River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Meriwether Lewis, after the Corps had portaged around the falls and rapids and finally was able to see the country the farthest Missouri issues from, expected to encounter even more cataracts, as would anyone who looks into such a mountainous western sky; yet in truth there is nothing more than riffles, rapids, and islands, even though today many of those hindrances to ascent lie under three farther impoundments. Beyond Black Eagle Dam, the Missouri is a stretch of tight twists and narrow horseshoe bends running through a high meadow-like country, and the mileage to Holter Dam, the next barrier, is almost exactly twice the beeline distance. Pierce said, “With all this water, I don’t know how far we can go even if the drift boats aren’t out. We might not make it under that low bridge at Ulm.”

  Off we went, up past the mouth of the Sun, or Medicine, River; it was here that William Clark wrote:

  [We] have Concluded not to dispatch a Canoe with a part of our men to St. Louis as we have intended early in the Spring. we fear also that Such a measure might also discourage those who would in Such Case remain, and might possibly hazard the fate of the expedition. we have never hinted to any one of the party that we had Such a Scheem in contemplation, and all appear perfectly to have made up their minds to Succeed in the expedition or perish in the attempt. we all believe that we are about to enter on the most perilous and dificuelt part of our voyage, yet I see no one repineing; all appear ready to meet those dificuelties which await us with resolution and becomeing fortitude.

  Some miles on we reached the mouth of the Smith, a canoeist’s river with a sign at the juncture prohibiting motorboats. Paralleling, but mostly out of view except when crossing the Missouri, was Interstate 15 where vehicles gave another perspective on our speed of forty miles an hour. The surrounding country was at first gentle contours brightly green from the rains and late sun, and glowing yellow fields of canola, and the river long glassy pools interspersed with swifter water of boils and a few shallows we skimmed easily; nowhere did we have to contend with broomstick chutes, a good thing since at our pace even big channels were tricky to interpret. We stopped to look at a nest of golden eagles, the unfledged young staring down, the parents in another tree doing the same, and from yet another cottonwood a bald eagle watched all of us.

  We went around a sharp bend and saw ahead the Ulm Bridge, the lowest immovable span on the Missouri, and we slowed to a near halt as we approached. With the water so high and boat canopy so lofty, clearance would be by inches if at all. Pilotis watched intently and intoned, “Please. Oh, please!” I said, If we miss by a whisker, we’ll get ten fat men to step aboard. Pierce concentrated and visually calculated. Passage looked unpromising, and I said, Everybody to the side—lean over and take a big drink. On we went, holding still so we wouldn’t bounce the boat, and then we started under. Graffitoed on a pier was DONT LITTER BUTTFACE. We sneaked forward and, by a handspan, passed cleanly beneath. Said a relieved Pilotis, “It’s like the dentist saying, ‘Okay, I’m finished.’”

  Near Cascade, we entered a country of old volcanic interruptions and perpendicular upthrusts and thousand-foot buttes, distinctively shaped things, and beyond them, for the first time from the river itself, we could make out what we’d waited so long to see—a deep and jagged blue shadow across the horizon. We stared in silence for a moment before Pilotis said, “Somebody assure me what we’re looking at isn’t clouds or an atmospheric illusion.” And our boatman: “You’re going to know soon that’s no illusion, but in a week you may wish it was.” We were at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

  Beyond Hardy, the Missouri has a clarity downstream residents could believe impossible, a transparence that makes the segment through the Big Belt Mountains a fine trout stream, and on that day of deep sky, the river was astonishingly blue. The terrain before us, while not so eccentric and unexpected as the White Cliffs, we thought the most postcard-scenic along the entire Missouri. Among brown volcanic walls were lighter sedimentary erosions, vertical humps too round to be pinnacles and too slender to be hills, risings like the apparently impossible formations common in Chinese brush paintings of the riverine landscapes around Guilin. Even a stretch of dumpy little vacation houses smack along the water did not totally dispel the excellence of topography.

  Pierce gave me the wheel and cautioned to keep the speed up to maintain our plane so we would pass over the riffles. As I spun us through the sharp bends, I thought again how a boat like this would have served us better along the slow miles in the Dakotas. I had no time to correct a navigational error and nothing but a moment to choose the channel with the best water. At that speed, which mocked the fast current as it for so long had mocked us, I simply looked and reacted then hoped in a kind of thrilling and treacherous piloting my friend called “a glance and a prayer.” Pierce said, “There are places up here usually so shallow you have to drag a canoe through. You’re lucky to catch the water like this.” Pilotis muttered, “This is probably the one time it’s not a question of luck.”

  As we entered the section troutmen love, we saw no drift boats, the current presumably too strong for good fishing, so I happily requested to attempt the last miles on to the dam. Pierce said he’d never been able to make it this far upriver before, and he was invigorated by the easy run and began to envy our crossing. To that Pilotis said, “Think twice.” Soon after, the hydroelectric dam came into view, an ugly concrete door to the splendent region Meriwether Lewis called Gates of the Rocky Mountains; just below it we pulled the boat out for the haul back to Great Falls.

  At supper that evening in a Chinese café, I tried to revive the crew with a toast to our good fortune in finding Jim Pierce and a reading from Lewis and Clark detailing their serious hardships which I hoped would give perspective to ours. I concluded with this satisfaction Meriwether wrote not far from where we sat: “My fare is really sumptuous this evening; buffaloe’s humps, tongues and marrowbones, fine trout, parched meal, pepper and salt, and a good appetite; the last is not considered the least of the luxuries.”

  Our own fare did not seem to lift my comrade who said, “Even after we run the string of lakes tomorrow in Nikawa, we still have way more than two hundred miles of cold water charging down at us before we reach the Divide. We know now we don’t have a proper boat for mountain rivers, so what do we do? Are you counting on Old Friend Luck?” I don’t have the answer, I said, except to tell you our canoe could have made it up to Holter Dam, but I listened to locals even though I know they’re full of misinformation and negative opinion.

  What I didn’t say was that our easy ascent in the powerful boat had saved us a couple of trying days in the canoe at a time when I was beginning to see the toll our voyage was taking on us. I was increasingly aware of the possibility of suddenly losing my mates, and I knew, as devoted as they were, this journey could never be to them what it was to me. I realized that, at least until we reached the Great Divide, I had to make our passage up the slope of the continent as easy and jolly as feasible, and I believed that, without a jet boat here or there, just then I might be sitting alone, eating lemon chicken and opening up a fortune cookie with no one around to share it. On the little slip, which I pasted in my logbook that night, was this:

  * * *

  NOW IT IS BEST TO TAKE THINGS

  JUST ONE STEP AT A TIME

  * * *

  I passed it to Pilotis who read it once, then again, and said darkly, “Don’t ever try to write a novel. Lucky coincidence after coincidence kills good fiction. And that’s the way you’re proceeding.” I thought, Do they really believe it’s just luck and coincidence that got us here, or is this only repining?

  Weaknesses in Mountains and Men

  WE HEARD THAT the snowpack was nearly half again higher than its average, and that was good news since such excess would make the spring melt-off last longer if temperature and rainfall didn’t wildly increase. From then on though, it was apparent, each morning we would have to play the height of the water on that particular day against the expected decreases of da
ys ahead, and we might have to take on a torrent now and then to avoid a river turned to rocks farther along. If we avoided too much today, we could have too little tomorrow. Or, in the cynical words of a certain cohort, “Drown today to avoid dragging tomorrow.”

  Because we’d gained time in the jet boat, and because of the threat in our incipient mental fatigue, I took a chance and suggested we get off the river for a day, so on Saturday we slept in to different hours and spent the morning on our own, each of us enjoying a brief solitude. When we gathered again for dinner, some vigor had returned, and I saw no repining. On Sunday, considerably recovered, we took Nikawa to Holter Dam to launch her in fine weather. I very much wanted blue sky to embolden our little company.

  Just below Holter, the Missouri takes an unfortunate southeasterly turn for westering travelers, and although I didn’t mention it, during the entire day we’d be moving away from the Pacific through a string of three impoundments, the first two quite narrow and linked by short sections of nearly natural river. Canyon-bound Holter and Hauser lakes, only marginally wider than the Missouri, are like distensions in an artery, yet those two smallest reservoirs on the river are arguably the loveliest, and the best section in them is a severely constricted defile today called the Gates of the Mountains. I don’t like to confess this, but it may be that the lake created by Holter Dam actually enhances the naturally stunning gateway. Before reaching it, we went around a pinched horseshoe, then a broader one, then beyond scarred Mann Gulch, the scene of the horrific 1949 forest conflagration Norman Maclean describes in his book Young Men and Fire.

  Had we been without a chart on our approach, we might have thought the Gates a cul-de-sac, but the truth is, the Missouri only hides itself like a prankster behind an open door to a curving hallway. Because the stone walls so narrow the river, we knew for the first time we were moving precisely in the wake of Lewis and Clark, albeit a good many feet above the surface they saw; there are few other places on the Missouri where a voyager can say with such certainty, Exactly here they passed. That the river could breach those high rocks seems to attest more to its power than to any inherent weakness in the enduring stone, although that is scarcely true. Here as everywhere, whether mountains or men, a river finds faults, weaknesses, rifts, and exploits them, and that’s why rivers outlast rocks. And men.

  The cliffs rise straight above Holter Lake about a thousand feet and continue upward for another three thousand as they recede from the Missouri. Due west, the Continental Divide lay only thirty-five miles off, but we would have to parallel it south for more than two hundred miles before we could turn to cross via a comparatively short portage—short if only we could overcome the increasing torrents.

  When we reached the upper end of the canyon, we stopped to meet the Photographer pulling the trailer toward Townsend, our intended destination that evening, and took him aboard and returned through the magnificent cleft that he might see it too. Then we set him ashore and proceeded on to a widening of the river called Upper Holter Lake and passed one forested gulch after another as the Missouri constringed to a stream before finally becoming too shallow for Nikawa to advance. There, below Hauser Dam, we hauled around the barrier and set off again. Each time we landed, we asked about the water ahead and how far Nikawa might go. After the third or fourth query, Pilotis said, “I notice you consider anyone with bad news to be ill informed, but those who babble ‘Nothing to it’ you believe.” If I did otherwise, I said, we’d still be looking at maps on my kitchen table and wondering whether Nikawa could get under the last bridge on the Harlem River.

  Much as a merely good-looking man or woman standing next to a beautiful one suffers from proximity of comparison, so Hauser suffers next to Holter, or it once did before it began to turn into a suburb of Helena. This second-smallest Missouri impoundment would be a logical purlieu for a couple of grand lodges rather than a sprawl of ranch houses and more pretentious nouveau dwellings, but of course to advocate that certain great American places are better shared than owned can cause some citizens to reach for the dynamite.

  Our charts had gone off in the tow wagon, and the river was so chopped up by water scooters and Sunday folk in inner tubes towed by speedboats, I failed to read its direction and took us a mile up the wide mouth of Prickly Pear Creek before I realized we were heading for Last Chance Gulch in downtown Helena. The Missouri narrowed again into steeper country, the houses fell behind, and we had a good run up to the face of Canyon Ferry Dam before turning back to a ramp on the east shore where we took Nikawa out for her final portage around a dam. As we were tying her in for the short haul to the other side, a man of no authority came along and upbraided me for going so close to the spillway. I pointed out there were no off-limit markers and the water release was negligible, then I described the nature of our trip and my insistence on keeping water under us. “Don’t carry it too far,” he said, and Pilotis nodded. Only as far as the Pacific, I promised.

  A more useful warning came from a fellow who told us about the south end of Canyon Ferry Lake—by much, the largest of the three upper impoundments—twenty-five miles away. “It gets real stumpy down there. It’s almost a bog because this reservoir goes from over a hundred feet deep behind the dam to a few inches around Indian Road. That boat of yours can get hung up in that place—no doubt about it.” Pilotis, believing that I was increasingly failing to respect the power in water, watched me closely. I said, I’m listening, I’m listening. “And discounting.”

  We arranged for a checkpoint with the tow wagon about halfway along at Goose Bay, and off we went, the water blown into some roughness but the sky still kind. The mountains begin edging back from the river at Canyon Ferry as the Missouri enters a long valley reaching, but for a couple of mild incursions of hills, all the way to the so-called Headwaters below Three Forks. We ran down past the mouths of gulches with names from prospectors’ nightmares: Hellgate, Avalanche, Bilk, Snag, Beer Can. The upper two thirds of the dogleg lake is a couple of miles wide and the lower section is twice that before it peters out in a tangle of shallows, a stretch that before the impounding was a navigational fright of labyrinthine channels. By comparing our century-old chart to a modern one, we could see that, in another time, a pilot might have spent hours finding a way through a mile of the shifting Missouri maze now, for the most part, lying many feet beneath us.

  We clipped along as the wind dropped with the setting sun and the water slicked down to polished steel, but I still maintained a compass heading to keep from weaving. Trying to point up our progress and bring cheer, I said, Nikawa is in her last couple of miles on the Atlantic side of things! The comment backfired. Pilotis: “That’s what I was thinking. Now it’s the canoe for two hundred miles before we even reach the road up to the Divide.” Would you please cease arithmeticking, I said, numbers only make it harder. Then, as a diversion: If you want to calculate, tell me the fewest number of states a traveler can pass through going coast to coast in America.

  That one worked, and before we knew it we were into the boglands near Indian Road Camp, just upstream from Townsend. “Don’t risk it in here,” Pilotis said. “We can pick up this stretch in the canoe tomorrow.” I wheeled us around, and we went back a few miles to a small pull-out called The Silos and put Nikawa onto the trailer. When her hull touched river the next time, we hoped it would be at Clarkston, Washington, where nothing but deep water would lie between us and the Pacific. Near the ramp was a sign, one I wished we might have seen on some other evening, a sign of arithmetic noting the drowning of twenty-one people in the area. It said: DON’T BE NUMBER 22.

  A Nightmare Alley

  THAT MONDAY in Townsend, population 1,600, an elderly fellow wearing a cap imprinted WHO? ME? asked where I was from—the standard opening gambit in rural cafés—and I told him, and he said, “I got a dog from back in Missouri.” He wondered how I came to be out in Montana country, and I explained, and he said, “So you’re out to see the watery part of America?” His daughter, her gray hair tied s
o severely back she couldn’t move her eyebrows, grumbled something into her coffee mug as if she knew what was coming; I had a feeling she’d spent a lifetime grumbling into coffee cups.

  He said, “I saw me enough water when I was seven and my preacher daddy baptized me in Clear Creek back in Tennessee. He was an oldtime brimstoner who would pray over God for creating Satan, chiggers, and the Republican Party. He prayed over me so long I nearly drowned in my baptizing, but he kept me down for enough to see the face of Jesus. It swum right up to me in the form of a big old terrapin and opened its beak to say something, but that’s when I got jerked back up into the air. All these years later I’ve wondered ever since what it was going to tell me. Maybe the secret to life. I don’t mean that ‘Trust Jesus’ junk of those teevee phonies, I mean something about the real way creation works, the secret you got to die to learn. I guess it didn’t come to me, because I didn’t quite die. But it sure would’ve been something if that terrapin let the secret slip out and I could’ve made it back up with it. I bet I’d be wearing silk shirts today, and maybe my girl here might take to smiling once in a while.”

  She turned to me. “Don’t get him going.” I said it was part of my job to get people going. Her father, I think to provoke her, asked, “What did the cowboy say in the Chinese opium den?” And the woman, again into her coffee mug: “To hell with you both.” And he: “Many men smoke, but Fu Manchu.”