River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Arnold Hufnagel said to Conrad Reiff, “Brother, how much will you give me for my place in Heaven?”

  The other replied, “I’ll give you just as much as you’ll give me for my place in Hell.”

  Hufnagel spoke again, “If you will give me so and so many sheep for my place in Heaven, you may have it.”

  Reiff replied, “I’ll give them to you, if you will give me so and so many sheep for my place in Hell.”

  So the two scoffers struck their bargain, joking blasphemously about Heaven and Hell. When Hufnagel, who had been so ready to get rid of his place in Heaven, wanted to go down to his cellar the next day, he suddenly dropped dead. Reiff, for his part, was suddenly attacked in his field by a flight of golden eagles who sought to kill him. And this would have happened without fail had he not piteously cried for help, so that some neighbors came to his assistance. From that time on, he would not trust himself out of his house. He fell victim to a wasting disease and died in sin, unrepentant and unshriven. These two examples had a visible effect on other scoffers, similarly inclined. For God will not let Himself be scoffed at.

  Pilotis said, “Another instance of ‘Like grandfather, like grandson.’" Yes, I said, but Mittelberger’s assertions about divine retribution are mendacious—Conrad lived in good health into his seventy-sixth year, but he did die unshriven—As for me, I can think of few better ways to go than to be taken by a flight of golden eagles.

  We returned to the river and followed its bends, passing many houses and a steep, clearcut slope with eroding loggers’ roads dumping mud into the Allegheny. As if to atone for those assaults, there followed a reprieve of rhododendrons richly green but not yet in blossom. At Emlenton, we tried to make a landing to get lunch but a severely rocky coast kept us off, so, crossing to the other side, we came upon long and overgrown wooden steps up the high earthen bank to I knew not where, but we packed up food, climbed, and found ourselves in the yard of a grizzled man working on two identical Fords, one with an adequate engine, the other an acceptable body; he’d paid fifty dollars for them both, and when he finished, he’d have a single tolerable car. We made thick turkey sandwiches, talked about weather, which led to talk about lightning, and that led to this from the mechanic: “My old uncle, back in the twenties, fell into a spell of bad times, and he finally decided to kill himself, but he wasn’t never a man to bear pain too good, so he figgered on some easeful way to join the Lord. One night he was in bed duren a electric storm, and he saw a tail of smoke come out of a light socket, and then he knew what to do. Over the next week he took a metal bed, arn it was, out of the attic on up to a bare knob, over by Wood Hill, I think he said. He clumb up with it piece by piece and chained it into the ground. The next stormy night he went up to that bed and laid down on it. His plan was for lightnen to strike the arn bedposts and electrify him. He said it thundered and flashed and jolted for two hours. It was like that whole knob was shaken, but nothen struck the bed, so he come on back home and got into his real bed and had the best sleep he had in six months. The next day he got up and figgered the Lord had changed his mind and didn’t want him, so he just went on about his business for another twelve years. Lived to be eighty-eight.”

  Pilotis gave over the bow seat in the canoe to the Photographer who had spotted us from the old Emlenton bridge, and we went on down the river, passed under the high span of Interstate 80 which effectively demarks the upper portion of the Allegheny only recently designated a Wild and Scenic River. While the first adjective hardly describes the country, the new status may help fend off developers who see dollars in every inch of riversides, just as it may also check the abuses of so-called “property rights”-spouting landowners who would do whatever they please, to hell with the neighbors. Today the upper Allegheny has a chance to avoid being turned into a long, skinny strip of suburbia, and the abandoned railroad grade along the east shore, now a trail, can bring in walkers and cyclists who will pass through leaving only tracks and money in the villages.

  Foxburg faces the Allegheny with a line of pleasing old commercial buildings, and about a mile downstream we passed the mouth of the Clarion River, its name coming from someone, so I read, who heard “the clear sound of distant ripples,” water speaking like a trumpet. On we descended, the sky obscuring, the riffles slowly disappearing in deepening water, the river growing broader, our run easy but for one violent underwater mystery that struck the canoe and motor shaft so hard we narrowly escaped capsizing. The Photographer said, “The Farm Bureau boys need to exterminate the whales in this river.”

  We came to the Narrows, a peninsula only a half mile across but eight miles around by water, and with last light we fetched up across from East Brady and went to lodgings overlooking the Allegheny in the large Clark House sitting there a century and a half and formerly serving river travelers when packet boats plied this far north. We poured out a round of Old Mister Smile, listened to our hosts tell about East Brady—they weren’t sure why the East was tacked on since the only other Brady they knew was the former ironworks—and about the couple who “never married but wore out two engagement rings.” Then we went out to walk the misty village and took a supper that, to say the best of it, we were grateful to find. On only three gallons of gas we had brought the canoe down 112 miles of the Allegheny to the head of navigable river, and tomorrow we’d return to Nikawa.

  Unlimited Sprawl Area

  PILOTIS AND I went off to a small boat shop to look for a repair kit to patch a deep gouge I’d put in the hull of Nikawa on Chautauqua Lake. To my surprise, the proprietor had one—only one—in a faded, dusty box long on the shelf, but he was afraid to sell it because he couldn’t remember the price. Pilotis offered five dollars, the proprietor considered, calculated, deliberated—the Louisiana Purchase was concluded in less time—and eventually decided six was better. While I changed the engine oil, my copilot laid in a smooth repair, and we took Nikawa to the drizzled river, backed her in, and struck off downstream for Lock Nine, the uppermost on the Allegheny. Because the northern locks operate only seasonally and primarily for pleasure boats, and because we were arriving well ahead of the opening of the commercial navigation season, Pilotis weeks earlier had negotiated through the bureaucracy of the Army Corps of Engineers and finally convinced it to let us pass downriver on the second and third of May (another deadline I’ve not mentioned), a persuasion that opened miles of water for us. When we appeared at Lock Nine, the tender was ready, actually expecting us, and we accomplished the twenty-two-foot drop promptly. One more barrier behind.

  Not far downstream we passed a large gravel-dredge staining the water for several miles, the clarity of the upper river gone, so that now it flowed in a green murk, a sign not just of silt but also excessive agricultural nitrates and phosphates. The Allegheny turned us northward around a small loop for a few miles, then took a fairly direct course toward the Ohio. Those reaches were bridgeless, and below Lock Eight the river uplands were smaller, the trees fewer and farther from the banks. Over a line of hills and fields to the west lay Butler, the home of Henry Marie Brackenridge, a law student and later an important chronicler of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers; in the early nineteenth century, he described how the largely Irish populace turned out for the first court held in the new settlement:

  A log-cabin just raised and covered but without window sash, or doors, or daubing, was prepared for the hall of justice. A carpenter’s bench, with three chairs upon it, was the judgment seat. The bar of Pittsburgh attended, and the presiding judge [was] supported by two associate judges, who were common farmers. The hall was barely sufficient to contain the bench, bar, jurors, and constables. But few of the spectators could be accommodated on the lower floor, the only one yet laid; many, therefore, clambered up the walls, and placing their hands and feet in the open interstices between the logs, hung there, suspended like enormous Madagascar bats. Some had taken possession of the joists, and big John McJunkin (who until now had ruled at all public gatherings) had placed a foot
on one joist, and a foot on another, directly over the heads of their honors, standing like the Colossus of Rhodes. The judge’s sense of propriety was shocked at this exhibition. The sheriff, John McCand-less, was called and ordered to clear the walls and joists. He went to work with his assistants, and soon pulled down by the legs those who were in no very great haste to obey. McJunkin was the last and began to growl as he prepared to descend. “What do you say, sir?” said the judge. “I say, I pay my taxes, and has as good a reete here as iny mon.” “Sheriff, sheriff,” said the judge, “bring him before the court.” The judge pronounced sentence of imprisonment for two hours in the jail of the county and ordered the sheriff to take him into custody. The sheriff with much simplicity observed, “May it please the coorte, there is no jail at all to put him in. May it please the coorte, I’m just thinken that may be I can take him to Bowen’s pig pen—the pigs are kilt for the coorte, and it’s empty.” “You have heard the opinion of the court,” said the judge. “Proceed, sir. Do your duty.”

  We reached Kittanning, then building a lovely riverfront park overlooked by the courthouse up the hill, a town on its way to becoming a flower of the Allegheny. But at neighboring Ford City we followed a long, unbroken line of factories and warehouses of brick, some still in use, others shuttered, a reach of decrepit and derelict history. From there to its mouth at Pittsburgh, the Allegheny was worn-out industry, its course almost unrelieved of Rust Belt decay and decline except for a few interruptions of riverside trees. We moved atop a river carrying, since the days of white settlement, local products, all having their turn of demand and ready availability and subsequent depletion: timber, coal, oil, gas, glass, iron, steel, tin, aluminum.

  The dammed and locked river, rebuilt for easy passage, gave us just that, and the shorelines were neither beautiful nor ugly but simply used and, in places, clogged with discarded factories, each marked with a brick smokestack long ago cooled, each revealing that typically American resistance to take old industrial land for new industry so long as fresh woods and farmlands are available for the squandering farther away. An Englishwoman, shocked in her travels across America to see the depressing number of abandoned commercial and industrial buildings, a rare thing in her space-conscious nation, once told me, “I realize now that USA stands for Unlimited Sprawl Area. Your wastefulness with buildings is deplorable, and most of you are blind to it.”

  Because the Allegheny locks lie close together and all of them were ready for us, we spent the day hooking up, descending, unhooking, and moving along more speedily than we had predicted. Every lock tender, unlike those on the Erie Canal, came out to take our line and loop it over a stanchion and return the free end to Pilotis. The details of this simple maneuver varied from lock to lock, with each man having a new set of directions, so we simply waited to be told how to do it his way, and that made the tenders think we didn’t know an oar from a shovel, which may be why one bystander we talked with shook his head and asked, “You think you’re actually going to make it across?” I answered we’d gotten this far from New York City in a couple of weeks, and he said, “Oh hell, my daughter drives that in five hours.”

  Immediately below Lock Five is the debouchure of the Kiskiminetas River; although only twenty miles long, it’s the largest tributary of the Allegheny. It and its connecting rivers and canal from the nineteenth century could have been our way from the Atlantic to the Ohio had the network, including a portage railroad that hauled canal barges over a mountain, not been abandoned years ago. It was down the Kiskiminetas that water poured from the great and deadly Johnstown Flood in 1889, flushing bodies—and one tool chest with its contents unharmed—all the way to Pittsburgh. A few years ago, the river was declared “biologically dead,” primarily because of acids draining from old mines, but there too, new regulations demanded by active citizens have somewhat improved it.

  Opposite the mouth of the Kiskiminetas is Freeport, at the virtual juncture of four counties, sprawling its fringes into three of them, an unusual circumstance since its population is not even two thousand. A couple of miles below, in a misty and woody bottom, we tied up at the long dock of the River Forest Yacht Club. To judge from the number of the big things in winter storage on the first terrace, a more accurate name would be the River Forest Houseboat Club. The Photographer radioed and soon found us and showed the way through the trees to the road, past a rusting tow truck with doors labeled:

  FRANK CRASH

  AUTO WRECKING

  Our rivering done for the day, but with the sun nearly in its happy and notorious relation to the yardarm, we went into Freeport to search out our favorite Irish stout to accompany a recounting of the miles and planning of the next day, one, we learned, that would be hampered by repair work at Lock Four, a snag leaving little room for miscalculation. In Freeport, about which even a kindly visual description would misrepresent were it to avoid the adjective “grim,” we went up and down in search of some real ale, stepping into one place after another to find only television-commercial lagers. We might as well have been looking for a phroso. The Photographer said, “We need a GPS,” to which Pilotis said, “We have one. Besides, we know where we are—approximately.” Replied the Photographer, “No, we don’t have a Guinness Positioning System.”

  We ended up nine miles northwest in glad serendipity, a frequent outcome of such real-ale searches, this one named Saxonburg with a Main Street from the nineteenth century, a fair village founded in 1832 by German immigrant John Roebling who developed there his patented process for “wire rope,” the stuff he used thirty-seven years later when he designed the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling’s son Washington, the chief engineer for the span, wrote, somewhat in jest, that his father saw western Pennsylvania as “the future center of the universe with the future Saxonburg as the head center, which was then a primeval forest where wild pigeons would not even light.” John encouraged his countrymen to immigrate and first named the village Germania but advised them not to bring tools, for in America “nobody could cut down a tree with a German ax.”

  In the big attic room of the Main Stay Bed and Breakfast, near Roebling’s home, we did our requisite logbook work, then went next door to the Saxonburg Hotel, a solid building put up the year of the engineer’s arrival, and there we found our stout, not on tap but at least bottled. I tried to start a conversation about the massive aesthetic differences between Saxonburg and the dolorous manifestation of the town on the river, and I hypothesized that the dissimilarities were today likely the result of only one or two citizens insisting on communal attention to history and beauty. I said, You know—the power of the lone voice calling us to excellence. Pilotis: “Not now, Skipper. Now is beverage time. Happy Hour’s a phrase first used among seamen, but I don’t remember that they ever had one called Hypothetical Hour.” To calm my restive crew, I immediately unzipped the pant legs of my trousers, turning them into hiking shorts. The hostess, watching with something between alarm and fascination, said, “Now that’s one I haven’t never seen done in here before.”

  Zing, Boom, Tararel!

  WE AROSE AT DAWN and hurried along so we could pass through Lock Four ahead of the repairs that would shut it down till noon. At last there was deep blue sky in Pennsylvania, but directly above and precisely following the Allegheny Valley lay a slender, dingy muffler of fog, with the surmounting hills in full sun. Nikawa, not even visible until we were out on the long pier, was socked in tight on a day beautiful beyond the river, and we would not reach Four, only three miles away, soon enough to avoid the closing. In some concern, we drove to a breakfast café and set to work on logbooks, a way to avoid killing time, although we did give it a good choking.

  The place was full of folks more or less the shape of biscuits and the pallor of white gravy, both of which they were putting down in quantities that convinced me a chemical analysis of their corpora would reveal them to be eighty percent identical to your standard Appalachian-country biscuit with gravy. Pilotis silenced my commentary and nodded toward
the Photographer happily dipping into a platter of them. I don’t mean to make mock of biscuits-and-gravy, a jolly food like mashed potatoes or Jell-O, but it is to a rural café what schnapps is to a Wisconsin tavern where one hears the outsider ask, “Are you really going to drink that swill?”

  Perhaps the overflowing talk in the restaurant was the result of the plates of b-and-g; certainly we had no trouble raising conversations there. One fellow, who found the thick gravy disappointingly thin that morning, told me of his soldier days in World War Two when he was aboard a civilian train: “I was dead broke, and here we were on our way to Philly for three days leave before getting shipped out. I came up with a plan. I took off my cap and went down the aisle and asked people—civilians—for a contribution to build a memorial to Missus Williams, the Mother of the Unknown Soldier. It worked to the tune of thirty bucks and change.”

  When we returned to the river, the brume was nearly dispersed, so we headed toward Lock Four. Pilotis’s earlier phone calls again made the difference: the construction crew moved a barge aside to let us edge through, and Nikawa was down and gone. The river continued heavy with industry, more vacant shambles too, but there were still many trees along the banks to soften the harshness. The Allegheny became a kind of watery quarry, its bottom being dredged—that is, sucked—for its glacial gifts of sand and gravel, but the color occluded further. Pilotis said, “Hard to believe this is the same river we were on three days ago, probably even some of the same water.” Then, watching the muddied surface, “What else in nature begins its existence, its journey, clean and pure but finishes so soiled and sullied?” I said, You mean, besides humankind? Still staring at the Allegheny, Pilotis mused, “If the beginning of a river is its head, why is its end a mouth? Why not a foot or a toe? Or a rectum, especially since that’s the way civilization treats it?”