Old Glory (3 page)

I went for long walks by the Thames, following the ebb tide as it ran out through Kew, Chiswick, Barnes, Putney, watching the way it piled against the bridges and came to the boil over deep muddy holes in the river bottom. It was the simple movement of the water that I liked, and its capacity to make the city which surrounded it look precarious and makeshift. The pastel cottages on the bank, with their bookshelves, net curtains, standing lamps and potted plants, stood on the lip of a real and dangerous wilderness. A freak tide, a careless shift in the current, and they could be swept away. The river, as it sluiced past their doorsteps, carried plenty of evidence of its deadliness. There were dead dogs in it, and stoved-in boats, and the occasional bloated human corpse. Once I found the body of a drowned woman. She was spread-eagled on the shore; her coat, of sodden leopard skin, had ridden up over her torso and covered her head. There were runs in her tights. Her boots were very new. At the coroner’s inquest on her death, I heard that she’d left a note. It was rambling, disjointed, full of resentment and depression, but it didn’t actually say that she intended to kill herself. It seemed rather that she had come to the river without knowing what she was going to do. Perhaps she believed that the mess and tangle of her life would somehow resolve itself if she could put it in perspective beside the bleak placidity of all that drifting water. It was probable, said the coroner, that she’d thrown herself into the river without premeditation; not really meaning to commit suicide, merely trying to assuage her misery and confusion in the comforting
void of the Thames. He announced his verdict: death by misadventure.

I felt I understood what had drawn the woman to the river. I wanted to lose myself too. I had no intention of landing up in some small Midwestern city morgue, but I ached to run away from the world for a while, to put myself in the grip of a powerful current which would make my choices for me, to be literally adrift. The woman had gone to the river for solace, and had ended up drowning in. it; I was going for much the same motive, but meant to stay afloat.

I hardly gave a thought to the mechanics of the voyage. It was, after all, a dream journey, and like a dream it was supposed to unfold spontaneously without effort on my part. Obviously I would need a craft of some kind, but I knew almost nothing at all about boats. A raft would turn the trip into a piece of quaint playacting; canoes capsized. I vaguely assumed that somewhere at the top end of the river I’d come across a leaky tub with a pair of oars, and cast off in that.

To make the voyage come true, I began to talk about it. At a party in London I met a man who had seen the Mississippi at St. Louis and had gone on a half-day tourist cruise up the river.

“It was amazingly depressing,” he said. “Totally featureless. An awful lot of mud. You couldn’t see anything over the top of the banks except dead trees. The only bearable thing about the entire afternoon was the ship’s bar. It was full of people getting dead drunk so that they didn’t have to look at the sheer bloody boredom of the Mississippi.”

“That was just around St. Louis, though.”

“Oh, it’s all like that, I gather. That’s what it’s famous for, being very long and very boring. The only reason people ever go on the Mississippi at all is because after you’ve spent a couple of hours looking at that horrendous bloody river, even a dump like St. Louis starts to look moderately interesting. I think God made the Mississippi as a sort of warning, to prove that things really can be worse than you think.”

He had an air of mighty self-satisfaction, having delivered me at a stroke from the lunatic fantasy with which I’d been possessed. Actually, I’d been rather excited by his description of the river. It had given it something of the melodramatic awfulness of a landscape by John Martin, a touch of
Sadek in Search of the Waters of Oblivion
with its dwarfish hominid scrambling into a world of treeless crags and dead seas.

“I suppose you thought you were going to do it in a
rowing
boat,” the man said, snuffling with amusement at the notion. I didn’t like the way he had consigned my trip to the past subjunctive tense.

“No, no. I’ll have a … an outboard motor.” I had had one experience with an outboard motor. I had driven myself from one end of a
small Scottish loch to the other, where it had coughed and died. It had taken me three hours to row back through a rainstorm.

“You’d get swamped. Or be run down by one of those tow-things. When we were in St. Louis, people were always getting drowned in the river. Went out fishing, never came back, bodies recovered weeks later, or never recovered at all. So bloody common that it hardly ever made the local news.”

Some days afterward, I ran into the man again.

“You’re not still thinking of going down that river, are you?”

“I’ve written off about getting a motor.”

“It’d cost you a hell of a lot less if you just swallowed a packet of razor blades. According to the Euthanasia Society, putting a plastic bag over your head is pretty much the best way to go.” He introduced me to the woman he was with. “He’s going to go down the Mississippi in a
dinghy,”
he said.

“What a lovely thing to do,” she said. “Just like Tom Sawyer—or was that Huckleberry Finn?”

The man smiled with exaggerated patience. It was the smile of a lonely realist stranded in the society of cloud-cuckoos.

That smile. I’d got used to it over the last few weeks. It said I was a jackanapes. Now, studying my route in the pale glow of the car map light, a scramble of lower-case names—
otisville, houlton, lakeland, hudson
—I imagined the smile broadening. In Minneapolis a boat was waiting for me. I was going to ride the river for as long and as far as I could go, and see whether it was possible to stitch together the imaginary place where I had spent too much of my time daydreaming and that other, real, muddy American waterway.

I was being interviewed by the radio pastor of WWID, Ladysmith.

“Have you said yes to Jesus yet?”

No.

“It’s by His grace you’re saved through faith. Exercise your faith and say, ‘Lord, I’m receiving You as my Lord and Saviour.’ ”

My headlights picked out the twin marmalade eyes of a racoon in the road. I swerved just in time.

“Henry Slotter tells the news at nine, straight up, and then
Sunday Hymnsing
to follow, on this second of September, Labor Day Weekend. Now hear this. The Oklahoma Baptist Festival Choir. ‘It Is Well with My Soul.’ That says just about all that needs to be said, folks. It Is Well with My Soul …” The opening chords on the electric organ quivered with pious tremolo; then came the voices, the sopranos sounding as if they were crying for joy, the baritones and basses adding
a counterpoint of moderation and common sense, as if getting on the right side of the Lord were just good business practice. I turned up the volume and joined the Interstate, singing my way into Minnesota along with the Oklahoma Baptist Festival Choir. After all, I was in no position to jeer at other people’s dreams of personal salvation. I had my own hopes of becoming a born-again something, even if it wasn’t a Christian.
It is well with my soul, pom, pom … well with my soul
.

I was jolted back into an America I recognized without affection. The bald glare of the sodium lights over the highway had flattened the landscape and robbed it of shadow and color. The exurban fringe of the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul was the usual mess of neon doodles. Curlicues of mustard. Trails of ketchup. The motels, taco houses, Radio Shacks and Pizza Huts stretched away in a bilious blaze of American mock-Alpine. I remembered poring over the Victorian atlas, playing with the exotic syllables of Minneapolis as if they spelled Samarkand. Even now I wasn’t quite prepared for the thoroughgoing charmlessness of this five-mile strip of junk food, porno movies and the kind of motels where you expect to find blood running down your shower curtain. There was a brief, merciful break of darkness. Then the illuminated crap began again.

It was only after I had gone on another mile or so that I realized I’d crossed the Mississippi. I had crossed the Mississippi. It had dropped through a crack in the lights of Minneapolis, and I hadn’t even seen it go. The smile on the face of my London acquaintance would have been so superior that it would have joined up with his eyebrows in a perfect oval. It was a jackanapes’ way of ending a pilgrimage and starting an odyssey.

I pushed on deeper into Minneapolis until I found myself driving up a street that felt like the heart of something. Hennepin Avenue. Louis Hennepin had been a seventeenth-century Franciscan friar who had been chaplain to the La Salle expedition which had charted the upper Mississippi in 1680. I’d just been reading about him in Francis Parkman’s
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West
, and was interested to see how his name had been commemorated here. Hennepin Avenue was blocked solid with gay bars, massage parlors, bright little boutiques with vibrators and dildos displayed in their windows, and the offices of pawnbrokers and bail bondsmen, now shuttered and padlocked for the night. Perhaps Father Hennepin had been an altogether merrier priest than Parkman had made him sound. Or perhaps the ruderies of Hennepin Avenue were intended to convey what Protestant Minnesota thought of foreign papists.

I stopped at a bar that looked and sounded rather more straight than its neighbors:
MOBY DICK’S—FOR A WHALE-SIZED DRINK
. Having just missed out on one American epic by oversight, I had better catch up with whatever classics I could find. A few doors down the street, no doubt, there’d be a sex shop called “The Scarlet Letter.”

In the three-quarters dark, the walls of Moby Dick’s were bright with sweat. It was the kind of place where all the loose ends of a city tend to shake down together. A glazed-looking Indian in a booth had a pitcher of beer for company. Two black men, wearing enviably sharp hats and suits with lapels as narrow as switchblades, were feeding the jukebox with quarters. At the bar, a drunk was getting nowhere with the bartender as he tried to sweet-talk her into betting on the outcome of the New England-Pittsburgh football game.

“Come on, honey. Just a little bet … a
gennelman’s
bet … Whaddaya say?”

On the TV screen above his head, someone dressed up in medieval armor was running for a touchdown.

“A
dollar
.”

The bartender squirted whiskey from a tube into my glass.

“I said a
gennelman’s
bet. One dollar. What’s a dollar between friends?” He sprawled across the bar toward the girl in a sudden access of inspiration. “Hey … you can take Pittsburgh.”

“Straight up or soda?” said the girl to me.

“Go on, what’s a dollar?”

“Food, clothing and a place to sleep,” I said. Bob Hope had said that in a movie once.

The girl faced the drunk for the first time in minutes. “It’s too early in the season. I ain’t into the teams yet.”

Defeated, he settled on me, grabbing at my sleeve as I started to leave the bar. “Where you from, fella? Where you from? I can tell you ain’t from around here,” he said with the triumphant cunning of a man who has got the better of half a bottle and can still pull off feats of amazing detection.

I headed for the empty booth next to the pickled Indian’s.

“Hey, where you going? Where you going, fella?”

Far away, I hoped. South with the Monarch butterflies. Downstream.

O
n
Labor Day
, no one was taking calls. The phone pealed unanswered in the boatyard. I pulled aside the heavy drapes of my hotel-room window and looked down on the emptied streets of Minneapolis, already beginning to fry in the early sun. I wondered where the Mississippi was. Its course must be a well-kept secret, hidden somewhere in the crevices between the city’s squat little skyscrapers of smoked glass and steel.

In this high room, with the expensive air conditioner breathing hardly louder than a sleeping child, I felt I was as far from my river as I’d ever been. My morning orange juice stood islanded in a silver tureen of crushed ice. I propped Parkman up against it and went back to my favorite bit, where La Salle, Tonto and Father Hennepin see the Mississippi for the first time.

Here it rolled obscurely through realms of insurance companies, cattle-feed factors, television stations and chain hotels. I put an admiring pencil line under the phrase “through all the perilous monotony of its interminable windings” and tried it out loud. It sounded terrific.

I went to the window to stare at the city, trying to find a gap or a shadow, a sign of a winding, but the man-madeness of it all looked seamless. I had spent a lot of time dreaming of losing myself on the river; it had never once occurred to me that it might be possible simply
to lose the river. There must be a reason for the way Minneapolis behaved toward the Mississippi as if the river were the skeleton in the city’s family closet. That was something else I would have to find out.

There was no clue on the streets outside as to the whereabouts of my river. Lost by a series of forced right turns, I took a long boulevard where the shadows fell toward me and hoped that that meant east. Mine was the only car about. The traffic-control system of Minneapolis had been switched on specially for my benefit. “Walk” signs flashed
WALK
and
DON’T WALK
to whatever ghosts haunt deserted cities. Blinking filter-arrows sped imaginary columns of automobiles down empty avenues. Somewhere, many streets away, a police car went whooping just for the sake of whooping, like a lonely kid whistling to keep himself company. The sweet stink of a brewery lay leaden in the heat. No people. No river.

Then, suddenly, I was part of the crowd. The street had merged into an expressway, and the expressway was jammed solid. We were elbow to elbow in the crush, a grumbling herd of dusty pickup trucks, all windows down, all radios turned full up. I spoke to my nearest neighbor, a colossal jellyfish in a plaid shirt and a cowboy hat with a wide curly brim.