River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (15 page)

A log-cabin just raised and covered but without window sash, or doors, or daubing, was prepared for the hall of justice. A carpenter’s bench, with three chairs upon it, was the judgment seat. The bar of Pittsburgh attended, and the presiding judge [was] supported by two associate judges, who were common farmers. The hall was barely sufficient to contain the bench, bar, jurors, and constables. But few of the spectators could be accommodated on the lower floor, the only one yet laid; many, therefore, clambered up the walls, and placing their hands and feet in the open interstices between the logs, hung there, suspended like enormous Madagascar bats. Some had taken possession of the joists, and big John McJunkin (who until now had ruled at all public gatherings) had placed a foot on one joist, and a foot on another, directly over the heads of their honors, standing like the Colossus of Rhodes. The judge’s sense of propriety was shocked at this exhibition. The sheriff, John McCand-less, was called and ordered to clear the walls and joists. He went to work with his assistants, and soon pulled down by the legs those who were in no very great haste to obey. McJunkin was the last and began to growl as he prepared to descend. “What do you say, sir?” said the judge. “I say, I pay my taxes, and has as good a reete here as iny mon.” “Sheriff, sheriff,” said the judge, “bring him before the court.” The judge pronounced sentence of imprisonment for two hours in the jail of the county and ordered the sheriff to take him into custody. The sheriff with much simplicity observed, “May it please the coorte, there is no jail at all to put him in. May it please the coorte, I’m just thinken that may be I can take him to Bowen’s pig pen—the pigs are kilt for the coorte, and it’s empty.” “You have heard the opinion of the court,” said the judge. “Proceed, sir. Do your duty.”

We reached Kittanning, then building a lovely riverfront park overlooked by the courthouse up the hill, a town on its way to becoming a flower of the Allegheny. But at neighboring Ford City we followed a long, unbroken line of factories and warehouses of brick, some still in use, others shuttered, a reach of decrepit and derelict history. From there to its mouth at Pittsburgh, the Allegheny was worn-out industry, its course almost unrelieved of Rust Belt decay and decline except for a few interruptions of riverside trees. We moved atop a river carrying, since the days of white settlement, local products, all having their turn of demand and ready availability and subsequent depletion: timber, coal, oil, gas, glass, iron, steel, tin, aluminum.

The dammed and locked river, rebuilt for easy passage, gave us just that, and the shorelines were neither beautiful nor ugly but simply used and, in places, clogged with discarded factories, each marked with a brick smokestack long ago cooled, each revealing that typically American resistance to take old industrial land for new industry so long as fresh woods and farmlands are available for the squandering farther away. An Englishwoman, shocked in her travels across America to see the depressing number of abandoned commercial and industrial buildings, a rare thing in her space-conscious nation, once told me, “I realize now that USA stands for Unlimited Sprawl Area. Your wastefulness with buildings is deplorable, and most of you are blind to it.”

Because the Allegheny locks lie close together and all of them were ready for us, we spent the day hooking up, descending, unhooking, and moving along more speedily than we had predicted. Every lock tender, unlike those on the Erie Canal, came out to take our line and loop it over a stanchion and return the free end to Pilotis. The details of this simple maneuver varied from lock to lock, with each man having a new set of directions, so we simply waited to be told how to do it his way, and that made the tenders think we didn’t know an oar from a shovel, which may be why one bystander we talked with shook his head and asked, “You think you’re actually going to make it across?” I answered we’d gotten this far from New York City in a couple of weeks, and he said, “Oh hell, my daughter drives that in five hours.”

Immediately below Lock Five is the debouchure of the Kiskiminetas River; although only twenty miles long, it’s the largest tributary of the Allegheny. It and its connecting rivers and canal from the nineteenth century could have been our way from the Atlantic to the Ohio had the network, including a portage railroad that hauled canal barges over a mountain, not been abandoned years ago. It was down the Kiskiminetas that water poured from the great and deadly Johnstown Flood in 1889, flushing bodies—and one tool chest with its contents unharmed—all the way to Pittsburgh. A few years ago, the river was declared “biologically dead,” primarily because of acids draining from old mines, but there too, new regulations demanded by active citizens have somewhat improved it.

Opposite the mouth of the Kiskiminetas is Freeport, at the virtual juncture of four counties, sprawling its fringes into three of them, an unusual circumstance since its population is not even two thousand. A couple of miles below, in a misty and woody bottom, we tied up at the long dock of the River Forest Yacht Club. To judge from the number of the big things in winter storage on the first terrace, a more accurate name would be the River Forest Houseboat Club. The Photographer radioed and soon found us and showed the way through the trees to the road, past a rusting tow truck with doors labeled:

FRANK CRASH

AUTO WRECKING

Our rivering done for the day, but with the sun nearly in its happy and notorious relation to the yardarm, we went into Freeport to search out our favorite Irish stout to accompany a recounting of the miles and planning of the next day, one, we learned, that would be hampered by repair work at Lock Four, a snag leaving little room for miscalculation. In Freeport, about which even a kindly visual description would misrepresent were it to avoid the adjective “grim,” we went up and down in search of some real ale, stepping into one place after another to find only television-commercial lagers. We might as well have been looking for a phroso. The Photographer said, “We need a GPS,” to which Pilotis said, “We have one. Besides, we know where we are—approximately.” Replied the Photographer, “No, we don’t have a Guinness Positioning System.”

We ended up nine miles northwest in glad serendipity, a frequent outcome of such real-ale searches, this one named Saxonburg with a Main Street from the nineteenth century, a fair village founded in 1832 by German immigrant John Roebling who developed there his patented process for “wire rope,” the stuff he used thirty-seven years later when he designed the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling’s son Washington, the chief engineer for the span, wrote, somewhat in jest, that his father saw western Pennsylvania as “the future center of the universe with the future Saxonburg as the head center, which was then a primeval forest where wild pigeons would not even light.” John encouraged his countrymen to immigrate and first named the village Germania but advised them not to bring tools, for in America “nobody could cut down a tree with a German ax.”

In the big attic room of the Main Stay Bed and Breakfast, near Roebling’s home, we did our requisite logbook work, then went next door to the Saxonburg Hotel, a solid building put up the year of the engineer’s arrival, and there we found our stout, not on tap but at least bottled. I tried to start a conversation about the massive aesthetic differences between Saxonburg and the dolorous manifestation of the town on the river, and I hypothesized that the dissimilarities were today likely the result of only one or two citizens insisting on communal attention to history and beauty. I said, You know—the power of the lone voice calling us to excellence. Pilotis: “Not now, Skipper. Now is beverage time. Happy Hour’s a phrase first used among seamen, but I don’t remember that they ever had one called Hypothetical Hour.” To calm my restive crew, I immediately unzipped the pant legs of my trousers, turning them into hiking shorts. The hostess, watching with something between alarm and fascination, said, “Now that’s one I haven’t never seen done in here before.”

W
E AROSE AT DAWN
and hurried along so we could pass through Lock Four ahead of the repairs that would shut it down till noon. At last there was deep blue sky in Pennsylvania, but directly above and precisely following the Allegheny Valley lay a slender, dingy muffler of fog, with the surmounting hills in full sun.
Nikawa
, not even visible until we were out on the long pier, was socked in tight on a day beautiful beyond the river, and we would not reach Four, only three miles away, soon enough to avoid the closing. In some concern, we drove to a breakfast café and set to work on logbooks, a way to avoid killing time, although we did give it a good choking.

The place was full of folks more or less the shape of biscuits and the pallor of white gravy, both of which they were putting down in quantities that convinced me a chemical analysis of their corpora would reveal them to be eighty percent identical to your standard Appalachian-country biscuit with gravy. Pilotis silenced my commentary and nodded toward the Photographer happily dipping into a platter of them. I don’t mean to make mock of biscuits-and-gravy, a jolly food like mashed potatoes or Jell-O, but it is to a rural café what schnapps is to a Wisconsin tavern where one hears the outsider ask, “Are you really going to drink that swill?”

Perhaps the overflowing talk in the restaurant was the result of the plates of b-and-g; certainly we had no trouble raising conversations there. One fellow, who found the thick gravy disappointingly thin that morning, told me of his soldier days in World War Two when he was aboard a civilian train: “I was dead broke, and here we were on our way to Philly for three days leave before getting shipped out. I came up with a plan. I took off my cap and went down the aisle and asked people—civilians—for a contribution to build a memorial to Missus Williams, the Mother of the Unknown Soldier. It worked to the tune of thirty bucks and change.”

When we returned to the river, the brume was nearly dispersed, so we headed toward Lock Four. Pilotis’s earlier phone calls again made the difference: the construction crew moved a barge aside to let us edge through, and
Nikawa
was down and gone. The river continued heavy with industry, more vacant shambles too, but there were still many trees along the banks to soften the harshness. The Allegheny became a kind of watery quarry, its bottom being dredged—that is, sucked—for its glacial gifts of sand and gravel, but the color occluded further. Pilotis said, “Hard to believe this is the same river we were on three days ago, probably even some of the same water.” Then, watching the muddied surface, “What else in nature begins its existence, its journey, clean and pure but finishes so soiled and sullied?” I said, You mean, besides humankind? Still staring at the Allegheny, Pilotis mused, “If the beginning of a river is its head, why is its end a mouth? Why not a foot or a toe? Or a rectum, especially since that’s the way civilization treats it?”

With Lock Three soon behind us, we came into Pittsburgh and the last lock.
Nikawa
made another rapid descent, the tender signaling us on out with his steam whistle that set Pilotis to singing, and we began passing under the many bridges of William Pitt’s town, he the Great Commoner who pleaded for cessation of hostilities with America but refused to recognize its independence. We passed Herr’s Island, once an eyesore with an abandoned slaughterhouse but now on the way toward becoming landscaped and not inexpensive housing. Beyond the old ketchup factory, we went under the Sixth Street Bridge which isn’t quite high enough to ensure a successful suicide, so the dedicatedly downhearted climb the big cables to the tops of the towers for the jump.

Mayor Thomas Murphy, who grew up not far away, once told me his mother always said when he left the house, “Be home before dark, and stay away from the river.” Now he and rowing clubs and others were reawakening residents to its three rivers. The Allegheny was wide and empty, giving us an unobstructed view of the downtown catching shafts of light breaking through a dark sky blowing out of the west. It’s excellent to see Pittsburgh from the bluffs—to realize its remarkable topographic setting where the Allegheny and the Monongahela join at that regular triangle to form the Ohio—but perhaps even better is the view from the water where the buildings rise in a way unmatched by any other river city in America (New York is a harbor city).

The Photographer had found a safe dockage for the night at the Pittsburgh River Rescue Station on the north side of the Allegheny, across from the Golden Triangle, the place those citizens of Vulcan began their town. With our man aboard and clicking his camera, the rescue crew motored up, gave welcome, then led us to a fuel stop and on to our mooring.

To celebrate a safe descent of the Allegheny, we went off that night to an old factory—at last a reused building—this one converted into a brewery of lagers which we ale lovers nevertheless duly appreciated, as we did a plate of pickled herring, but the accordion man in Tyrolean hat and lederhosen was another matter. My manliness would never admit that I try to flee when I see a belly organ coming near, but I will say that should I never hear one again I’ll account myself well served. We endured an enfilade of schussbooming polkas and Teutonic schmierkäse. Then that one,
“In München steht ein Hofbräuhaus,”
with its infernal
“Eins, zwei, g’suffa!”

The accordionist saw our navy blue sweatshirts,
NIKAWA
writ boldly across them, and he took an interest and decided to give a special concert inches from our ears. Half deafened, half insane, I was able briefly to quiet him by describing our attempt for the Pacific, but the musician was soon ready for “Beer Barrel Polka” when the Photographer saved another moment by asking him what he thought “Nikawa” meant. The music man stood puzzled
and
silent, then said,
“Jawohl!
It translates, ‘White man must be crazy,’” and then out rolled those damn barrels of fun—zing, boom, tararel! And that’s how, blues on the run, we got ready to descend the thousand miles of the river Ohio.