Old Glory (17 page)

Weaver Bottoms was blotted out by another false wall of living timber. According to the chart, I must be passing Lost Island to the east. It was certainly lost to me. I wondered how it had come by its name. Perhaps someone had come here once on a day like today and had been tricked, like me, by all the deceptions the river was capable of springing. Mistaking reflections for the things they shadowed, water for sky, the fringe of trees for land, he had settled on the invisible island as a symbol of his condition, so confused by this amazing hall of mirrors that his own identity had temporarily dissolved in Mississippi water.

I had no intention of losing myself here, though; I meant to get my bearings and find things out. In Wabasha I had added a book titled
Trees of North America
to my traveling library. If I could just begin to decode the jumble of the forest, that at least would be a start. I ran the boat into a sandy cove, hitched up the motor, and climbed out, book in hand, to read the trees. In the field guide, arrayed by class, order, family, genus and species, they formed a perfectly articulated society. There were gymnosperms and angiosperms, monocotyledons and dicotyledons. The families sounded like the sort of decent, dullish people one might meet at a faculty party on an East Coast campus. The Dogwoods. The Tupelos. The Lindens. The Buckthorns. The Maples. The Apples. The Hophornbeams. The Birches. Each family
member had his or her own full-length color portrait. In such a well-distinguished company, one should never be at a loss as to who was who.

I found that I had landed up in a tree slum, where overcrowding and miscegenation had made it almost impossible to make out individuals in the tangled mass. The leaves of one tree seemed to be reaching out from the branch of another which, in its turn, was growing from the trunk of yet another. They swarmed up the bluff; trees in their incontinent millions. They didn’t seem to be aware of the opportunities for trees in North America; far from yearning to be free, these huddled masses looked as if they were getting on very well as they were. I pulled off a few leaves from the branches in front of me. Was this
Salix interior
, the Sandbar Willow?

Or could it be
Carpinus caroliniana
, the American Hornbeam?

What were “axils”? I didn’t know. I saw, or thought I saw, elms, red oaks, cherries, pines, walnuts … and lost count. I pulled the cork from my bottle, and started to make some contributions to American botany. Helped by the book, I discovered species hitherto unrecorded in this part of the United States. The farther away they stood, the more exotic they became. I found Jamaica Thatch Palms, Saw Palmettos, Longleaf Blollies, Florida Poison Trees, Swamp Cyrillas, Everglades Velvetseeds. The exhilarating thought occurred to me that I might be a new Darwin as I swept away the pieties of traditional science and prepared to tell the world that a single Mississippi bluff (not very far from Buffalo, Wisconsin) actually contains all the trees of North America.

I drifted on downstream, just letting the river unroll around me. It was no wonder that the charts and the tree book seemed hopelessly thin and theoretical when set against the here-and-now of the Mississippi itself. The river was simply too big, too promiscuous in its nature, too continuously changeable. It would never tamely submit to posing for its portrait. The engineers had done their best to make it presentable, with their locks, levees and wing dams, but these didn’t control the river, they merely curbed some of its wilder tendencies to eccentricity, and every so often the river would sweep away these curbs in a flood—a brute demonstration that the Mississippi was not to be messed with
lightly, that no human order could safely contain it. My own charts were less than a year old, and already they were out of date. Again and again, the channel would run around the wrong side of a sandbar, turn west not east, or divide around a new, unmarked island which was even now beginning to sprout with a baby forest.

The river defied representation. In the 1840s there had been a craze among painters to produce enormous “panoramas” that would transfer the Mississippi, drawn to scale, onto rolls of canvas. These were exhibited like movies: the audience sat in a darkened hall while the illuminated painting was slowly unspooled in front of them. They were thought of as marvels. It was like enjoying an accelerated steamboat ride all the way from New Orleans up to St. Paul: a three-week journey compressed into the length of a play at the theater. For the American artist, the Mississippi was his inevitable subject. The river was the best embodiment of the sheer space and variety of American life; nothing else in the country could match it for its prodigious geographical reach, as it moved through genteel Southern life, modern industrial cities, frontier farmsteads, budding towns and uncut wilderness. The panorama painters spent months afloat, sketching and taking notes. Then they supervised the design and coloring-in of the roll, using squads of apprentices to put the Pepins and the Pig’s Eyes into the picture.

Léon Pomerade, a French immigrant who had settled in New Orleans, did a
Panorama of the Mississippi and Indian Life
which was shown in St. Louis in 1849, and destroyed by fire a year later. The panorama that came nearest to being a serious painting was Henry Lewis’
Mammoth Panorama of the Mississippi River
. This was 12 feet high and 1,325 yards long; and even then it covered only the upper reaches, from the Falls of St. Anthony down to St. Louis. Lewis’ painting was a miniature, though, compared with the epic panorama constructed by John Banvard—a three-mile long picture which showed the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico to St. Louis. Banvard went on a world tour with this giant spool of canvas. He was invited to exhibit it to Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace. It is an episode in her life that her biographers seem to have missed. How long did it take? What did she say? Did she start to nod off at Vicksburg, or Natchez, or Greenville? Did she become hypnotized by the groaning noise of the cylinders as they moved the river on in front of the small gilt throne? Was Banvard able to alter the speed of the thing when he saw the suppressed beginning of a royal yawn? Nine hundred miles at a scale of 18 feet to the mile … Even if Banvard had bowled the Queen up the river at twenty miles an hour, the trip would have lasted more than eleven hours.

Banvard’s panorama was lost in another fire, in Chicago. It was, apparently, the fate of these epic representations of water to be consumed, almost as soon as painted, by water’s rival element. Or perhaps these old deities had found a common cause in making people like Banvard repent their temerity. The Mississippi would not be cut down to size.

For me, it was slowly unspooling itself past Kieselhouse Bay and Haddock Slough, around Horseshoe Bend, past Fountain City and into Betsy Slough. A big double tow was coming upriver through Lock 5a, and I stood off among the islands with half an hour to kill before I could lock through. I set up my fishing rod and tied on a homemade bass plug that Jim Curdue had given me. I flipped it out into the shallows where the walleyes were supposed to lie.

It was taken almost instantly, in a splashy lunge under the trees, and the fish came in, swimming fast for deep water, under my boat. I reeled in, first on nothing, then on something strange which was juddering like a road drill thirty feet below. For a minute or two I was lost in the old cruel joy of being back in touch with who-knew-what … a monster, perhaps … a creature out of legend more than natural history. The fish abruptly stopped fighting against the strain of my rod. When I raised it to the surface, it came up with the limp weight of a bundle of old clothes. I netted it, and it lay on the seat in front of me, gasping feebly in the mesh. It wasn’t a walleye—it was too heavy-bellied for that. It was too big to be a white bass. It had spines, and no whiskers, so it couldn’t be a catfish. I settled on the notion that it must be a large-mouth bass. I unhooked it as gently as I could and gave it back to the Mississippi. Its fins fluttered hesitantly in the water; it swam in a slow circle; then, in a sudden restoration of energy, it dived deep into the black.

All I could see of him was his big, gray porcine face suspended over the lock railing as I was sinking in the chamber.

“Hey—you the
Englishman?”

“Yes!”

“My wife saw you on TV! Every day she’s been asking me if you come through yet!”

Our talking time was running out. I was dropping rapidly down the wall. The hiss of the sluices was getting louder every moment. My interrogation was conducted at a pace of frantic
accelerando:

“You know Mildenhall, Suffolk?”

“Yes!”

“I was stationed there. In the military.”
Millie Teary
.

“Really?”

“You know the Samson and Delilah Ballroom, Norwich?”

“Yes,” I shouted, “I used to live in Norwich.”

“Ya
did?
Boy, wait till Beverley hears that!”

Another two feet of brown slime went by.

“You stopping off in
Winona?”

“Yes!”

“Where?”

“Don’t know!”

“You wait there! I got an ideal”

I settled finally at the bottom of the pit. The lockmaster’s instruction to “wait there” was perfectly gratuitous. I was firmly caged in. The chamber was cold, dark and smelly. Clinging to a rope with one hand, I lit up a pipe with the other and wondered whether the lockmaster’s intention was simply to keep me here as an exhibit. Perhaps the railing far over my head would soon crowd with curious faces; perhaps I would have to dodge a hail of bananas, sugar lumps and Cracker Jack. It was several minutes before a message was lowered to me, wrapped around a rock, on the end of a rope.

It read like a list of clues for a treasure hunt. In wobbly capital letters it told me to take my boat to Dick of Dick’s Marine, ask Dick to ring Chubby, get Chubby to pick me up and take me home with him, then Beverley would collect me from Chubby’s place and the author of the note would see me later. It wasn’t signed.

“Okay?” His voice might have come from a far mountaintop.

“Fine! Thank you!” I called back. My first law of the river was always to submit to a
force majeure
when I met one. I carefully pocketed my instructions and rode out of the open lock in search of Dick’s Marine.

Lights were coming on all over the city. Winona’s riverfront of grain elevators and oil terminals had gone to a deep purple against the streaky evening sky. I found Dick’s Marine in a lagoon on Lasch Island; Dick was shutting up shop when I pulled in. Feeling foolish, I showed him the note.

“Oh, yeah. So you’re a friend of Bob’s.”

I supposed that I must be. We walked around the darkening lagoon to Dick’s boat store.

“Ever been to Winona before?”

“Never.”

“Great place. You know we got twenty-nine millionaires in this city? Now, they don’t look like millionaires. You’d never tell they was millionaires. But they’re millionaires, all right, you better believe it.
Look—” He pointed to himself. “Thirty-dollar boots. Fifteen-dollar overralls. Ya smoke? Lousy cigarette case. Twenty-dollar watch—in case it drops in the river. Round here
no one
looks like a millionaire. But there’s twenty-nine of them, right here in one little town.”

I was exhausted by the treasure hunt. It went on for hours. I was shunted through the suburbs of Winona in the night rain, seeing them only as smears and blotches through the streaming windshield of one car after another. I hauled my suitcase from trunk to trunk. In a timber barn of a house, I was besieged by shrilling children who all wore hearing aids. They brought me sloughed rattlesnake skins, swimming certificates and lumps of raw agate, while I dreamed of escaping to a hotel room, a bath, a meal, sleep. Then there were more suburbs, more Pizza Huts and Kentucky Fried Chicken joints, more wet flags billowing over clapboard bungalows, and then, at the end of the trail, Beverley, with her feet up on the sofa, watching the TV and eating popcorn.

She looked like a retired lady wrestler. Slack-jawed, her eyes hidden behind the thick lenses of her glasses, she filled her outside stretch pants to the last stitch. She had insulated herself behind a solid wall of electronic noise. The volume of the TV set was turned full up, and beside her on the floor stood a great black hulk of gadgetry from which distorted voices squawked and burbled continuously.

“What’s that?” I called to her, pointing at the thing.

“Radio scanner. So’s I can keep a track on Bob.”

A comedy show was running on the screen. When the audience laughed, Beverley paused in her popcorn eating, gave a perfunctory cackle and said, “Funny, huh?” to me without moving her eyes from the TV. Once she jerked her head at her radio scanner. “Hear that? That’s Bob there, up on the lock. They’re bringing the
Delta Queen
up through there tonight. You ever seen the
Delta Queen?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Know what Bob calls it? The Floating Fire Hazard. Funny, huh?”

I agreed that it was.

“You don’t like to watch TV?”

“No, it’s fine. I’m just not concentrating very hard.”

“You like to read books?”

“Yes. I seem to have spent half my life doing nothing else.”

“We got the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Over there. Anything you want to look up, you look it up.”

“Thanks very much. There isn’t actually anything I …” But Beverley had evidently transferred her entire attention to the popcorn and the people in the comedy show. Beverley and I were not hitting it off,
somehow. Whenever I tried out my own notions of conversation on her, something in her circuits made an automatic cutout, and I found myself reduced to stumbling monosyllables on the rare occasions when she tossed me a sentence from the side of her mouth.

“I sure would like to take you down the cellar. Bob’d kill me, though.”