itself to create a claustrophobic trough, but they also blocked the wind, so Nikawa could move over smooth water. What potholes do to a highway, mild wind does to a river.

  On the high north bank we saw two boys fooling in the brush, the bushes moving in that certain way, that guilty rustling of lads up to no good. Small splashes pocked the channel, rocks perhaps, but before I could get us to the other side, we were under the devilment, and we watched something big roll to the edge and fall heavily toward us. Pilotis yelled a warning, but Nikawa was helpless at canal speed to maneuver out of the way in time. A terrific splunge of water
rose over the bow, rocked the boat, drenched the windows. Pilotis said, “What the hell was that?” Surfacing violently, like an angry god thrusting his trident from the sea, was an automobile wheel. Pilotis: “There but for the grace of et cetera.” Indeed. We averted what would have been a terminating disaster through no agency of our own, and I understood, more clearly than ever, that to reach the Pacific would take luck as much as preparation and prudence.

  Near Spencerport we emerged from the miscreant Rock Cut only to catch the wind head-on, a bullying that beset us all the way into Brockport, and there we stopped. The convoy be damned, we were in for the night. Pilotis called for a room in a big Victorian house with knickknacks, whimwhams, gimcracks, and fribbles worrying every corner, shelf, and wall, but it was otherwise tranquil. At a canalside grill, I found myself sitting transfixed on the water until I realized I was trying to sail a barstool west, and I turned my back on the venerable Erie.

  We Sleep with a Bad-Tempered Woman Tossed by Fever

  FIRST THERE WAS the soap salesman at breakfast, a man of ready and glad hand who asked but a single question, what were we doing in town, and when Pilotis answered, “Crossing the country in a little boat,” the drummer nodded and began speaking about the difficulties of “marketing store-brand detergents vis-à-vis name brands.” The meal done, he rose to hustle off to his accounts, and Pilotis said, “There goes a man whose curiosity never got the best of him.”