River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (11 page)

After supper we walked down to the dock to check our spring lines, found a bumper torn loose, and resecured things. We’d just heard there had been a three-day blow over Lake Erie, a body of water that yields its turbulence only slowly, but tomorrow there likely would be less wind. As we went to find a stable bed, Pilotis murmured, “I think we have a little rendezvous coming up.” That night I slept with apprehension as if it were a bad-tempered woman tossed by fever.

III

The shallow basin and the position of Lake Erie make it the most tempestuous and choppy of the Great Lakes. The wide frontal storms roaring down over Lake Huron from upper Canada and Hudson’s Bay strike Lake Erie with great force. The subtropical highs press in from the south. They engage in conflict over and around Lake Erie, and its shallow waters plunge and toss furiously. The winds can whip up tremendous seas on the surface almost without warning. The navigation charts are figured on a low-water datum 570.5 feet above sea level. The actual level fluctuates widely from half a foot below this datum in winter to four feet above it in certain summers. And the wind alone, sweeping up from southwest to northeast along the axis of the lake, may lower the level at Toledo by eight or more feet, while the depth of the harbors at the east end may rise by several feet. Likewise a strong east wind lowers the water at Buffalo and has, at times, actually laid bare the rock bottom of the lake near Fort Erie.

All through its maritime history Lake Erie has been unpredictable. Uncounted numbers of disasters, tragedies, and shipwrecks have overtaken men who have sailed over her blue surface. Time and again ships have put out from Buffalo under friendly skies only to be turned back or beaten to pieces by a raging sea before they reached Erie, Pennsylvania, or Long Point, Ontario. More voyagers have been seasick on Lake Erie than on Lake Superior. But with all her moods and whims, Lake Erie remains the most intimate and happy of all the Great Lakes.

Harlan Hatcher

Lake Erie
, 1945

T
HE LAST TIME
I’d felt such apprehension as the one upon me that Saturday morning happened the day I got out of a dismal hotel bed to report for active duty in the Navy. Now I studied Pilotis but couldn’t determine whether I saw fearlessness or a façade of insouciance, nor could I decide which response I wanted. Sometimes the chicken-hearted love the lily-livered. I needed a good rousing Sousa march, maybe my favorite, “High School Cadets,” but a thumping version of “From Maine to Oregon” would have been more apt. Although I’d been seasick only once during my naval tour, Pilotis and I ate almost nothing before we made our way to
Nikawa
, where I hoisted a blue peter of the soul to announce she would sail. The sun was just appearing in a cloudless sky, the wind a moderate fifteen knots, and our little boat lay quietly in her lines. So far, so good. Off we went, down behind the long, high Buffalo mole, ready to take on the second smallest of the Great Lakes which the old Jesuit explorers called “seas of sweet water,” but I think they had in mind only potability. We kept to the smooth, protected channel as far as possible before turning into the open lake. It was splendidly blue and not fraught with whitecaps—all we needed was two hours of such sweet water. Barcelona, New York, our destination, lay fifty miles southwest, where the Photographer, who had been off on his own assignment since Pollepel Island, would meet us with the tow wagon and trailer in order to take up our first inescapable portage. Life was good.

And so also were the first four minutes. Then
Nikawa
rose, rode down, up again, higher, down farther, continually building until we were soon into the violence of last evening. Goddamnit, I yelled, not more of this! Pilotis, struggling to keep upright, said, “Do you want to turn back?” In the increasing racket we talked it over: these conditions might hold for several days or they could get worse, but were they likely to improve soon? After all, this was Lake Erie, with a comparative shallowness that leaves it prone to rapid and violent changes from wind, one of the reasons a recent book about the lake called the section we were about to enter “the graveyard of the Great Lakes.” We banged along in ambivalence, hoping that beyond the next swell somehow would lie peaceful water. We did know one thing: we didn’t want to turn about and put
Nikawa
broadside to the rollers. And, as always, we had to weigh the Rocky Mountain Snow Imperative.

And so, under innocuous skies, the lake beautiful in its menace, we bashed on, our motors laboring against wind and waves to push us forward,
Nikawa
rising up the swells so steeply we could see nothing ahead but the blue yonder and behind only the deep. After a while we were, in nerve if not mileage, beyond any point of no return.

If you’ve ever made the first slow climb up the initial ascent of a rollercoaster, when it’s too late to disembark and before you is only heaven and fear, and if you remember that godawful pause before the cars drop into the screaming abyss, then you have a notion of what it was like that Saturday on that inland sea, except for one thing: we didn’t
roll
down the watery hills because they were too steep and close together. Instead of broad backs they had sharp crests which held us a moment before the engines drove
Nikawa
off the edge into the trough to a crashing, splintering, shattering collapse. We weren’t cruising on Erie so much as falling down it, and during any given hour we were airborne a not insignificant portion. At first the drops were three feet, then four, then six, and after an hour a ton of boat was falling seven feet every couple of minutes.

The navigation table almost immediately got jerked out of its locking mechanism and pitched to the deck, and charts, dividers, and pencils became missiles until Pilotis stumblingly caught and stowed them. My friend could only try to grip a small coaming above the entry to the cuddy, a poor purchase indeed that forced Pilotis into a simian squat to cushion the shock of the crashes. I had the wheel to grasp, but that did nothing to keep my skull from banging the overhead, and there was no end to hand-cranking spray off the forward window.

At every moment we watched for an indication that things were lessening, that the worst had passed, but in fact they went the other way. As we hit the bottom of troughs, the lake rose above the transom with only our forward movement keeping that crucial gap of air between us and the water, and I imagined some rogue wave breaking over into the welldeck (oh evil name) to snuff the motors. Without power, we’d be through in every sense of the word.

When I took my eyes from the compass,
Nikawa
instantly veered off our bearing, but with a choice of watching sky or nine-fathom water, I found the instruments almost a solace, and I was glad not to have a clinometer, but I did wish for a lethometer, a gauge I was inventing to show when conditions change from naughty to lethal. Where are the tocsins of life when one needs them?

On we crashed through the surge and plunge, making invisible headway, the indurate towers of Buffalo bobbing into view when we crested yet seeming to fall no farther behind. The south lake shore lay only five miles off, but over an athwart-the-swells course, so it might as well have been fifty miles. Still, I offered we edge closer to land in case of a capsize, but my deep-water sailor, so accustomed to a six-foot keel, would have none of it, and shouted out the hazards: shoals, sunken cribs, rocky shallows, dumping grounds, a wreck, sewer outlets. In one pause atop a crest Pilotis read the chart aloud: “Due to periodic high water in the Great Lakes, some features shown here as visible may be submerged, particularly near shore.” In the early nineteenth century there was a proposal to build a canal from Buffalo to Portland, New York, along our very route, but the idea never went beyond a sketch.

It so happened that a direct course required us to hit the swells perpendicularly, the most violent way, and Pilotis argued for quartering them—that is, taking them at less than a ninety-degree angle to allow us effectively to broaden the backs of the rollers and come closer to sliding down along them; all well and good, but that tactic would nearly double our mileage. I held to the shorter bearing of head-on violence. Take it in the teeth and get it over with. As for power, to use too little would leave us standing still or being driven backward, and to clap on too much would almost assure the boat breaking up.

From time to time it came to me that this wasn’t really happening; it had to be the insubstantial wandering of a sleeper who merely awakes in a sweat—nothing more; one good scream and surely I’d find myself in a Buffalo hotel room. But there was no waking. Never had I been frightened so long. Of the unwelcome emotions, I most hate fear.

After an hour of what I can only call terror, I realized my apprehension was the worst aspect of what was going on, and I sought some measure to kill or at least still it, to make death nothing more than a disappointment. In the bludgeoning—even the air in the pilothouse seemed to be tossing about—I came up with a solution: the wind was rising, the lake was not abating, and I unquestionably was going to die in a watery coffin of a C-Dory, so it was pointless to be afraid, for fear is useful only to those who yet have hope. River-Hearse. Scorn your cowardice, man! Proceed as the way opens! But was a way open just because it looked open? I’ve read that drowning, if you avoid the panic, is a fairly quick and painless way to exit. So, as best I could, I gave myself up for dead and tried to think of all those who might miss me. I can’t say it worked entirely, although my descent into bathos did, to a degree, buck me back toward pluck, but I didn’t suggest such a philosophy to my friend. Part of being skipper is to admit no impediments.

Pilotis called out that drinking from Lake Erie probably killed more people annually than sailing it. On we struggled, hoping the motors kept going, wishing the shoreline changed more quickly. A certain water tank seemed to be at the same bearing it was a half hour earlier—could the waves be giving us nothing but a beating and a fantasy of movement? My hands began to cramp around the wheel and my back ache from the slams, and Pilotis’s legs tired from the continual halfsquat, so we changed positions, and when I stood down I was immediately pitched to the deck. I couldn’t believe the difficulty in staying upright, so I tried sitting, but that was impossible and dangerous. I took a grip on the coaming, only to have my hands repeatedly shaken off, and I too assumed the Erie crouch. We were being pitched around like a couple of beans in a bowl, but we were yet afloat, the most beautiful word I knew.

The console over the instruments tore loose, the screws ripped out, but the welldeck was wet only from spray, and the motors held steady, and I tried to conclude we’d lasted nearly four hours, so
Nikawa
wasn’t likely to go down now. Built according to federal regulations, she was supposed to be virtually unsinkable, supposed to go under only to her gunwales before stabilizing. We could cling to her, but the temperature of the water in April would soon do us in. We had no real belief that our radio might bring rescue in time. With onboard space severely limited, I’d never planned to carry an inflatable life raft, a consideration that now led me to imagine how nice to see the
Doctor Robert
lumbering along behind; but Cap, clever seadog, was portaging his craft over this long leg to the Ohio. Why hadn’t I listened to that old riverman Mark Twain: “Traveling by boat is the best way to travel, unless one can stay at home.”

I grew weary with my incessant and fruitless expectation of progress, so I looked back at the wall of water—still pursuing, still waiting for us to falter and then have us—and as we scended a crest, Buffalo was yet heartsinkingly visible—but just barely. Using the tops of the swells as a crow’s nest, I tried to match the skimpy shoreline details on the chart with what I saw, and at last decided we were off Irving, New York. If that were so, we’d gone about twenty-five miles, halfway. Then again, if that water tank were at Sturgeon Point, we’d done less than twelve, and our holding out was highly questionable. We carried a small GPS—Global Positioning System—that could pinpoint our location, but we’d not yet taken time to learn it, since we intended it for the Great Plains, not the Great Lakes.