As promised, a post on the three day trip through the Missouri Breaks National Monument.
I arrived early to Fort Benton and was able to offload the mattress platform on a local lumberyard and do laundry. I checked in to the Grand Union Hotel. It had been built at the very end of the steamboat era when Fort Benton was the “undisputed commercial hub” of the area. Steamboats ran on wood on the Missouri, burning 25 cords a day. There were loggers along the river called wood hawks who chopped down trees and sold it to the steamboats in between attacks by Indians defending their land. Once the railroad came, bypassing Fort Benton, the town fell into hard times, and for years the hotel was abandoned, it's only tenants pigeons. Two sets of owners have brought it back to its former glory and are lovingly preserving it. They say it's haunted; one particular story has it that there was a dispute, and one of the aggrieved rode his horse up the stairs to confront the other, and was shot dead on the spot. I didn't learn the fate of the horse, but people say they sometimes hear it on the stairs.
I struck up a conversation with a woman at the bar who was there for the annual reunion of descendants of the Fort Shaw Girls Basketball Team. The girls came from one of the boarding schools for indigenous children designed to assimilate them into white, Christian culture. They went on to dominate the games at the 1904 World's Fair. I found this PBS documentary, Playing For the World, that tells their story.
The next morning, I met my fellow travelers and guides, and we drove 45 minutes to the embarkation spot. We had our dry bags and got the safety talks. The weather was raw; cold, wet and windy. We were in river shoes, because hey, you gotta walk in the water to get in the canoe. Our guide Jay said, “Don't walk in the boat. If you don't want to get your feet wet, you should've taken the Princess Cruise.” I had neoprene socks, so that helped, and I had layers and rain gear, but it was still really cold. One very thin woman was visibly shaking at lunch. I was having my internal dialogue about feeling uncomfortable, but stayed outwardly cheerful. I was impressed with how nonplussed some folks were, especially old Wayne. He's a lifelong farmer and pays no attention to such trivialities as the weather.
After lunch my canoe partner Carrie and I switched places, with her in the back. The wind had picked up even more, and she was having a hard time keeping the canoe from turning broadside to the wind. There were a few times where the waves were whipped up so much there was a real risk of capsizing. She wore herself out trying to muscle the boat, and we did an emergency switch back, floundering as we climbed through the mud while holding the canoe. I kept it pretty straight, hardly ever paddling, just steering, and we made it to camp long after the rest had arrived. We found out later everyone else had paired canoes, which increases the stability. I felt for the guides as they rushed around putting up tents during a brief break in the rain, then got straight to making dinner. I climbed in my sleeping bag in flannel pants and sweatshirt and warmed up. I had invited Wayne to be my roommate, which saved the guides from having to set up another tent. I learned he was 82, had been a gunsmith and machinist, ran a chicken farm with 30,000 chickens, was never married, and served a year in Vietnam. He sold his farm just last week, and will be driving around in his camper looking for a place to live. These stories!
We all had dinner and retreated back into the tents. It rained most of the night, but in the morning, you could see “Dutchman's britches”. Fellow traveler Todd used the term; I hadn't heard it for decades. It shows that the weather is breaking and the sun can't be far behind. From then on, the trip was glorious. The White Cliffs are sandstone from when much of the country was an inland sea. Even without the wind pushing us, the river was taking us along at almost 5mph. We stopped at Hole in the Wall for lunch, a landmark unchanged since at least the Lewis and Clarke expedition. Some of us hiked up to the hole, and we did some rock scrambling at the end. Our guide Tom said he didn't recommend the final scramble to the hole, but would help if anyone wanted to do it. Yours Truly felt the need. It wasn't really perilous, but “sketchy” would be apt. It feels good to have just a touch of “nope” running in your head, but then you persevere and feel a little rush afterwards. On the way down, I said to Tom, “What's it like for you to be responsible for people who want to do something but you aren't sure if they're capable?” He said, “That's why I say I don't recommend it.” Fair enough.
We had a delightful second night hanging out by a fire and getting to know each other. The next day was the last. I enjoyed getting to know Carrie now that we weren't battling the wind. She's a wildlife biologist and does bird surveys way out in the wilderness. She recently switched to training animal rescues, partly because her supervisors weren't following safety protocols. She was told by one, "If you know you're going to be in cougar territory, bring a flashlight"."
I've been noticing how much knowledge of history people seem to have out here. They know the details of the Discovery Corps, the work of the CCC, the realities of mining towns and Indian displacement. Our canoe trip was entirely following the path of Lewis and Clarke, but in the opposite direction. I was dumbfounded as we zoomed downstream, thinking how the expedition fought the current the whole time. At one point I said to Carrie, “Let's see just how hard it is to paddle upstream!” We gave it all we had for about two minutes, and we did make about 50 feet of progress. And that was enough of that.
