Hold the Enlightenment (34 page)

“Did the cops question you about it?” I asked Bobbie late the next day.

We were standing just across the river from our campsite, on top of the cliffs, staring numbly at the remains of a formation that was once a familiar landmark to Indians and fur trappers and steamboat captains. What we saw was a pair of inward-curving arms, each about ten feet high, stretched upward, to the sky, as in supplication. The arms had once held and balanced capstones so that the formation was a graceful natural arch, eleven feet high, a national landmark called the Eye of the Needle.

“We talked to the BLM and the local cops. We were the last people to see it before …”

Sometime between May 25 and May 26, 1997, vandals pried the capstones off the top of the arch, then pushed them over the cliff.

“I was guiding a group,” Bobbie said. “We were the last people to see it intact. Climbed up here on the Memorial Day weekend. It was rainy and slick and it poured rain all the next few days.” The steep climb winds its way up through a narrow chute, and it is necessary to move carefully, three points on rock at all times. Bobbie carries a climbing rope because a sudden rain can turn the chute into a water slide. “The next group to come through reported it down. Some folks think it may have collapsed on its own, but the cops told me they found the marks of a metal bar on the rocks that had been kicked over the cliff.”

The FBI was called in, Bobbie and her group submitted their snapshots—the last photographs ever taken of the intact formation—and then the years began to gently drift along, no arrests were ever made, and the remains of the Eye stand sentinel over the river, testament to a certain virulent variety of human disfigurement.

Late that afternoon, we climbed back into the cliffs behind our campsite. The rock walls closed in around us, forming a water-carved, keyhole-shaped passage of the sort found in caves. Several fallen boulders the size of trucks or houses blocked the way, but Bobbie led us scrambling up over them, insisting that she had something to show us. And, indeed, when we topped out, we immediately saw another Eye of the Needle—an arch of about the same size, wind-scoured and smooth as gritty marble. I climbed up to get slightly above this peculiar eye, and when I looked through it, there, below, stretching out for over a mile, was a maze of canyon and tortured rock, perfectly framed: an invitation to commit poetry or philosophy or any number of the higher aesthetic or contemplative crimes. I imagined there were other Eyes, in other drainages, none of them actually on the river, but all probably worth a climb—isolated instances of beauty and in no urgent need of beholders.

We floated through the White Cliffs, past Citadel Rock, a distinctive crag leaning out over the river and, at a guess, about two hundred feet high. The citadel is an igneous intrusion, which is a pleasantly onomatopoetic way of saying that hot magma rose up into the cracks of the White Cliff sandstone in hard, vertical blades called dikes. As the softer sandstone falls away, the dikes remain: towers of odd and idiosyncratic rock.

In 1805, Lewis and Clark took note of this particular rock, and on August 16, 1833, a Swiss artist named Karl Bodmer sketched the most famous depiction of the Citadel. Bodmer was traveling with Prince Maximillian of Wied, a German aristocrat with an interest in indigenous American peoples. He’d hired Bodmer to document the journey. The artist’s work was accurate and evocative. His drawings and watercolors underscore, I think, one of the few faults
of the Lewis and Clark expedition: their failure to bring along an artist like Bodmer to record their trip.

Somewhat farther down the river is another igneous intrusion, a relatively thin blade of rock standing at right angles to the course of the river. From upriver, we could see—at the summit of that rock—a large roundish hole through which blue sky was visible. This was the Hole in the Wall.

We saw two canoes on the bank, and there were two older gentlemen sitting in lawn chairs and fishing for Missouri River sturgeon where we pulled over to climb up. “Uh, our wives are up there,” one of the fishermen said, pointing toward the canyons and gullies that led up to the Hole. He held out a mobile phone. “They said they’re stuck.”

“Probably not so bad,” the other fellow said.

“You might give them a hand on your way up,” the first man said in a paroxysm of chivalry.

One of the women was frozen at a tricky down-climb and her friend wouldn’t leave her. Bobbie climbed up to their position, deployed the rope, and sent the women back to their husbands, who were talking about sturgeon on the riverbank far below.

The Hole in the Wall is about three hundred feet above the river, standing above a ridge that drops to a sloping grassy hillside. We moved through the grass, wary of snakes. Prairie rattlers, up to six feet long, make their homes along the Missouri. We’d seen no rattlers, but the campsites were full of bull snakes slithering along on their reptilian business. They are bigger than rattlers and essentially harmless to humans. It is a tenant of Montana folk wisdom that when the bull snakes are plentiful, rattlers are scarce. Still, it is disconcerting to nearly step on a seven-foot-long snake. Bulls will hiss, and they can bite, but are not venomous.

As we moved through the grass, Scott hissed, snakelike. Linnea froze with a foot in the air, and we all laughed—ha, ha, ha—about how funny our best chef was today, and nobody snuck up from behind to bean him with a rock.

The view was 320 degrees of palaces and turrets and spires. We could hear the wind whistling and booming through the Hole as
we crawled up the backside of the formation, past initials and names and dates carved into the rock. None of them said: “Meriwether Lewis, 1805.”

And then we were back on the river, paddling past piles of columned rocks standing alone on the sage-littered hillsides that looked like Greek temples.

“That one,” I said, paddling beside Scott, “looks like the Acropolis.”

“I see a Buddha,” he said.

“You’re right,” I said, staring at the Acropolis. “Spitting image of the Buddha.”

We camped near a place called Steamboat Rock, because it looks like a steamboat, though it is likely Scott saw other images. No one asked him. I climbed a dry drainage and found a big-game trail leading up to the summit of a ridge overlooking a hillside that dropped down to the river. The slope was crowded with closely spaced but individual pillars that looked, to me, like the rows upon rows of terra-cotta soldiers at Xi’an, in China.

Back at camp, as Scott cooked, Joel and I argued a bit about cows. Very occasionally, we saw a few of the animals on a distant hillside. Once we found a dozen standing in the water. Joel is one of those folks who would like to see the federal government deny grazing leases and buy up—or merely confiscate—millions of acres to save the land from the depredations of ranchers. I, on the other hand, live in Montana, know many ranchers, and believe that they are often conscientious stewards of the land.

The BLM manages the Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River with the stated purpose of ensuring “that the river will retain its essentially wild and pristine nature.” The BLM asks floaters to do their part in protecting this vision, which Joel translated as “destroy all cows.”

“Actually,” Linnea said, “I floated this stretch fifteen years ago, and there were cows everywhere.” Now it was a jolt to see just one, even from a distance.

I thought about that while floating the next day. There was no
one else on the river at all, and when I blasted out ahead of the others, paddling like a bastard, it was easy to imagine that I was the first person on the river, the first to see this stretch.

There is a bridge over the Missouri where the Judith River empties into it from the south, and a BLM campsite at what is called Judith Landing. It was a weekend and there was a dirt bike competition on a track just up from the river. The bikes roared over various jumps in phalanxes of four and five.

“Nice place,” I said to Joel, shouting over the howl of dirt machines. “No cows.”

About a half mile down, we lost the sound of the dirt bikes and set up camp on the grassy banks of the river. There weren’t a lot of trees, not as many as one would expect, anyway, and that is partially the legacy of steamboats that brought trappers and traders and pioneers up the river for the entire last half of the nineteenth century. A steamboat burned about thirty cords of wood a day, and, in the years between 1860 and 1888, there were four hundred steamboats operating on the Missouri in Montana. Wood was purchased from enterprising businessmen called woodhawks, who, naturally, cut down the most convenient trees available, the cottonwoods on the riverbank. The cottonwoods have not come back in force. They need an occasional flood to propagate properly, and a dam above the Wild and Scenic stretch of the river moderates the yearly flood.

“And even if a few do get a start, there are always cows to trample them and such,” Joel said.

“You see any cows?” I asked.

“They used to be here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because there’re no cottonwoods.”

And so it went, bickering on about cows all the next day, until, once again, I paddled out far ahead, then drifted down the river in splendid solitude. The White Cliffs had given way to layers of sand and clay called Claggett Shale, the Judith River Formation, and Bearpaw Shale.

Shale means badlands: those areas of tortured, eroded hills and
cliffs unsuitable for ranching or farming. Badlands are seldom inhabited by humans (or cows), which is why they are generally alive with wildlife of almost every description. We saw golden eagles, bald eagles, osprey, mule deer, antelope, foxes.

At our campsite that night, we watched the sun set on some bighorn sheep up in the notch of a ridgeline above. I thought it might be possible to climb up on the notch, but Joel said it couldn’t be done.

Which is why, the next day, David Fox, Bobbie Gilmore, and I were laboring up a hillside of crumbling black mud: just about what you’d expect from an old, dried-out seabed. Near the top I found myself in trouble. There was no going down—too crumbly—and the last few moves were pretty much impossible, just as Joel had said. What was I doing up here, anyway? Trying to prove something to Joel about cows?

Bobbie and David were already standing on top, just above me, watching my struggles.

“You know,” Bobbie said, “if you got your weight out over your feet, you’d be right up here. You climb like a reptile.”

True enough, but I managed to find a handhold and lever myself up over the top. It was a fine view all around, especially directly below, where the bighorn sheep were staring up at us with an air of incredulous curiosity. I waved down at the camp, signaling Joel in a gesture that I hoped expressed the oxymoronic concept of bovine nobility.

The last ten miles of the float were in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, a million acres of native prairies and forests in the groins of the hills, and otherwise all badlands and river bottom. The mud was about as bad as it gets here, and there was no way to stop for lunch anywhere along any bank without sinking into the greasy muck up to the knee. And there was no way to scrape the mud off legs or sandals without simply spreading it around, distributing it more evenly about the body.

So we were filthy when we took out at the Fred Robinson Bridge on Montana Highway 191. We washed Bobbie’s kayaks a number of times, but every time they dried, we could still see the
same thin skim of Missouri mud on them. Everyone embraced everyone else—spreading more gumbo mud about—and I mentally ticked “Missouri River Float” off the Life List but noticed that, almost immediately, it migrated directly into the “Do Yearly” column. Missouri mud does not want to let you go. It clutches at you across time and space. It lives in dreams, in the heart, and in the soul, and I was still washing little bits of it out of my bathtub three days later.

I
’ve been writing about travel for twenty years now. I get interviewed about it a lot, and the articles that result always have excruciating titles, like “A Travel Pro’s Advice for Hapless Innocents.”

But travel advice, on the whole, is a fairly straightforward affair. It’s all pretty obvious: Make sure you have a current passport and a visa, if necessary. Pack half the clothes you think you’ll need, and take twice the money. Get the proper shots, carry the appropriate medications, consult your doctor or the Centers for Disease Control. Purify drinking water in cholera-ridden areas. Study up on the festering political and cultural animosities so that you don’t do something to create a situation in which already angry or zealous people feel obligated to march on your campsite with pitchforks and torches. That sort of thing.

On guided expeditions, a lot of this is taken care of for you. Of course, there are those who believe that commercial adventure travel lacks any semblance of actual adventure, in that your chances of being killed in the field are substantially diminished in the presence of competent guides. This may be true, but a guided trip is still the best way to learn the ropes and calibrate your own tolerance for peril. You alone get to decide if the trip was an “adventure.” That’s the rule.

What follows is a personal list of somewhat less-evident rules, which can be used whether you’re traveling on your own or on a guided trip. A few are entirely idiosyncratic. Like …

Rule 1:
Avoid psychotic travel companions. Here’s the nightmare: It’s two in the morning. You are sitting around the campfire speaking slowly, with exaggerated calm, enunciating each word very, very carefully. You are saying, “Give me the gun, Laszlo. Give
me
the gun, Laszlo.
Give
me the gun, Laszlo.”

Rule 1, corollary 1:
The most carefully chosen travel companions become the most psychotic.

Rule 1, corollary 2:
Psychosis is contagious.

Rule 2:
Have a quest. The quest is the most significant and consequential of all travel plans. What you really want to do is meet indigenous folks, understand their concerns, find out how things work, make friends. You don’t do this in the company of traveling English-speakers. So have a quest, some bit of business that will shove you into the cultural maelstrom. Perhaps you have distant relatives in the country. Look them up. That’s your quest. It will force you to use the phone book (people in Iceland, you’ll note, are listed by their first rather than last names) and to arrange transportation to an area of the country that is not likely a tourist destination. Perhaps you’re interested in trains, or motorcycle clubs, or ecological issues. Find locals who share your passion. You’ll make friends.