River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (14 page)

We want a national name. We want it poetically, and we want it politically. With the poetical necessity of the case I shall not trouble myself. I leave it to our poets to tell how they manage to steer that collocation of words, “The United States of America,” down the swelling tide of song, and to float the whole raft out upon the sea of heroic poesy. I am now speaking of the mere purposes of common life. How is a citizen of this republic to designate himself? As an American? There are two Americas, each subdivided into various empires, rapidly rising in importance. As a citizen of the United States? It is a clumsy, lumbering title, yet still it is not distinctive.

The proposal brought other suggestions: Columbia, Fredonia, Vesperia, the Republic of Washington. South Carolina novelist William Gilmore Simms helped send the idea, no matter the logic of its arguments, to the dustbin of historical footnotes: “I conscientiously believe that if the nation was called
Squash
, [Americans] would not be conscious of any awkwardness.”

Our Allegheny passage let us repair ourselves from the bruising of Lake Erie, and the river showed us mergansers, canvasbacks, teal, coots, an osprey, a bald eagle. Big fish, as silent and dark as shadows, moved slowly away from us, but I saw only their backs and couldn’t identify them. Much of this natural plenty was the result of citizens working recently to clean the upper Allegheny, and we were in their debt.

On the east bank we passed a village once called Goshgoshing and later Saqualinguent, Indian names doomed on the tongues of Euro-Americans, so it became the simpler but still tricky Tionesta (rhymes with “my ol’ Vesta”), but in the dropping temperature and darkening sky we kept to our course as the river began bending, although its happy trend was westward. The rain finally found a way through the thick overcast and prevented us from reading the river and seeing far enough ahead, so near Eagle Rock we went ashore where the Photographer could find us. We pulled the canoe up to an outbuilding and asked permission of a startled woman to leave it overnight, then we drove the tow wagon a few miles to Oil City, only to discover the 1924 Petroleum Street Bridge lying bank to bank on the river bottom; just days before, the highway department had blasted it off its piers to make way for a new one. In the dampness, our course abruptly dismantled like the bridge, we stood staring, disappointed, and dismayed. We walked the river edge to find a pull-out, but the steep banks gave no accommodation.

My prudent mariner, of all people, said, “Let’s run it. We can get between those trusses.” Cautious Pilotis, growing improvident, seemed suddenly infected with my passion to keep water under us for every possible mile. I reasoned what we must have, both now and later, was not two rash people but one ardent mind in compromise; nevertheless, I looked long for a route through the twisted girders. At last I said, If the bridge doesn’t get us, the sheriff will—the area’s buoyed off. With that somber decision, we hung up the day like an old wet coat. But we were satisfied to have found the sometimes rampaging Allegheny so friendly and to have floated it so easily so far.

M
AY DAY
—not the distress signal, but the date. We retrieved the canoe from upriver and took it to the other side of the blown bridge being raised from the bottom a few feet at a time and torched into pieces of scrap to sell at four cents a pound. A farmer came along to buy a couple of half-ton cubes of collapsed steel to make into a garden bench, even though he didn’t really want one and had no garden; he just loved the old bridge. He said, “I wanted to turn some of it into a barn and house, but I already have a house and two barns.”

Pilotis was unusually willing to shoulder the canoe to the water, and I understood why when I heard an intoning from under the aluminum: “Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life.” Anyone happy to tote burdens just for a chance to recite Shakespeare is always welcome on such an undertaking as ours.

In the cool air, light wind, and broken sunlight, we were but five minutes onto the river when we hit the first rapids of note, and we bounced, took water over the bow, rode through to a deeper channel and on down past Franklin with its well-preserved Liberty Street, and then the river again took to the wooded hills. Gradually, pools became longer and more frequent, we paddled fewer riffles, the little motor pottering us between them, but the bottom of the Allegheny, now less lucid, still held many stone sleepers visible only as the canoe passed over their mossy backs. Large slabs of rock here and there slanted from the banks into the river, and we stirred ducks into long skittering withdrawals, their deep wingbeats dimpling the water.

River travel commonly makes this country appear as it ought to be: a sensible number of people blending their homes, barns, and businesses with a natural landscape free of those intrusive abuses junked up alongside our highways. Despite the continuous physical threat in moving water, going down a river can put travelers into a mellow harmony and make them believe all is not yet lost to the selfishness and private greed that so poison our chances for a lasting and healthy prosperity. To follow a river is to find one’s way into the territory because a river follows the terrain absolutely—it cannot do otherwise. I’d come here in the belief that I could never really know America until I saw it from the bends and reaches of its flowing waters, from hidden spots open only to a small boat.

At Kennerdell we stopped under a bridge to stretch our legs. I told Pilotis about my preparations for our venture, about scanning my shelves and shelves of accounts of exploration and travel in America. One of the books I pulled down was
Journey to Pennsylvania
by Gottlieb Mittelberger, a German who came to the state in 1750 to deliver a church organ and remained four years. He was a man of common cloth but nonetheless with insight into the hard life of immigrants often exploited by agents and employers. He saw much in the new settlements to displease him. As I neared the last chapter and read his angst over the wilting of religiosity among new Pennsylvania Dutch, I was astonished to come across an anecdote about one of my grandfathers eight generations back, Conrad Reiff. Mittelberger wrote:

I cannot pass over yet another example of the wicked life some people lead in this free country. Two very rich planters living in the township of Oley, both well known to me, one named Arnold Hufnagel, the other Conrad Reiff, were both archenemies of the clergy, scoffing at them and at the Divine Word. They often met to pour ridicule and insults upon the preachers and the assembled congregation, laughing at and denying Heaven and future bliss as well as damnation in Hell. In 1753 these two scoffers met again, according to their evil habit, and began to talk of Heaven and Hell.

Arnold Hufnagel said to Conrad Reiff, “Brother, how much will you give me for my place in Heaven?”

The other replied, “I’ll give you just as much as you’ll give me for my place in Hell.”

Hufnagel spoke again, “If you will give me so and so many sheep for my place in Heaven, you may have it.”

Reiff replied, “I’ll give them to you, if you will give me so and so many sheep for my place in Hell.”

So the two scoffers struck their bargain, joking blasphemously about Heaven and Hell. When Hufnagel, who had been so ready to get rid of his place in Heaven, wanted to go down to his cellar the next day, he suddenly dropped dead. Reiff, for his part, was suddenly attacked in his field by a flight of golden eagles who sought to kill him. And this would have happened without fail had he not piteously cried for help, so that some neighbors came to his assistance. From that time on, he would not trust himself out of his house. He fell victim to a wasting disease and died in sin, unrepentant and unshriven. These two examples had a visible effect on other scoffers, similarly inclined. For God will not let Himself be scoffed at.

Pilotis said, “Another instance of ‘Like grandfather, like grandson.’" Yes, I said, but Mittelberger’s assertions about divine retribution are mendacious—Conrad lived in good health into his seventy-sixth year, but he
did
die unshriven—As for me, I can think of few better ways to go than to be taken by a flight of golden eagles.

We returned to the river and followed its bends, passing many houses and a steep, clearcut slope with eroding loggers’ roads dumping mud into the Allegheny. As if to atone for those assaults, there followed a reprieve of rhododendrons richly green but not yet in blossom. At Emlenton, we tried to make a landing to get lunch but a severely rocky coast kept us off, so, crossing to the other side, we came upon long and overgrown wooden steps up the high earthen bank to I knew not where, but we packed up food, climbed, and found ourselves in the yard of a grizzled man working on two identical Fords, one with an adequate engine, the other an acceptable body; he’d paid fifty dollars for them both, and when he finished, he’d have a single tolerable car. We made thick turkey sandwiches, talked about weather, which led to talk about lightning, and that led to this from the mechanic: “My old uncle, back in the twenties, fell into a spell of bad times, and he finally decided to kill himself, but he wasn’t never a man to bear pain too good, so he figgered on some easeful way to join the Lord. One night he was in bed duren a electric storm, and he saw a tail of smoke come out of a light socket, and then he knew what to do. Over the next week he took a metal bed, arn it was, out of the attic on up to a bare knob, over by Wood Hill, I think he said. He clumb up with it piece by piece and chained it into the ground. The next stormy night he went up to that bed and laid down on it. His plan was for lightnen to strike the arn bedposts and electrify him. He said it thundered and flashed and jolted for two hours. It was like that whole knob was shaken, but nothen struck the bed, so he come on back home and got into his real bed and had the best sleep he had in six months. The next day he got up and figgered the Lord had changed his mind and didn’t want him, so he just went on about his business for another twelve years. Lived to be eighty-eight.”

Pilotis gave over the bow seat in the canoe to the Photographer who had spotted us from the old Emlenton bridge, and we went on down the river, passed under the high span of Interstate 80 which effectively demarks the upper portion of the Allegheny only recently designated a Wild and Scenic River. While the first adjective hardly describes the country, the new status may help fend off developers who see dollars in every inch of riversides, just as it may also check the abuses of so-called “property rights”-spouting landowners who would do whatever they please, to hell with the neighbors. Today the upper Allegheny has a chance to avoid being turned into a long, skinny strip of suburbia, and the abandoned railroad grade along the east shore, now a trail, can bring in walkers and cyclists who will pass through leaving only tracks and money in the villages.

Foxburg faces the Allegheny with a line of pleasing old commercial buildings, and about a mile downstream we passed the mouth of the Clarion River, its name coming from someone, so I read, who heard “the clear sound of distant ripples,” water speaking like a trumpet. On we descended, the sky obscuring, the riffles slowly disappearing in deepening water, the river growing broader, our run easy but for one violent underwater mystery that struck the canoe and motor shaft so hard we narrowly escaped capsizing. The Photographer said, “The Farm Bureau boys need to exterminate the whales in this river.”

We came to the Narrows, a peninsula only a half mile across but eight miles around by water, and with last light we fetched up across from East Brady and went to lodgings overlooking the Allegheny in the large Clark House sitting there a century and a half and formerly serving river travelers when packet boats plied this far north. We poured out a round of Old Mister Smile, listened to our hosts tell about East Brady—they weren’t sure why the East was tacked on since the only other Brady they knew was the former ironworks—and about the couple who “never married but wore out two engagement rings.” Then we went out to walk the misty village and took a supper that, to say the best of it, we were grateful to find. On only three gallons of gas we had brought the canoe down 112 miles of the Allegheny to the head of navigable river, and tomorrow we’d return to
Nikawa.

P
ILOTIS AND
I went off to a small boat shop to look for a repair kit to patch a deep gouge I’d put in the hull of
Nikawa
on Chautauqua Lake. To my surprise, the proprietor had one—only one—in a faded, dusty box long on the shelf, but he was afraid to sell it because he couldn’t remember the price. Pilotis offered five dollars, the proprietor considered, calculated, deliberated—the Louisiana Purchase was concluded in less time—and eventually decided six was better. While I changed the engine oil, my copilot laid in a smooth repair, and we took
Nikawa
to the drizzled river, backed her in, and struck off downstream for Lock Nine, the uppermost on the Allegheny. Because the northern locks operate only seasonally and primarily for pleasure boats, and because we were arriving well ahead of the opening of the commercial navigation season, Pilotis weeks earlier had negotiated through the bureaucracy of the Army Corps of Engineers and finally convinced it to let us pass downriver on the second and third of May (another deadline I’ve not mentioned), a persuasion that opened miles of water for us. When we appeared at Lock Nine, the tender was ready, actually expecting us, and we accomplished the twenty-two-foot drop promptly. One more barrier behind.

Not far downstream we passed a large gravel-dredge staining the water for several miles, the clarity of the upper river gone, so that now it flowed in a green murk, a sign not just of silt but also excessive agricultural nitrates and phosphates. The Allegheny turned us northward around a small loop for a few miles, then took a fairly direct course toward the Ohio. Those reaches were bridgeless, and below Lock Eight the river uplands were smaller, the trees fewer and farther from the banks. Over a line of hills and fields to the west lay Butler, the home of Henry Marie Brackenridge, a law student and later an important chronicler of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers; in the early nineteenth century, he described how the largely Irish populace turned out for the first court held in the new settlement: