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Overview
In Canoeing the Great Plains, Dobson recounts his journey on the Missouri, the country’s longest river. Dobson, a novice canoeist when he begins his trip, faces the Missouri at a time of dangerous flooding and must learn to trust himself to the powerful flows of the river and its stark and serenely beautiful countryside. He meets a cast of characters along the river who assist him both with the mundane tasks of canoeing—portaging around dams and reservoirs and finding campsites—and with his own personal transformation. Mishaps, mistakes, and misadventures plague his trip, but over time the river shifts from being a frightening adversary to a welcome companion.
As the miles float by and the distinctions blur between himself and what he formerly called nature, Dobson comes to grips with his past, his fears, and his life beyond the river.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803274433 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNP - Bison Books |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 730 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Canoeing the Great Plains
A Missouri River Summer
By Patrick Dobson
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7443-3
CHAPTER 1
Doomed
I stepped off my porch in Kansas City and into the Great Plains on May 1, 1995. It was one of those crisp, sunny midwestern mornings that erases bad memories and fills me with hope of my salvation. For the next two and half months, I trekked fourteen-hundred-plus miles through landscapes so beautiful they hurt my senses. My journey took me through the difficult terrains of being me, a hardheaded guy who, at that moment, wanted and needed to find more in life than working and dying. I thought I found that in the Great Plains. Then I wound up on the bank of the Missouri River outside Helena, Montana, and understood how much farther I needed to go.
That day, July 15, the river, swollen with spring rains and snowmelt sluicing down from the Montana Rockies, wrapped sinewy emerald currents around the bridge pillars and through the grass where it fled its banks. I had only one thought, likely the one that saved me a lifetime of disappointment: I was going home on this river. I had come too far and learned too much. I wasn't turning back.
As I walked across the prairies and among fields of wheat and corn, my conception of the Missouri was that of a child's. I was born in a city beside it, and all my life I drank and bathed in it from spigots and faucets. As a boy, I ran through it as it gushed from sprinklers in front yards. I dunked and splashed in it at the bright and blue municipal pool. It was the river of garden hoses and fire hydrants, fountains and fish tanks.
All across the plains, I feared discovering the Missouri was more powerful or terrible than I had heard or imagined. When the passing of a semi or a squawking goose woke me in the night, fear of the river kept me awake. My thoughts whirling in circles and my anxiety building, I reflected instead on blue-green oceans of wheat, lazy trills of meadowlarks, and people I'd met on the road. When I finally fell asleep, the river flowed through my dreams, a black line just out of sight on the other side of the wheat and corn.
On waking each morning, uncertainty about the road ahead froze me in my sleeping bag. Where was I going? What was I trying to prove? Who would I meet along the way? Where would I sleep that night? With great effort, I wrestled these thoughts aside and climbed out of that sleeping bag, dressed, and fired up my stove. As I waited for water to boil, I rolled up the sleeping bag, stuffed gear into my pack, and put on my shoes. I washed my face and hair in some sink in some bathroom somewhere. Then I drank my tea and put my shoes to the pavement.
The road took charge. Worry disappeared. After a mile or two, the sun and wind transformed my thoughts into daydreaming. I imagined bison herds stretching to the horizon. I bumped along in horse-drawn wagons, camped out with Indians, and pounded rail spikes with gangs of rough men. I dreamed of winning the lottery and giving all the money away.
Twenty-some miles later, I set up for the night in a park, someone's yard, or on a couch. When I sat down, the day complete, my head hummed from heat and sun and the rhythm of walking. In those moments, I reflected on conversation earlier in the day with a stranger over a cup of coffee or on the shoulder of the road. Sometimes I watched the sun set without moving or thinking, until I nodded and slipped into my sleeping bag. For more than seventy days — an entire lifetime, it seems now — though the river flowed at the boundary of my dreams, it might have been as far away as the moon.
Once I arrived in Helena, I could no longer ignore the 2,200-mile ribbon of water back to Kansas City. I was frightened: the currents, the hardships, the lessons I still had to learn. Unable to bear such fear, I focused, instead, on more immediate things, just as I had each morning walking across the plains. For the week I was in Helena, I gathered gear, arranged funds, and found a way to transport my boat, a sixteen-foot purple canoe, from a sporting-goods store in downtown Helena to the river.
Despite my best effort, I couldn't make the river go away. It flowed through my thoughts and the middle of my dreams. When I settled each night into the creaking bed in my bare-bulb hotel room and stared at the ceiling, I ached with the enormity of the journey ahead. Unable to sleep, I walked Helena's empty streets, wandered its alleys, and walked up into the hills to the west of town. Then, in the morning, I wrestled with the tasks at hand until the pieces came together and it was time to go.
As I stood on the bank at the Wolf Creek Bridge that July afternoon, the clouds that had hung behind the rocky sagebrush hills all afternoon blew into the valley. Within minutes, cold wind whipped the river into an angry, foamy field of white and dark green. Stinging nickel-sized raindrops splashed my fire into a smolder, the steam and smoke hugging the ground and spinning away. When the rain and cold so fogged my glasses that I couldn't see, I climbed into my tent and lay wet on my sleeping bag. I felt the river waiting behind the wind and rain.
Sometime later the wind died, and heavy rain turned into a steady drizzle. I piled the steaming remains of my fire with wet sticks, crossed the bridge, and walked along a river road. At some distance, I looked back at my campsite. The smoke from the fire rose in a wispy column. For the next two-plus months, I would live in that canoe and with those few pieces of gear. They seemed too small for such a hefty task. I was tempted to scuttle up the side of a brushy hill and get a better look downstream. But I didn't want to see or know the future. Would I have the courage to go all the way? What would the river reveal? Of itself? Of me?
On returning to my camp, I stoked the fire and watched the river from my picnic table. A truck that pulled a trailer of drift boats bounced down off the road and into the grassy field at the river access. After backing the trailer to the gravel boat ramp, a gray-haired woman stepped out of the truck and stood to the side. She wore a down vest and was sturdy as a stump. She barked orders at three men who loaded the boats with coolers, fly rods, and tackle boxes. A group of men in high-fashion fly-fishing outfits milled about looking anxious and out of place. They talked and laughed loudly, like walking through a graveyard at night. Their voices echoed over the river. Once the men climbed into the boats and set afloat on the still, opaque water, the woman walked over and sat down at the picnic table.
"Whatcha doing here?" she asked in a low, gravelly voice.
I had backpacked from Kansas City, I said. The river was my way home.
She peered at me with a wrinkled squint. Her lip curled and exposed small, stained teeth.
"You're doomed," she growled.
Before she came, I'd sat at the table, staring at the river, telling myself I wasn't going to fail. The perils were not that great. I was going to have fun and get home just fine. But when this stranger told me my journey would lead to failure, I despaired.
"I don't feel doomed," I said like a bullied kid who says, "Oh, yeah? Well, that's what you say." I didn't want to admit that I might die on this trip or, at some point, give up and go home to a life of wretched disappointment.
She harrumphed.
"You got no business out there," she said. "It's a flood year, boy. It's dangerous as hell."
Reminding me of my ineptitude was bad enough. "Boy" made me angry.
"You put people on it every day," I said. "It must be dangerous for them."
"Mister, I take city people down a little stretch of river for lots of money." She sniffed, lit a cigarette, and looked over my gear, which was in a pile by the fire. "You don't know what you're doing, do ya? You oughta turn around and go right back where you come from. That river's gonna eat you."
I slapped my journal down on the wet table and marched over to the bank. "Yeah, well, fuck you," I thought.
She was right. I'd spent all of an hour in my canoe paddling around a park lake in Helena. I'd canoed a lazy Missouri stream ten years before, when I was twenty-two. On that trip, I'd filched beer out of my friends' coolers and hard liquor from their packs and passed out in the bottom of a canoe before the middle of the first day. The rest of the weekend exists somewhere in a blackout. I don't know how I got home.
With that much know-how, then, I was starting down a big river. I counted on learning by degrees the skills I needed to get me home.
My heart raced, and my thoughts whirred in tight circles. My hands shook. The "I'll show those bastards" chip on my shoulder grew a few sizes. That defiance motivated nearly everything I'd ever done or tried. It still crops up whenever I'm intimidated and feel inept or resentful. That woman may be right, I thought to myself, but I'd prove her wrong. Regardless of the difficulties I faced, I'd pull my boat up on the bank at Kansas City and scream, "I showed you!"
I took a deep breath and stood there a minute more. On the opposite bank, a blue heron stood like a statue. Suddenly, it threw its head forward, and the water flashed. It came up with a fish in its beak. Jerking its head back, it pumped its neck and swallowed the fish. Then it took to the air and disappeared downstream with a primordial croak.
Oh, brother.
I felt the woman's gaze on the back of my neck. Did I have the wherewithal for the trip to Kansas City? Could I stand the isolation? Were there rapids and waterfalls? How would I deal with them? What would I do in storms? What kinds of people would I meet in the next two and a half months? What kinds of wildlife? Were there bears? Moose? What would I do if the boat capsized and I lost my gear? What if I was hurt? Who would save me?
I took a few more deep breaths and settled down. The river's aromas of fresh fish and cut grass filtered through my distress. The sun broke through the clouds. My vision cleared, and I watched ripples and currents snaking over the water.
I began to order my thoughts. The river terrified me the same way the walk across the plains once frightened me. In the months leading up to the trip, people warned me of dangers I'd encounter as a lone traveler on rural highways. Some even snarled at me as the woman at the picnic table did. They told apocryphal tales of murderers, rattlesnakes, and vicious dogs. Such fables, I'd learned, revealed more about what the storytellers feared than any danger I faced. I walked into Helena alive, unpoisoned, and whole.
Across the plains, through Yellowstone National Park, and past the Three Forks, I shivered in the rain and wind, slept through thunderstorms, and baked in summer heat. A pasty white business owner in Topeka mistook me for an indigent and chased me from his store with a revolver. A thunderstorm caught me outside North Platte, Nebraska, where I was the tallest thing in the landscape — no trees, buildings, or cows for miles. Lightning struck the ground so near I tasted electricity. The thunderclaps left me deaf and without even a ringing in my ears for over an hour. In Gering, Nebraska, a scrawny man with ill-defined but malicious intent followed me around town in his beat-up car. A woman in Lander, Wyoming, made ugly sexual advances toward me as her husband slept in the next room. Moose tromped around my campsite in the woods outside of Dubois, Wyoming. A homeless veteran held me hostage in a van full of cats in Jackson. In the Yellowstone backcountry, moose blocked my passage on narrow trails and bison grazed through my camp as I ate dinner. Two nights running, bears sniffed me up while I lay frozen with fear in my lean-to. I'd had a cold and the flu and suffered innumerable foot problems and several pairs of bad shoes; and once, a swarm of biting flies bloodied me.
None of it had turned me around and sent me home. Most of the way, in fact, the weather had been good for walking and animals had been gentle. I had met hundreds of people, many of them open, funny, or generous, or all three. A convenience store clerk in Beatrice, Nebraska, asked where I was from when I walked into her shop. Assuming I needed a place to stay, she tossed me the keys to her house. No questions. Just outside North Platte — after the lightning strikes — a spunky kid with a blue streak in his hair plucked me out of the rain. Through the ringing in my ears, I listened as he told me how much he wanted to be a musician. His future, he said, had to be better than the life he knew. A middle-aged corporate manager from Riverton, Wyoming, explained how he feared for his future, his career, and his personal relationships. When he dropped me off at a lonely lake on the Wind River Indian Reservation, he thanked me for letting him take me there. In Yellowstone a couple from Boston gave me a ride in an RV big enough to house a family. While he drove, she padded about in fuzzy pink slippers and showed me postcards of all the wonderful places they'd visited. What came next for me, she said, was "sure to be nice."
These people had shown me that I make my own misery. When I left Kansas City, I dreaded a rain storm when it wasn't raining. I feared creatures when they weren't around. I worried where to stay. I feared homicidal maniacs, robbers, and just plain mean people. What I imagined was always worse than real rain storms, animals, crappy camping places, or people.
I also began to feel like an insignificant mote in the vast stretches of creation. Moose didn't move out of my way because I had someplace to go. Bears sniffed me over, though I needed sleep. Snakes, mosquitoes, and raccoons slithered, bit, and rattled around in my things with no spite toward me. Thunderstorms came and went as they do. My desire for comfort and safety didn't prevent skunks, feral cats, and wild dogs from taking food from my pack. With or without me, thunder rolled across the plains, pavement ticked in the heat, and meadowlarks sang as they lifted from fence posts. After a while, that was fine with me.
Over time, the dead showed me the comfort of powerlessness. In Nebraska, wagon ruts in limestone traced the people's paths a century and a half after their passing. In Guernsey, Wyoming, naked stones next to the Oregon Trail marked where families buried their loved ones. The blank rocks made me think of the thousands of white settlers, Native Americans, freed and escaped slaves, and soldiers who died somewhere on the Great Plains and left no traces of their lives. Even the tiny, overgrown roadside cemeteries where names and dates marked gravestones revealed how faceless and forgotten we become in death. The world moves on. A few decades and a few turns of fate might erase these cemeteries altogether.
Before, a person's disappearance into anonymity saddened me. But seeing these things, I imagined the people who had crossed the plains were like me. They had dreams of new lives, or at least better ones. They lived and struggled. They felt love, heartache, and joy. That was all anyone had the right to ask of them. It was all I had the right to ask of myself.
Canoeing home would be a different trip than journeying over land to the river. No one would drive up and ask if I wanted a ride or a place on the living room floor. I trusted my feet much more than a canoe on water. I'd have to camp and rough it more. I would have time alone, and I would have to fill it.
I cupped my hands and splashed the Missouri's cold water on my face. I possessed no talents or skills in which to put any faith or doubt. I had a canoe, tent, and sleeping bag. Waterproof bags contained food and a few other possessions. All my money was in my pocket. My direction depended on the river and my paddle. I couldn't cry to anyone. No city, town, or stranger would distract me from myself. There was nothing and no one to blame or give credit to for what would happen to me or for the experience I'd gain. Setting off into the unknown, I felt free for the first time in my life. This was my trip. The consequences, good and bad, would be mine.
The water dripped down my face and into the front of my shirt. I'd show this woman and everyone else, I said to myself. I'd walked among tornadoes, slumbered in the midst of beasts, and braved blinding thunderstorms. It would rain again. I'd swat mosquitoes and pluck ticks from my flesh. I might meet more bears, raccoons, and snakes. People were going to be selfish, but more often the opposite would be true. Anything I'd ever accomplished came out of hard work and persistence. I was good at those things, and that's how I'd push through to Kansas City.
I stood up and watched the river. I thought of Gordon, a proud Assiniboine whom I'd met in Helena a few hours after I arrived there. As I gathered and arranged gear for the river trip, he led me around the streets and alleys of Montana's capital. Over the course of the week, he introduced me to his friends — lawyers, artists, Indians, and indigent men and women. When he told them my plans, they congratulated me and wished me well. They never told me I'd fail. Gordon himself never doubted my ability or determination. As we searched for someone to ferry my canoe to the river, his friend Rico stepped forward and offered to help. He was an ornery giant of man who'd moved to Helena from inner-city Chicago. A gruff character whose manner was as confrontational as his mouth, Rico told me I was crazy. Then he smiled and said he believed in ordinary people who didn't do ordinary things.
Gordon and I roped my canoe to Rico's rusted, smoking Ford LTD. When we had unloaded my gear at the Wolf Creek Bridge, we stood on the bank, the three of us astonished at the size of the river. The river here, I had imagined, flowed about as big as the one I had seen at Three Forks — what we in Missouri would call a big creek. But this was a grown-up river, and it took me by surprise.
"This river's a good thing," Gordon said finally. His face broke into a smile. "It'll take you where you want to go."
"I got a feeling about you," said Rico, laying his catcher's mitt–sized hand on my shoulder. "Be afraid. You gotta. But keep going. You'll get to the other side. Yes, you will."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Canoeing the Great Plains by Patrick Dobson. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Prologue,
1. Doomed,
2. Drunkenness, Fear, and Determination,
3. Your Friend, the River,
4. Life Preserver,
5. Carless,
6. Medicine River,
7. A Speck in the Landscape,
8. Spirits of the Dead,
9. Cheap Cigars,
10. Oaths and Vulgarities,
11. Staying in Motion,
12. Owl Headdress,
13. Doris,
14. A Startling Leap,
15. Rather Be Fishing,
16. The Toughest Part,
17. Home but not Home,
Epilogue,