Old Glory (23 page)

I looked through the window. The ceiling was falling in, and the wood reception desk was whitened with flakes of rotten plaster. An abandoned
tubular chair stood in a waste of carpet that had lost its pile. There were flowerpots on the windowsill, but the plants inside them had died long ago, leaving naked bamboo stakes behind.

All down the street there was the same sad air of dereliction. In each vacated store there was a dusty pile of cardboard boxes; torn screening peeled out from the doorframes. Gokey’s Meats and Groceries was a boarded ruin. Rusted metal plaques bore advertising slogans at once chirpy and wan. A Coca-Cola logo from the 1940s had its message eaten almost completely away. Was it
PAUSE … DRINK
or
PLEASE … DRINK
? I couldn’t tell.
HILLDALE MILK—DRINK THE UDDER KIND
was clear; so was
REACH FOR SUNBEAM BREAD
. Even the realtors’ signs that hung outside these places were beginning to rust and fade. Yet the basic fabric of the town, its fine neoclassical brick and white clapboard, retained an unseasonably prosperous look, as if it were just waiting for the arrival of the next train or steamboat to restore it to spanking glory.

In fact, the steamboat had just docked. The
Delta Queen
had pulled in that afternoon and anchored in front of the Villa Louis, a pompous Victorian mansion which had been built by Wisconsin’s first fur millionaire on the island that kept the town just out of sight of the river. Teen-age girls, sweating in costume bustles and mobcaps, escorted the tourists around the house. I fell in behind one party and was bored by a succession of bad paintings, old dinner plates, clothes that smelled of mothballs and the oohs and ahs of the
Delta Queen
gang as they took in their compulsory history lesson before getting back on the boat and heading for the next scheduled attraction upriver. No one crossed the bridge to the town. Shooting pool in a bar on Front Street, I mentioned the steamboat to my opponent. “Oh, yeah?” he said, chalking his cue. “I never seed it.” The only connection between the
Delta Queen
and Prairie du Chien was that their names rhymed. The old cry of “Steamboat a-comin’!” which used to rouse every town along the river would not today stir a single dozing hound on the levee.

Below Prairie du Chien, the Mississippi ran through a tight wooded ravine. The swell on the river was ribbed and glittery, and I plowed into it as fast as I dared. I could feel the fall chasing me; I must move south before the cold, short days caught me up. I was being overtaken now by my fellow migrants. Each day more Monarch butterflies went by, riding the wind in zigzag swoops and bounds. I had seen the first of the snow geese from Canada, going high overhead in strict formation. They were headed for their winter quarters on the lakes of Kentucky and Tennessee. Lower in the air, skimming the water, there were flights of teal. At first I mistook them for puffs of smoke—gray smudges
of a hundred birds or so at a time. Then, suddenly, the puff would atomize into its constituent parts, the ducks scattering wildly at some signal from within the flight. I tried to keep up, but my own progress was hobbled and jerky. All through the morning, the southerly wind had been steadily building; by the time I reached Guttenberg, Iowa, just twenty miles downstream, the wave tops were splashing over my bow, and I had to tie up at a fishing station where the boats were lurching noisily around on their moorings. I watched a Monarch being blown back by the wind like a scrap of burnt paper. It fluttered up, made a foot or two of air, lost it, struggled to regain its hold, and was carried off on some slipstream into the trees, drawn to the south as senselessly as an iron filing in the field of a magnet.

I walked into Guttenberg along the sandy track on the levee, nervously watching where I was putting my feet after I’d spotted two sloughed snakeskins within fifty yards. My entry into town was at least more tactful than Jimmy Carter’s. The President had stepped off the
Delta Queen
clutching notes for a speech. Once the crowd was already packed solid around him, he had called to his aides, “Hey, is this Iowa? Is this Iowa?”
Yes
, said the crowd; and Carter sailed into a lengthy tribute to Iowa and the Iowans. Unfortunately, his initial question had been better remembered in Guttenberg than the speech that followed it.

For weeks afterward, wits went putting their heads around the doors of Guttenberg bars and crying, “Hey, is this Iowa?” Someone at the end of the bar was then supposed to growl, “Hey, that ain’t Ted Kennedy, is it?”

Now, though, Guttenberg was preparing for some more pressing elections of its own. The town was stuck over with posters advertising candidates for mayor, for the school board, for the city council. We were living through a period when contempt for national politics, for “Washington outlaws,” for the mass-marketed big shots in the presidential race was deeper than it had ever been. Yet in the politics of the local community there was a transparent enthusiasm and liveliness, as if people had rejected “America” as an ungovernable abstraction and turned instead to that older, more comprehensible model of the city-state as their political sphere of action. Let Reagan, Connally, Carter, Kennedy, Anderson go hang; in Guttenberg, Iowa, the democratic process was alive and well on names like Farmer, Kregel, Webster, Saeugling, Rodenberg, Willenborg, Tangeman and Merrick. That, at least, was the notion I wanted to explore, and I went off to find the mayor of Guttenberg at the back of his cable-TV rental store.

Mayor Webster pushed a pile of paperwork aside to talk to me. He
was retiring from office later in the year, and he called in Karen Merrick, a young doctor’s wife who was hoping to become the first woman mayor of Guttenberg.

“Look,” Webster said. “I’m a registered Republican. Karen here’s a Democrat. If we ever got to talking about national issues we’d split right down the line. I’m a conservative, she’s a liberal. But I’ll vote for her as mayor. On the city council, we’ve disagreed on a lot of things; but she’s backed me on some issues, I’ve backed her on others. It’s totally bipartisan. And that’s where national government has gone all to hell, and where the city council of Guttenberg scores. It’s the right person for the job, and not the party line. I think Karen’ll make a great mayor—and she’s a
Kennedy
supporter!”

We talked about the “issues” of the town. There was the swimming pool I’d passed on the way in—that was something Karen Merrick had campaigned for and won. There was a big sewage project on hand … the question of town lighting … the electricity and water supplies …

“But it’s only with things like this that you can have real democracy, with everyone in the community participating,” Karen Merrick said. “Democracy’s something that works best in a town this size, and the bigger you get, the less democracy you tend to have.”

I said that I found that a depressing prospect. Didn’t such intense localism simply lead to ugly small-town xenophobia? “Like Lansing, up the road. I gather that Lansing people think of anyone with a Dubuque license plate as an intruder.”

“Yeah,” said Webster. “But that’s special. That’s all to do with the hunting party. Didn’t they tell you about that? That was, oh, must have been back in the 1950s. Some guys from Dubuque County got up a hunting party and went shooting squirrels over on the bluff there. Farmer comes out on his horse, orders them off his land; they shot his horse from under him. Then they cut all the squirrels they got in two; they took the back legs away with them and scattered the heads and front legs all over the guy’s land.… That’s why Lansing folks don’t care for Dubuque County license plates. Now, if they’d been hunting rattlesnakes, that wouldn’t have been so bad … but squirrels …” He laughed. “Don’t you ever try shooting a guy’s horse
and
his squirrels. That’s what’s known as testing a man’s patience.”

I had to admit that I was on shaky ground with the case of Lansing versus Dubuque County.

“No, I think we’ve got things about right, here in Guttenberg,” Webster said. “The family’s still the center of things here. And the church.
Kids grow up knowing what’s right and what’s wrong. They know what it means to be a member of the community.”

“And then as soon as they graduate from high school, they take off for the big city.”

“That’s not true. Sure, some go. But then they take what they’ve learned in Guttenberg with them. That’s how the small town educates the city.”

“Where are your own children?”

“Right here in Guttenberg.”

Foiled.

“I just see one big problem,” Karen Merrick said. “So many kids now are going into trade schools and technical schools, the whole vocational thing, and they’re losing out on the liberal arts. Unless we can get them back into liberal-arts programs, they’re going to lose their understanding of the whole democratic process. Then you’ve got an unworkable system. I think that’s happening now. We’re raising a generation that isn’t educated enough to know what it means to be a citizen.”

“That’s in the cities,” Webster said.

“No, I think it’s happening here too.”

“How do you feel about places like New York and Los Angeles?”

“Those New Yorkers,” Webster said, “they think Guttenberg doesn’t exist; but if places like Guttenberg didn’t exist, then those New Yorkers, they’d
starve
. Well, we know that here, but they don’t know it there. So I reckon we just about got the edge on them.”

“I spent two years in California, when my husband was an intern. I hated the attitude there. You know, I’d say I came from Iowa.
Iowa?
Half the people there didn’t know the difference between Iowa, Idaho and Omaha. They didn’t know if it was a city or a state. The other half just said, ‘Oh yeah: fields of corn.’ It’s not
like
that.”

“California …” said Webster, “… where the soap operas come from. Those soap operas, they’re really something else. You ever seen
As the World Turns?
I was looking at it this afternoon. There was this girl in bed, naked, with a guy. She gets up; the guy shouts, ‘You just been using me.’ ‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘I’ve just been using you. For sex.’ And slams out the door.” The mayor chewed the phrase over again. “ ‘I’ve just been using you. For sex.’ And that’s a
girl
talking. Imagine that in Guttenberg—”

Later that evening, in the bar of the hotel on the bluff, I had reason to remember Mayor Webster’s happy disbelief in the possibility of such outrageous lines ever being spoken in his city. Beside me, two women were drinking with steady intent. A husband arrived. There was a
quick, quiet row in which a few words were used like razor blades, and the husband left before the whiskey he’d ordered had been set up on the bar.

“What
you
doing tonight?” said the wife, handing me her husband’s drink. Then, to her friend, she said, “You were always the lucky one.”

“Why? Because mine died before yours did?”

“Yup.”

“You know they work together now—Ben and her together? That’s why they’re so goddamn shit-to-shit.”

So perhaps Guttenberg did, after all, turn on the same axis as the world.

The wind blew stubbornly on from the same quarter. From the window of my hotel room on the bluff, the river looked like a pretty sheet of beaten metal; but at water level each hammer dent was big enough to hold my boat, its lip curling with foam above the bow. I wedged my hat hard down over my ears and talked to the waves. In foreign climes there were at times some moments quite appalling …

I had another useful incantation, too. Just before I’d left London, the British poet Gavin Ewart had published a clever piece of doggerel in the
New Statesman
. It had won a competition in which entrants had been invited to base an eight-line stanza on any town, mountain or river with four syllables to its name. Ewart had chosen the Mississippi:

I chanted this down Cassville Slough and Hurricane Chute. The sprawl of islands here was thick enough to soften the effect of the wind, and the rhythm of the hull on the rocky water was as regular as the sound of train wheels leaping over the gaps in the tracks.
Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi
. On the train, one is supposed to hear the name of one’s destination in the noise; on the river, all I could hear was the river itself.

I thought of the Monarch butterfly that I’d seen the day before, fighting its way south, and saw myself in my yellow boat as a bug of another species—committed to the same route more by bug instinct than
by any act of conscious intelligence. Sometime—I couldn’t remember when—the idea of the river had become fixed in my head like a computer program. I could work out what it meant only by the cluster of vague associations with which it seemed to be surrounded. When the seven-year-old lay on the bank of the piddling little river at the bottom of the road, he saw his childhood only as constriction. It was like a suit of heavy clothes in which he was muffled and gagged. His father was a giant, an almost-complete stranger, who had come back from fighting a war to find that the only man who was still under his command was a spindly, tearful dwarf. Unused to children, the father talked to his son in the language of the officer dressing down an unruly private. In a real army, the enlisted ranks quickly develop a retaliatory strategy; they know exactly how to put officers in their place. The child didn’t. He smarted miserably under his father’s strict discipline. He found it impossible to predict what was likely to win him praise or send him, blubbering, to his father’s study for yet another court-martial. The house was small—so small that the father seemed taller than the chimney pots. It was in a tiny village where the handful of other children were all enemies, since the father had forbidden his son to play with village children because they were not the sons and daughters of officers and gentlemen.