Edward Hoagland's Splendid "Tugboats on the Tanana"

A few weeks ago, I praised Robert Macfarlane’s “The Living River” (see here). There’s another river piece I’ve read recently that I want to commend – Edward Hoagland’s “Tugboats on the Tanana,” chapter 13 of his Alaskan Travels (2012).

“Tugboats on the Tanana” is an account of a 1983 trip that Hoagland took down the Tanana and Yukon Rivers on a push boat called the Tanana. The boat pushes two fuel barges from Nenana to Galena, a distance of 430 miles. Hoagland describes the trip superbly. Here are a few samples:

Streaks on the water’s surface showed Captain Keith Horton where the current was, although ruffling up to signal a shallows. He followed the flow, taking the long way around most of the bends, as it chewed at each side of the river in turn, but pointed the prow of the frontal barge out of the curve before the Tanana’s twin propellers lost their purchase and we skidded close to colliding with the bank, or slid too far to keep within the current’s five-to-seven-knots-per-hour boost. Deadwood lay strewn at sixes and sevens across the sandbars materializing inconveniently midstream; or jouncing stubs and spars poked out from the bottom like horse’s heads, galloping relentlessly till they would get scrubbed away. The banks were an atrocity zone for standing trees – havoc and slaughter wherever the river inched toward gripping them, though some survived at crazy angles if the roots had found a hidden boulder that had not been pulled loose yet. 

At Shirttail Channel – seven miles and forty minutes below Nenana – we passed several Indian fishing camps on the east shore, each with a fish wheel placidly turning. Maybe twenty feet high, these water wheels, set upright, rotated with the river’s push to scoop up any spawning salmon swimming upstream on a tangent to connect with the wooden blades, producing a sudden Ferris wheel hoist for the fish, till it was flipped backward into basket, then dumped into a collecting bin, where it twitched, smothering in the air, and eventually somebody would grab, gut, and fillet it, laying the strips with others to dry red on racks in the sun.

White birch and black spruce lined both banks, all different ages according to what the river had wrought. It chomped on trees like a horse crunching carrots, or else tipped them whole into the roil to travel beside us, the branches jutting up like a brown shark’s fin. Clouds built up on some of the knolls to make them look like snow peaks, or else turned bruise-blue, or pewter-colored. Sawmill Island stood two miles below Soldier Slough; then the deadwater of Totchaket Slough eight miles beyond that, at Pritchard Crossing. The complexities of Twenty-four Mile Slough followed soon after, and in another mile, Sawmill Slough, and, next, the braidings of Minto Slough, at an abandoned Indian settlement twenty-nine miles below Nenana, where beaver swamps and shortish streams congealed. At Campbell’s Crossing we tied up for lunch.

After the Upper and Lower Tolovana Sloughs, where we’d stuck close to where the river’s volume poured in, we carefully rounded an island to David Crossing, alongside a log like a moose in the water – its roots sticking up like antlers – and toward Sand Crossing, which was recognizable by a certain sweeper – a tree now hanging semi-horizontally over the tumult, but still leafy and partially attached to the disintegrating bank. 

More red-rock bluffs on the north side led to extensive thickets of moose pasturage opposite them, where the river broadened again, with anonymous islands and flats, until at last we reached Miller’s Camp, where we tied our stern to a tree trunk at ten-forty-five p.m., dusk, pointing downstream, and walked a pirate plank to a clay bank six feet high, having covered a hundred-forty miles in ten hours from Nenana.

From the Kokrine Hills, Sunset Creek, and Lady, Burns, and Chokoyik Islands, a settlement called Joe De Louis followed one called the Birches. Then, between Kathaleen, Edith, and Florence Islands, the Nowitna River, an important if corkscrewed tributary, joined us from the south. Moose Point faced Mickey Island, and Hardluck Island, the Big Bend, and Kokrines Village; then Fox and Ham islands; the white cliffs of Horner Hot Springs, and Shovel Creek. 

I love the poetry of the place names – part of the magnificent Hoagland specificity that just keeps rolling, like the Yukon itself, detail after immersive detail. Hoagland is a master writer. “Tugboats on the Tanana” is one of his best pieces.