ON THAT TEMPERATE Monday morning we knew we were going to run out of impounded water and enter natural river again, but we didn’t know where it would happen, an ignorance that made us set out with two boats, the canoe tied across the afterdeck of Nikawa in an unwieldy and unsailorly manner. Off we went up the west side of U. L. Bend where the fifteen-foot-deep water was half what lay on the downstream side of the tongue of open land that is too narrow and straight to be properly either an oxbow or a horseshoe. The bottom rose steadily but remained flat enough to allow Nikawa to ascend due north for ten miles until the Missouri became a river once more and turned sharply to give us a westerly run. The broad and broken uplands, part of the Charles Russell National Wildlife Refuge, showed no evidence of ever having seen anything human and encouraged our expectations of finding birds and animals we’d not yet come upon.
Islands, chutes, and sandbars began reappearing to force us continually to change courses and speeds, and after an hour I had only a guess where we were or how far we’d gone. At what I thought was just short of twenty miles, we saw the dread thing again. I groaned out a god almighty, and Pilotis looked at me instead of upstream and said, “Are you sick?” Up there, I said, dead ahead. The Professor: “What the hell is that?” Pilotis stared, then, “That’s what it is—hell.”
Across the river lay a thin miasma of brown that turned into a line of saplings as we approached, and once again we were into the willows. I weaved Nikawa up channels that became progressively narrower, shallower, until she was doing no better than the canoe could, so we stopped, untied the Grumman and put it onto the river, fired up the motor, and putted away, slipping between gaps in the trees until Pilotis and I lost sight of our mates who were to return Nikawa to the camp at the mouth of the Musselshell and haul her on to the next place a highway crossed the Missouri, thirty-five long miles upstream.
The unadorned beauty of the arid Missouri Breaks helped us face the distance ahead, and even more to our relief, we soon passed out of the willows into open river, not deep but at least free of any bulwarks of shrubbery. A big Canada gosling, almost fledged, crossed our bow in a movement that was a combination of paddling, waddling, and flapping, a chaos of feathers that set up such a wake it rocked the canoe and set us to laughing and made us look forward to more wildlife in the refuge. The spring melt was reaching its peak, but the Missouri, although hardly a torrent, gave just enough depth to proceed without hunting out chutes, and often we could take a direct course and cut across bends; nevertheless, if that was high water, we didn’t want to see it low. Coulees of many sizes interrupted the humpy hills, and here and about grew pockets of stunted junipers and little ponderosas, the whole scene beginning to look not so much like the plains but the farther American West.
Our progress was slow enough to allow mosquitoes to hover alongside and sorely beset us, particularly on our defenseless backs. We pulled on rain suits until the sun steamed us out of them, and we had to let the insects have at our posteriors, but on arms and legs we could kill three and four of the devils with every swat, a game that helped pass a few miles. When we stopped on a grassy flat for lunch, I took up my binoculars for a hike to spot some new species of anything, but as soon as we landed, the stench of cattle manure made us hurry our snack, and I found no pleasure in spending more time watching where I stepped than in scanning the bushes. The foul flat was barren of birds. We had landed in the Russell Wildlife Refuge, a narrow strip that boxes the river, a comparatively few square miles surrounded by thousands upon thousands of acres of grazing lands in every direction. In what way cattle, those Jaws That Ate the West, qualified as wildlife was beyond me, and I execrated the refuge managers for allowing such an abuse.
The place has come for me to say it: the antiquated Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 and two later modifications allow “ranchers”—many of them wealthy individuals living far from Montana and huge corporations like Anheuser-Busch and Hewlett-Packard—to run cattle almost anywhere on public land in the West, including wildlife refuges and nearly every mile of flowing water. Simply by paying an absurdly low $1.36 per animal per month (less than many fast-food burgers), these operators assault some of our most beautiful and diverse lands as well as American taxpayers who annually give a $500 million subsidy to corporate cattle operations. The very year we took to the rivers, the Republican-controlled Congress was considering changing the law even more to the liking of the industry. Considered against declining species—birds, plants, animals—the need for more meat in this nation is ludicrous; considered against the soil erosion and siltation that cattle create, the consumption of more beef is stupid; considered against the fecal pollution of our waters, the sale of more franchise burgers is criminal. For the past several years, big-spending cattle corporations have killed attempts in Congress to revise the grazing act to give a proper return to taxpayers and to control the degradation of our land and water. Yet what ordinary citizen would find it unfair to fence cattle and sheep away from our creeks and rivers just as we keep them off our roads? Windmills and pumps should water stock, not natural waterways. In the arid West, streamsides support three quarters of the wildlife, but Americans still unwittingly accept profligate and outdated laws that primarily benefit the wealthy while permitting them to poison the rest of us downstream.
Said Pilotis as we left that stinking shore, “How long do you think we’ll let those rustlers of clean water, those corporate hamburglars, go unhanged?”
We proceeded through a refuge that, discounting mosquitoes, showed us no wildlife whatsoever, not even an English sparrow, a non-native bird that will live almost anywhere. The rest of the afternoon turned into something to be got through. Our backs tired, our legs twitched in the cramped space, our bums burned from the hot aluminum and the bites, our eyes went bloodshot from glare, our noses filled with the butt end of cattle.
The Missouri is great in part because, like the Grand Mysterious, it lets nothing go on forever. A wind, not a hard one, came along to blow the air fresh and cover the hot sky with dark clouds so that our last miles were tolerable. But when we came within view of our destina tion, Robinson Bridge, a fierce windflaw ripped down from a rocky bluff to shake the canoe and, as if it had hands, grab my hat and pull it off in spite of the chin strap which caught the safety cord on my sunglasses, then hurl the entire entanglement upward before flinging it down into the river.
I must confess, at that moment I’d had it. I went to my knees and thumped on the bow of the canoe, shook my fists at the gritty air, and yelled for Pilotis to wheel about toward my sinking hat and glasses, the only protective spectacles I carried. This was going to be a difficult loss.
Pilotis turned the canoe as quickly as the waves allowed and swept up alongside my cap just as the river was taking it to the bottom. I leaned over, grabbed out in desperation, snagged a strap, and pulled up. Still enmeshed in the cords were my sunglasses. Then I was laughing, thanking the river for keeping such a necessity afloat just long enough, and I turned toward the thieving wind to imprecate it as if it were the 104th Congress trying to steal away the beauty of American lands and waters.
Moments later we were ashore. That night the Photographer reminded me of a famous line from Aldo Leopold, author of the celebrated book A Sand County Almanac: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” But that was two generations ago, and now the world is not so lonely for those who act on behalf of our planet.