Read Online River-Horse: A Voyage Across America by William Least Heat-Moon - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: William Least Heat-Moon
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creation of a practical typing machine. I said to Pilotis, The first typewritten manuscript accepted for publication came from a Missourian who wrote about a river, and he did it on a contraption made in Ilion. “That’s got to mean Twain’s
Life on the Mississippi.
”
The Erie now lay in long straight segments with only occasional warps from the engineer’s transit line. As we left the big hills of the Adirondack rumpling, Pilotis and I fell into the drone of the motors, once more thinking how easily we were moving along and wondering how long it might last. At Lock Nineteen the tender kept us back until the convoy could come up, and even then we had to hold further for the chamber to fill, but we had a simple mooring to a concrete wall with good rings for our lines. We went aft to watch the water follow our course of the last days, and then Cap’s boats arrived to tie up for the wait. The tourist tub lumbered alongside and began attempting a tricky and needless flanking maneuver, a showoff move, to ride in ahead of us. I was in the pilothouse to check fuel and looked up as the monstrous stern of the tub swung toward our forward quarter.
Nikawa
was about to be torn open and ground into the wall. I grabbed the radio and shouted for the helmsman to stop, but he just kept on flanking toward us, stupidly believing he had enough clearance. This was it—after only five days, our voyage was about to end.
Pilotis leaped to the rail, ran to the bow, and sat down to thrust out feet just as the heavy butt-end came up. With a shove made powerful by desperation, my mate moved us taut against our lines and by luck gained just enough inches to let the baneful tub clear our prow.
I stood in disbelief, shaking, still thinking the expedition ruined. On the water, the time between the easy life and disaster is but a moment. Blanch-faced Pilotis looked at me, and I said, You are one damn prudent mariner! Then I jumped off
Nikawa
and onto the wall, and in a voice of only a little less volume than the infamous loudspeakers of the tourist bucket, I dressed down the slovenly man and shouted something to the effect of wishing to see him never again on the same water with us. He only stared in feigned innocence.
I went back aboard and said to Pilotis, You saved this voyage by twelve inches and two feet. Thinking how months of preparation and thousands of dollars nearly went under, I got angry once more and started again for the wall, but Pilotis grabbed me. “Let it go. Let it go. He heard you—everybody heard you,” and then, smiling the Hell Gate Grin, said, “By the way, exactly what is a ‘moronic piss-brain’?” The gates opened, we locked through and left the convoy behind, and it felt good to show them our stern at Oriskany Flats. It was Thucydides, I think, who wrote two thousand years ago, “A collision at sea can ruin your entire day.”
Between Utica and Rome, only fourteen miles, industries came down to canalside, although a screen of scrub trees camouflaged most of them, effectively creating an appearance of ruralness so that we slipped past downtown Utica before realizing sixty thousand people were moving just beyond the woody scrim of narrow bottomland. In river travel today, perhaps nothing is finer than arrival in the center of a town without having to undergo those purgatorial miles of vile sprawl, hideous billboards, and reiterated franchises where we become fugitives of the ganged chains in an endless surround of noplaceness, where the shabbiest of architectural detritus washes up against the center of a town. To come in by canal or river is to see a genuine demarcation between country and city and to fetch up in the historic heart of things the way travelers once did when towns had discernible limits, actual edges, and voyagers knew when they had entered or departed a place. To approach Boston or San Francisco by the bay or New Orleans or St. Paul by river is to arrive suddenly and merrily like Dorothy before
Life on the Mississippi.
”
The Erie now lay in long straight segments with only occasional warps from the engineer’s transit line. As we left the big hills of the Adirondack rumpling, Pilotis and I fell into the drone of the motors, once more thinking how easily we were moving along and wondering how long it might last. At Lock Nineteen the tender kept us back until the convoy could come up, and even then we had to hold further for the chamber to fill, but we had a simple mooring to a concrete wall with good rings for our lines. We went aft to watch the water follow our course of the last days, and then Cap’s boats arrived to tie up for the wait. The tourist tub lumbered alongside and began attempting a tricky and needless flanking maneuver, a showoff move, to ride in ahead of us. I was in the pilothouse to check fuel and looked up as the monstrous stern of the tub swung toward our forward quarter.
Nikawa
was about to be torn open and ground into the wall. I grabbed the radio and shouted for the helmsman to stop, but he just kept on flanking toward us, stupidly believing he had enough clearance. This was it—after only five days, our voyage was about to end.
Pilotis leaped to the rail, ran to the bow, and sat down to thrust out feet just as the heavy butt-end came up. With a shove made powerful by desperation, my mate moved us taut against our lines and by luck gained just enough inches to let the baneful tub clear our prow.
I stood in disbelief, shaking, still thinking the expedition ruined. On the water, the time between the easy life and disaster is but a moment. Blanch-faced Pilotis looked at me, and I said, You are one damn prudent mariner! Then I jumped off
Nikawa
and onto the wall, and in a voice of only a little less volume than the infamous loudspeakers of the tourist bucket, I dressed down the slovenly man and shouted something to the effect of wishing to see him never again on the same water with us. He only stared in feigned innocence.
I went back aboard and said to Pilotis, You saved this voyage by twelve inches and two feet. Thinking how months of preparation and thousands of dollars nearly went under, I got angry once more and started again for the wall, but Pilotis grabbed me. “Let it go. Let it go. He heard you—everybody heard you,” and then, smiling the Hell Gate Grin, said, “By the way, exactly what is a ‘moronic piss-brain’?” The gates opened, we locked through and left the convoy behind, and it felt good to show them our stern at Oriskany Flats. It was Thucydides, I think, who wrote two thousand years ago, “A collision at sea can ruin your entire day.”
Between Utica and Rome, only fourteen miles, industries came down to canalside, although a screen of scrub trees camouflaged most of them, effectively creating an appearance of ruralness so that we slipped past downtown Utica before realizing sixty thousand people were moving just beyond the woody scrim of narrow bottomland. In river travel today, perhaps nothing is finer than arrival in the center of a town without having to undergo those purgatorial miles of vile sprawl, hideous billboards, and reiterated franchises where we become fugitives of the ganged chains in an endless surround of noplaceness, where the shabbiest of architectural detritus washes up against the center of a town. To come in by canal or river is to see a genuine demarcation between country and city and to fetch up in the historic heart of things the way travelers once did when towns had discernible limits, actual edges, and voyagers knew when they had entered or departed a place. To approach Boston or San Francisco by the bay or New Orleans or St. Paul by river is to arrive suddenly and merrily like Dorothy before
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