OUT OF THE WET NIGHT he came, blown into the cellar café where our meal was, blustering in like an actor overplaying his entrance, a soggy cap on his head, oilskin pants and jacket, a cigarillo clenched under his white mustache, and he rasped out across the room, “Where’s the captain? The one crossing the country. Where is he?” Surprised, thinking him perhaps unstable, no one spoke, the diners silent and guarded, watching. He scanned the place, approached our table, the several of us, and settled on me. “Are you him? You’re the man? It’s your boat?” I said it was, and who was he? “I can help you. You’re tied out on that dock. That’s no good in this bad water. You come up to my dock—it’s a good dock—gas, everything you need. It’s no good here. I’m your man on this river.”
Maybe tomorrow, I said. “Hey, Captain! Captain! Trust Nick. I know this river—no one here knows it. You’re down here, and you’ll have problems.” Maybe tomorrow. “Maybe, maybe! Captain! There’s no gas on this river till St. Joseph—five hundred miles! Come up to New Haven, up to my dock. You think maybe, maybe, so maybe tonight your boat gets loose and you never see it again. There’re punks on this river—pirates. They find a loose boat, and they strip it. You want a hull? Just a hull? That’s what they’ll leave you. Take a hull across the country! Try it! Scavengers are worse than the flood. Or maybe your boat just floats off and hits a bridge pier and damages it. Who’s responsible? The captain has to maintain control of his vessel at all times. You got a lawsuit. But up at Nick’s nobody bothers anything. And this river, it ain’t through rising. I’m a Greek—I know water.” He was a small man, in his late sixties. He stood too close, talked too loud, too relentlessly, pointed his index finger too often, but I liked Nick Kotakis. Maybe tomorrow, I said.
The next morning after a big breakfast we learned the Corps was going to close the river to boats, and the Piper announced he wanted to leave a few days early. I felt the voyage starting to unravel. Next to me stood the Reporter, my newspaper friend from the Kansas City Star who had just been speaking of his time of terror on the Hudson River when he kept storm watch aboard Nikawa while Pilotis and I explored Pollepel Island. He had returned for an update to his story, and now he was going to get one as a shanghaied sailor. The Piper, in youthful haste, failed to proceed until the sky opened and insisted on getting gear from the boat just as black clouds rumbled in, and, helping him, the Reporter and I got soaked in the rain, then took shelter in town until the weather passed, and it was afternoon before the two of us could set out.
The truant Missouri sprawled everywhere, flaunting its mastery of the valley, and we had to follow tree lines that delineated the river from the inundated everything else. Nikawa, as if recognizing her baptismal stream, ran atop the boils and eddies so slickly I had to restrain her, hold her back since the current wasn’t doing it. No boat can be built for all waters, but I was beginning to see that Nikawa—although she was almost certainly the first C-Dory ever on the Missouri—might prove herself a match for this most cantankerously challenging of American rivers, a good thing because the long Big Muddy was the key to reaching the Pacific.
New Haven, Missouri, only thirteen miles from Washington, sits behind a modest levee, and in front of it was Nick’s barge-dock, the Penelope, a simple contraption—two fuel drums at the rear, a sodapop machine, a withered potted plant, a television antenna—the entire rig secured at the edge of the roiling channel by nothing more than a slender cable wrapped around an old cottonwood and another tied to a skinny post, both of those stanchions in ten feet of moving water. “That’s it?” the Reporter said. “Somehow he made it sound better. Can that thing hold?”
The current put the mooring lines under a keen tension, enough to make me wonder how long the roots of the cottonwood might keep their grip in the saturated bottom. I could hear Pilotis speaking of “the prudent mariner,” but I couldn’t think of an alternative. Nick came out, hailed us, and I asked, Is that tree going to be there in the morning? “Captain! Captain! It held Penelope through the ’ninety-three flood, the big one. Bring your boat in!” I knew of no means to test the cottonwood, and once again I had to give us over to chance. We secured Nikawa on the inside of the dock, out of the way of direct hits by floating trees, barges, chicken coops, oil drums, or any of the freak debris that floods bring down. Nikawa would remain as long as the cottonwood, and for the next hours our trip would depend on tree roots; if they pulled loose, so would our voyage.
When’s the crest supposed to hit? I asked. “Maybe tomorrow,” Nick said, “maybe later, but when it does, the dock will still be here.” The Reporter said, “How do you know that?” And Nick: “Hey, my friend! How do you know you’ll be here tomorrow? Hey! I got more crucifixes inside than a church.” I muttered, Now I’m reassured. I could only hope that his Penelope was as steadfast as Odysseus’s.
Nick ran us to shore in his johnboat, and we walked along the levee to a two-storey bed-and-breakfast, a clean and pleasant house sitting at the base of the dike and affording a good view of our boat. The caretaker answered the door but tried to turn us down, saying conditions were too dangerous to stay there overnight, what with the river only fifteen feet away and rising and now actually above the ground floor. I pointed to Nikawa and told her we’d come from the Atlantic Ocean in that thing, so a house seemed a citadel to us. She studied the little dory, then said, “If this is what you really want.” I took the upstairs room so I could lie abed and look out onto the cottonwood holding everything that then constituted my life.
After dinner, the Reporter and I walked along the levee, the Missouri only a few feet from topping it, and we tried to estimate the awesome weight rolling past the village, by our beds, under our boat. The windless night had filled with stars, and the river—you must understand this—although capable of sweeping away a town, the river made no noise whatsoever. The water moved hard and fast and in utter silence as if nothing were there, nothing at all.