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

into continuing.” And I said that was one more way a voyage was a metaphor.
    We were beginning to enjoy locking through and the way it interrupted hours of mere steering, and Pilotis liked discovering whether the operator was one to give information and lore or only annoyance at our disrupting his oiling of machinery. Lock Twenty-three is in the middle of a woods and, like all the New York barge canal locks, kept in Bristol fashion: bollards painted, brass polished, shrubs trimmed. The valves and gates of every lock have a distinct voice, each giving a different performance: a basso profundo, a vibrato soprano, another not singing at all but only clattering and clanking as if drawing heavy chains across a dungeon floor, and everywhere the deep chamber walls amplify all of those harmonics and phonations into fine resonance. Twenty-three was our last descent on the Erie before we once again began the climb to Buffalo.
    The Oneida River in its brief sixteen miles manages to flow to almost as many points as there are on a compass rose and follows the most ambagious part of the canal. The undeveloped wooded banks and marsh the river passes through made us feel an isolation not really there—downtown Syracuse lay just twelve miles south—but the trees enclosed us cozily after the windy and battering expanse of the lake. Where the Oneida joins the Seneca River stood a sign and an arrow pointing west: BUFFALO → 192 MILES . Such a marker, uncommon on American rivers, gave us a surge that life at eight miles an hour relishes. The Seneca took us in the opposite direction from our destination for a spell but then turned
Nikawa
again westward, where we found another sign, a realty one: townhouses on the river. Pilotis said, “Here they come.” Yet for us it was only a chilly Wednesday in early spring on a forlorn waterway.
    A whistling swan greeted us outside the lock at Baldwinsville, and this was the way we ascended: the big portals closing us into a near dark, thousands of pounds of flowing river pushing against the forward gates, leaking out a pattern in splatter and spray of a liquid angel, wings spread as if to fly out of the Stygian tank, cracks in the side walls funneling and dripping grace notes into the water, sounds in a deep cistern (nasal
deeblook-deeblook
, guttural
gahblunk-gahblunk
), a sense of foreboding and being trapped in a place not meant for humankind, a waft of fish,
Nikawa
bobbing atop the paused water, voices from unseen people above as if speaking from another realm, everywhere the fecund dampness of a boxed river waiting to sunder the concrete imposition, the valves below grating open and the upsurge churning and deepening and darkening itself, fathoming up, working to turn us like a twig, our almost imperceptible rising atop the boil that collects detained and inevitable flotsam and twists it in circling menace, chunks of log thunking the hull, the revolve of a bloated carp, eyeballs bleached and full upon us and its rot in our nostrils, an empty soda bottle pulled down to show us buoyance is but temporary, the nasty suck of a dozen whirlpools that would jerk us to the slimed bottom in retribution for this human outrage stopping the river, and the angel still unflown and drowning in the flood, and we are now in half-light,
Nikawa
straining against our holds, Pilotis calling something I cannot hear, and then our heads level with the pavement, the caution line of yellow paint (Don’t fall in here, bub!), then we’re above ground, and the machinery stilling to numb the water, the forward gates shudder against the river insistence, a vertical shaft of light splits them, widens like a theater curtain parting to reveal the mystery of the waterdance waiting ahead to draw us into the masque, the lockhouse horn sounding us free, and we breast off from the wall, the engines turning over, and we’re again in the river, and the lockman calls something, but all we can make out is, “Oregon, you lucky