River-Horse: A Voyage Across America Read Free Page A

miles east of the Pacific, and what’s in between is our life for the next four months.”
    We took the Wards Island channel into the Harlem River, the other one with two mouths and no source. Like the East River, it too is a strait, although partly manmade, but even shorter and narrower with twice as many bridges as nautical miles. (A geographer might insist that Manhattan has no rivers at all; what it does have is an estuary and a pair of straits.)
    It may have been Pilotis’s comment about the two Astorias so far apart: suddenly I never felt luckier in my life. For the past sixteen months I had searched out and studied charts and maps of a potential transcontinental course. One evening, after poring over them with a magnifying glass and dividers to make a coast-to-coast voyage on paper with Pilotis at my shoulder, I finally went to bed exhausted. The whole night I dreamed of the twisted route with its leagues of unknown threats only to awake at dawn to the conviction we couldn’t possibly complete such a trip, surely not in a single season, definitely not without long portages. That afternoon, Pilotis, ever-cautious Pilotis, revealed a similar dream and reaching a similar conclusion and a parallel belief that the voyage looked like a six-month venture over two years. How, I cannot explain, but that twin nightmare canceled mine, and I figured what we’d encountered in the dark was not foreshadowing but merely fear. I realized, while I
might
lack the nerve to undertake the trip, I was
certain
I didn’t have the courage to tell friends I was backing out: with an audience below, once you’re up on the high diving board you must at least jump.
    So there we were, the four of us, river,
Nikawa
, Pilotis, and I, my friend wearing a strange smile and looking back toward the skirmishing waters of the East River; that smile of a small conquest was about to become known as the Hell Gate Grin. To a workman sipping from his Thermos under the Third Avenue Bridge I called through the window, We’re bound for Oregon! His surprise was but a moment, then he yelled back with delight, “You’re headed the right direction!”
    Beyond the decay of Harlem and the South Bronx, Yankee Stadium and the football field of Columbia University, the riverside began to seem less fallen, not lovely but pleasant as if all had not yet been abandoned or destroyed, and the water appeared clean enough that, were Pilotis to go overboard mishandling a line, there’d be no cry to be put out of a poisoned agony. The shores there looked benign perhaps because the cold water, like a moat, lay between us and littered alleys and dilapidating warehouses. A friend, a woman forced into boating by her former husband, told me the evening before I hauled
Nikawa
east from my home in Missouri, “Follow two rules: Stay between the banks, and try not to ditch.”
    Ahead lay the wide Hudson. I cut the engines and we bobbed in the Harlem to wait for the railroad bridge, so low that waves sometimes lap at the tracks, to open. It was river engineers cutting through here years ago that turned Spuyten Duyvil Creek into a canal and the Harlem into a little strait.
    The bridge soon pivoted to let us pass, and we entered the Hudson and turned north again, happy to have a river with a navigable portion that is naturally regular, an almost symmetrical shaft except for its run through the outreaches of the Appalachian Mountains called the Highlands. For two hundred miles upstream where it makes its grand turn out of the Adirondacks, the lower Hudson never shows an oxbow or even a truly twisted bend, in part because it is actually a fjord, the only one in the contiguous states, with a tidal reach of 140 miles north, as far as we would take it. At Yonkers, we moved below the statue of Henry Hudson high atop his column from which he looks
down
river and not
up
, the direction he was interested in, the one he hoped would take him to the far western sea. Pilotis said, “In a way,