Old Glory (7 page)

Looking down on that fallen world from the standpoint of this temporary synthetic Eden, I thought that perhaps Minneapolis and I were really on much the same track, traveling hopefully, never arriving. I loved the audacity of that American principle which says, When life gets tainted or goes stale, junk it! Leave it behind! Go West. Go up. Move on. Minneapolis had lit out from its river. Now it was trying to wave goodbye to its own streets. The skyways were just the latest stage in its long voyage out and away. “Where ya goin’?” said the truckdriver to the hitchhiker at the end of
Manhattan Transfer
. “I dunno. Purdy far.” It was the same answer that I’d given to the drunk in Moby Dick’s, and on the skyways the whole city seemed to be echoing that classic traveler’s statement of intent.

Our voyages, though, led in separate directions, and I seemed to have made yet another knight’s move away from the river; so I was cheered to see a rack of corncob pipes in a cigar store. They weren’t called corncob pipes—that would have been too straightforward for this realm of artifice and invention. They were advertised as “Missouri Meerschaum,” and I bought two of them, along with a tin of Captain Black Smoking Tobacco, which sounded suitably swarthy, and a Zippo windproof lighter. Drifting idly through more chambers of glass and ferns and tea-garden rumbas, I picked up a corkscrew, a thermos flask and a khaki rain hat. I reached my hotel room half a mile away without ever touching ground.

I sat in front of the mirror and tried to construct the man who was going to ride the river. I packed a corncob with Captain Black, lit it with my Zippo, jammed my new hat over my ears and looked in the glass, hoping to see the beginnings of a true voyager. The effect was not good. The face reflected there belonged to a grinning scoutmaster.

Half the luggage in my room was books. For months I’d been collecting them in London. I had found more in New York. They were the stuff out of which I had been making my imagined river, and as the Mississippi grew more real, I would have to start dumping them overboard.

The one I liked best was titled
The Navigator
. Set in cheap, jerky type, it had been published in Pittsburgh in 1814, and it had been written by Zadok Cramer as a pocket guide for immigrants and traders who wanted to travel on the Western rivers. It had detailed maps of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and it was full of notes about where one could find lodgings, where the best places were to tie up one’s boat, which were the most dangerous bits of the river, what to do in storms and how to test sandbars for safety. When I had first looked at it, I had thought it a
charming curio; now its cracked pages were beginning to take on a riveting up-to-dateness. Cramer’s first remarks about the Mississippi were standard pietistic twaddle:

Within a paragraph, though, Cramer was scoring direct hits.

Exactly. Cramer knew only the lower river, below its junction with the Ohio at Cairo, Illinois; I wished he’d been able to see it from the railroad tracks at Minneapolis. Flicking through, I went back to his section of general hints for intending voyagers.

Well, I had attended to that, all right. Right now, Herb Heichert should be fixing the steering gear to the motor and putting in the circuitry for my navigation lights. Cramer’s tone grew sharply monitory. This business of going down the river must not be done impetuously. There were, he said, too many “young and inexperienced” navigators who,

In Cramer’s day, no one thought of going down the river without a copy of
The Navigator
. It was a much-reprinted best seller—and ironically enough, it became a hazard to navigation in its own right.

At least, that is what it was for Timothy Flint, a Presbyterian minister from Boston who went west with his family, taking the river route,
intending to do some evangelizing among the rednecks on the shores. He had a dreadful time of it. His book,
Recollections of the Last Ten Years Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi
(1826), was a wonderful inventory of terrors and disasters. The Flint family had innumerable brushes with death on the river, and
The Navigator
was directly responsible for the first of these catastrophes.

There was a moral for me here somewhere. Like the Reverend Timothy Flint, I was an incorrigibly bookish man. The river in my books was one thing; that sludgy beast beyond the tracks was quite another—and I had better start getting the distinction between the two clear in my head. If I didn’t, I was going to run dangerously, perhaps finally, aground.

Herb Heichert was too much of an artist to take much notice of my dull and utilitarian specifications. When I arrived at the boatyard the next day, everything was fixed: the wheel, the lights, the pump that would drain the boat at the flick of a switch, a swivel seat of imitation pigskin and a neatly carpentered chart stand. What I had not bargained for was the canopy that now fluttered over it, a candy-striped sheet rigged up on a folding aluminum frame. Nor was I prepared for the fact that the boat was no longer just called WS 1368 DD. The words
RABAN’S NEST
had been painted in enormous black letters on both sides.

“Like your canopy?” Herb said. “Now you got a surrey with a fringe on the top.”

“The canopy looks fine, but what’s this ‘Raban’s Nest’ stuff?”

“Couldn’t resist it. Thought it up in the night. Just came to me. Don’t you like it?”

We trailed it down to the river at Camden to try it out. The afternoon was rank and sweaty, and the Mississippi here drifted in a listless
sweep between two bridges, a mile north of the end of commercial navigation. It looked as tame as a fishpond in a civic park. Root-beer cans bobbed in the scum at its edge, and more condoms dangled from the branches of the trees like a freak show of spring blossoms.

We pushed the boat out from a concrete slip overhung by willows. In the water, it suddenly looked tiny, its canopy riffling in the feeble wind, its broken reflection a scatter of chips of yellow, white and scarlet.

“Floats, anyhow,” Herb said.

Swinging there on the current, it abruptly changed sex. It switched from an
it
to a
her
. She looked just right, and I felt a new rush of excitement at the prospect of my voyage.

I sat up in the bow while Herb started the motor and aimed the boat at the bridge downstream. She was alarmingly fast. As Herb pushed the throttle forward, she lifted her sharp nose clean out of the water and settled on her rump, her wake fanning in a wide V to both shores. Herb sent her into a careening series of figure-8s, with the boat heeling over until the river sluiced by the top of her gunwales. As she cut into her own wake, the aluminum hull clanged as if it had hit rock. Clinging on up front, I was high over Herb’s head down in the stern.

“You got to see the limits of what she can do!” Herb called over the yakking chatter of the outboard. He spun the wheel and the boat flipped its head, jumped violently on its wake, and headed off on another diagonal.

“Floating log! You got to watch for floating logs! You hit a log, it’ll rip the lower unit out!” Not knowing what a lower unit was, I searched the river for floating logs and saw that we were in the middle of an archipelago of the things. Herb was zigzagging at speed between sodden tree trunks whose only indications were a few innocent-looking twigs sticking out above the greasy water.

He turned the boat around on the current, where it slowed, pointing upstream, the motor just ticking over. My turn. I joined Herb in the stern and started off by muddling up the throttle lever and the gear-change stick. Gingerly I set it in forward gear and gave it a cautious dribble of gas.

For me, the boat would hardly steer at all. Its nose wobbled this way and that, and we corkscrewed slowly in the vague direction of the bank from which we’d come.

“Keep to the main channel!” Herb reached for the wheel. “Watch for the buoys! You get out of the channel, you’ll run on a wing dam!”

“
Wing
dam?”

“Yeah. The wing dams, they run out twenty, thirty yards into the
river. You can’t see them when she’s high as this, but they’re there. Maybe six inches underwater. Maybe a couple of feet. They’re real
rascals
. They built them out of riprap … rocks and stuff. You run into a wing dam, you’ll be real lucky if your motor’s the only thing you lose—it can take the bottom clean out of the boat. Hey, don’t get too close to them buoys, now! See that log? Watch the piles of the bridge!”

This was probably the safest little stretch on the whole river. Even here, though, there seemed to be more snags and hazards than I would ever be able to comfortably keep in my head at once.

“Those moored barges over there? You keep well clear of them. When the current runs up against them it makes for one hell of a big undertow. Not so much up here, but lower on down the river when the current gets to be stronger, it can suck you right under if your motor stalls ahead of a line of barges. You don’t often hear of guys going in at one end of a barge fleet and coming up alive at the other.”

“And people do go under?”

“Happens every year.” Herb looked pleased with this piece of information. “I don’t know nothing much about the river. The only times I go boating is on the lakes. I wouldn’t mess with the Mississippi. I guess I’m kind of sweet on the idea of staying alive.”

The boat maundered downstream, going hardly quicker than the current. Every time I touched the wheel, its head whipped sideways and threatened to take us straight into a wing dam, a log, a buoy or the piling of a bridge. I found it impossible to keep a steady course.

“You’ll get used to it. After three, four days of riding the river it’ll be no different than driving a car. You’ll be okay. Watch your charts, keep in the channel, look out for them towboats.… Remember, you don’t have to do
nothing
fast. Think about it. Do it slow. You run into any kind of trouble, think slow and you’ll make out okay. Hey! Remember what I said about logs?”

I thought fast, panicked, and we smashed into the log broadside. The hull shuddered and clanged.

“You have to do that a few times. It’s the only way you’ll learn.”

“I’m just frightened that the next mistake I make will be the fatal one.”

“We’ll rig you out with a life vest.”

We were getting into the start of the commercial river. There were more lines of moored barge fleets parked in front of wharves and grain stores. A shovel-fronted tug was crossing the stream ahead of us, throwing up a wake that looked too high for me to handle. I turned the boat around and headed back for the bridge.

“You know how to take a wake? Never get caught sideways to it. Steer into the wave. If they’re big and close together, you’ll have to ride them out on a diagonal.”

He took over the wheel from me and steered for the tug. Close to, its stern waves were running in steep ridges, four feet high and less than twenty feet apart. Herb drove squarely into them, and the boat seesawed from crest to crest, plunging down, then tilting sharply upward to the oily sky. As each new wave hit the bow, the metal rang out in a melancholy boom.

“Never take it too fast. You don’t want to pop a rivet.”

My stomach was leading a private yo-yo life of its own.

“See? She hain’t taken on a spoonful. You take a wake right, you won’t have no problem at all. You let her swing you round broadside, though, she’ll roll you right over. Then you’ll have to swim down to New Orleans. Guy even tried
that
once. He made, oh, I guess a coupla hundred miles. Then had to climb out. His skin was all boils and sores … looked like he had leprosy, they said.”

Driving the boat on farther downstream, I went very quiet indeed. Scared by the wake, I’d forgotten my difficulties in steering the boat and was surprised to notice that she was now keeping to a reasonably steady path. I dodged a floating log. I kept to the main channel, watching the twin unfolding lines of red and black buoys. Red to port and black to starboard. This had nothing to do with daydreams and boyhood memories; it was the serious business of learning to ride the river. For the next two hours I crammed myself with everything that Herb could teach me. I rode out the wake of two small tows. I practiced holding the bow into the face of a wave while the wave itself took hold of the boat’s nose and tried to swing it around and lay it in its trough. I began to read the surface of the river, hunting for the telltale riffs in the current where the submerged wing dams ran out from the shore. I got accustomed to spinning the boat around, throttling it back and putting it hard into reverse gear. As the traffic on the river thickened, with tugs swinging whole fleets of barges around on the current, I did my best to think slow, feeling childishly dependent on Herb, who stood at my side saying very little except
Easy
and
Okay
and
Watch it
, as if he were gentling a nervous horse. I thought a lot about the warning that I’d been given by the lockmaster.
You better respect her, or she’ll do you in
.