IN MY WRITING, when it comes to intuition versus advice, if the former is mine and the latter another’s, I unfailingly choose intuition, but when the issue was the Missouri River on our last day in North Dakota, I did the opposite and followed the counsel of two government officials who said the high water should carry Nikawa well upstream. That ended the Canoe Debate for the morning and, nearly, the expedition. We started easily enough over those first miles above Fort Union, and took comfort in knowing the course of the Missouri for some distance was one of rather long reaches after we got past a trilogy of oxbows. The day was fair, the wind but a breeze.
We immediately crossed the Montana line and entered Mountain Time, congratulated ourselves, said how we had only one more zone to reach, and the crew spoke of the Rockies as if they expected them on the horizon at any moment. I reminded them that the only contiguous state wider than Montana was Texas with its eccentric borders; I said that even dawn took almost an hour to cross Big Sky country, and that our route to Idaho was anything but direct.
The old Great Northern railway bridge, one of the few in the nation where locomotives and automobiles share exactly the same roadbed (but not at the same time, we hoped), is a vertical lift span, its design evidence that steamboats really did ascend two thousand miles up the Missouri on their way to Fort Benton—a bit of the past otherwise hard to believe the farther we went. I thought, If a paddlewheeler can make the run, so can Nikawa. It is such insistent optimism that leads travelers into continuing up the Missouri against the evidence of the river itself which for two centuries has gone to great lengths to indicate its general unwillingness to be navigated by anything other than schools of the finned and gilled.
Even before we were beyond the oxbows, the lake-like river created by the joining of the Yellowstone and the Missouri disappeared, and the depth dropped from sixteen feet to six, and sandbars began breaking the channel into trickles and dribbles and gurglets, a piece of river so unmitigated I could use my century-old chart to steer through bends and even around some shallows. But the glare off the water at times made reading it most difficult, and I soon ran us onto a bar, a beaching that held Nikawa as if the shoal were adhesive; neither poling nor wallowing her by shifting our weight from side to side could free us. It was a grounding beyond any we’d yet had. As life must go, so it did in that moment of our struggle: a motley flotilla of young blades, their heads tied up in red bandanas as if ready for the bounty main, came canoeing around the bend to witness and comment on our predicament. Seeing they flew a jolly roger from their beer boat, Pilotis whispered, “Prepare to repel boarders.” We heard a buccaneer sneer to his fellow picaroon, “Don’t offer them help. They don’t know how to read the river.” To that Pilotis called out, “Try it upriver sometime, O jolly canoemen!”
When they had passed from view, my mates stripped down and went over the side to push and groan against the bow until they overcame the shoaly grip on the hull and I could steer Nikawa back into four feet of water. On we went, struggling against a river that rewrites mile by mile every law of hydraulics yet advanced by science. Where there should have been current, there was sand; where there should have been a deep, there was sand; where there should have been sand, there was sand. All the same, I thought I might be slowly catching on to the Missouri chop-logic for those particular bends and reaches, but not before we had to pole off twice more. The erratics drove the sounder mad, and I glanced at it only to remind myself that even an electronic intelligence couldn’t quite fathom the Big Naughty. As I steered back and forth trying to keep to a good channel, trying to avoid an alluring and more direct route, Pilotis said, “It’s hard to escape an asphalt mentality that makes a straight line look like the right way.”
The worst part of a grounding was not the labor in escaping but the afterthought of wondering whether a strand of shallows was an anomaly or an indication the river was deteriorating into impassability and the June rise insufficient. On that day, the answer was six or seven miles of shoals followed by something worse, something that could not merely slow Nikawa but stop the voyage entirely—the archenemy upon whose nether church our venture could founder, Old Scratch-of-the-Rocks. By afternoon we were having to squeeze through narrow bankside channels where we clanked against stones, each time stopping for those dread moments of waiting to discover whether we still had props and motor stems. Even the halting was tricky, for if I proceeded too far after a hit, I might damage the engines, and if I didn’t go far enough beyond a rock chapel, the current would carry us back over it. In all this I found a single favorable aspect in our edging, grudgingly granted progress, another feint a Missouri River traveler uses to keep from submitting: just such an ascent was the way boats passed up the great stream for two hundred years; since I was there not simply to learn American rivers but to learn the rivers in their histories, I tried to accept how that one was teaching us in spades.
Where rocks and bars played out, we passed through shallows of dark silt the props stirred up and the engines sucked in with the cooling water, but that too had historical precedent in the number of steamboats that came to explosive grief because of suspended sediment clogging boilers.
The consequence of our travailing that day was we could not make our destination, Poplar, Montana, where we’d heard there was a boat ramp good enough for the trailer to reach Nikawa and let us use the canoe. With the afternoon wearing on, we grew apprehensive with the realization we would likely have to get the dory out at Culbertson. As unruly, illogical, shifty, and willful as the Missouri is—here’s one more river traveler’s gambit—it nevertheless gives recompense, and in that country of long reaches and mild bends it returned to us some of the finest riverine landscapes we’d seen since leaving central Missouri. Plunging right into the shallows, the steep and high Bighorn Bluffs exposed banded banks of yellow and faded-ocher clays and soft rock eroded into cuts and washes and pinched coulees. We knew we were approaching the far edge of the Great Plains, and that on some afternoon, if we didn’t founder, on the horizon a blue smear like an approaching storm would appear, but it would be the foothills of the Rockies.
From time to time we passed portable irrigation pumps sucking the river, and toward each of those I would mark out a heading because they indicated deeper water as a lighthouse does a shoal. On two occasions, beaver lodges built against the banks revealed where the river ran at a swimmable depth, and wherever we saw geese or ducks floating I made for them, knowing if there were enough water for goslings and ducklings to take their protective dives, Nikawa also had safety; but where we saw shoal-loving herons and pelicans, I took a different course. Still, since we were on the capricious Missouri, no method of piloting was without flaw.
By late afternoon, the Culbertson Bridge came into view, and Pilotis picked up the radio in hopes the Professor was there at the only checkpoint for miles, but we received no response. More calls. Nothing. Then a crackling that slowly modulated into a voice, and with the binoculars we could see him waving the signal flag. He radioed, “There’s no good ramp here, just some muddy slopes that look bad for Nikawa and worse for the trailer. Which do you want, an earache or a toothache?” We searched the shore and finally settled on a place near the northern foot of the bridge that attaches to the Red Bluffs. It took some doing to get Nikawa over the rocks, and the Professor had trouble maneuvering the trailer around the worst of a quagmire. The boat struggled against things of earth, and the tow wagon against those of water. It was a match made in hell, a union the Missouri, no less than the Styx, makes a specialty of.
After I squirmed us into position and then partway up the cradle, the trailer wheels sank to the hubs, and I had to back off, beach the bow, and jump ashore to study the muddle we were in. All we could do was try to make the quaggy ground passable, so we went in search of stones, driftwood, branches, flotsam lumber, and then we began wading, digging, and laying down two narrow tracks. Pilotis paused to say, “On the Hudson, do you remember the line in old Ed’s poem, ‘Go soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk the skid demon’?”
When the trailer was again more or less in position, I went back onto Nikawa and brought her up, but now the trailer was too high. I asked the crew to come aboard and stand all the way aft to raise her bow. I gunned the engines for a second, the nose lifted, rode forward partway onto the cradle at an alarmingly steep angle, then could go no farther. She was so precipitously inclined, as if again on Lake Erie, I could see only sky ahead. I called toward the stern, Walk forward slowly, one at a time! The big Photographer came up last, and as he did the bow gently teeter-tottered down into position, but the props came out of the water and could push no more, so with much sweat we hand-winched her the rest of the way. Pilotis went to the tow wagon and put it in gear, but it couldn’t overcome the poor traction and dead weight of Nikawa which moment by moment was forcing the trailer wheels through our cobbled-together ramp and into the mud. In another few minutes they would be locked in. With every inch they sank, so did our chances of getting out.
The Professor mentioned he’d seen a fisherman near a pickup truck just below the bridge, and Pilotis and I took off running. My friend’s face seemed to say, “We’ve had it. This time Mister Lucky isn’t going to escape.” My mind, I’m afraid, was about to agree. “Will you help us?” Mate yelled down to the fisherman. “No time to lose!” The man walked all too deliberately to his truck and drove us back. As fast as the crew could work, we double-chained his pickup to the tow wagon. The trailer was now in nearly to its axle. Trying not to hurry and spin the tires and dig in deeper, we put the vehicles into gear, but nothing happened except strange sounds of steel under great stress, the engines pulling so hard I warned everyone away from the chain in case it parted. We took protection behind Nikawa and pushed on her stern while the trailer tried to break the suction of the muck; now the sounds were more sexual than mechanical as the wheels began to rise from their slimy pits, and suddenly our venture depended on the weakest link in our chain. “Push, you sissies!” Pilotis yelled. “Lean into it, you mama’s boys!” And we did, and with a last slurping lurch the wheels came up and out and onto the upper end of our ramps, and our whole kit and caboodle rolled free and onto stable ground. Pilotis scowled at me: “Next time you disregard your instinct and take on the Skid Demon, I’m relieving you of command.”
Our Montana samaritan said, “This bank is one nasty bastard, and it’s like that because ranchers here keep opposing anybody who suggests putting in a good ramp. They do it everywhere because they don’t want people using the river. They think the Missouri is theirs.” As he started back to his fishing hole, he said, “Oh, by the way, welcome to Montana, the place where they say, ‘If it ain’t yours, it’s mine, so get the hell out.’ It ought to be our new state motto.”
We drove into Culbertson, three miles off the river, a bland little western plains place, once described this way: “Just when or how the town came into existence is not known, but the theory that there was a town gained currency between 1888 and 1892. In the latter year, however, a certain Lucy Isbel stepped off the train and spent some time looking for it.” We found Culbertson readily enough and also a couple of rooms and a garden hose to flush mud from Nikawa and the trailer. After showers and a small ration of River Relief, Pilotis and I joined our mates in a railroad passenger car turned into a café—it wasn’t a classic diner, just a railroad car turned into a café.
For the last couple of weeks we had made a standing bet about who first could divine the name of a waitress (waiters in rural America are as rare as passenger pigeons). The contest nearly got the Professor punched in South Dakota when he guessed Edna, a moniker from another time, for a woman just coming into her age-sensitive years. Pilotis, following some maverick interpretation of the odds, repeated the same name from café to café, but I tried to consider not only age but also locale, speech, and hairstyle. (I’ll say here, without concern about jactitation or advancing the narrative too far, that I eventually won with Stephanie, a guess predicated on sentences of this order: “So like, are you guys like in a boat or what?”) The wager usually amused our waitresses and got them talking about things beyond meat loaf. That evening Charmaine, toting a touchy load of cynicism not uncommon to the recently divorced, said, “Where you coming from to get way up here to Nowhereville?” Pilotis: “New York City.” She: “What interstate does that?” The Photographer: “It’s no interstate—it’s rivers, lakes, a canal.” She looked closely, evaluating us, then said, “Bullshit.” Having just ascended thirty-eight miles of a wrung-out river, a route more damp than watered, I could see her point.