heard the conductor’s voice behind me as he worked his way up the aisle.
“Tickets.” He drew closer.
I fought the urge to peer around the edge of my seat. Instead I sat staring straight ahead, waiting in ambush. As he turned to punch my ticket, he saw my face. “John Robinson!”
“Jim Lagnaf! Man, am I glad to see you.”
The conductor was an old friend. We’d grown up in the same Jeff City neighborhood, so this trip was starting out a lot smoother than the nightmare with Brian the Conductor.
“Whatter you doin’ on my train?” Jim asked.
“Headed home. Been on tourism business.”
“Tourism. Hmm,” he grunted. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He continued up the aisle. “Tickets!”
* * *
I settled back in my seat and watched the scenery roll past my window. The train followed the river around a sweeping turn called Alert Bend, named after a boat, an early river pioneer that didn’t make it.
I knew the story. The Alert was steaming a few miles upriver from Hermann when it happened. A lookout at the bow of the boat spotted a sawyer at the edge of the channel. A sawyer is a limb that sticks out of the swift current. It’s attached to a submerged tree, so it’s a trigger, waiting to spring the sunken tree trunk like a mousetrap and punch a hole in a wooden boat hull. The lookout pointed to the sawyer so the captain would see. The captain already had seen it. Any captain would have seen it, because that’s how captains become captains. They see all the obstacles atop the water. But the good ones, the captains who endure, they know what’s under the water.
The Alert was a side wheeler, “like all early-day boats on the Missouri River,” wrote E.B. Trail, one of the Missouri River’s foremost steamboat historians. And she ran “an irregular trade on the Missouri.” That may have been the Alert’s undoing. “An irregular trade” means the captain probably didn’t know the river very well.
She had beat the odds so far, five years old, still going strong, built in Pittsburgh the same year Sam Clemens was born, 1835. But she had entered a river where most steamboats wouldn’t reach their second birthday. On the Ohio River or the Mississippi River, she could chug in relative safety at five or six knots and provide useful service for a dozen years, maybe more.
But this was the Missouri River—swift and turbulent, braiding, deadly.
The captain steered the boat safely past the sawyer and was rounding the tight bend into a narrow channel when he felt the jolt. His heart sank. The Alert had struck a snag. He had evaded the snap of the sawyer, but the sunken tree punched a hole in the wooden hull below the waterline. In minutes the river rushed into the gash and claimed another victim.
To the small fraternity of riverboat pilots whose two dozen boats braved the Missouri River in 1840, that spot became known as Alert Bend. Within the year, two more spots on the Missouri River would take their names from shipwrecks.
There would be more.
* * *
Like Jim the conductor, I grew up beside this river. So I’d heard the stories. This was the first highway of westward expansion. Steamboats shipped a million pioneer families on their first leg of a long journey west. Some families didn’t make it, buried in shipwrecks beneath the flood plain, tombs filled with enough provisions to satisfy a pharaoh in the first millennium of afterlife.
Living near the edge of Jefferson City as a kid, I could sneak out of the house on warm summer nights, and hike to the bluffs above the river as it moved silently through the darkness. Back then it was easier to find total darkness, away from star-erasing pollution caused by streetlights and security lamps. The river bluffs offered a clear view of the universe. The night sky entertained me with infinite vastness, rewarding my patience with a shooting star across the Milky Way. But I never waited long before a light saber would stab the black night, waving low across the river, focused laser sharp from the bridge of a towboat, a narrow beam of white light swinging from one fix to the next, marker to marker, buoy to bridge to bank and back again, bright enough to make a new moon full. Back then, riverboat spotlights were common as fireflies. On a dark treacherous river, these powerful beams helped show the way for gigantic rafts formed when daredevils lashed supermarket-sized barges together, two across, four barges long, and filled them with the harvest from America’s breadbasket. These daredevils rode the barges from Omaha and Sioux City and Bismarck, pushing their cargo day and night down to their destinations along the Mississippi.
Barge traffic finally died out when engineers dammed the river in the Dakotas. The dams do their best to control flooding in the spring, and they do a better job of offering recreation in the summer. But they also withhold the autumn waters that once ferried the grain harvest to St. Louis and New Orleans and St. Paul. So nowadays grain shipments do what human travelers do: crowd the highways or take a rail route.
* * *
Jim the conductor returned and sat down in the empty seat next to me. In a firm low conductor voice, he warned me:
“Keep Montauk a secret.”
And since he was the conductor, I listened.
“Promote the trout fishing at Bennett Springs if you want,” he said, “and at Maramec Springs and at Roaring River. But keep Montauk a secret.”
Fishermen are that way. Secretive. Possessive. Sometimes down-right paranoid. I think it has something to do with spending so much time alone with beer and worms. Since I was on his train, I lied and told him I’d keep his secret. At least until now. Truth is, there are thousands of secret water spots in the heartland. But Montauk isn’t one of them. The conductor knows that. Every fly fisherman within a thousand miles knows about Montauk.
I grew up nearby, near enough to frequent that not-so-secret Ozarks spring near the headwaters of the Current River. And roots being roots, I’m proud of Montauk. I recall my first trip to that remote little trout park.
It was about as far back as my memory goes, back when I was practicing my phonics on Burma-Shave signs. My family unit rolled out of Rolla in a ’58 Biscayne, leaving Route 66 in our rearview mirror, headed for the springs. Our car bobbed and weaved on a roller-coaster road that unfurled through the thick woods, deep in free-range country where we had to keep an eye out for deer, but also had to dodge pigs and cows and horses.
When our family arrived at Montauk, not one of us wet a line. We ran around the old mill, and fed the tiny fish in the hatchery and stood in the cold rushing water for as long as we could stand it, and marveled at the natural beauty of spring water busting out from under a mountain.
And I slept all the way home.
* * *
The historic old Montauk lodge is almost unchanged from the picture in my memory. Nowadays a few more cabins dot the hillsides. And the lodge has a new name, but it still serves up the same great Sunday dinner. Real mashed potatoes. Chicken like your grandmother made it.
And the trout have no clue that my friend the conductor might show up soon.
From Montauk, if you didn’t have to stay on the curvy swervy roads, it’s only about 17,000 frog hops back to Salem. From there a county road snakes south, down to Akers Ferry, where a barge transports cars across the spring-fed Current River into the deep Ozark Mountains. These are
