THE LIVELY BANDS OF PIONEERS boarding flatboats in Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the early 19th century would soon share a particularly dreadful memory of the inland rivers. The thunderstorms in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys were unavoidable, and just about the worst environment to encounter while riding in a wooden flat-bottom that steered like a bathtub. Most 19th-century journals about river trips include descriptions of at least one or two perilous encounters with thunderstorms, which often ended with a collision against submerged trees, sandbars, or wooden islands. Mark Twain, famous in his day as a seasoned world traveler, said that even the legendary fury of storms in the Alps “were not the equal of some which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley.” In 1842, the frontier naturalist and writer Thomas Bangs Thorpe, in an essay in the Spirit of the Times of New York, employed the literary technique of recurrence-repetition to stress the most harrowing aspects of the Mississippi storms—their intensity, frequency, and duration.
In the essay, “A Storm Scene on the Mississippi,” Thorpe describes how he and two companions, a Native American guide and an old woodchopper, were crossing the swampy edges of the Mississippi by foot when they were forced by a violent storm into an abandoned squatter’s cabin that sat on a point jutting into the river. While lightning flashed outside, the woodchopper was inspired by the weather to tell the story of a trip he had made as a younger man, steering a flatboat loaded with bacon from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. About three hundred miles north of New Orleans, after an eerie quiet, “all of a sudden it [the weather] changed, the river grew as rough as an alligator’s back, thar was the tallest kind of noise overhead, and the fire flew up thar, like fur in a catfight.” During the thunderstorm that followed, the captain of the boat insisted that it was safer to remain on the river than trying to tie up on the banks, and the flatboat was soon carried by runaway currents into a submerged tree.
“The boat broke up,” the woodcutter continued, “like a dried leaf would have done, pork and plunder scattered, and I swum half soaked to death, ashore. I lost in the whole operation just two shirts, eighteen dollars in wages, and a half a box of Kentucky tobacker, beside two game cocks; I’ll tell you what, a storm on that ar Mississippi, ain’t to be sneezed at.”
While the woodchopper was yarning away, the Native American guide cocked his head to listen and warned his party that the river was rising and coming “too near.” The men decided to flee the cabin and run for high ground, and just after they exited through the door, the “weighty unhewn logs” of the structure, and everything around it, crumbled and disappeared into the rushing current of the Mississippi. After spending a miserable night in the forest, Thorpe and his companions woke in bright sunlight to see that the entire promontory where the squatter’s shack once stood had completely disappeared. The river had massively rerouted itself right where they had sheltered the night before. “The caving banks had obliterated all signs of humanity,” Thorpe wrote, “and left every thing about in a wild, and primitive solitude.”
Thorpe’s essay was the tale of a storm wrapped in the middle of another storm, interrupted by a storm-tossed river carrying the whole scene away. The meteorological rages of the Ohio and the Mississippi valleys were inescapable, in Thorpe’s telling, whether travelers were on land or huddled in the cabin of a flatboat. This presented a supreme and ironic challenge for early 19th-century westering Americans, given that the river valleys beyond Pittsburgh were where millions of people wanted to be. Thunderstorms along the inland rivers epitomized the irony of America’s thirst for western settlement. Every week, hundreds of additional pioneers and cargo-boat crews were scrambling over the Appalachians to join the flatboat procession, and every week, a dozen or more flats were wrecked during storms along the water route to New Orleans.
Long experience on the rivers didn’t seem to make much of a difference. One of the most poignant tales of a storm’s wrath was delivered by Timothy Flint in his Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi, from Pittsburgh and the Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Florida to the Spanish Frontier, a bestseller published in 1826 that inspired many Americans and European immigrants to join the migration over the Appalachians. Flint was one of the most interesting figures of the flatboat era and typified a character type frequently drawn west: the lovable, entertaining misfit who reinvents himself on the frontier. The son of a Massachusetts farmer, Flint was born during the American Revolution in the North Shore country above Boston. After Harvard, where he studied theology, Flint lackadaisically served as a supply minister at Congregational churches around the North Shore and soon became renowned for his incompetence. On the grounds of poor health, he refused to deliver the traditional second, Sunday afternoon sermon, and he neglected to record the marriages at which he presided, or the births and baptisms of parish children, including his own. His sermons were outrageously sophomoric—sometimes his homily consisted of a long reading of everyone in the North Shore towns who had died, been married, or accused of crimes over the last month. Flint preferred to spend most of his time conducting scientific experiments and reading adventure and travel books, like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. He dreamed of following the trail of the famed Revolutionary War explorer and militia officer George Rogers Clark through the northwest frontier. But Flint was dashingly handsome, a colorful raconteur, and he married well, to Abigail Hubbard of Marblehead. She was related to the Peabodys of Salem, a wealthy shipping family that proved willing to bail the Flints out whenever Timothy got fired from another church.
Failure gets quite boring after a while, especially in the staid environs of North Shore Boston, and in 1815, when he was thirty-five, Flint decided to head west over the Alleghenies and repackage himself as a traveling “frontier missionary.” His waywardness quickly proved to be an asset once he reached the Ohio River and found his voice as a writer. He failed at farming in Missouri and Arkansas, frequently moving with his growing family, which exposed him to a wide swath of country south to the Mexican line. He also moved east into present-day Florida, where he could observe the terrain and the social development of frontier towns, providing him with convincing details for the newspaper articles he had begun to write. During his wanderings, there was always a church that needed a minister, however maladroit. Flint, apparently, was capable of making strong first impressions, by slyly alluding to his Harvard degree, for instance, or the fact that he spoke “fluent French,” which appealed to churches in the polyglot river towns of the former French territories along the lower Mississippi, where many residents still spoke the language. His French, in fact, was mediocre. But everybody loved listening to a Flint sermon on Sunday because his wild mispronunciations and verbal antics were so entertaining. From Louisiana to Missouri, the Flint myth grew every time he moved on to a new church. Though forgotten today, he became one of the great literary voices of the trans-Mississippi frontier.
The vagabonding family eked out a precarious living at various parishes in the river hamlets, and Flint became one of those literary figures who gravitated toward writing because nothing else had worked out for them. Between residences, Flint endlessly voyaged the rivers on flatboats and keelboats, and his keen observation skills and high tolerance for the eccentrics found on the frontier helped launch his writing career. He wrote several well-received novels about the frontier and, after meeting and interviewing Daniel Boone, published a much-embellished account of Boone’s life that became one of the bestselling biographies of the 19th century and helped spread Boone’s mystique. After its popular success in North America, Flint’s Recollections, adapted from letters sent to his cousin back in Massachusetts, was widely translated and reprinted in Europe. Recollections is credited with introducing the American public back east to the rigors of pioneer life, and improving the image of the Kaintuck frontiersmen, and scholars have also credited Flint’s two-volume The History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley with “materially advancing” the settlement of the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys.
In the fall of 1819, when his wife was eight months pregnant, Flint decided to move again, this time from Arkansas back to an earlier haunt along the Missouri River above St. Louis. Undertaking an early-winter boat trip with young children and a pregnant wife was not a particularly good idea, and the journey was a classic Flint fiasco. His hired boatmen quit and sneaked off in the middle of the night, requiring Flint and his young sons to manage the boat alone. The Flint boys, Micah and Ebenezer, shivered with malaria, and the water that year on both the Arkansas River and the Mississippi was low, forcing father and sons to laboriously haul their six-ton boat over sandbars. The Flints ran out of food and were gouged by the crew of a passing boat, who charged them $30 for one barrel of pork and one barrel of flour.
Early one sultry morning in late November, while the Flint boat was parked against a sandbar opposite the Second Chickasaw Bluff, a remote, uninhabited stretch of the Mississippi above Memphis, the family heard distant booms of thunder to the southwest, and the wind picked up. Abigail Flint had just entered labor and was huddled inside the boat cabin under covers while the Flint children wrapped themselves in blankets out on the sandbar.
As the wind began to howl and the rain hammered down, Flint panicked about his family’s predicament, but Abigail Flint was a model of saintly composure. “She was so perfectly calm, spoke with such tranquil assurance about the future, and about the dear ones that were at this moment ‘biding the pelting of the pitiless storm’ on the sand bar, that I became calm myself,” Flint wrote. By noon the ferocious winds of the storm had torn a hole in the roof of the cabin on the boat, and Flint wrapped more blankets around his wife to protect her from the rain. The storm began to subside at four in the afternoon and at five the sun came out. Mrs. Flint would struggle in labor for six more hours before a baby girl was born at eleven o’clock that night.
But the Flints had not been delivered from torment. The storm baby was “feeble and sickly” and died two and a half days later. The children cried while Flint said last prayers over the dead infant. Flint and his sons placed her body in a small traveling trunk and laid the makeshift coffin in a grave dug near the tall grasses at the edge of the sandbar.
The tribulations of Job continued to wrack the Flints’ winter journey. By December, their boat was often frozen in when they woke in the morning, and finding food and firewood along the deserted banks of the Mississippi was a constant trial. Finally, the Flints limped into New Madrid, Missouri, about seventy miles downriver from the Ohio River confluence, and, typically, decided to spend the winter there. The capricious decision-making of the Flints, however, was a gift to history. New Madrid was a fascinating and important river town and Flint’s writing about it became one of his best frontier portraits. In the spring, the family moved fifty miles upriver to Jackson, Missouri, and lived there for a year while Timothy continued to travel, preach on weekends, and began his first novel. The Flints seem to have been reasonably happy there. Ebenezer and Micah found some pretty girls to court. But the disappointment of burying their infant girl at the Chickasaw Bluffs would always haunt the family.
Eight or nine years later, on a clear spring morning, Micah Flint was traveling the Mississippi on a steamboat. He was now almost twenty and studying the law, but he would eventually jettison these career plans after one of his earliest poems, “The Mounds of Cahokia,” was published to high praise. (The star of the delightfully named Micah Flint would soon burn as brightly as his father’s.) As the steamboat approached the timbered bottomlands opposite the Second Chickasaw Bluff, Micah stepped to a quiet place on the upper deck, away from the other passengers, and stared down to the bar along the banks where he had helped his father bury his newborn sister in 1819. He was overwhelmed with emotion when he recalled the stormy scene of years before.
The elegy that Micah Flint later wrote, “Lines, on Passing the Grave of My Sister,” was still recited by American schoolchildren up until the 1950s. William Cullen Bryant considered it worthy enough to be included in his influential Selections from the American Poets. By the time it was published, Micah had become the editor of the highly respected monthly his father had founded in Cincinnati, The Western Review, and enjoyed a large following as a poet.
Here are the first and last stanzas of Micah Flint’s “Lines, on Passing the Grave of My Sister”:
On yonder shore, on yonder shore,
Now verdant with the depth of shade,
Beneath the white-arm’d sycamore,
There is a little infant laid.
Forgive this tear. A brother weeps.
’Tis there the faded floweret sleeps.
She sleeps alone, she sleeps alone;
But yearly is her grave-turf dress’d,
And still the summer-vines are thrown,
In annual wreaths, across her breast.
And still the sighing autumn grieves,
And strews the hallow’d spot with leaves.
It seemed amazing to me, when I read about the Flints, that the rocky wagon road over the Alleghenies, then the unpredictable rivers and the vagaries of a rough, unplanned frontier life, not to mention the demands of growing up in a crazy, unstable family, could produce such character, such stanzas, such expression. Micah Flint’s “Lines, on Passing the Grave of My Sister” delivers to us something important. From the rudiments of tragedy and suffering, the frontier, so often, produced brilliant flashes of beauty.
I had flown and motorcycled across the Mississippi valley every few years since I was fifteen and thought I knew exactly what to expect from the legendary “Dixie Alley” storms. The most common progression of weather in the thousand-mile river corridor of the lower Mississippi begins with the development of “maritime tropical” systems, moving north from the Gulf of Mexico, which pick up moisture and energy as they race toward the Gulf Coast between Galveston, Texas, and New Orleans. The systems moving from the south typically carry high temperatures and high humidity, and the “high precipitation supercells” embedded in the air mass can generate rainstorms dropping two or three inches per hour over Louisiana, coastal Alabama, Mississippi, and East Texas.
The maritime tropical storm systems generally track north by northeast up the Mississippi valley, roughly following the river’s course toward Cape Girardeau and St. Louis. The maritime tropicals generally create broad bands of weather, stretching all the way back to East Texas and lower Arkansas. Systems that wide and heavy with moisture take several hours to pass over any single spot, lingering while they continue to drop heavy rain. This is the primary reason why the bayous of Louisiana and Mississippi are so prone to flooding.
Once or twice a month, or even more frequently, the wet air mass from the South collides at the top of the Mississippi valley with the prevailing westerly flow across the Rockies and the plains. The westerly “continental” flow is slightly cooler and dryer than the maritime tropical flow. When the edges of the two air masses meet, the differences in the temperature and moisture gradients generate large storm fronts that explode northeastward through the Ohio River valley as far as Pittsburgh. The collision of the air masses also stalls the tropical front moving north, prolonging the rain and winds along the Mississippi.
The result can be clusters of storms from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh, spreading south to the banks of the Ohio, raging almost weekly in the summer. As a consequence, southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, along the Ohio River valley, receive about ten inches more rain every year than the northern areas of the states. In pioneer days, except for veteran captains who were good at reading clouds, the majority of flatboaters were virtually defenseless against these storms because they couldn’t see them until the rain and high winds were almost on top of them.
Modern weather forecasting and radar have greatly improved things, of course. For fifty years now I’ve flown planes or driven motorcycles, even mule teams, across the Mississippi valley storm belt. I’ve learned over time, especially when traveling west, that it’s best to hold short just shy of the Appalachians, and then again just shy of the Missouri, to check ahead for Gulf storms moving up the Mississippi. If there is also a strong continental flow in the airspace ahead, the storms will be hellacious.
That was my plan for the New Orleans trip. Every night, or perhaps early in the morning, I would give myself a full radar and forecast weather briefing from my cell phone or laptop. In remote spots where cell or internet reception was poor, I knew that I could rely on my favorite radio show, the detailed forecasts broadcast on VHF bands by the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). When I saw that a big maritime tropical from the Gulf was moving up toward Memphis, and about to collide with the westerly continental flow, I could lay over in a marina or a protected cove, tie up well, and enjoy an afternoon of wind and rain in the cozy poplar cabin of the Patience.
It was a good strategy, backed by years of travel experience, and totally erroneous. As soon as I left Pittsburgh in July and began to regularly check the weather ahead, I could see that a new and unfamiliar weather pattern had established itself for the summer. A large and unusual U-shaped dip in the jet stream over the Great Lakes was drawing the continental flow north of the Ohio River, and pushing the tropical flow slightly west of the Mississippi. Every morning, the radar maps looked the same. A long, crescent-shaped front of storms, parallel to the Mississippi but usually about fifty miles away, curved up toward southern Illinois, and then bent east, paralleling the course of the Ohio. On the weather radar, a curled line of dark green, indicating steady rain, stood just off the rivers, like a two-thousand-mile privet hedge stretching from the Louisiana coast all the way north to Pittsburgh.
This initially seemed favorable, because the unique weather formation was mostly keeping the big, slow-moving fronts off my course on the rivers. But the volatility of the air masses north of the Ohio River was often creating a series of relatively small but fierce “pop-up” storms that peeled off from the main front and then raged south and east to the Ohio and the Mississippi. One morning, I listened carefully to a “Special Alert” on the NOAA band while a government meteorologist explained that these pop-up storms often quickly emerged and then disappeared, only to reappear twenty or thirty miles away, making them almost impossible to see beforehand or follow on radar. I would know that one of these fast-tracking storms was headed for my position on the Patience only a minute or two before it got there, when I could see it. I had never seen storm formations quite like these before. But I knew that aberrant jet stream formations, once established, tend to remain embedded for the whole season. It was going to be a hell of a summer for pop-up storms along the Ohio and the Mississippi.
I welcomed these conditions. The constant threat of unannounced storms would only draw me closer to the experience of the 19th-century Kaintucks. Only rarely could they see the raging meteorology lurking just over the horizon, about to pounce on their boats. The unique conditions of my summer aboard the Patience would produce the same results. I wouldn’t be able to see the storms until they were literally just off my bow, and my days as an alligator-horse on the inland rivers were going to be challenging and fun.
I ran into my first pop-up storm along a remote stretch of the Ohio just past Grandview Light, about ten miles upriver from Owensboro, Kentucky. I couldn’t have been better situated for the event. By far my best crew member all summer, Mike Binkley, was sitting beside me at the rooftop steering console when I felt a sudden blast of cold air on my right shoulder. When I looked west past the inlet of Honey Creek, the sky had turned anvil black with shadings of deep purple and green, the colors swirling in a kind of cyclonic barber pole behind a thick screen of rain that was falling about two miles away. The smaller trees on the Indiana side were already bending low and swaying from the wind. The storm was nearly on top of us.
Mike was an interesting fellow. A successful furniture store owner and real estate investor whom I met in Gallatin while I was building the boat, he had spent most of his free time for the past thirty years racing motorcycles in the United States and Europe, mountain climbing, and making weeklong bicycle tours through the South. He is tall and blond with movie- idol good looks, so fit that he looks ten years younger than his sixty-four years. He couldn’t join me at Pittsburgh for the launch of the Patience because he was hiking the Grand Canyon in Arizona with his children, but had first joined me in Kentucky, then returned home for a few days before rejoining the boat at Rocky Point in Indiana.
Mike had spent most of his life boating on the Cumberland River, particularly the Old Hickory Lake stretch near Gallatin. The Cumberland is a great training area for learning the inland rivers. The Army Corps of Engineers does not consider it a major commercial waterway like the Ohio or the Mississippi and only occasionally maintains the channel and riverbanks with dredging and improvements. The banks of the Cumberland are littered with runaway buoys never returned to marking the channels, and the river is strewn with tree snags and wrecked boats. The Old Hickory Lake section is only an hour’s drive from Nashville, making it a popular destination for water-skiers and bass fishermen, but its numerous and tempting coves are generally unmarked, and treacherous with shallow water. “On the Cumberland,” Mike says, “you can go from having sixty feet of water below you to less than three feet of water in a matter of yards.” Few conditions we encountered on the Ohio or the Mississippi intimidated him. To this experience, Mike added two valuable attributes as a sailor. He enjoys a great sense of humor and is wonderfully sarcastic, and this is leavened by a deep, abiding calm.
Upriver, Mike had been on board when fishermen and marina owners had punctuated their dire warnings about the treacherous boils and tugboat wakes ahead of us with the rote omen “You’re going to die.”
When I looked back from Honey Creek, the advance winds of the storm were already pushing against the starboard sides of the Patience, turning us broadside.
I motioned my head west and spoke to Mike.
“Look at that thing. We’re about to get blasted.”
Mike looked over my shoulder and nodded.
“We’re going to die, Rinker.”
“Damn. Do I have time to get below and write a last note to my family?”
“Make it quick,” he said. “Then we’ll have more time to die.”
By now, the whitecaps were kicking up on the river ahead of us and the hardwood bottoms on the Indiana banks were a swirling, watery rush of pale green against green as the underside of the leaves flipped in the wind. Large branches and even the crowns of some of the trees were cartwheeling in the air. The wind was shifting, too, turning to blast us from the south and pushing toward us a somersaulting wave of surface water.
Mike’s imperturbability was reassuring.
“What do you want to do?” he said, without indicating that there was an urgent need for me to know. His tone was “Let’s turn this into a teaching moment.”
The situation was a classic example of how an amateur like me, whose only knowledge arrived from reading books, didn’t have much to go on. In a sudden storm like this along the Ohio, Harlan Hubbard had thrown an anchor behind his shantyboat and laboriously hauled himself downwind into an inlet, and then tied himself to a tree, but he still got beached by the storm onto a mud bar. But Hubbard’s shantyboat rarely remained aground for long—the local farmers, or a commercial boat with a motor, always came along and either poled or pulled him out. In the 19th-century Kaintuck journals I had read, captains had either steered or desperately poled for shore and tied to a tree, or tried to point into the wind as much as possible and remain with the current. Both strategies had worked most of the time, until they didn’t, and the journals tended to favor lurid accounts of ropes snapping in the wind, or disastrous rides over sudden white water onto rocks, submerged sawyers, or sandbars.
Initially, I elected for the tie-up-on-the-shore approach, because I was desperate to escape the chaos out in the current. But as soon as I turned for the Kentucky banks and looked for a likely tree to catch with a rope, I could see the futility of my choice. The strong southwest winds had turned us sideways and almost motionless, and I could see that there was no chance of safely handling the boat near the banks. The wind was still picking up and both of the riverbanks were turbulent with high whitecaps and even waves. The hardwood stands on the Kentucky side that I intended to reach for protection were a blurry mass of flying limbs, swirling leaves, and airborne spray.
Mike had stood up and quickly removed the bungee cords attached to our convex bimini cover, then stowed it on the roof deck beneath a pile of lawn chairs and a sleeping cot. We were both yelling over the roar of the storm.
I told Mike that I had concluded it was madness to try and tie up on the banks in a maelstrom like this. Now I knew that this wasn’t the preferable option. After asking me if I minded a suggestion, Mike yelled above the wind.
“Give me full power and point the bow of this crate directly into the wind.”
Of course. Pointing into the wind would at least stabilize the direction of the boat and prevent us from turning broadside, at which point we would be pushed either backward or in circles.
I knew that the heavier rain that was about to arrive would reduce our visibility to almost zero, so I picked a clump of trees at the next bend on the Indiana banks and looked at our compass for a heading that would probably keep us in the navigable channel. In the rough water, the compass was skittering around about thirty or forty degrees in both directions. But it looked as though an “attempted heading” southwest, about 220 degrees, would keep us upwind and away from the banks.
Wrestling with the wheel of the Patience to keep her tracking southwest required a lot of muscle, and sometimes I had to pull in a single direction with both arms. The wind was blowing so fast past our ears that there was really no sound to hear at all, just the white roar of the storm, and the rain pounding against us came in massive sheets, like the flow off a barn roof. My ribs shuddered with pain every time I pulled the heavy wheel around to correct our heading against sudden gusts. But by jamming my knees and feet against the wooden console I could at least bear the pain and avoid wandering too far off 220 degrees.
The rain was now banging on the roof deck as loudly as a hammer echoing against nails. I was reveling in my contrarian personality. I loved this storm and the thudding pain in my ribs and the wetness and blindness of being on the turbulent river. I guessed but really didn’t know that by holding my heading we were safe because we were almost motionless against the wind and couldn’t hit anything going very fast. The obsession of holding 220 degrees was comforting and kept me focused.
The sky was so dark now that the binnacle light on the compass had automatically switched on and I stared ahead, fixated on the lit dome. It was the only thing I could see inside this typhoon of water and wind. The distant riverbanks had disappeared, and I could barely see our own bow. I grunted against the pain in my ribs. The only thought or action that existed was to steer 220 degrees southwest.
Two hundred twenty degrees southwest. I was possessed by that heading, like a dog looking for sex.
The adrenaline rush from the storm erased most of the pain from my ribs, and the highly oxygenated air from the rain induced a strange euphoria. This was a random pop-up event, moving quite fast, and it couldn’t last long. It would blow itself out in ten minutes. As the Patience rocked violently in the waves I was still steering blind into the vapory nothingness all around me. But in my mind’s eye I could imagine the image of a radar screen showing a green and yellow blob of rain racing northeast for the river, and then quickly disappearing out over the Kentucky foothills. We just had to hold our heading of 220 degrees and bear the wind and rain for a few more minutes.
After about twelve minutes, the storm blew out over Kentucky and daylight returned almost as quickly as it had disappeared, reminding me that weather is so starkly fickle, an abrupt mood disorder of the sky. The Ohio River, bank to bank, was now calm and glassine, the air as fresh as bleached linen on a clothesline. My 220-degree course had been true. We emerged in clear air right over the sailing line just past the cooling towers of a large generating station near Rockport, Indiana. Two miles ahead, the suspension cables of the William H. Natcher Bridge were shining under bright sunlight.
Mike skipped down to the cabin deck for some fresh towels and we vigorously rubbed our heads and backs, letting the sunlight warm us and dry off our clothes. I gave the wheel to Mike and went below to make coffee.
Getting past the storm filled me with self-glory and affirmation. I had done well during my first storm on the Ohio not only because Mike was there. I got through my first big weather event because my father had insisted that his sons be tough. As we resumed our course in calmer water toward the Natcher Bridge, I realized that I missed that complicated, hard-ass man. Toughness was next to godliness for him. In the winter we pushed our sleighs and teams so hard and so far that afterward we had to light fires in the stove in the barn to warm our hands before we could unhitch the horses. In the summer he made me fly the Cessna or the Beechcraft all the way across New York State to Lake Chautauqua at one thousand feet, where the turbulence on a hot day was brutal, with the avionics turned off and just an airman’s map in my lap. We flew the Chautauqua route round trip several times a year, carrying our family doctor up to the lake for her vacations. I can still fly the route blind and without a map, by heart, from anywhere, Great Barrington to Chautauqua, Sullivan County to Chautauqua, Lancaster to Chautauqua. Dead, I could fly my ass right up from hell and climb through purgatory to Chautauqua. Morristown to the Clinton Reservoir to the Delaware at Frenchtown to Easton to Wilkes-Barre to Elmira. At Ithaca, we flew 240 degrees past the bottom of the Finger Lakes, and then we dropped down to the headwaters of the Allegheny, descending into Jamestown. My father was a good, demanding flight instructor. He was also a glorious control freak who could imagine so many bright futures for me. Someday, he would say, as we bounced past the Alleghenies, I would be as good as “Saint-Ex in Wind, Sand and Stars, or Ernie Gann in Fate Is the Hunter.” I believed this and my father’s regimen of hard travel filled me with adolescent arrogance, good arrogance. I was as good as Saint-Ex. Age fifteen, July 1966, 2,400 miles direct to L.A. in less than a week. That shitwreck Piper Cub had a top speed of eighty-five miles per hour and I could feel parts failing in the tail section as we bumped through the thermals. My brother was the pilot and I was the navigator and we had only a shopping bag full of maps, no radio, and a compass that barely worked. But I knew rivers, blacktop, and railroad tracks, even ones that I had never seen before. We never once got lost, not through the overcast Kentucky Swale, not all the way across sweltering, turbulent Texas, not through Lindbergh’s 1927 route over the treacherous Guadalupes. Sunburn and exhaustion feel good to me. Arrogance and overreaching produce results. Domineering fathers are quite a goddamn pain in the ass at the time you are subjected to them and you only know later how good they were for you. On November afternoons, when I came in before dark after logging the Jockey Hollow ravines, he was sitting beside the warm, crackling fire in his library. He would tell me that I probably wasn’t tired enough yet because I had come in early, while it was still light. He was joking, but I still lacked sarcasm awareness. Supreme dumbass that I was, I went right back down to the barn, harnessed a fresh horse, and climbed up Tea Mountain for some more logs.
Now, on the Ohio above Rockport, I was happy about my miserable, obsequious, workaholic, puddingheaded, and incomparably fucked-up youth. Hard travel dredges up some pretty good realizations. Nothing in my life would ever be as harrowing as climbing through the Guadalupe Pass, and that torture dated back to age fifteen. The Ohio and its storms were just rehearsed behavior for me.
And Mike had given me the best tutorial of the trip. The meteorological template was there now. The major weather challenge of the summer would be the pop-ups radiating off the main storm fronts about fifty miles away. They would arrive with little warning and never last more than ten or twelve minutes. All I had to do was point into the wind, obsess on the compass, and revel in the blind and bumpy ride.
Mike and I enjoyed the next day together on an enchanted stretch of the river winding into Owensboro. We were now two-thirds of the way down the Ohio and the eternal flow of centuries had accreted the ancient tree snags into mature, gracious islands, often as large as several hundred acres curving around the bends for over three miles. The islands were green ecospheres with full forests, sandy beaches, and high open spaces thick with calico bush, wild berries, and Indian grass. Deer browsed in the high clearings above the banks and stared at the Patience as we passed.
At night, we tied up to a tree on the banks and sat on folding chairs before our fire, grilling steaks or chicken for dinner. Mike and I talked about our lives, our politics, the mixed joys and disappointments of family, and it was a relief to spend time with a genteel southerner and gifted conversationalist after so many months of unending redneck chatter in Gallatin. One night, when my younger brother called from Maine, I kept my cell phone on speaker because there was nothing to hide from Mike, and we talked about some problems Adrian was having at work and a friend of his who was dying from cancer. But he had joined a mindfulness group that seemed to be helping. When we said good night, Ady and I both said “I love you” to each other. Mike had told me that he almost never spoke with his only brother.
“Boy, I sure wish that I came from a family where brothers said that they loved each other,” he said.
Crickets screeched from the banks and, a half mile away, the Rockport Light cast a pale triangle on the river. Night breezes rippled the water. Just before I went in to sleep, a beaver slapped its tail on the water and I stood on the galley deck watching it pull a small island of sticks past the bow.