Old Glory (10 page)

In 1869, 125,000 Germans and 42,000 Scandinavians had arrived in the United States. No wonder that so many of them had gravitated here.
To me, the idea of “westward expansion” had always had the impressive vagueness of one of those laws of quantum physics, like the causes of black holes and the structure of the double helix. It made a great deal more sense to think of it in terms of the price of hogs and strong boots.

What would my old man, with his log house and his memories of Pig’s Eye, have made of his descendants in Admiral Benbow’s? Would he have felt a damp-eyed pride to see them here, jiggling the ice cubes in their cocktails?

sang the tired woman on her cabaret rostrum.

Surely Barbra Streisand must have made more rhythmical sense out of the unrhythmical words; yet this rendering had given them an unintentional, rather terrible sincerity. It was smart now to sing of loss and failure and the discovery that life was mostly secondhand. The catch was that the songs were supposed to be sung by successes—international stars of loss and failure. From the mouth of a real loser, they came close to genuine blubbering despair. And in this setting, where the hopefulness of the immigrants who had created it was so close to the historical surface, far from sounding narcissistically wry and self-knowing, they sounded simply and painfully tragic.

The mournful mustaches of the junior executives were in tune with the rest of their faces now. They nodded to the music. They poked at the lemon chips in their vodka martinis with little striped straws. If I had been Great-great-gran’ pappy, I would have wanted to whup them good, every one. Hell, those guys, they wouldn’t have known one end of a five-dollar hog from the other.

I walked back to my hotel along Front Street. A sodium lamp cast a disk of light on the river below. It looked like a vat of simmering tar: busy water, wrinkling and bulging and coiling in on itself. It didn’t just keep rolling along, but kept itself occupied with a myriad of pointless calls and errands along the way. Standing there in the darkness, I felt that the more I experienced of the Mississippi’s character the more it looked as if she and I were going to be happily compatible.

The hotel room was a featureless closet somewhere high up in the teens among the elevator buttons. I switched on the TV: the Federal Reserve Board announced that the dollar was being propped up by heavy intervention on the foreign-exchange markets. That didn’t seem
very interesting, so I sought entertainment elsewhere. A rusty steel box built into the side of my bed promised me a relaxing vibro-massage if I fed it with a quarter. I dropped the coin in the slot and lay on the bed and waited. The mattress on which I was slumped suddenly seemed stuffed with several hundred small, scurrying gerbils. The experience of squashing these animals was mildly interesting but not, I thought, particularly relaxing; and after a minute or two of feeling them wriggling under my buttocks I began to wish that the gerbils would go away.

The TV news went local. An Englishman had left Minneapolis that day in a small motorboat bound for New Orleans and beyond. In interview he said that he’d first read
Huckleberry Finn
when he was seven, and had been haunted by the idea of going down the Mississippi ever since. In the picture on the screen, his face had a cheesy pallor. His countrified hat didn’t at all match the urban fatigue of the rest of him. He climbed into his boat, produced a wan grin for the camera, and was soon lost to sight beyond a bridge. He looked to me like a clowning greenhorn, as raw an immigrant as any of those other, weary Europeans who had come to the Midwest with hopes and handbooks. Feeling rueful to see myself so travestied by this foolish character on television, I took comfort from the fact that at least the gerbils had moved out.

Ahead of the highway bridge, the river bunched and narrowed; great wings of blackened timber funneled it through a central arch. I fed my boat into the main channel, where the water ran fast in a glittery swell. The bow clanked as it hit each new wave and kept a permanent corona of spray over my head. When I squinted upward, I could see my own, private, traveling rainbow there.

I had little time for rainbows, though, for now the traffic on the river thickened. Big tows lounged on the current, thrashing the water around their tails, their engines farting loudly as they turned. They maneuvered lugubriously around each other, honking and grumbling, heaving their ridiculous bulk about like hippopotami at a water hole. As I threaded my way through them, one boomed its horn at me, a warning animal note from a very dangerous beast indeed.

Here the river really did mean business. The St. Paul shore was solidly blocked in with cranes, derricks, huge steel drums, gantries, chutes, silos and brick warehouses. I tried counting cargoes … scrap iron, salt, molasses, coal, phosphates, sand and gravel, grain. This was harvest time, and there was so much grain that it colored the river itself. Near the elevators, the surface of the water was dusted a pale ocher by the husks of soya, barley, wheat and corn. Closed chutes like elephant trunks fed the moored barges in a continuous stream: twelve or fifteen
hundred tons to one barge … nine to fifteen barges to a tow … and still there were whole fleets of empty barges, tied up off the channel, waiting to be filled.

Until the river straightened out, I didn’t realize the strength of the south wind. It was blowing dead against the current, and the water was crumpling into it, ridged with lines of whitecaps running so close together that the boat just rattled across the top of this bumpy, corrugated river. Steering into the waves in the early-morning cool, I felt unreasonably happy merely to be here and now; and the happiness was made real by an underlying tinge of anxiety and fright.

I passed Pig Eye Island, the end of St. Paul and the last reminder of how the city had begun. On the right bank, a long freight train trundled south on the Chicago and North Western railroad, moving hardly faster than I was myself. The tracks and ties were so dilapidated now that trains had to go on tiptoe for fear of falling off the rails. As the train inched past me into the forest, it blew a long, deep chord of organ notes in a valedictory minor key.

It was Saturday, and there were other pleasure boats about, looking tiny and solitary as they nosed out into midstream from behind islands and sandbars. The smartest of them were restored steamboats. Once they had been working tugs and ferries; now, painted up, their stern wheels powered by marine diesels, they were historical toys, hung with holiday bunting, Old Glory flying from the masts on their texas decks. Other bits of history were being reconstructed elsewhere on the river. Wood fires smoked on the sandbars as suburban families played at being pioneers, laying lines for catfish and boiling up their breakfasts in billycans.

The past they were acting out was not, after all, very far away—still within the realm of hearsay and grandfathers’ tales. Back for a weekend in the wilderness, in cowboy hats and dungarees, people were taking a day round-trip ticket to a family memory of a time when the essential quality of American life was its freedom from precedent and tradition. Here in Minnesota, between the 1870s and now, America had molded its immigrants into a pattern of manners just as rigid as any that they had left behind in the farming communities of Europe. On the river, though, there was still a smell of uncut forest, and the haunting reminder that things could, perhaps, have been otherwise. Not so long ago, personal identity here was all pliancy and possibility, and camping on a sandbar one might just conceivably remember something—a lost key, a talisman. The plumes of smoke from the fires were flattened by the wind. The houseboats and launches rocked at their moorings. The wilderness was government property.

I pulled in out of the channel to set myself up with a mug of coffee and a filled pipe. There were Man Friday footprints in the sand that blew around my ankles as I hooked my anchor around a fallen tree trunk on the bar. The footprints disappeared over the top of a ridge. Another boat was moored in the inlet there: the most basic of all the sorts of Mississippi boat—a wood-frame garden shed mounted on a floating pontoon, with a flat tin roof and an outboard motor at its back door. It made no concession to the usual fripperies of marine design; it was just a shack built on oil drums. As I stood on the ridge, a German shepherd dog came growling nastily down the plank that joined the boat to the shore.

“Hurricane! Hey, Hurricane! Shut your shit, hey, willya? Willya just shut your goddamn shit, now?” The man might as well have stepped from a sepia photograph as from his boat. Fair-haired, bearded, in denims and lumberjack shirt, he looked as if he could easily be in the market for a log house on a small improved farm at twenty dollars an acre.

“Okay—he won’t do nothing.”

Hurricane sulked, deprived of his English breakfast.

“I’m sorry, I’m trespassing on your island.”

“Ain’t mine. Ain’t no one’s. Ain’t posted.” He stared at me for a moment, his fingers playing in the thick tawny hair of Hurricane’s neck. “You foreign or something?”

“From London, England.”

“That so? You want to come on in?”

Inside, his boat was bare and jumping, with water lights playing on the knotted wood. It smelled of creosote and sawn pine. There was a cot, a rocker, a homemade table. Someone was saying, “Downtown we have sunny skies and sixty-eight degrees …” on a cracked transistor radio. The remains of a skillet of beans stood on a Sterno camp stove. Playmates of the Month were thumbtacked to the walls. Two six-packs of Schlitz, a can of Alpo, a shotgun … the fundamentals of a very rudimentary life.

He was a carpenter. During the week, he worked on a construction site in Minneapolis making slats to spread concrete over. On weekends he left his wife and two young children back in the city and came out here alone to brood and hunt and cuddle his wolf-dog in his floating shack.

“Don’t you ever bring your wife and kids?”

“Elvira, she don’t care for the river too much. She says it’s a dirty place. She weren’t raised on the Mississippi like I was. Hell, my family … we used to come down here, swim in the river, fish, camp out.…
Elvira don’t allow for the kids to go swim, even; she read someplace that the river’s all full of diseases and such.”

We rocked on the wake of a passing tow. Splashes of sun raced each other up and down the walls.

“On the river, you get your head right.” He pulled the ring from the top of a beer and sank half the canful at a gulp. “You want a beer? No, what I’d like to do … I’d like to build a houseboat the whole family could live on all year round. The whole thing—bathroom, gas central heating, big kitchen, give the kids a cabin each … sell out the home I got in Richfield … live on the river. Elvira, though, she wouldn’t stand for that. She’d go goddamn nutso.
That stinkin’ river!
Shit. Hey, give over, Hurricane—give over! But the Mississippi, it ain’t dirty, not now. Shit, you can drink the water. I don’t know why she hates it so. Lot of women, they do. Guess it kind of scares them.”

“It’s beginning to scare me.”

“Scares me too, sometimes. Specially when she’s running high. In the spring, now, with the floodwater and all, this river, she’s something else.”

The carpenter was on much the same track as Len Mink, the radio gospel singer: he too was going back to the God of his childhood, to the same simple things as the child he once knew. Here he was twelve years old again, a boy in the woods. I tried to guess at the family he had slipped away from, but their outlines were dim. I imagined that Elvira must be big and grown-up, slopping around the house in a floral-print smock and pink fur slippers.

“What do you hunt?”

“Coon. Squirrel. Duck. Coyote. Last fall I got a shot at a polecat, but I missed it. I wanted that polecat real bad, for a trophy. Hurricane, now, he’s a great coon dog, ain’t you, fella? That dog, he just loves to tree coons.
Coon
, huh?
Coon!
Hey, Hurricane!”

Hurricane looked back at his master with tolerant incomprehension.

“You want to go tree a coon?”

The dog eyed me. A very faint glimmer of hope showed behind the film of rheum. Coons, though, were outside his imaginative range on that particular Saturday morning. Some dim spirit of canine realism asserted itself, and I watched the hope die in his eyes.

“Hurricane?”
Harry Caine?
was how the carpenter actually said the name.

Obliged to respond in some way to this torrent of questions, the dog shifted heavily off his butt and went to eat Alpo out of a bowl with his name custom-printed on it in German Gothic lettering.

“That
is
some coon dog.”

“Looks like a fairly keen Alpo dog, too.”

“Coon’s out of season yet, though. When the coon season starts, that dog … shit, there ain’t nothing Hurricane likes better than treeing coons.”

He laid his shotgun across his lap, posing for his own self-portrait:
The Settler, 187–
. Hurricane broke wind and slept. I said goodbye, leaving the carpenter to his solitary, adolescent make-believe, and went back to my boat to get on with mine.

The rags of blown foam on the water were copycatting the rags of high cloud that came beating north across the sky. I kept the boat headed into the waves. The whole trick, according to Herb, was never to get caught broadside … “She’ll roll you right over” … and I could feel her doing her best, snatching at my bow and tugging it sideways, knocking loudly on my hull and trying to come in.

The river was squeezed into a twisty crevice between high bluffs, and the wind, thickened with sand from the bars, went scouring into every cranny and backwater. The forest came down sheer into the water on both sides, broken by outcrops of ribbed limestone, staring out of the solid cliffs of green like the faces of Easter Island statues. Fall was still a couple of weeks away, and the leaves hadn’t yet begun to turn. Shaken by the wind, they caught the sun and winked. The river, barred black and silver, was too bright to take in all at once; I had to watch each wave, looking for the rim of shadow under its breaking crest, and steer the bow into it.