River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The Day Begins with a Goonieburger

  THE SUN ROSE and with it our appetites for a hearty meal; by the time we drove the borrowed clunker to the 1000 Franklin Café in Toronto, Ohio, “hearty” had defined itself as hamburger, a craving only Americans can deeply understand. The choice was a Billyburger or a Goonieburger. “Either is appropriate for you,” Pilotis commented needlessly. The waitress didn’t know who or what Billy and Goonie were, but she said of the Goonie, “It comes with everthing includen tomaters.” And the Billy? “It just comes with everthing.” Pilotis ordered the Special, fried fish, and asked, “What kind is it?” Replied she, “Jumbo fish.”

  By the time we boarded Nikawa, noon was upon us. Our course was about as due south as a river can run, the Ohio curving just enough to give us the joy of anticipation, of waiting to see what lay around the bends, an important occurrence for water travelers who never have their route perceptibly climb or descend as does a highway to the sweet and sour of the unexpected; people who think driving across southern Florida or central Kansas is an encounter with ultimate levelness should try a stretch on a river.

  The thousands of nineteenth-century traders and settlers who put out onto the Ohio to take them deep into the newly gained territory commonly carried a small book at first simply titled The Navigator(but with a ninety-six-word subtitle) which they purchased from the author’s print shop in Pittsburgh. Zadok Cramer gave terse but trenchant “particular directions on how to navigate" the Ohio and the Mississippi to readers employing boats they built themselves or bought cheaply, craft intended for a single downriver float: flatboats (arks, barges, broadhorns, Kentuckys), keelboats, skiffs, and who knows how many hybrids, all of them sharing one significant element: they had no propulsion but gravity—that is, the current. Cramer advised:

  The first thing to be attended to by emigrants or traders wanting to descend the river, is to procure a boat, to be ready so as to take advantage of the times of floods and to be careful that the boat be a good one: for many of the accidents that happen in navigating the Ohio and Mississippi, are owing to the unpardonable carelessness or penuriousness of the boat builder, who will frequently slight his work or make it of injured plank, in either case putting the lives and properties of a great many people at manifest hazard.

  Because the Ohio is no longer a freely flowing river, we found our descent almost as simple as driving an auto, if you discount that at every moment our road moved under us in several directions at the same time, and one other thing: towboatmen who, with their gigantic loads, showed contempt for a small thing like Nikawa, a scorn not surpassed by interstate truckers for automobiles.

  Steubenville has long been a town of suspension bridges, and the newest of them, the Veterans’ Memorial, is a stunning piece, all of its myriad supporting cables depending from a single, central tower that looks like—take your choice—a tuning fork, a wishbone, or a clothespin rendered by Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg. At Coketown, appropriately, we caught a scent of coal smoke, an odor once so prevalent on this river it could have been bottled as Eau de la Belle Rivière. And then came Wellsburg, with trimmed lawns to the water, a delightful old inn, and Pilotis wrote on the chart “nice place,” although one eminent guide to West Virginia described it in 1941 as “an unromantic-looking industrial town for a long time more widely known for its ‘gin weddings’ and ‘marrying parsons’ than for its glass plants and large paper mills producing great quantities of paper bags.”

  The men of the Pike Island Lock took Nikawa in at their leisure. Again we had to furrow through a nasty field of woody drift and plastic flotsam. Once we started descending, the wheels of the floating bitts howled and screeched, and Pilotis said, “The Lock Mess Monster is dying.” Then we were free, went past the Sisters Islands, taking one on our port, the other starboard. I’ve never seen an island I didn’t want to explore, perhaps because, unlike us, they seem so entire unto themselves with their capacity to withstand the relentless river and their isolation that spawns mystery.

  At Wheeling, West Virginia, we came upon another suspension bridge, in days gone the longest in the world, drift stacked against the piers neatly like cordwood; the Tenth Street span connects the city with Wheeling Island (the largest inhabited one in the Ohio and a rarity with its road links to shore). The historic structure of twin stone towers has the look of a small Brooklyn Bridge, although it’s been around more than a third of a century longer, the smoke-grimed rocks revealing its age as if wrinkles. Built in 1856 and the oldest on the Ohio, it and its 1846 predecessor changed river law in two Supreme Court cases argued between Wheeling and Pittsburgh; the latter, fearing loss of its river trade, claimed the bridge interfered with navigation and won the first decision, but Wheeling prevailed on appeal, with the new law holding that the height of steamboat stacks must be governed by bridge clearances. When the span collapsed during a windstorm in 1854, the packet Pennsylvania continued to lower her chimneys in derision as she passed Wheeling, but the mockery lasted only until the present thousand-foot-long version went up. For us it was good to go beneath a bridge that has looked down on the stovepipe hat of Abraham Lincoln, the mustache of Mark Twain, the sooty funnels of a hundred thousand steamboats, the rifle muzzles of Union soldiers, and every other Ohio River traveler since before the Civil War.

  Formerly a river town, Wheeling today turns its back to the Ohio, showing bum-ends of old brick office buildings and warehouses and a wretched four-storey auto garage that largely negates a new park along the bank. The name Wheeling probably derives from several early settlers, venturing down the Ohio in quest of land, whom Delaware Indians captured, decapitated, and set their heads as a warning on poles along the river, a site subsequently called wih-link, “place of the skull.” Local residents, as you might guess, offer other etymologies.

  On we went in the quiet, reflective afternoon. A river—with its attendant cascades, eddies, boils, and whirlpools—is the most expressive aspect of a natural landscape, for nothing else moves so far, so broadly, so unceasingly, so demonstrably, and nothing else is so susceptible to personification and so much at the heart of our notions about life and death. Across generations and around the globe, humans, we double-footed jugs of seventy percent water, have seen rivers as both our source and the way out of this world. The Osage Indians use the same word, ni, for water, river, sap, breath, life. To the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, the afterworld lay on the far side of a river, a bourn from which no traveler returns. But, the marine sailor might ask, what about seascapes? I’ve found the ocean, despite its continuous movement and manifest moods, too overwhelming to comprehend as anything other than an implacable immensity. The sea is the wind made visible, but a river is the land turned liquid. No engineer ever tried to bridge an ocean, dam a sea, or turn its currents another direction: oceans surpass our capacities too far. River travelers, even ones not poetically inclined, soon begin to conceive the water as friend or foe, to view it as possessed of a will, and at times even a primitive mind capable of acting companionably or inimically. In this country, bankside inhabitants often call themselves with pride “river rats,” a self-inflicted insult expressing their humility before that force controlling their lots and their lives.

  I’ve driven more than a million miles over American highways, but I don’t recall loving, for itself, even one road. How can you love an unmoving, stone-cold strip of concrete, ever the same except for its aging, its attrition? But a river comes into existence moving, and it grows as it moves, and like a great mother carries within itself lives too varied and multitudinous for our myriad sciences even yet wholly to number and name. I say this now because we had just accomplished our thousandth wet mile, and during that passage I felt we were atop something animate and wondrously strong and strange which, were I but once to fail in my respect, would take me in a moment to its deadly bottom.

  About then, Pilotis called my stare from the sounder.

  Of the ancient monuments of America, few are as considerable, abundant,
and fertile with mystery as the aboriginal mounds standing like sentinels all along the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, and their tributaries. These hundreds upon hundreds of earthen constructions—mostly simple tumuli, but also ones shaped into serpents, bears, birds, and platforms to hold temples—commonly lie hidden among shoreside trees. But why are they usually along rivers? I think the Osage expressed it: ni, river, breath, life.

  The largest conical earthen mound in the New World is at Moundsville, West Virginia. Called Mammoth, or Grave Creek Mound, it is at least two thousand years old and once held the remains of Indians wearing copper bracelets, bone and shell beads, a gorget or two; but its most famous artifact was a sandstone tablet inscribed with a couple of dozen characters variously interpreted as “ancient Greek, Etruscan, Runic, ancient Gallic, Old Erse, Phoenician, Celtiberic, Old British, Appalachian.” Translations of those twenty-four marks seem to express more the mind of an interpreter than the inscriber:

  Thy orders are laws.

  Thou shinest in thy impetuous elan,

  and rapid is the chamois.

  ***

  The Chief of Emigration

  who reached these places

  has fixed these statutes forever.

  ***

  The grave of one who was assassinated here.

  May God revenge him,

  strike his murderer,

  cutting off the hand of his existence.

  ***

  I pray to Christ,

  His most Holy Mother,

  Son, Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ, God.

  ***

  United States of Egypt.

  Built by States of Eastern Union.

  ***

  I knelt on the island,

  Øn’s yule site on Meadow Island,

  now the island is a Hodd.

  ***

  Your hope to be imbued with measure

  of purity, manners, industry,

  misery, folly, strength.

  ***

  Bil Stumps Stone

  OCT 14 1838.

  And in 1948 another interpreter opined the characters were actually an image of the back end of an automobile, a prognostication carved by a giant prophetess. The tablet, now lost, was likely inauthentic except as an artifact planted during the first excavations of 1838 to lure tourists to the gallery dug into the heart of the sixty-nine-foot mound, a dim and damp exhibit hung with Indian skeletons and lighted by guttering candles, a spook show designed to thrill paying visitors. Atop the tumulus the purveyors built an observatory, later replaced by a dance platform, replaced by a saloon, replaced by a Union artillery position in 1863; around the perimeter at one time was a horse track. When these efforts failed to make enough money, citizens proposed leveling the mound to provide fill (the fate of a hundred other mounds nearby), or building a post office at the summit, or turning it into the Tomb of the Unknown West Virginia Soldier. In 1909 the state reluctantly and belatedly accepted this preeminent ancient monument and for some years assigned the care of it to the penitentiary across the street. It was convicts who restored it to something like its original contours.

  We passed several strip-pit coal mines and their high tailings, the kind of mounds industrial people leave, massive cicatrices symbolizing not mystery or an honored death but rather nothing more than extracted power and consequent exhaustion, corporate barbarity and final uselessness, with an appendant poisoning of land and water. Yet a few of the tailings recently had been “reclaimed,” their new slopes trying to come into kindly disposition with the landscape once again.

  At the Mason-Dixon Line, the wind came on as if to cuff a couple of Yankees, and where the direction of the hills and river let it get at us, it bashed the water into a jogglety, noisy course that intervening quiet stretches served not to give relief so much as to point up our banging discomfort. It was then Pilotis identified the worst of a windhammered river, a small and crucial discovery: “It’s not the jarring that wears me down—it’s the din, the racket. In this fiberglass we’re riding inside a big snare drum.” On and on, the corrugated water beat its tattoo into our bones. The next day I bought earplugs.

  The enclosure of Hannibal Lock gave us a brief reprieve and added a soothing music from its floating bitts, as melodious and plaintive as American Indian flutes. And then we were back to an open twenty-three miles down the throat of the wind, but we complained little because the way was free of boils and rocks. About every hour we came upon a big sycamore or cottonwood making a long and eventually fatal lean over the river, and sometimes from a large limb dangled a rope swing, a heavy, knotted cord for swimmers to drop from. Even in the cool air, the lines tempted us. On one sycamore that had completed its tilt and joined the Ohio to become a sawyer—a bottom-stuck tree breaking the surface to saw up and down in the current—stood a great blue heron in leggy elegance, aloof as if the suzerain of backwaters. Old steamboaters believed the birds embodied the souls of river pilots, for who knew the chutes, channels, and shoals better than a heron?

  Steep, wooded bluffs lay close to the banks, creating a section of beauty that, at last, fully deserved the lost French name of the Ohio. Then came Paden Island, a mile-long cluster of trees, its upper ends swept back to a point, an overgrown sandbar generations ago when Obadiah Paden got it from Chief Munsie who dwelt there and one night dreamed the white man made gifts of his rifle and engraved powderhorn. Following an alleged native custom that holds a person appearing in another’s sleep responsible for fulfilling the dream, Munsie, upon waking, went to Paden and told him of the vision; the white man, wishing to keep the peace, turned over the gun and horn but then went silent for several days. Some days later he found Munsie and related his own dream about the chief giving him the island. After that, they say, dreamers hereabouts kept their sleep to themselves.

  The island marks the head of the Long Reach, at sixteen miles the farthest straight run on the river and also the beginning of a sixty-mile stretch of slender islands that survived canalization, although several of them lie so close to the banks they can hardly be distinguished as separate from the shore. To starboard was an Ohio settlement whose first residents, a number of them undoubtedly illiterate, years ago wanted an utterly simple name: Dog? Wet? Pot? Elf? They settled on Fly—insect or verb, I don’t know. Across the river is Sisters-ville, a village of some late-nineteenth-century quaintness, once called Ziggleton, where Charles Wells and his wife had twenty-two children, the eighteenth and nineteenth the sisters of the present name. The Wellses called their next child Twenty and the following Plenty, but when the last arrived they lost their humor, and she was merely Betsey. Having tired of creating names, they just flat gave up procreating children.

  Nine miles down the Long Reach, on the West Virginia shore, we passed Friendly, the name from the Quakers and not a description of local demeanor, despite some cheerful citizens treating it as a daily reminder. On the opposite bank lies what’s left of New Matamoros, which the Ohio WPA Guide describes as “now a stilled community of old, severely simple business structures and shuttered houses,” a possibly inevitable fate for a place named “killer of Moors" (even if the slayer, Saint James—Santiago—happened also to be an Apostle).

  Because we were running smoothly and I wanted to try to gain a little on the Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative, Pilotis served up sandwiches while we moved, although I was tempted to stop at St. Marys, as agreeable a town as there is on the Ohio. In the 1830s Alexander Creel, an inconstant man, came down the river on a steamboat, allegedly in the company of the Virgin who appeared at the rail, pointed to shore, and advised (in language that, to my ear, sounds notably uncelestial, although I must confess never to have heard it spoken): “There you behold the site of what will some day be a happy and prosperous city.” Creel bought the land in 1834, but perhaps for the same reasons as mine, or maybe having eaten one too many Goonieburgers, he came to doubt the divine flea-in-the-ear. He sold his holdings and moved a couple of miles downstream where he stayed for fifteen years until
he learned a county seat was about to be selected, whereupon the Virgo Sapientissima again apparently proffered her presagement; he bought back the site, platted it, and named it after his realty adviser, a better decision, history suggests, than a link with any apostolic swordsmen.

  Above Willow Island Lock, Pilotis, scanning downriver with the binoculars, said, “Here it is again,” and soon we were behind a boat tiredly trudging the current, and I said over the radio, Prepare to launch torpedoes. There came no response from the Dry Docktor, and when we overtook her, no whistle of recognition, only a weary Cap bent over her wheel. Once in the lock together, Pilotis hailed Mr. V—, who simply lifted a weak thumbs-up. We were wayworn too, ever the more so when our exit got us entangled in floaters, and we had to raise the motors to unwind branches and monofilament fishing line. Ten miles farther at Marietta, we entered the muddy Muskingum River and tied up at a small fuel dock. Pilotis jumped off to find us a room in the old rivermen’s hotel, the Lafayette, but slipped on the pier, went down hard, and while decumbent yelled, “Goddamnit to hell!” While the day had not been difficult, we felt our thousand miles as if we carried them on our backs, and all I could think to do was get off Nikawa and help my friend up.