River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Meriwether Lewis

  The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition

  We Meet Mister Eleven

  IF, ON FOOLSCAP, you drew an elongated S the length of the paper, then let a three-year-old scribble over it for a minute, you’d have a map of the Jefferson River that would serve a navigator almost as well as any you could otherwise come by. Above its junction with the Madison, the Jefferson wanders, staggers, and crankles, flushing half its water askew, the other awry, and throughout its upper and lower miles manifests little urge to go anywhere other than sideways; when it’s not hunting a new route or sending one channel off in search of two others, it will flow properly just long enough to fool a boatman. In short, it is the little Jefferson that puts the mischief into the big Missouri, and, like its descendant, it seems always to ask “Where am I?” although it stays not for an answer.

  For sixteen months my concern had been with finding our way up that torture of lost waters, but once we reached it, the question was moot, and instead we went looking only for somebody knowledgeable enough to suggest we had even a slim chance of ascending what had become for a couple of weeks a most unambiguous route of hard-flowing water. The worry now was not getting lost on the river, it was simply getting on the river. We found no one to say anything other than “It’s impossible,” although one man added, “And if it isn’t, you should wish it was.” Outfitters, fishermen, and a government agent each trotted out the hazards we already knew: diversion dams (small barriers for irrigation), barbed-wire fences (illegal), bridges with clearances low enough to decapitate (if the fences didn’t do it), logjams (perhaps the deadliest of all), and overhanging trees called sweepers. I pointed out that those perils posed less danger to an upward-bound boat because the current would not ram us into them. “Sure,” said an outfitter, “but how’re you going to make headway against that uproar? There’s a ten-horse legal limit for motors on both the Jefferson and Beaverhead, and that river’s coming down in places more than twelve miles an hour. Maybe you don’t know, but current increases geometrically, not arithmetically. A twelve-mile-an-hour current is much more than twice as powerful as one at six. You get it?” He looked to see whether I comprehended. “If you go on that river, I can just about guarantee I’ll be along tomorrow afternoon cutting you out of the trees.” Then, “But hell, last year you could have poled up the Jeff.” As I stared disconsolately, Pilotis said, “What we need is a little stream boat.”

  The Jefferson, Beaverhead, and Lemhi, Three Forks to Baker, 241 river miles (112 air miles)

  Here was one more thing I’d evaluated the wrong way like a simpleton who reads a comic book back to front and wonders why he’s confused. The issue for us in the Snow Imperative was no longer missing it and finding a river too low but rather catching it and finding a river too high. Could I have foreseen a big snowpack breaking a decade of diminished precipitation, I might have made plans for an additional craft of some sort. I complained so much about my shortsightedness in not having a bad-water contingency boat standing near, Pilotis said, “Enough, enough! Just remember your history: Meriwether Lewis walked all the way from here to the Divide and on over it, while Clark and the others dragged the pirogues for a hundred miles. To go up the Jefferson and the Beaverhead in a boat is unhistoric.”

  Such a remark is further evidence why one should never undertake a venture such as ours without companions, intelligent companions who can restore common sense and open the way to any skipper blinded by insistence. I thumped my hand on the table. That’s it—we’ll do it on foot! Pilotis: “Oh, no. What have I said?”

  I pulled out our best topographic maps and a magnifying glass. By sweet chance I found what appeared to be a railroad grade running along the south bank of the Jefferson, a route through the most scenic terrain the river passes, a confined way where Lewis himself likely walked. But Pilotis wanted wheels: “You and your historical precedents—me and my mouth.” What lovely precedents they are, I said, and sometimes your ideas too. “It was no damn idea.”

  We spent the afternoon looking into that passage and phoning for permission to hike the abandoned grade, and by nightfall we ended up in Willow Creek, a village just off the Jefferson. At the venerable Blue Willow Inn we took supper, finishing with peanut butter pie, then went into the adjoining taproom where we discovered a worn player piano and a cabinet with rolls of music. I looked inside, came across “Cruising down the River,” put it into the antiquated instrument, and began treadling the thing into creaking motion and wobbly music. As the notes rolled across the room, fair-voiced Pilotis sang along with words slightly altered for the moment:

  Walking up the river

  on a Thursday afternoon,

  the clouds above

  no one we love—

  waiting for Heat-Moon—

  an old piano playing

  a mountain-river tune.

  The next morning we began fulfilling the lyrics. A couple of days earlier, the Photographer had hauled Nikawa over the Divide to a farmhouse of acquaintances and tucked her under some big poplars near the Lemhi River. Thus unencumbered by boats, we agreed that the only point in walking, other than historical precedent, was to see the Jefferson, so we decided to hike just the portion that would allow us next to the water, a segment almost a quarter its length. From Three Forks (a town where in season you can witness ice fishermen engaged in racing their bait, that is, maggots) we went west to near the Sappington bridge and set out on foot up the abandoned grade of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, a name only a little shorter than its route. Stripped of tracks a couple of decades earlier, the way at first was fairly smooth but became progressively rougher, yet never enough to hinder a good pace. I liked hearing my footfalls and thinking each one took me a twentieth of an inch higher up the slope toward the Divide and a yard closer to the Pacific. Although the portage across would have to be longer than I’d wanted, I made my peace with it: from the Missouri Headwaters—as flies the mountain raven—the next certain river was 112 miles away. Given the imposing barrier of the Great Divide, that distance was negligible.

  It isn’t happenstance that the old railbed and a functioning one across the stream rub shoulders with the Jefferson through those singular miles because the high, hard walls of the London Hills admit passage only via a canyon the river has taken three million years to cut. The sixteen-hundred-foot cliffs drop to the water and leave scarce space for works of humankind, and for fifteen miles the deep defile is hardly wider than the river itself—about forty yards across—and shackles it into a single, powerful channel. Beyond the cliffs of whitish limestone rise easy hills, mostly treeless, a strange aridity to encounter so near all that pounding water, a place opposite in every way from the low bushy meadows above and below the canyon.

  The day was fair but warm and so breezeless that mosquitoes attacked whenever we came near a copse of willows. We had hopes travel by foot would turn up more and different wildlife than we’d seen—I repeat, our numbers and varieties did not match even remotely the accounts of early travelers—but the ramble yielded only a couple of towhees, a nesting osprey, and three magpies pulling their long tails like pennants across the canyon. Down in the hard flush, beyond the banksides of wild roses, swam brown and rainbow trout, some of the largest in the West, so we’d heard. Near our halfway mark and not far from Lewis and Clark Caverns high up the cliff—caves they didn’t know existed—we saw a mule deer at the edge of the river. Paying attention only to the cold swirlings, it watched the flow for a few moments, then leaped in and began a strong but unconcerned swim for the north shore. By the time the beast reached the other side, it was more than a hundred yards downstream at a bank of easy ascent. Said the Photographer, “I think he aimed for it.” In dry weather the Jefferson can get nearly “dewatered,” and we wondered whether the deer had learned to cross during those easier times, for hard current like we saw, on the Missouri anyway, once swept migrating bison to their doom.

  The walk was long an
d hot but otherwise a vacation from the confinement of our boats, and several times I bolted ahead of my mates only to wait at some choice observation post, but by the time we reached the South Boulder River at the far end of the arid canyon, our drinking water was gone, and we were tiring and parched. Mosquitoes swarmed in as we came to the bosklands near Jefferson Island, and, thirst and weariness be damned, we scurried toward cover across the Cardwell bridge and went on to La Hood Park. There we found a 1930s tavern near a long-closed filling station with a large wooden canopy still covering the broken pumps, its underside painted with an illustrated map of one of the formerly great transcontinental routes, U.S. 20 running from Boston Harbor to Yaquina Bay in Oregon, from scrod to oysters. Although it lies ninety-five miles south of La Hood Park, the fame of 20 was such that it effectively obliterated the lore of Highway 10, which the station once sat alongside. Today the numbers have changed, and the way west in that place is Interstate 90, only a mile north of us. When I mentioned we were seeing the last of that four-lane we’d first crossed under on the Hudson River, Pilotis looked up surprised. “New York seems as remote as New Guinea.” By river passage, emotionally, it almost was.

  At that point, our miles from the Atlantic and our elevation in feet above it happened, by my figures, to match: 4,250. To celebrate the coincidence, after a mathematical discussion of whether or not mileage and elevation at some place had to coincide, we went to evening prayers in the old tavern (the word is related to “tabernacle”) at the mouth of the canyon. Inside stood a noble altar of a back bar, with a large mirror framed with a hundred signed dollar-bill offerings above an assortment of bottles gleaming like candles, upon each label in bold numbers the price of a shot, and at our backs a bookcase neatly full of prayerbooks like The Blonde That Rode Texas.

  Before ordering up spirits, I drank two glasses of ice water and asked for a third, whereupon the bartender, Baron (“a name, not a title”) Stewart, said to me, “Come around and I’ll show you how the drink hose works. I’m here to serve—booze. Now, when you’re quenched, what will you drink?”

  My mates ordered lager, but that seemed insufficiently celebratory for the happy coincidence of our travel numbers, so I said, How about a martini? “What?” Stewart said. “If that’s your call, come back here and make it yourself.” I took the white towel, stepped behind the polished wood, mixed my potion, and tended our little company and the friends they were making—a demanding lot, I must say—while our host disappeared into the kitchen before returning some time later with plates of burritos and a stack of hot tortillas.

  Soon filled to comfort and ripe for meditation, Pilotis engaged a fellow, a science teacher, in a tedious fifteen-minute discussion about the length of an “instant,” a ramble that made me redefine the duration of a quarter of an hour. During most of that debate, I fell into an interior commemoration of our mileage, and for the first time I thought not how distant we were from the Pacific but rather how far from the Atlantic.

  Stewart told me, “I’m just here on hiatus—is that Greek or Latin? I’m a helping hiatus. You all have been talking a lot of numbers, but standing before you is a living number—meet Mister Eleven.” He was a short man, balding, round billows of white hair at his temples, possessed of a jolliness confirming he was not a bartender except by hiatus, the sort of fellow who might step from a crofter’s cottage in the Scottish Highlands to invite you in to a bowl of cock-a-leekie, but in fact he was from Florida, Weekiwachee Springs, “that place where mermaids swim in glass tanks and eat bananas underwater—but never a fish.” He had just learned to tap-dance and proved up our new friendship by not insisting on a demonstration. “That’s me, Mister Eleven,” he said again, so I obliged: Why are you a number? “I play eleven musical instruments, I’ve totaled eleven cars, I’ve been bitten by eleven snakes. Now I’m afraid I’m opening up a new category—falls. I fell down the stairs, I fell off a bridge forty-one feet onto a highway and broke both arms.” He held them up to show the large calcium knots on the ulnas where the bones had knitted less than perfectly. “Not long ago,” he said, “a neon sign fell out of the sky and hit me on the head. So now I wish I was just Mister Three.”

  As a reporter, I’m pledged to try to ascertain the veracity of tavern talk, so I challenged him to name his eleven serpents, and without hesitation he said, “Black snake, green snake, blue racer, bull snake, chicken snake, garter snake, ring-neck, water snake, tree snake, copperhead, and water moccasin. That cottonmouth bit me in the navel when I was twelve. I grabbed it and pulled it loose. Threw it a mile.”

  Just then there was an explosion from the deck behind the tavern, and we ran to the door. We should have known. I mean, this was Montana: outside, nothing more than two men shooting potatoes. Not shooting at potatoes but shooting them out of a homemade contraption called a spud gun. From the porch above a deep field reaching down to the Jefferson, a man named Parker and his assistant launched the potatoes to see who could get the farthest trajectory. The spud gun was about four feet long and made from four pieces of PVC plumbing pipe: the assistant rammed a raw Idaho potato down the barrel to the firing chamber into which he then injected a spritz of hairspray; Parker aimed the gun as his friend put a match to the igniter hole, and with a loud !whump! a spud went sailing some hundred yards toward the river.

  Parker handed the gun to me. “Try it.” I said, I don’t have time right now to get a new face. “There’s no danger. Not much.” Don’t you have something smaller—say, a parsnip pistol or a radish revolver? “I’ve thought about that,” he said.

  The temptation was too much, so I loaded in a nice, firm Idaho and fired the thing into kingdom come. “Hey, you’re a natural.” I said, Not quite, although I nearly finished seventh at the Missouri Turnip Toss back in ’sixty-three. “These things were invented in California,” Parker said, “but I hear they’re illegal there now.” Pilotis: “That’s right. The Association of Los Angeles Grocers got them outlawed when a masked man held up a produce stand with a large russet.”

  In the dusk we retrieved our tow wagon and went down along the Tobacco Root Mountains, through the valley of the Jefferson, a pleas ant flatlands where, except in fast-water years, the gadabout river lingers as if in love with the bottoms. At Twin Bridges, under Old Baldy Mountain, near the junctures of the Big Hole and Beaverhead rivers, we found a cabin for the night, a place from the forties but clean and spacious. After we turned in, I heard across the dark room, “If Meriwether Lewis amazed the Indians with his air rifle, think what he could have accomplished with a spud gun.” A long quiet, then through the blackness, “If only he could’ve gotten the boys to haul from St. Louis those two hundred cases of Aqua Net.”

  Eating the Force that Drives Your Life

  FROM THE BEGINNING of the voyage, I had little hope of ever ascending the Beaverhead River. The Corps of Discovery accomplished it only by making the men wade the treacherous bottom, ropes over their shoulders to drag the loaded pirogues, a task that perhaps more than any other could have precipitated a mutiny. Clark, overseeing the effort, wrote almost the same sentence at the end of each day of the long haul: “Men complain verry much of the emence labour they are obliged to undergo & wish much to leave the river. I passify them.” And Lewis: “Capt. Clark found the river shoally, rapid, shallow, and extreemly difficult. The men in the water almost all day. They are geting weak, soar, and much fortiegued; they complained of the fortiegue to which the navigation subjected them and wished to go by land.” But without the Indian horses Lewis had gone ahead on foot in search of, lining the pirogues up the river was the only practical way to move their heavy stores.

  While we considered the Jefferson the same river as the Missouri, the captains thought the Beaverhead to be but more miles of the Jefferson. By whatever name, those waters below and beyond the Tobacco Root Mountains are a hell of a tangling. Like an indigent, that river will take any bed it can find and the next morning go looking for another. One of our small maps warned:

  The
Beaverhead is a maze of braided channels, sloughs, and irrigation ditches that are numberless for all practical purposes. Also, there are more bridges than have been indicated here. Showing all details at this half-inch-to-the-mile scale would simply make the map unreadable. Don’t even count the bends, because from season to season they may be in different places. To have shown the islands would only have added another element of chance, for they come and they go. For example, the one that Lewis and Clark named “3000-mile island”—that far from St. Louis, they calculated—washed downriver many years ago.