Read Online River-Horse: A Voyage Across America by William Least Heat-Moon - Free Book Online

the Erie Canal would have been significantly more difficult to build. Even today, betwixt the proboscises run two railroads, two state highways, one interstate, the Erie, and the river.
    We again proceeded ahead of the others to find the water quiet but for a lone canal-tender doing maintenance. Along one isolated bend we came upon, although we could hardly believe it, an animal once the most widely distributed in the Americas and today among the most elusive and mysterious: a crouched cougar lapping at the Erie before bounding in high arcs toward the north forests, its long tail whisking the icy brush. Pilotis: “That’s something, if you’re lucky, you see once and never again. Not in our time anyway.”
    Four miles west of the Noses is “the pot that washes itself,” a translation of the Algonquian name Canajoharie; the “pot" is a surprisingly circular depression several feet across that gritty, swirling currents have cut into the rock bed of Canajoharie Creek; people drive out just to watch it work. The village is close enough to the canal to allow a small boat into the mouth of the stream below the old BeechNut chewing gum factory, and travelers can tie off and walk to Main Street and on down between a couple of blocks of stone and brick nineteenth-century storefronts all the way to the intersection with an old-style traffic signal at the center, the thing called “the dummy light.” I once asked the mayor why that name: “Because it stands in the middle of the street.” Said Pilotis, “Have you got a better Canajoharie story?” Not really, I said, except for that fellow here—the man who thumped his little boy’s full belly to see whether he could eat more watermelon and who sold me a history of the Mohawk Valley and said, “My wife lives her days like forgiveness is the best revenge, and she’s forgiven me day in and day out for ten years.”
    The forty miles of canal from Amsterdam to Little Falls was easy running through softly cambered terrain of wooded hills that become larger and more deeply timbered as they recede from the Mohawk Valley northward. Only ten miles away they rise to become the Adirondack Mountains, a tract big enough to clean the slow wind that rode over us on its way down along the great Appalachian corrugation. In several places the canal berms are low, and we found good views across the narrow valley. Here and there, Interstate 90, the New York Thruway, came within a few yards of the Erie, and drivers waved as if we were locomotive engineers, and we saluted, since their Thruway tolls underwrote the operation and maintenance of the State Canal System: we could boat across New York because they drove I-90.
    In the morning sun, Pilotis at the helm, I sat back, feet propped up, and watched the canalmen putting out buoys for the new season, a farmer turning a fallow field, buds on the frosted bushery beginning to thaw; but the willows and sycamores, playing the vagaries of a north ern spring more cautiously, had only bare branches as if winter had just gone, and that made me imagine we had a world of time to reach the snowmelt of the far Rockies.
    Our conversation was doodling items of the sort people fall into when they are on water and content to believe they’ve earned an easy moment: as we passed Otsquago Creek I began rattling on how I liked American Indian toponyms and the manifold and usually fanciful translations attending them. I offered that Hudson was a better name for an automobile than a river and wished it were still the Mahicanittuck or the Mohegan; I said I wished the spelling of some upstate names looked more Indian: Skanektadee, Skoharee, Kanajoharee. After all, how much more native seems Tennessee than were it, say, Tenisi. And how about my state as Mazooree? “Not elegant.” It’s true, I agreed, one can carry even an Indian name too far. Take the Massachusetts lake due east of us, the one called, in its entirety, Char-goggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaug,