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

Oz—out of the woods and into the light.
    Years ago, engineers moved the canal from the center of Utica, Schenectady, Syracuse, and Rochester so that now the waterway skirts the hearts of towns, making it more a barrier than a boulevard, and the traveler no longer glides right through the nub of gaiety and commerce, no longer able to float along and look from a boat deck into shop windows, or see hustling clerks on a street errand, or pick up the scent from a lunch counter, or hear the newsboy’s hark. What was once the Erie through these downtowns is today paved streets; only villages have kept the waterway close. Although the canal is unlikely ever to return to its earlier urban courses, city rivers everywhere across America still offer opportune avenues to enchant wayfarers.
    Lock Twenty was full of drift and broken timber as though the woodchoppers’ ball had been there the night before. Cap, perhaps thinking himself again at the helm of his Navy tug in World War Two, came on the radio: “I’ve made a command decision: we will
all
resume fleet order.” It was my penalty for having earlier overtaken him too quickly—a wake from another boat drove him mad—and I grumbled until I noticed the clutter of logs in the water west of the lock; then we were content to have the trawler plow the way open.
    We saw only the industrial edges of Rome from the canal, they too obscured by brushy trees as if nature were trying to hide human affronts. There the watershed changes, the flow no longer toward the Atlantic via the Hudson but now toward the St. Lawrence by way of Lake Ontario. The Indians knew that topographic detail well, for at that place, where the narrowing Mohawk turns north, they pulled out their canoes and carried them a couple of miles over a barely perceptible rise in the swampy country, to Wood Creek for a run down the twisting brook into Lake Oneida, the only major lake in New York to lie east and west, a fortuitous circumstance for early travelers and commerce. From the Hudson we’d been following a route as ancient as the Ice Age, a course later used by humankind for at least ten thousand years.
    For us there was no portage-and-float down entangled twists of a boggy creek but rather a perfect alley of canal slicing through the lowland for fourteen miles of skunk cabbage and perched kingfishers, all the way to Sylvan Beach, the carnival village on the western edge of Oneida. The sun evaporated into an obscuring grayness hanging over the water, and our hope for a fuel-up before crossing the long lake tomorrow against a probable headwind also disappeared when we learned the waterside pumps weren’t working. Pilotis found us a ride south a few miles to a room and hot shower which we followed up with a couple of drafts of a certain Irish stout of renown. While we guessed over the possibilities of lake wind and water, a scowling man came in from the rain, didn’t bother to wipe off his spectacles, hat dripping into his double shot of rye intended to ease “a chill on the liver.” His wife soon followed and asked why he was drinking whiskey. I didn’t pick up his answer, but I did hear him break wind in something of a forced manner, and she said, “Don’t you do that durn flatulitis at me, mister!”

Like Jonah, We Enter a Leviathan

    F IVE IN THE MORNING. Light wind, cold, no rain. We arrived to board
Nikawa
and, to our pleasure and consternation, found the convoy gone; should she run out of gasoline on Lake Oneida, we’d be on our own. The first lock west was thirty-three miles away, so, could we quickly find gas near there, the flotilla might still be within reach before we got locked out. Pushing for our independence, we received it at the worst time, and I wondered whether Cap had deliberately put our passage at risk. Pilotis said, “Is he competing against us to get to the middle Missouri first?” I don’t know. Then, “Can
Nikawa
make it to the other side?” We’ve got no choice, I said, either