Old Glory (8 page)

Back in the evening inside Minneapolis-in-the-air, I was the one lone diner in a restaurant full of families and couples. I picked at an omelette which had been cooked to the texture of chamois leather and
drank, rather more enthusiastically, a bottle of California chablis, feeling my solitude as a conspicuous caste mark.

Most travel involves the reassuring presence of other travelers: one joins that easygoing society of professional solitaries who are themselves just passing through—the salesmen, homesick U.N. peacekeepers, drifters in search of jobs, political scientists pretending to be agricultural advisers, anthropologists who haven’t had a bath for weeks, and the rest of that roving crew who prop up bars in foreign places and make for poker schools and conversation. On this trip, though, I was traveling through someone else’s domestic interior; a stranger in the American living room. Here, if one didn’t have a family one was at least supposed to be a delegate to a visiting convention, with a lapel badge and a light hound’s-tooth suit to prove it. Lacking both, I felt that Minneapolis was condemning me to the grim demimonde of Hennepin Avenue.

Trying to look, at least, like an occupied man, I spread out my navigation charts conspicuously on the restaurant table and set to studying them. I had only the volume of charts for the “upper river,” the eight-hundred-sixty-mile stretch from Minneapolis down to the junction with the Ohio at Cairo. It was a huge, ring-bound book, broad and thick enough to stun a sheep with, handsomely produced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. By an act of Congress in 1917, the management of the river had been put into the hands of the Secretary of War, and it was still military territory. In a country where really good maps are curiously hard to find, these charts were a cartographer’s masterpiece. Brilliantly particular in their details, severe in their exclusion of irrelevant bits of landscape, they gave a practical soldier’s-eye view of the Mississippi, breaking it down into a clean summary of all the logistical problems involved in its mile-by-mile navigation. Weeks later, when I got hold of the charts for the “lower river,” from Cairo down to the Gulf of Mexico, I was disappointed to find that they were hopelessly inferior—so small in scale, so careless in their inclusion of a distracting mass of surrounding countryside, that the Mississippi wasn’t the hero of the book at all, but a minor character following its wriggly career somewhere out on the obscure edge of things.

These, though, were everything that charts should be. At a scale of two inches to the mile, they gave the river a decently heroic size. Turning the sheets, I watched it growing from less than half an inch wide in Minneapolis to sweeps of four and five inches as it suddenly swelled out just a few miles south of the city. Here it became a pale blue tesselation of lakes, islands, “sloughs,” chutes, “towheads,” “stump fields,” bars and creeks. The red vein of the main channel tacked from shore to
shore, hedged in by the dotted outlines of “submerged features” that I was going to have to learn to steer clear of—the wing dams, hidden bank supports, pipes, cables, wrecks and stumps.

I was enjoyably lost in the difficulties of getting from Mile 818 to Mile 816 (all distances were numbered from Mile 0 at Cairo). Running close to the Minnesota shore past Boulanger Slough, I’d pass the light and the government daymark on the bank, then begin a long eastward swing out across the river to Wisconsin, keeping on a narrow track between a stump field to my left and a serrated line of wing dams on my right. Buck Island wasn’t an island at all, but a miniature Caribbean, backed by another stump field. Past the head of Nininger Slough, I’d graze the Wisconsin shore, following the railroad tracks as they ran along the water’s edge, then swing out again, to position-up to enter Lock No. 2 at Hastings.

“Excuse me, sir, but are you the gentleman from England that’s going down the river?”

In the electric-candle dusk of the restaurant, all I could see was a stooping business suit. It was pearl gray and filled to capacity.

“That’s right. I’m just looking at where I hope I’ll be tomorrow on the charts.” I pointed to the bloody hairline.

“Lois?” the business suit called to a table somewhere behind him. “Yeah, I was right. It’s him. It’s the guy I said it was. He’s got maps.” In an afterthought he said to me, “Read about you in the paper. I was telling Lois—that’s my wife—I was saying, ‘There’s that guy, at that table.’ Recognized you from your picture in the paper.”

I took this as a prelude to a relationship of some kind, but when I started to reply, his back was already turned to me and he was on his way to finish his dinner across the restaurant. I would have been glad to talk to anybody at that moment, and I found his abrupt departure unsettling. What
was
he doing? I supposed that he must have been settling a bet. I found it saddening that the business suit might have won a dollar by establishing my identity. I would not have risked a bet on it myself.

The charts had lost their vividness. After Lock 2, the river narrowed sharply between Lake Isabelle and Lake Conley. There was a marina on the Minnesota bank, just south of Hastings. After that, I couldn’t be bothered to follow it further. The chablis bottle was empty. The waiting check looked rapacious. I saw the face of the business suit turned momentarily toward my table. It was meaty, and it was laughing.

I slept thinly. High wakes from towboats came rolling at me through my dreams. There were floating logs, and the propeller screamed on the
rocks of a wing dam, and the boat pitched and clanged, and I tried to remember why on earth I was here, out of character in a Boy Scout hat. Later, with the curtains drawn against the sun, jittery and unshaven, I ordered up breakfast from Room Service and packed my bag.

The waiter who brought my eggs and coffee looked as if he had already done some growing that morning since he had put on his tuxedo. His forearms stuck out of his cuffs, and his collar was popping around his Adam’s apple.

“I saw the article about you in the paper. The trip you’re making … I really envy you.”

“Really?”

“That’s something
I’d
like to do, go down the river. St. Louis. New Orleans.” He named them as I used to name them to myself.

“Why don’t you go?”

“I’m buying time. Working through the summer. Most days, when I can, I go down to the lock and dam and look at the river. You’re taking a boat, right? I want to build a raft.”

“I thought of that too. I think it could be hellishly dangerous.”

“People nowadays, nobody does nothing. Everyone plays safe and stays home. I’m going to save myself some bread and get out of this city. I’d like to work on the towboats … get a start as a barge hand.… But that river … shit! I love it, you know?”

I showed him my charts. He pored over them, saying, “Hey!… Hey!… Hey!” and clicking his tongue noisily against his front teeth. “Just looking at these, man … I am going to build that raft. There’s a place up above the lock, a friend and me, we were talking about putting it together up there.”

“On a raft you’re going to have a lot of trouble keeping out of the way of the tows, aren’t you?”

“Yeah … I guess so.…”

I had intruded a ponderous detail that had no place in the waiter’s vision. He shook out his forelock of Swedish-colored hair.

“I better get back. Hey, have a
fantastic
ride, will you?”

“You too,” I said.

“Yeah … well …” He laughed. “Wouldn’t that be something else?”

It had faded into the conditional. Every time the waiter looked at the river he thought of lighting out, and the thought was sufficient in itself—more sustaining, even, than any real journey could be.

I found it harder to leave the city than I’d planned. Herb’s partner had been doing some heavy public relations, and by the time I reached the
river a crowd was waiting. Two television crews had turned out, and a gang of passersby had thickened around the television crews. No one seemed to know why anyone was here. But whatever it was, it was going to be on TV. There were rumors of a drowning, a rare bird, the arrival of the
Delta Queen
steamboat, and various other wonders. I was introduced to a spruce old man with an Instamatic camera and a basset hound. He was announced as the King of Camden, and very kindly took my picture. As he put away his camera he said, “I got an album of photos of people who’ve been on TV.”

The boat went growling from its trailer into the water. I sprinkled a few drops of five-dollar champagne over her bow and shared the rest of the bottle with Herb, the King and the basset hound. I heaved my case into the front of the boat and was about to take off when the TV crews intervened.

I’ve always enjoyed slow-motion action replays on television. I now found myself living in one. Acting under instructions, I held the neck of the champagne bottle over the bow of the boat. I shook hands with Herb. I climbed into the boat. I pushed off with an oar. I started the motor with a jerk of the cord. I waved to the King (who was by this time happily engaged in photographing the cameramen). I steered for the railroad bridge downstream. As soon as I had passed under its arches and was out of sight, I returned to the slip, got out of the boat, picked up the empty bottle, held it over the bow, shook hands with Herb, got into the boat, and went through the rest of the mime until I reached the bridge, then turned back to repeat the whole sequence one more time. With each new performance, these movements stiffened until they took on the ritual grotesquerie of a scene from Kabuki theatre. I became a star at taking my leave of Minneapolis: now christening my boat, now waving, now setting my face southward with, I thought, a becoming expression of jowly determination. The twin violet eyes of the cameras followed me with the same indifferent gaze that I’d noticed in the cow at the state fair. My head rattled with a conundrum: if my going away didn’t happen on TV, it wouldn’t be real; if it did happen on TV, it couldn’t be real.

There was one problem with a sound boom; two hairs in the camera gate; one time when my motor wouldn’t start; and a hitch involving a small boy and a basset hound. After the sixth rerun, I got back to find the crowd dissolving and the TV crews packing their equipment back into their vans. I turned around. No one remarked my last departure. I slipped into the main channel and let the boat take root in the river.

At last I had the Mississippi to myself, and it seemed that Minneapolis had conspired to make a gift of it to me for the afternoon. Nothing
was moving. Barges and towboats were moored at the wharves, but no one was about on them. Cranes and derricks were frozen on the sky, caught at odd angles, as if their operators had been suddenly called away. The air was inert, and the surface of the river was as finely patterned as a fingerprint. Every twist and eddy of the current showed up as a black-pencil curlicue on the water. One day, I’d learn to interpret every squiggle—at least, I’d try to. For now, it was enough to be moving just for moving’s sake, like Baudelaire’s lost balloon.

A factory went by; an empty dock; a lone man with a paintbrush on the deck of a tug, who looked up for a moment from his work and waved; then summer-dusty trees, massed and entangled on a shore of powdery sand. Rising fish left circles on the water here, and the current squeezed them into narrow ovals, before they faded into the scratched wax polish of the top of the river. It was lovely to be afloat at last, part of the drift of things. All I needed was a pet fox from a Bingham painting to throw his black reflection on the water.

Beyond the riverbank, the city blocks wobbled and tapered in the afternoon haze. They looked so insubstantial that a cooling wind might have wiped them away altogether. Pity the typists, doormen, cleaners, clerks, executive vice-presidents locked in those trembling columns of gas! I had the natural superiority of the truant; out of it all, on my own limb, at a happy angle to the rest of society. The motor chirruped smoothly behind me, the boat kept up an unwavering line between the buoys, and in this still water I could see the floating logs fifty yards ahead and swing casually around them.

The upper lock at the Falls of St. Anthony was already open for me when I rounded Nicollet Island. Up on the platform, Herb, the lockmaster and the King were leaning over the railing. I crashed into the chamber wall, overshot the ropes that had been lowered for me to hang on to, reversed furiously, crashed again, and just managed to grab one of the lines before the steel gates at the back of the lock closed with a hiss and a clunk.

“Okay,” said Herb. “You’ll learn.”

“Wish I was going with you,” said the lockmaster.

The lock had seemed huge when I’d stood above it four days ago. Inside the chamber, it felt twice as big. I clung to my pair of ropes. The water began to bubble and boil as the lock emptied. The boat edged down the slimy wall, and the faces above my head grew smaller and vaguer. As I dropped to thirty, then forty, then fifty feet down, it was like entering a new element in which the air was dank and cellarlike; I was far out of earshot of the people I had left back up there in the city daylight, their voices lost in the gurgling and sluicing of Mississippi
water. The boat tugged and swung on the ropes, and even in a sweater I was shivering. Looking up at the pale pink blotches of Herb, the King and the lockmaster, I felt that this descent was a kind of symbolic induction, a rite of passage into my new state as a river traveler.

I couldn’t hear what they were calling. The front gates of the lock opened on a blinding rectangle of day, and I was out, past the railroad sidings, into another chamber, another drop, more clammy half-darkness, and another wide-open afternoon.

In that sudden alarm which sets in an hour or so after one has started any journey, I ran through the inventory of what I’d packed. My Hostmaster soda siphon with its box of bulbs for putting bubbles into tap water … chapstick … aerogrammes … the ineffective electrical gadget that was supposed to put instant creases in my trousers … surely I had left my hotel room quite bare. Then I remembered. On the lower shelf of the bedside table, a fatal place to put anything, I had left my copy of
Huckleberry Finn
, open face down at the bit where Huck plays the mean trick on Jim with the sloughed rattlesnake skin. Damn, damn, damn. Slowing on the current, I thought that perhaps my loss wasn’t such a bad augury after all. This was a voyage I was going to have to make alone.