Floating the Mighty Free and Easy (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine November 2001

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Floating the Mighty Free and Easy (Cont.)


	David Fox leads the way in the not-so-Wild and Scenic Missouri

THE NIGHT WAS MILD—the others were fools to carry bulky sleeping bags—and then it was dawn and we were up and paddling. There were a few pelicans downriver; they rose up as we approached and we floated under them as they soared overhead. I love the idea of pelicans 800 miles away from any ocean and, quoting from Linnea's bird book, told everyone that the birds had a wingspan of nine feet.

"I don't think that one does," David said.

"Probably a juvenile," I said.

"Those two don't," David continued, "or that one either." When David was last in Montana, he testified in a Billings courtroom. He'd been working for NBC, covering the Freemen militia standoff outside Jordan. The Freemen had "confiscated" his video cameras, probably for being too literal about eyewitness evidence, like the wingspan of certain birds.

We passed through Black Bluff Rapids, which is marked at river mile 20 on the BLM Upper
Missouri National Wild and Scenic River map. The water was smooth as a mirror—a muddy mirror—and the rapids didn't
actually exist.

In point of fact, most of the "rapids" marked on the map are from the steamboat days of the late 1800s. They are gravel bars, or areas that are tricky to navigate upriver in a steamboat. The Missouri trucks along at an easy average of 3.5 miles an hour and there is virtually no whitewater whatsoever. It is a lazy float,
appropriate for beginning canoeists or kayakers or rafters. I
suppose you could get in trouble on the river, but you'd have to work at it in a fairly assiduous manner.

Bobbie, apparently attempting to raise the adrenaline quotient, said, "Well, in a couple of days we'll hit Deadman Rapids." She let the name sink in. "Women," she added solemnly, "can go through there." At mile 22 we passed the mouth of the Marias River on our left, where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark spent nearly ten days on their upriver trip: June 2 through 11, 1805. They were stuck there in the throes of a navigational quandary. Their mandate from President Thomas Jefferson was to ascend the Missouri, cross the Rocky Mountains, and descend the Columbia to the Pacific. At this fork in the river, each stream seemed about the same size. Which was the Missouri? (These days, there is little doubt. The Marias, confined by the Tiber dam, 70 miles upstream, is now little more than a creek at its confluence with the Missouri.)

Most of the men in the Lewis and Clark party thought the north fork, the Marias, was the Missouri; both Lewis and Clark were skeptical. They measured the width of each stream, explored up the banks of each, and inquired locally, always a prudent move for any traveler. Bolstered by what the Indians said, they concluded, correctly, that the south fork was the Missouri and would take them into the mountains.

The river carried us past the Marias. Bobbie was giving Linnea some paddling advice. I was eavesdropping because I can use all the help I can get. "I tell my clients that a woman's center of gravity is lower, so women are more stable in kayaks than men," Bobbie said. "Women are probably more stable in life altogether."

"You mean," I asked, in all innocence, "because they got fat butts?"

"Said the moron who forgot his sleeping bag."

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