SPRING WAS IN profusion that morning—its scent along the avenues of dignified Marietta, its angle of light against the brick shops, its promise in the gait of citizens on Front Street—but the season didn’t draw us immediately to the river. Instead, we walked the town, the oldest (they say here) in Ohio, and we found a couple of conversations, a breakfast, a grocery, a bookshop, all the time my notepad filling:
— Child to mother in coffee shop: “Do pearls make oysters hurt?”
— Ayoung woman to her friend after stumbling on curb: “I’m not sure-footed, but I’m not afraid to fall down.”
— From Francis Galton’s 1867 The Art of Travel: “Neither sleepy nor deaf men are fit to travel quite alone. It is remarkable how often the qualities of wakefulness and watchfulness stand every party in good stead.”
At last, with a small sack of books under my arm, we walked to the water, boarded Nikawa, and followed the Muskingum into the Ohio, on down past a long run of skinny islands, remnants of the many before the dams drowned them. Mark Twain said, “A river without islands is like a woman without hair. She may be good and pure, but one doesn’t fall in love with her very often.” Under a beneficent sky we did the dozen miles to Parkersburg, West Virginia, where years ago residents had the sense to create on a river hill a picnic garden out of the former hanging-ground and the linguistic courage to call it Nemesis Park; now, if they would only have the courage to stop certain dimwits from turning their historic downtown into a parking lot, a process that makes pointless the big floodwall separating the city center from its rivers, the mass of concrete giving lower Parkersburg the feel of a penitentiary exercise yard.
A year earlier here, in the quaint Blennerhassett Hotel, I met Enamel, whose name I learned from the grocery store nametag pinned to her shirt. She was forty, of melodious voice, serious, and able to tie a knot in a cherry stem in her mouth using only her tongue, a bar skill she’d learned in her whiskey-sour days. When I asked how her name came about, she corrected me: “It isn’t Enamel—it’s Enna-mell. My grandmother, who couldn’t read too good, saw the word on a fancy brooch in a jewelry store and thought it was classy, maybe like Tiffany. It’s a good name because I can tell if people know me or not. One gal was claiming to be my friend but making up tales about me, but everyone knew she was lying because she called me Enamel like I came out of a paint can. But I took her boyfriend from her—then we broke up when he started writing the date on dusty furniture. Of course, he couldn’t ever help clean. He wasn’t any good anyway. All’s he wanted is you-know-what. And a dust lady.”
The Ohio turns directly west at Parkersburg, and two miles along lies the island where a wealthy and eccentric Irish immigrant, Harman Blennerhassett, settled in 1797 to conduct experiments in the natural sciences. After shooting down Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr arrived there in 1806 to seek underwriting for his design of setting up an empire somewhere southwest of the lower Mississippi. Convincing Blennerhassett he would be surrounded by a utopia of intellectuals, Burr got the Irishman to join the treasonous plan, and on a dark December night he started down the Ohio to join the conspirators, but President Jefferson learned of the schemery and dispatched militia who caught them near Natchez, Mississippi. The traitors were charged but never tried. Had the plot succeeded, the United States might have been smaller by a third.
Nikawa slipped between green shores, the day happening easily, and Pilotis hummed a strange barcarole just before we entered a section of the Ohio which appeared to lose its urgency to reach the sea; it twisted and bent and bowed, often traveling a curving eight miles to gain only two straight ones. That day we hoped to cover about a hundred river miles, but the crow-flight distance was only about half that. Still, the Ohio, partly from its current, although much hidden in the dam pools, and partly from its sinuousness, gave us proof of its infixed destina tion, its destiny to lose itself when at last it loses its way in the begetting sea. Its gravity-driven motive moved us powerfully, if blindly, in a way our engines could not, and it seemed we and nature became a single intention, and we were but a small message in a corked bottle thrown to the current, to wash up someday on a far shore. All of this yielded a concord, one strong enough to put Pilotis into a doze I presently interrupted by quoting Francis Galton on the qualities of wakefulness.
When we descended Belleville Lock, I heard my mate singing quietly on the bow, playing the mooring line back and forth, and then we went on through the afternoon with Pilotis sometimes at the wheel, sometimes me, sometimes conversation, sometimes not, but always a contentment in our clement travel; even the drift was benign, pieces of it actually getting out of our way and taking flight as we kept misreading slender, dark cormorants for floating sticks. Then Racine Lock, then around the big northern bend with little Pomeroy, Ohio, perched atop it like a feather in a cap, the late sun casting over it a flaxen light. Because the village opens to the river to show inviting front sides of buildings, we almost hung up the day there, but the pull of the Ohio was greater, and we rolled on a few miles more to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a place surely named on an afternoon like ours, although in the earliest days of the settlement Henry Clay described it and its excellent setting as “a beautiful woman clad in rags.” The first white man known to see the point between the Ohio and Kanawha rivers was Pierre-Joseph de Céloron. In 1749 he came from Lake Erie on the same route as ours to la belle rivière to claim it and its tributary country for Louis XV by burying along the Ohio four inscribed lead plates. Incredibly, two of them have turned up, the one at the Point coming to light exactly a century after the Frenchman left it.
I knew of a well-situated bed-and-breakfast there, one with a good river view and near Céloron’s hiding spot, so we turned into the Kanawha (river folk pronounce it Kah-NAW) and searched for a tie-up, but we found nothing suitable or even safe, so we went back into the Ohio another four miles to Gallipolis and passed the riverside town square where the citizens remind themselves of the 1878 arrival of yellow fever in the village with a monument made from the broken rocker shaft of the steamboat that brought the disease. We entered silty Chickamauga Creek, bounced over a sunken log, and came upon a quiet little backwater harbor with a gasoline pump and an owner who let us moor for the night. We had joked the Dry Docktor would be there, and indeed she was, Cap and Mr. V—as mellow as we, a mood we polished with supper together at a grill across from the river park where teenagers swarmed Saturday night like a glom of mayflies during a hatch-out.