Old Glory (6 page)

“I’m going to take a sixteen-foot boat down the river to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico,” I said. “At least, that’s what I
was
going to do.”

“Sixteen feet? That’s a pretty good size of boat. You won’t have too much trouble at all. I seen guys go down the Mississippi in all kinds of things. Twelve-foot jonboats … canoes … why, just a month or two back, we had two crazies go through here in a pedal boat like they have in parks. They thought they was going to New Orleans.”

The thought of the two men in the pedal boat took the glory out of my own trip at a stroke.

“Did they make it?”

“I never heard nothing of them since.”

I had, after all, dreamed of disappearing from the world.
WENT DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI, NEVER HEARD OF SINCE
, would at least make a tantalizing line on a modest memorial slab somewhere.

“Oh, you’ll have problems. You get down in some of the big pools, like the Dubuque pool—that’s one of the worst pools, is the Dubuque pool. She’s wide open: four, five miles, as far as you can see. There’s stump lines.… When you’re out there … boy, when it gets rough it can really get rough in a hurry. Then you’ll get wakes. When some of them big tows get down in the flats, they’re pushing along at ten, twelve miles an hour, and they’ll turn the whole river to a rooster tail.”

“What do I do then?”

“You stay right inshore and ride those waves out. If you’re in the channel, you’ll be running into waves that are seven feet tall. Even up here, we’ve had boats tipped over, just from wakes. We get drownings every day. You going to ride the Mississippi, you better respect her or she’ll do you in.”

His lock basin had filled. It had the absolute stillness of the moment after the last note of the finale before the applause begins. He ran his eye along the brimming surface. I felt that the lockmaster was a kindred spirit, a man who simply loved water. He softened every time he looked at his pet element, his long, chipped hatchet face taking on a moony otherworldliness.

“But you’ve got to watch that sky. You ever see anything queer about it, if the clouds look wrong somehow, you get off the river. Oh, you’ll see thunder and lightning. Hell, you could run into a hurricane. There’s storms on the Mississippi so bad even the big tows get lost sometimes. There’s tows gone down there, just sucked under in a storm
on the river. She can be meaner than the ocean. But you’ll be okay. Just remember, if there’s something in the air that don’t feel right,
get off the river
. You’ll get to know her. You’ll learn the signs. The time you got to start worrying is when she goes dead quiet. That’s when she means to get up to something, and that’s when you get off that river.”

He had put me back in touch with the dream. The lockmaster’s river and mine were, thank God, the same beautiful, treacherous place. He had grown up right beside it in the little river town of Lansing, Iowa. When he left school, he had become a commercial fisherman and trapper. Then he’d got a job as a construction worker, building levees to contain the floodwaters of the Mississippi. From there he had gone on to work as a bargeman and had graduated to being a full-fledged river pilot, ferrying barge fleets between Minneapolis and St. Louis.

“In 1960, I got married. Hell,
I
wanted to stay on the river, but my wife was mad. You know the way women change you? My wife … she don’t care for the Mississippi too much.”

So he had settled on his lock. I asked him how much he still missed being a pilot.

“Every time a tow goes through here, I think I’m up there in that wheelhouse.”

Upstream of us, a tow was swinging round the bend of Nicollet Island. It looked as if someone had turned several tall apartment buildings on their faces and set them afloat. It was not a “tow” at all, in fact: it was a push. Somewhere far at the back of the fleet of barges, now lost behind the island, now printing blots of smoke on the sky, was a boat that wasn’t a boat, but a blunt white four-story house, all balconies and verandas, mounted over the top of an enormous engine. This displaced housing project filled the river. Its wake shook the trees on the banks and sent a curling wave far into the shore.

“Three by three,” the lockmaster said. “A little one. A single. You should see a double come through here.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, as noncommittally as possible. I didn’t want to be too soft a touch for Minnesota comedians. “So what’s a double, and what do you do with it?”

“A double, she could be fifteen barges, three wide, five long. You push nine of ’em in. Break the couplings. Boat backs out with six barges. Then they lock ’em, raise ’em up, drag a cable on ’em, snake ’em up the wall. Drop back. Pick up the second half. Then they make up the fleet and away they go.”

“I think I lost about six barges somewhere.”

“You’ll see how they lock-through. There’s twenty-nine locks between here and St. Louis. After that it’s open river. Then you’ll see the real big tows. Fifty, sixty barges. That’d be around eight acres. And that’s something else.”

Looking at the wake of the baby tow ahead of us, I felt an apprehensive surge in my guts, seeing waves as high as houses breaking on my cockleshell.

“That trip you’re making … now, that’s something I’d like to do. You a married man?”

“Not exactly.”

“If you was married … Boy, if I told my wife I was going to ride the river down through New Orleans … reckon she’d be around at her attorney’s, filing for divorce.”

The huge gates at the head of the lock swung open on hydraulic winches.

“All those river towns … they’re different than the inland towns—looser, more wild. A few years back, they were really wild, those river towns.” He seemed to be thinking of his own past and his present compromises. “Yeah,” he said a little sadly, “they were wild.”

He locked the tow through. Thirteen thousand tons of grain bound for Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When the pilot’s voice came through on the radio, he spoke in the singsong whiffle of the very deep South.

“Well, Cap—wish I was goin’ with you,” said the lockmaster into his handset. I supposed that he said that to everyone.

On Tuesday, I drove out to see my boat. I had firm ideas about what a boat should be. One of the river books over which I’d pored during the summer had been Henry Thoreau’s
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
. Thoreau had made his inland voyage in a green-and-blue dory, “a creature of two elements, related by one half of its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong and graceful bird.” I had been tempted to send this lovely specification on an airmail postcard to Crystal Marine.

The boatyard lay far out of town, away from the river, at the end of a dismal suburban boulevard. In the lot at the back, a hundred boats were tipped up on trailers, identifiable only by their numbers. Mine was WS 1368 DD. It was just a mustard-colored shell of aluminum. Blunt-backed, broad in the beam, this bare piece of riveted alloy did not look like a craft in which one might float at all easily into an idyll. It was related to neither fish nor bird, but to some new, efficient brand of nonstick saucepan.

Herb Heichert, the joint owner of the yard, stood by while I walked in a slow circle around this unalluring object, trying to think of something polite to say about it.

“How do you like it?” His voice had the rusty remains of German in it.

“It looks … strong,” I said. “Would it be easy to sink?”

“No, you got plenty of flotation there. See those seats? That’s where you got your flotation.”

I was glad that I had flotation. I thought of it more as a moral quality than as a physical property. I’d always wanted to have flotation.

“Now we got to fix you up with the right rig for the river.” He leaned on the transom. The boat boomed like a dull gong. Mr. Heichert pointed at the blank metallic space.

“All these hulls, they come in the same, and every one she goes out different. You got to build it around the customer, right? No one’s the same. Everybody’s different. That’s America. That’s the American Way. We’re in the customization business here. You take a plain old hull and you build a guy’s whole identity into it. Look, I’ll show you—”

He led me to his showroom. Boats hung on ropes from the ceiling, stood on trailers and were rooted by their keels to the walls. My mind boggled at the identities of the guys for whom they had been customized. One was carpeted from bow to stern in blood-red polystyrene fur; another, in the kind of artificial grass which undertakers spread over fresh graves.

“When a fella gets a boat, he gets real sore if he sees some other fella riding round the lake in a boat just like the one he’s got himself. Round here, everyone’s an
individualist.”

So it appeared. I tried to focus my eyes on a boat on which every last inch had been covered with swirling rainbows of acrylic paint. The effect was roughly comparable to taking a heavy overdose of lysergic acid. A little dinghy had a ship’s wheel that might have been salvaged from the wreck of the
Golden Hind
. I peered into cocktail cabinets and freezers and rang the great brass bell that was mounted over a chubby day boat.

“Know what this is?” Herb was playing with a bit of fun technology that had been screwed to the thwart of a red-and-white-striped skiff. Fifty stars were painted on its stern. “Electronic fish locator. Like radar. See here—switch it on, it finds your fish for you, shows you what size it is, what the depth of water is there … all you got to do is put your pole over the side and catch it.”

It struck me as immoral.

“We like our gizmos here.”

“Will the fish locator tell you what bait to use as well?”

“They must be working on that, I guess.”

When we returned to the lot, I saw WS 1368 DD through rather different eyes, as an empty canvas on which Herb Heichert was going to paint a gaudy extravaganza. I had certainly come to the right person: he was the works manager of a dream factory. I was bothered, though, by the fact that the dreams he dealt in bore no resemblance at all to mine.

“So what do you think?”

“I’ll need somewhere to put my charts. A chart stand.”

Oddly, a chart stand turned out to be the only gizmo that Herb had never been asked to fit to a boat. We set about designing one: a foldaway wooden frame with a button-down front of transparent plastic.

“The guys here stick to the lakes mostly. They don’t use charts.”

We settled on navigation lights, a steering wheel, an electric pump and a swivel seat. Herb seemed disappointed with my parsimony.

“Fish locator?”

“No, thanks.”

“We could run you up a paint job.”

“No, it’s fine as it is.”

With oars, anchor, and the engine that was now running in a tank at the workshop, I would have the vessel I needed to sail into my Cockaigne. Esthetically, it might not be a patch on Thoreau’s dory or Huck’s raft, but it would be fast enough to run from trouble. And I had plenty of flotation.

I needed to lay in some provisions. Thoreau had taken a supply of melons and potatoes on his trip. Huck and Jim had loaded up with traps, setlines for catfish, a lantern, a gun and a Barlow knife. I went shopping in the city, hoping that if I acquired a few symbols of pioneer self-sufficiency it would bring about a transformation of my character and turn me into a proper outdoor adventurer.

Minneapolis itself, though, had gone indoors. When it had done all it could to tinker with the Mississippi; when the bridges, mills, power plants, locks and dams had been finished; then the city had turned its back on the river and focused inward on itself. Now it was engaged in yet another exercise in Utopian gadgetry; building a city within a city, a perfumed maze of artificial streets and plazas set in midair, four stories above the ground.

No wonder the streets had seemed so empty. The city had gone somewhere else and cunningly hidden itself inside its own facade. To go shopping, one had to take the elevator up to this other Minneapolis.
It was a completely synthetic urban space. Glassed-in “skyways” vaulted from block to block, and the shopping plazas had been quarried out of the middles of existing buildings like so many chambers, grottoes and tunnels in a mountain of rock.

Here, fountains trickled in carpeted parks. The conditioned air smelled of cologne and was thickened with a faint, colorless spray of Muzak. The stores were open-fronted, like the stalls of a covered Arab souk. Like all the best Utopias, this one was only half-built. It was the nucleus of a dream city designed to stretch out and farther out until Minneapolis-in-the-air would be suspended like an aureole over the deserted ruins of Minneapolis-on-the-ground. If one put one’s ear to the walls, one might hear the distant reverberation of workmen with pneumatic drills tunneling out more corridors and plazas in the wider reaches of the city.

The skyway system was as vividly expressive of the peculiar genius of Minneapolis as the roller-coasting freeways are of Los Angeles or the glass-and-cement cliffs of New York. Only a city with really horrible weather could have arrived at such a thing. Here people had left their local nature behind altogether. It was something nasty down below, and the skyways floated serenely over the top of it. “Nature” here was of the chic and expensive kind that comes only from the most superior of florists: ornamental palms and ferns, rooted not in soil but in coppery chips of synthetic petroleum extract.

Voices melted into the musical syrup of André Kostelanetz that trickled from hidden speakers in the palm fronds. Footsteps expired on the carpeted halls. At a mock-Parisian street café, the shoppers sat out at gingham tables, drinking Sanka with nonsaccharin sugar substitutes. Skyway-city turned one into an escapee. It was a place where everyone was on the run—from the brutish climate, from carcinogens, from muggers, rapists, automobile horns. Even one’s own body was being discreetly disinfected and homogenized by the deodorant air. Up here, everything was
real nice:
we were nice people who smelled nice, looked nice and did nice things in nice places.

Four floors below, we could see the nasty world we’d left behind. Hennepin Avenue was stretched out in front of us, famous for the Original Sin in which it wallowed. Beneath the skyway, a crummy little store sold rubber wear and shackles. Posters for the blue-movie houses showed nipples and pudenda so imaginatively colored and airbrushed that they’d ceased to look human in origin. A wino pissed in a doorway, watched by his dog. It was a pregnant bitch, and looked vaguely ashamed of its owner.