KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, is the preeminent city on the longest river in America, but you would never know it from talking to the inhabitants, not because of their usual modesty but rather their forgetfulness of the Missouri. In the self-proclaimed City of Fountains there is no spiritual link between them and it and only a distant awareness of its connection to their iced tea, potted geraniums, and baptized babies. Living in such a topographical Land of Nod, they are little different from most other Americans, who nevertheless seem to awaken when properly nudged. One day, perhaps, even their pastors will come to and dare to proclaim God dwelling not only in the hearts of humankind but also in the actual lands and waters from which those fleshly pumps derive. But Kansas City, born of the Missouri, has turned away from its great genetrix more than almost any other river city in America. If you want, for example, just to see the Missouri here, you have to cross a bridge at breakneck speed or take an elevator in a downtown skyscraper.
The view is important because the river makes one of its two grand changes in direction (the other, near the Canadian border, keeps the Missouri from leaving the country, which it did thousands of years ago when it flowed into Hudson’s Bay). If the river did not turn at Kansas City just where the Kaw enters, it would by a shorter route—were the Ozark Mountains not in the way—enter the sea coincidentally at the place the Mississippi does. To look from atop an office tower is to witness one of the great facts of American topography, a detail that has made a decided difference in the way the West got peopled.
That Thursday began in one wise and ended in another. Perhaps because I grew up here, I couldn’t escape a bedful of dreams about my recently dead father and my infirm mother’s incapacity to realize he was gone; it was a night of sorry sleep turning every incident into loss. On waking, I recalled the words of a fellow a few days earlier: “The Army’s going to pull you off the river.” Then I remembered our misshapen propellers and nearly empty fuel tanks. For some moments I felt I couldn’t do another mile, believed I was too weak a man to continue, and knew now was the time to admit it. I seemed to hear, Face it, the voyage is finished—you’re flagging, and you’ve come only halfway. Then that last word hit and got me out of bed: halfway. A midpoint in any venture is difficult because that’s the place where days gone and miles done equal those ahead, and the result is equilibrium, stasis, inertia. A rollercoaster nearly stops just before the last drop to the finish. In some ways, the first mile of the second half is the most crucial because it’s the one that propels the traveler down the slope of endurance to destination. While we were still some miles shy of being exactly halfway, I knew I had already emotionally arrived there. So I dragged up onto my feet, doleful, depressed, dejected, disgruntled, dissatisfied, dissipated, discouraged, disheartened, downcast, and otherwise down in the mouth, and I went into the damp, dreary, dismal day drooping, despondent, disconsolate, and damnably in the deep doldrums.
Pilotis chirped about, whistling, but I couldn’t find a blunt instrument smaller than the bathtub. The Reporter appeared briefly to bring us bagels and the New Haven clover, and then Pilotis and I went down to the river. Nikawa was steady and riding out the malign Kaw, but two entire sycamores had washed in to lodge between the barge and the bank to trap her. Okay, I said, that solves that: a boat that can’t move doesn’t need propellers or gasoline. I sat down and stared at my shoes. Pilotis let things be, but I could almost hear “Rub that clover.”
Soon our host appeared and said his crew had gone for chainsaws and would take to the johnboat and try cutting up the trees so they could float on downstream; that left me again with broken props and empty tanks. The nearest gasoline on the river was eighty miles away, too far. We’d have to haul some in, a lot of it, and we had no transport and no good containers, a serious oversight. Pilotis mentioned a man I’d met only days before leaving on the trip, a fellow who volunteered help should we need it. Hoping for the unlikely, I phoned Barth Kleinschmidt, actually found him, and he was happy we’d arrived, pleased to help, and, “By the way,” said he, “it’s a big city, but my warehouse happens to be only a couple of blocks from you.” I hung up the receiver and said to Pilotis, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for your cosmic view—we have another coincidence happening here.
Kleinschmidt arrived in his truck to drive us to the big warehouse full of his business—unclaimed freight—and he helped us comb through the eccentric place stacked with the draff of our times: chef toques, reams of copy paper, deodorant-stick rollerballs, toy swords, carnival tickets, chinchilla pelts, lampshades, microwave ovens, wet suits, a snare drum, football bladders, bookends, a gumball machine, and thirty thousand other things. Within minutes I found some five-gallon containers, and Pilotis said, “I’m only surprised that you didn’t find them already filled.” We took them to a gas station and pumped them full, ate a good lunch, and returned to the river to see the last log drift away from the barge. Pilotis: “We’re down to props. It’s going to be hell or impossible to change them in that water.” Pedro, our host’s mechanic, overheard us, and said, “Come, amigos.” We got in the johnboat and motored up to the stern of Nikawa and, from his boat, replaced the props.
Twenty minutes later, under a lifting sky and light breeze that pushed away the dampness, we backed Nikawa into the Kaw, let the current turn her, and went again into the Missouri to start our ascent toward the next great bend, the one that would take us nearly into Canada. We pushed up along the Quindaro Bottoms, past the Kansas City water intake sucking in nine thousand gallons a minute to fill their fountains and make it easy for citizens to forget the river. Above the Kaw mouth, the Missouri was much less flood-struck, and we unconcernedly went up among the green hills. Park College sat atop its bluff, marked by the tower I used to visit in 1965 to look at the river and try to write poems about it; the reminiscence gave me confidence that I’d safely passed a point of no return in the heart. Then came Weston, a delightful old tobacco and whiskey town the river moved away from, leaving it high and dry (“Divine justice!” a preacher once stormed). Even with frequent stops to clear brush from the propellers, we moved easily through the peaceful afternoon, a calm enhanced by our having heard that the crest of the flood was now below Kansas City. The Army would not have to close this section.
We followed a broad curve of river and went under the long Kansas bluff that holds Fort Leavenworth, the preeminent post in the West after it replaced Fort Osage in 1827 and still today the place where the military writes its doctrine and incarcerates the most nefarious federal prisoners. In the first five years of the cantonment, disease and alcohol so troubled it that General Winfield Scott issued an edict:
Every soldier or ranger who shall be found drunk or insensibly intoxicated after the publication of this order will be compelled, as soon as his strength will permit, to dig his grave at a suitable burying place large enough for his own reception, as such grave cannot fail to be wanted for the drunken man himself or for some drunken companion.
And it was at Fort Leavenworth that a young officer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote the initial draft of his first novel, This Side of Paradise.
Dividing Missouri and Kansas, the Missouri River valley is a rather uniform two to three miles wide. Channelizing by engineers, coupled with the inconstant character of the river itself, have filled the bottoms with horseshoe and oxbow lakes, old meanders of the Missouri that create an abundant chain of pollution-cleansing wetlands underneath the Great Central Flyway used spring and fall by millions of migrating birds: bitterns, godwits, dowitchers, phalaropes, terns, grebes, widgeons, buffleheads, coots, herons, rails, soras, plovers, snipes, willets, ibises, sandpipers, dunlins, yellowlegs. Three quarters of American bird species depend on wetlands for rest, food, or nesting, but over the past two centuries Americans have destroyed sixty acres of wetlands every hour.
With the floodcrest downstream, Nikawa could no longer simply follow the curve of the river, so to avoid tearing her open on a wing-dike, we had to observe the navigational day marks attached to trees and poles; we tacked northerly along zigzags that are the hallmark of piloting on the Missouri, a procedure Mark Twain would recognize. It became necessary on bends to keep to the outside, often only a couple of feet from the bank, where the deepest water is, and everyplace we had to watch ripples to see whether they foretold merely wind or a rock dike or something worse. There is nothing more challenging or necessary than reading the surface of the water, and no pilot does it flawlessly all the time, for the only thing more fickle than wind is a river. An auto rides on top of a road, but a boat rides in a river, down in the usually invisible heart of it. People who do not like to swim in water that obscures their feet do not make for jolly river boatmen.
As we approached the old railroad pivot bridge at Atchison, Kansas, Pilotis stiffened. “Can we get under that damn thing?” I slowed, my mate went to the bow as we crept forward, nosing beneath while Pilotis called out the clearance. “Ten inches! Seven! Easy, easy!” I waited to hear a scrape or collision, but all was quiet except for the aerial soundings. “Six! Okay! Seven! A foot! Clear!” Had we arrived two days earlier, had I not been forced to lay over in my homeport, we would not have made it under that bridge. During the months planning the voyage, I’d forgotten to consider this lowest span on the navigable Missouri, and I wondered what others I might have overlooked.
At half past seven, we found at Atchison only the second dock since Kansas City, a small, friendly float although quite exposed to river drift. There wasn’t enough daylight to continue. Another Hobson’s. But for once the drift gave us something beyond consternation and broken props: a massive tree trunk, an ancient thing the river had pounded down to a heavy forked log, lay hooked under the front of the dock to form a V-shaped breakwater against the platform. After some shoving on the trunk, I slipped our horse between as if putting her in a stall. Could the timber hold, Nikawa had a chance to lie during the night safe from marauding drift. Pilotis: “What would we do without that tree?” Toss here sleepless or wake up in Kansas City.
The dock gangway was underwater, and we were not in the mood to get out the kayak, so we stayed aboard, but people came down to call their questions: “Why are you out there? Where you going? Aren’t you scared? Need anything?” Pilotis set up a small supper of smoked herring, Kalamata olives, pepperoncini, Branston pickle, and sourdough bread, and by the light of a candle I poured out glasses of merlot. We toasted, and while the Missouri rocked us softly by the Kansas shore, we sat in the little pilothouse, now our dinner club, and supped and said we’d not gone far on that day fraught with hindrance, but nevertheless we’d done the important thing—we had gone. Now we could hope to be above the worst of the flood. I relished how such an atrabilious morning led to the sweetest evening aboard we’d yet found. Months earlier, in my hopeful innocence, just so I’d dreamed of our voyage happening. The best part of that day was the night.