THE PHOTOGRAPHER woke on Friday to find a blood blister on the tip of his middle finger and spent some time trying to recall how he might have pinched it. When he put on his glasses to read the breakfast menu, he discovered the blister was in fact a well-attached tick. Another diner, a beautician who happened by and saw our examination, looked at it and called across the café, “We’ve got a tick on a funny-finger over here!” Then she said quietly to my friend, “Where have you been with that digit, sonny? Didn’t Mama tell you about sheep?” For everyone to hear, she added, “This looks baaaaad. We’re going to have to play doctor.” She went to the kitchen for a dollop of shortening and returned to spread it thickly over the finger. Her treatment drew to us more diners who began defining their own sure-fire methods of tick removal while scoffing at others, the whole time our Photographer sitting silently, holding his greasy finger aloft. One man, who had spent perhaps too much time on the range, gave his technique: “Put a tablespoon of cayenne pepper in a glass of grain alcohol—whiskey will work too if you double the dose—drink it down except for the last swallow, then eat three jalapeños, then take the last sip and rinse it around in your mouth and get the tick between your teeth and pull real slow.” I asked, What’s the booze do? “It keeps you from caring you’re biting a bug’s ass.”
Thirty minutes later the tick was still locked on, so, lacking jalapeños, I put a lighted match to the critter and out it came. Said the beautician, an inveigling woman, “That shortening loosened him up. I could write a book on what you can do with lard—and I’m not talking cooking.” I said, Let us know if you need help with any of the, of the, uh, recipes. She leaned close and said, “Ohh, are we a naughty boy?” then smiled out the door. Her perfume fell over us like a veil, and I suddenly realized how far away I was from another life, how distant from cologne and evening gowns, shined shoes and Sunday matinees, easy chairs, a good book by the fireside. For a few moments I was close to believing I was ready to go home.
What the people told us about the next miles of river did not make continuance easier: the current would be too much for our canoe and motor. “Wait it out” was the consensus, a choice I couldn’t risk because, although the Continental Divide was only days away, we would still need a week of good water on the western slope. I have not spoken of one final time constraint facing us: I intended to follow three mountain streams to the Salmon River in Idaho and take it through the deepest part of the western mountains to the Snake and hence to the head of navigable water. Because the Salmon is a popular wilderness run for rafters, the U.S. Forest Service controls the number of boats going down it in the summer to keep it from being overrun. Four hundred miles of white-water rapids, it requires in high water boats and skills we did not possess. To get us through, months earlier I engaged an outfitter and had to choose a departure date because regulations stipulated that hire-boats must leave on a preassigned day or wait until autumn. So our crossing from the beginning was compelled not simply by the opening of the Erie Canal and the spring rise but also by government edict, one I did not disagree with, but several days of waiting in Montana was not only bad for morale, it also set the calendar further against us.
That morning I telephoned a man we’d learned of, a car dealer in Great Falls, a generous fellow who might consent to take us up a few miles of the Missouri in his jet boat. I described our voyage, and after due consideration he said, “I can’t go out this weekend. Not a chance.” Our luck seemed at last to have snagged. He said, “I’m sorry to disappoint you. Too bad you can’t go later today.” But we can! “Okay,” he said, “although I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know how far we can go. Do you still want to give it a shot?” That’s exactly our modus, I said.
We hauled our boats around the five dams near Great Falls, a portage of eighteen miles for Lewis and Clark that took them two weeks, where a welter of things from gnats to grizzlies pestered them. Wrote Clark, “To State the fatigues of this party would take up more of the journal than other notes which I find Scarcely time to Set down.”
The chasm the Missouri has cut through the dark and renitent sandstone just above Belt Creek is mostly easy bends and continuous rapids between and below the five big cascades, all within only a dozen miles of each other, and lying like steps, ledges which for years have been either inundated or topped with hydroelectric dams. Small by Missouri River standards, the first was completed in 1890 and the last in 1958; it’s hard to believe a power company could persuade the public today to allow, for the sake of a few megawatts, so massive an impairment of one of the most magnificent riverscapes in America. Indeed, some people are finally starting to talk about the eventual removal of the dams and arguing that the value of tourism to such a series of cataracts could overwhelm the income from selling electricity and, what’s more, put money not in the already full pockets of a few electro-magnates but spread it more democratically across the area. (To megawattmen, the motto on the old electric company building in Helena has a special meaning: ex aqua lux et vis, From water, light and power.) Now, having complained, I’ll admit the dams could be worse. Three of them sit several yards back from the ledges of the falls, so a visitor can yet see something of those cascades when the river is high enough to let a great volume of water top the spillways. Still, Meriwether Lewis’s description of “this sublimely grand specticle [as] the grandest sight I ever beheld” points up what Americans have lost through an unregulated pursuit of wealth by a powerful few. There are many places and ways to generate electricity, but the Great Falls of the Missouri are unique, and they cannot be moved.
One of those early hydro-barons, so I heard, did decree that Rainbow Dam (1912) be built only to a height that would not flood another remarkable feature in the chasm, a fountainhead at the edge of the Missouri. The cold and tremendous outpouring of Giant Spring comes from the Little Belt Mountains about forty miles away, a journey lasting eons. I bought several bottles of it, the labels claiming that carbon dating proved the water fell as rain and snow three thousand years ago. Until the moment of my first swig from that source, the oldest beverage I’d ever drunk was fifteen-year-old bourbon, a notable spirit, but that ancient spring water was a sweet draft from an antediluvian world, a quencher from the time of Odysseus. (Incidentally, the streamlet flowing out of the spring into the Missouri runs only a couple hundred feet and, so says the Guinness Book of Records, is the shortest river in the world.)
About four that afternoon we met our new boatman at Broadwater Bay in downtown Great Falls, not far upstream from Black Eagle Dam. Jim Pierce, about ready to enter middle age, was a rangy, slender fellow relieved to get away from the automobile dealership and happy to put into the river his new nineteen-foot boat driven by a motor with three times the power of the twin engines on Nikawa and three hundred times more than our pisspot. His craft was the kind that turns rivers into highways and—if it avoided sucking up sand—could cross the continent over our route in a couple of weeks. But such an effort would be like flying nonstop around the world: except to set a record, what’s the point of it?
Although Pierce’s machine was small compared to those insanities called “cigarette boats,” I must admit I’m not fond of such tremendously powered vessels and had mixed feelings about taking to his even for one afternoon, but the alternatives were to wait for the current to subside and perhaps miss passable water farther on or to portage the next miles. Such choices made my decision easy. To get washed out now after more than four thousand miles was not tolerable. It helped also that Pierce was a man of consideration: “If trout fishermen are out in the little drift boats on up the river, I’ll turn around. It wouldn’t be fair to zip past them.”
Meriwether Lewis, after the Corps had portaged around the falls and rapids and finally was able to see the country the farthest Missouri issues from, expected to encounter even more cataracts, as would anyone who looks into such a mountainous western sky; yet in truth there is nothing more than riffles, rapids, and islands, even though today many of those hindrances to ascent lie under three farther impoundments. Beyond Black Eagle Dam, the Missouri is a stretch of tight twists and narrow horseshoe bends running through a high meadow-like country, and the mileage to Holter Dam, the next barrier, is almost exactly twice the beeline distance. Pierce said, “With all this water, I don’t know how far we can go even if the drift boats aren’t out. We might not make it under that low bridge at Ulm.”
Off we went, up past the mouth of the Sun, or Medicine, River; it was here that William Clark wrote:
[We] have Concluded not to dispatch a Canoe with a part of our men to St. Louis as we have intended early in the Spring. we fear also that Such a measure might also discourage those who would in Such Case remain, and might possibly hazard the fate of the expedition. we have never hinted to any one of the party that we had Such a Scheem in contemplation, and all appear perfectly to have made up their minds to Succeed in the expedition or perish in the attempt. we all believe that we are about to enter on the most perilous and dificuelt part of our voyage, yet I see no one repineing; all appear ready to meet those dificuelties which await us with resolution and becomeing fortitude.
Some miles on we reached the mouth of the Smith, a canoeist’s river with a sign at the juncture prohibiting motorboats. Paralleling, but mostly out of view except when crossing the Missouri, was Interstate 15 where vehicles gave another perspective on our speed of forty miles an hour. The surrounding country was at first gentle contours brightly green from the rains and late sun, and glowing yellow fields of canola, and the river long glassy pools interspersed with swifter water of boils and a few shallows we skimmed easily; nowhere did we have to contend with broomstick chutes, a good thing since at our pace even big channels were tricky to interpret. We stopped to look at a nest of golden eagles, the unfledged young staring down, the parents in another tree doing the same, and from yet another cottonwood a bald eagle watched all of us.
We went around a sharp bend and saw ahead the Ulm Bridge, the lowest immovable span on the Missouri, and we slowed to a near halt as we approached. With the water so high and boat canopy so lofty, clearance would be by inches if at all. Pilotis watched intently and intoned, “Please. Oh, please!” I said, If we miss by a whisker, we’ll get ten fat men to step aboard. Pierce concentrated and visually calculated. Passage looked unpromising, and I said, Everybody to the side—lean over and take a big drink. On we went, holding still so we wouldn’t bounce the boat, and then we started under. Graffitoed on a pier was DONT LITTER BUTTFACE. We sneaked forward and, by a handspan, passed cleanly beneath. Said a relieved Pilotis, “It’s like the dentist saying, ‘Okay, I’m finished.’”
Near Cascade, we entered a country of old volcanic interruptions and perpendicular upthrusts and thousand-foot buttes, distinctively shaped things, and beyond them, for the first time from the river itself, we could make out what we’d waited so long to see—a deep and jagged blue shadow across the horizon. We stared in silence for a moment before Pilotis said, “Somebody assure me what we’re looking at isn’t clouds or an atmospheric illusion.” And our boatman: “You’re going to know soon that’s no illusion, but in a week you may wish it was.” We were at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
Beyond Hardy, the Missouri has a clarity downstream residents could believe impossible, a transparence that makes the segment through the Big Belt Mountains a fine trout stream, and on that day of deep sky, the river was astonishingly blue. The terrain before us, while not so eccentric and unexpected as the White Cliffs, we thought the most postcard-scenic along the entire Missouri. Among brown volcanic walls were lighter sedimentary erosions, vertical humps too round to be pinnacles and too slender to be hills, risings like the apparently impossible formations common in Chinese brush paintings of the riverine landscapes around Guilin. Even a stretch of dumpy little vacation houses smack along the water did not totally dispel the excellence of topography.
Pierce gave me the wheel and cautioned to keep the speed up to maintain our plane so we would pass over the riffles. As I spun us through the sharp bends, I thought again how a boat like this would have served us better along the slow miles in the Dakotas. I had no time to correct a navigational error and nothing but a moment to choose the channel with the best water. At that speed, which mocked the fast current as it for so long had mocked us, I simply looked and reacted then hoped in a kind of thrilling and treacherous piloting my friend called “a glance and a prayer.” Pierce said, “There are places up here usually so shallow you have to drag a canoe through. You’re lucky to catch the water like this.” Pilotis muttered, “This is probably the one time it’s not a question of luck.”
As we entered the section troutmen love, we saw no drift boats, the current presumably too strong for good fishing, so I happily requested to attempt the last miles on to the dam. Pierce said he’d never been able to make it this far upriver before, and he was invigorated by the easy run and began to envy our crossing. To that Pilotis said, “Think twice.” Soon after, the hydroelectric dam came into view, an ugly concrete door to the splendent region Meriwether Lewis called Gates of the Rocky Mountains; just below it we pulled the boat out for the haul back to Great Falls.
At supper that evening in a Chinese café, I tried to revive the crew with a toast to our good fortune in finding Jim Pierce and a reading from Lewis and Clark detailing their serious hardships which I hoped would give perspective to ours. I concluded with this satisfaction Meriwether wrote not far from where we sat: “My fare is really sumptuous this evening; buffaloe’s humps, tongues and marrowbones, fine trout, parched meal, pepper and salt, and a good appetite; the last is not considered the least of the luxuries.”
Our own fare did not seem to lift my comrade who said, “Even after we run the string of lakes tomorrow in Nikawa, we still have way more than two hundred miles of cold water charging down at us before we reach the Divide. We know now we don’t have a proper boat for mountain rivers, so what do we do? Are you counting on Old Friend Luck?” I don’t have the answer, I said, except to tell you our canoe could have made it up to Holter Dam, but I listened to locals even though I know they’re full of misinformation and negative opinion.
What I didn’t say was that our easy ascent in the powerful boat had saved us a couple of trying days in the canoe at a time when I was beginning to see the toll our voyage was taking on us. I was increasingly aware of the possibility of suddenly losing my mates, and I knew, as devoted as they were, this journey could never be to them what it was to me. I realized that, at least until we reached the Great Divide, I had to make our passage up the slope of the continent as easy and jolly as feasible, and I believed that, without a jet boat here or there, just then I might be sitting alone, eating lemon chicken and opening up a fortune cookie with no one around to share it. On the little slip, which I pasted in my logbook that night, was this:
NOW IT IS BEST TO TAKE THINGS
JUST ONE STEP AT A TIME
I passed it to Pilotis who read it once, then again, and said darkly, “Don’t ever try to write a novel. Lucky coincidence after coincidence kills good fiction. And that’s the way you’re proceeding.” I thought, Do they really believe it’s just luck and coincidence that got us here, or is this only repining?