Old Glory (5 page)

“… outstanding aids to education … indispensable in the home, school or college situation … no article longer than seven hundred words …” His voice ran on like a leaky tap. The language of encyclopedia selling is an Esperanto; I imagine that every phrase is duplicated word for word in China, Persia or Peru.

I found
LINCOLN—PACIFIC
.

“… world’s foremost scholars in their fields … expert communicators … selected vocabulary … uniquely commissioned from leading illustrators and artists …”

MISSISSIPPI
. I skimmed the entry. Nothing new.

I copied out those two sentences and returned the book to its rank.

“Thanks. I was just looking something up.”

“May I ask the ages of your children, sir?”

“I haven’t got any.”

The salesman stopped looking like a scholar.
Jerk. Smartass
. But there were other, real parents about, trailing visible children of genuine school age, and I watched the salesman reminding himself that his own imposture was of more immediate importance than mine. He gave me a cold, waxy, very scholarly smile. The lenses of his spectacles were plain glass.

Ebbing and swirling, we drifted from tent to tent. At every bend
there was another pagoda selling brats or franks or dogs or burgers. Church flags flew from their tops. The Lutherans specialized in bratwurst sausages, the Methodists in hot dogs, the Catholics in hamburgers. At each stall, there was a stack of giveaway devotional reading placed handily beside the ketchup squirt. Did all this eating have some sacramental significance? Could munching on an Adventist wiener be the first step on the ladder of conversion?

The crowd was wedged solid from horizon to horizon. There were no signs of an exit from this colossal Roman holiday. In a brief gap in the stream of overamplified country-and-Western I heard a faint familiar voice, and almost thought of it as a friend.

“We offer a reward of a thousand dollars if they’re not real and alive, exactly as advertised. We could make it a million dollars, or a billion dollars, it doesn’t make any difference, because we won’t have to reward anyone a penny. Because the Siamese twins are real, human and alive.”

Lucky Siamese twins. As each sticky, claustrophobic minute went by, I felt less real, less human, less alive. I thought how curious it was, this crowd. No nation in the world had ever put quite such a high value on privacy and space as the United States, and nowhere in the country did people live so far apart, in houses islanded in acres of sequestered green, as here in the Midwest. When Minnesotans got together on Labor Day, they did so with the fervor of people for whom being part of a crowd is a rare holiday luxury. The fairgoers were like children playing sardines.

We rolled slowly on past an amphitheater. They might have been feeding born-again Christians to the lions there, but no—it was just a late-model-stock-car race. On the public-address system, the commentator’s voice was bawling over the top of the growling animal bass of the auto engines. He was getting the Amzoil Three Hundred under way. Well, we certainly had a beautiful day here today in Minnesota, he said. Plus, we had some real beautiful cars and a lot of real super people.

“They’re turning those engines at over seven thousand r.p.m.,” he shouted. “So, gentlemen! Let’s go racing!”

Please, I thought, please don’t let’s go racing. The thought was instantly smashed from my head by the noise of what sounded like an intercontinental bronchial hemorrhage, as the stock cars took off from their starting positions and went roaring around the stadium. Christians and lions must at least have been a great deal quieter.

I didn’t want to go racing. I didn’t want to stuff my face with meat, corn and cotton candy. I didn’t feel like rolling dimes for the National
Heart Foundation. I wasn’t going to buy a snowblower. I didn’t care to ride the Big Wheel or goggle at the Black-Necked Spitting Cobra. I wanted out. I wanted to find my river.

I had crossed and recrossed the Mississippi. There were eighteen bridges over it in as many miles, and it seemed that already I had been on most of them. Yet I was having almost as much trouble as De Soto or La Salle in actually reaching the riverbank. Once, the Mississippi had provided Minneapolis and St. Paul with the reason for their existence. Later, it had turned into an impediment to their joint commercial life, to be spanned at every possible point. Now it wasn’t even an impediment. The Twin Cities went about their business as if the river didn’t exist. No road that I could see led down to it. From a gloomy little bar on First Street, I could smell the Mississippi, but didn’t know how to reach it. Feeling foolish, I called the bartender over.

“How exactly do I get down to the Mississippi?”

“The river? She’s on the far side of the tracks.” The
wrong
side of the tracks. The river had been consigned to the part of town classically set aside for the American poor. It belonged to the same category as vandalized public housing projects, junked automobiles and dead cats. I was appalled. No one would have dared do such a thing to the river in my head.

I left my beer untouched. Across the street, there was a potter’s field of ancient railroads. Most had died. Others were in that geriatric state where death is just a whisker away. It was a sorry strip, half a mile wide, of dingy grass, cracked ties and crumbling rails. The rolling stock looked as if it had rusted solid on its tracks. I couldn’t see any locomotives, only the names of the surviving railroad companies, painted in flaky lettering on the sides of the cars.
BURLINGTON NORTHERN. CHICAGO
AND NORTH WESTERN. MINNESOTA TRANSFER. THE SOO LINE. CHICAGO, MILWAUKEE, ST. PAUL AND PACIFIC
. Crickets wheezed and scraped at my feet as I crossed from track to track. The soggy holiday air smelled of diesel oil, rotting wood and river.

I clambered between two standing chains of freight cars, slid down a culvert of cinders, and there was the Mississippi. All that I could see at first was what it was not. It was not a great glassy sweep of water, big enough to make the civilization on its banks look small. It wasn’t the amazing blue of the cover of my old copy of
Huckleberry Finn
. Nor was it the terrible chocolate flood of Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope.

It was just a river. From where I stood, the far bank was no more than a couple of hundred yards away. Its color was much the same as
that of my domestic Thames: a pale dun, like iced tea with a lot of mosquito larvae wriggling in the glass. I squatted moodily on a bleached rock, looking across at the dead smokestacks of a Victorian mill and listening to the rumble of a weir upstream. I lit a cigarette to frighten off the gnats buzzing in a thick cloud around my head, and flipped the empty pack into the river. The surface of the water was scrolled with slowly moving eddies. My cigarette pack drifted for a moment, slipped into the crease of an eddy, and was taken crabwise off across the stream. How long, I wondered, would it take to reach the Gulf of Mexico? Two thousand miles at … what—four, five miles an hour? A month? Six weeks? At any rate, it would arrive long before I did. I watched its red flip-top lid slowly circling in the tepid water until it was carried out of sight.

I realized that I’d seen this bit of river before, in a dozen or so bad nineteenth-century engravings, most of them by untalented but adventurous Germans who had traveled up and down the Mississippi with sketchbooks. The rock on which I sat was exactly where they must have set up their equipment to draw the Falls of St. Anthony. Then the river spilled over a succession of steep limestone steps. It was famously picturesque. The Germans represented the waterfalls by taking a pen and a ruler and making a hatchwork of parallel vertical lines. It must have been a very orderly way of passing an afternoon. They then colored them in with a fierce mat white. The general impression was that at this point the Mississippi was a cascade of toothpaste; one could almost see the army of hired hands squeezing the giant tubes behind the falls. The kindest thing that one could say about the engravings was that they were a vivid illustration of the sheer bewilderment of the European imagination when it tried to confront the raw wilderness of the American West.

For even in 1800, this place had been utterly wild—far wilder than the Alps, or the Upper Rhine, or the English Lake District, or any of the other places to which romantic pilgrims went in search of wilderness. Fort Snelling, just downstream, was the last outpost of white America against the Sioux. In 1805, Colonel Zebulon Montgomery Pike led an expedition to the headwaters of the Mississippi and camped beside the Falls of St. Anthony. A Sioux warrior stole the Colonel’s American flag while Pike was out hunting for geese, swans, ducks and deer. In his notebook, he was very hard on the local savages and wrote that he had shot “a remarkably large racoon” on the riverbank.

Then the falls had been harnessed to turn millwheels. The remains of the mills still lined the far shore, their brickwork fallen in, their paddles long gone. They’d ground corn and sawed up forestfuls of
timber. The falls had blocked any further navigation of the river to steamboats, and Minneapolis had been the natural place to join the railroad system to the waterway.

In 1861, Anthony Trollope came to Minneapolis by train, but couldn’t make up his mind about whether the place, whose name he found delightfully ridiculous, ought properly to be called a village or a town. Mark Twain came here in 1880 and found a city that had swollen to the size of St. Paul, its “Siamese twin.” The two cities were the Ronny and Donny of the Northwest, joined at the breastbone and the abdomen, facing each other for every second of their lives, interesting to visit, alive, real and living. By then, sixteen different railroads met up in the desolate sidings at my back, and they were knocking the heart out of the commercial life of the river. In 1904, the Baedeker Guide to the United States, rather at a loss to find nice remarks to make about Minneapolis, was at least able to describe it as “the flour-milling capital of the world.”

And the river … poor, schooled, shriveled river. All this piling up of one technology on top of another—railroad on steamboat, interstate highway on railroad, hydroelectric dam on watermill—had reduced the Mississippi from a wonder of nature to this sluggish canal on the wrong side of the tracks. Bridged, dammed, locked, piered, she was safe now. Minneapolis had no need to bother with her. It had turned its back on the water, and only odd foreigners like me with dreams in their heads came here to brood over what had happened to her.

Out in the stream, the grubby current humped against the giant steel mooring bitts to which no barges were tethered. I thought I saw a dead fish, but it turned out to be a condom. I remembered the old spelling bee, the voices of little girls chanting in a primary-school classroom:

The condom went off in pursuit of my cigarette pack—a “French tickler” with a nasty semblance of swimming life. I suppose that some indigent peasant in Yucatán might find a use for it when it finally washed up on his beach.

It was a forlorn walk upriver, through the chunky, honey-colored arches of the old Burlington Northern railroad bridge. I had not expected to feel quite so elegiac about the Mississippi quite so soon. That was supposed to happen later on in the plot.

Beyond the bridge, I came on the last of the fetters that Minneapolis
had built around the river in order to cramp its style, the new lock and dam at the top end of what had once been the Falls of St. Anthony. It had been finished only sixteen years before, in 1963, and it had turned what remained of the rapids into a watery equivalent of a split-level putting green.

It wasn’t picturesque at all. No romantic German would have wanted to set up his sketchbook in front of it. Yet one had to admit that the thing was a wonder of sorts in its own right. I was used to the tiny, pretty wooden locks on England’s eighteenth-century canals—dripping little chambers seven feet wide and sixty or seventy feet long. This was a monster. Two city blocks could have been comfortably sunk in its basin. Its fifty-foot drop looked more, a dizzying black pit in the river. The lockmen were talking to each other over walkie-talkie radios. With a hundred yards or more of bald concrete between each man, the place felt more like an international airport than a device for ordering a river. Why, too, on this empty afternoon when the only things stirring were the crickets in the overgrown railroad tracks, was all this Oscar-Lima-Charleying going on over the short waves? The lock was a gigantic toy. The lockmen were playing at being lockmen; gates and valves and sluices were being opened and shut for the simple boyish pleasure of watching that staggering quantity of rancid Mississippi water boil up in the basin.

I found the lockmaster, captaining this pointless operation from an upper deck, his handset squawking incomprehensibly. He had the contentedly abstracted look of a man listening to a favorite piece of music. I felt I had a useful hold over him, having caught him out tinkering with several million gallons of river just for the hell of it.

“Just fillin’ her up,” he said, gazing happily down into his private maelstrom. It didn’t sound like much of an explanation to me. If I’d come along fifteen minutes later, I suppose he would have said that he was “just emptying her out” in exactly the same tone of voice.

“She’s real quiet today, real quiet …” The entire building thrummed under my feet as water from the river raced through the tunnels to fill the chamber. “Feel it?” the lockmaster said. “That’s twenty-three thousand gallons a second coming in down there.” He stood at the window, alternately shouting into his radio and waving his arms at the men below: Bernstein conjuring the
Dies Irae
through its fortissimo climax. There were the giant bass drums, there the massed choir, there the trumpets, there the trombones. He was a maestro of water. I found the performance splendidly exciting, but from a practical point of view, I didn’t like the look of it at all. A sixteen-foot boat
would be … I tried to measure sixteen feet against the lock wall. Hardly more significant than an empty Budweiser can or a fallen leaf.