Old Glory (9 page)

B
y the time
I reached Lock 1, six miles farther on downriver, I was feeling cautiously insouciant about locks in general. I rode up to the ladder built into the lock wall, tweaked the bell rope hanging behind it, and was told by a voice coming out of a loudspeaker to stand off while an upstream tow came through.

I beached the boat under the Ford Parkway Bridge and lit a pipe, listening to the grumble of city traffic over my head and to the fanatic whistlings and scrapings of the crickets on the shore. The rising tow-boat showed over the top of the lock: its smokestack, radar scanner and top deck, then four more decks, one after another in wedding-cake tiers. These modern towboats had inherited a great deal of the glory of the steam-powered stern-wheelers they had superseded fifty years ago. Each deck sported a frieze of white ornamental railing work, slender Corinthian pillars and a fancy portico. Like the old steamboats, they were the floating equivalent of the Southern planter’s mansion, brimming with neoclassical swank. Their pilot houses, jutting forward from the rest of the boat in a wide-windowed balcony, had a royal arrogance about them. Even now, a Mississippi River pilot was a definite somebody, and the top-heavy pyramid of the towboat’s superstructure reflected all the luster that still attached to his title.

When the lock gates opened, the tow pushed out its fleet of nine barges, sucking the river away from the shore as it came, and sending out a long stern wave which lifted my boat and rammed it deep into the bank. I got my motor started and headed for the open lock chamber. The water there was still threshing from the action of the tow’s twin
screws, and when I went in I lurched and slid as if I were trying to drive too fast on ice.

I had been warned. Tows had engines of enormous horsepower—anything from three thousand for little ones to eight and nine thousand for the big, lower-river boats. In the open river, they could make wakes and eddies that went on churning for a mile after they had passed. In a lock chamber, they could swill the two-or-three-million-odd gallons of water about like a milkshake.

I wasn’t even supposed to be here. In my newly won assurance I hadn’t troubled to notice the red light at the entrance, and as my boat slopped and skidded in the lock I got cursed for a blind sonofabitch shit who should’ve waited for the fuckin’ green,
you asshole
. Were they going to drown me in cold blood in order to teach me a lesson? The lockman allowed me my rope only after he’d run through such a lexicon of expletives that the torrent of excrement being tipped on me from the lock wall was roughly equal to the volume of turbulent water on which I was just managing to keep afloat. I was torn between fright, fury and bleating apology. As I sank into the emptying chamber, I heard my own whinnying voice collapse into a stutter of f’s.
F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f
, I went, my own attempt at obscenity turning as seemly as a line of asterisks in a Victorian novel.

The lockman called down: “You come in like that, you goin’ to have to
luck out!
How far you goin’?”

“Oh … New Orleans.…”

“
N’Orleans?”
His derision boomed off the wet walls. “I’m telling you, man, you get to N’Orleans, you can send me a fuckin’ postcard!”

Mercifully, distance and the noise of the sluices obliterated the rest of what he had to say.

Below the lock, the face of the river changed. Before, it had been a city slicker, hemmed in by streets, yards, piers, warehouses. Now it ran through a rough country of forest, sand and rock. The chart showed Minneapolis and St. Paul keeping pace with the Mississippi, less than a mile away from each bank; but this wasn’t parkland so much as a stretch of original wilderness on which the twin cities had never bothered to intrude.

At the sound of my motor, baby turtles the size of saucers plopped from overhanging branches into the water. Big butterflies on floppy wings rode the air like kites, tacking and dipping ahead of me. They were Monarchs, and we were going the same way. The butterflies used the river as a highway down which they made their annual migration. They left the Northern states in late summer and traveled downstream to the Gulf and on to Venezuela and Colombia. Sometimes I took them
on as hitchhikers. They would come flickering out of the wind and lie on the thwarts of my boat, where they sunned themselves, their crinkly orange wings veined with fine threads of black. I liked these fellow vagrants. Their style of travel, at once feckless and compulsive, seemed much like my own.

Here the water was a deep olive green, mottled all over with leaf shadows. Its current thickened as the Minnesota River added itself, in a string of miniature whirlpools, to the Mississippi below Pike Island. A tow was heading upstream between the trees, and I pulled in to the bank to keep out of the way of its wash. Setting my anchor in the crook of a boulder on the sand, I felt contentedly Robinson Crusoeish. I wandered along the shore, scuffing up gouts of bleached dust. I never noticed the fisherman, and nearly fell headlong on him as he squatted in the bushes, his cane pole lost among the other branches that ran out over the water.

“Hey, mister—” He was old and black and wore a once-gray suit which had gone to the sheen and color of verdigris. A brown derby hat was tipped back on his head. His half-eaten sandwiches were spread on a scrap of greaseproof paper at his feet. Stale slices of bread had peeled back in wings in the sun from their fillings of cheap corned beef.

“I’m sorry—I didn’t see you there.”

“I thought maybe you was the warden.”

“No.”

“So I was layin’ kinda low.” He flipped his pole upstream and trailed it down with the current.

“What are you fishing for?”

“Just for what I can catch. Crappies … catfish …”

“How big do the catfish run here?”

“Oh, pretty big.” He made the classic fisherman’s gesture of showing me with his hands. They began a foot apart, then spread to encompass a giant.

“What bait do you use?”

“Good meat.” He pointed at his bait tin. It was true. Corned-beef sandwiches were good enough for him, but for the catfish he’d bought at least a pound of filet steak. Channel catfish must have been picky eaters, for they hadn’t been tempted, even by these bloody hunks of prime Midwestern beef.

“Can’t seem to get a bite out of them. Sun makes them real sleepy. Been down here for better than four, five hours and I hain’t had but one little nibble.” He resettled his hat over his eyes. “There’s no way you can rely on them catfish. Some days, I’ve had more of ’em outa here’n you could shake a stick at; other times they’re layin’ right down
at the bottom of that river, and they’re so
lazy
they won’t raise a whisker.”

The tow went by, dragging the river in creases behind it like a trailed skirt.

“Maybe she’ll wake them fish up,” he said.

My own boat rocked and banged on the beach. I pushed it out onto the current, through a tangle of hanging green, and out into midstream. The western shore was beginning to darken, while the eastern shore was taking on a buttery glow of evening sun which turned the trees to bright cutouts and the sand to turmeric. After the tow’s passage, the water tidied itself back between the banks, and the swallows came crowding in over the surface.

It was mosquito hour. All over the river, the bugs were coming to. Crickets, ticks, gnats, chiggers … grass bugs, rotten-timber bugs, leaf bugs, water bugs … everything with six legs and wings and stings was whirring or whining or chirruping. The din these insects made was enough to override the noise of the motor at my back. It sounded as if a dozen radio stations were all trying to broadcast on a single frequency. It was, I realized, no accident that I had the river more or less to myself. My wrists and ankles were turning lumpy with mosquito bites. When I slapped at the air, it was crunchy with bugs.

The trees went black, then lost out to high warehouses again, while the sandy beaches were shuttered away behind piles and wharves. In the violet light, the riverfront of St. Paul had the pretty decrepitude of a European city; its dusky brickwork floated in long reflection on the water. It looked frowsty, aged, and likable. I found a little shantytown of houseboats moored on the west bank, and tied up to a pontoon there. The whole assembly of floating frame houses was murmuring and groaning in the current as it dragged at their hawsers and scoured their front steps. I lugged my case down a steel catwalk, the inky water hissing under my feet. Behind each lace-curtained window, the same colored picture flickered in each houseboat’s darkened room. Bursts of obedient studio laughter broke with the monotony of waves on a beach.
Mork and Mindy
. I crept past as quietly as I could. My own picture was a great deal grander than that livid and jerky image … the Gothic silhouette of the highway bridge, the black sweep of the river streaked with city lights, and the tangerine moon lying low over the rail yards.

I was mesmerized by the river. St. Paul was an abstraction on a limestone bluff where I checked into a hotel room for the night and found a bar to kill time in while the Mississippi went on unrolling in my head.

Admiral Benbow’s was a convenient enough nowhere in which to let
one’s thoughts drift. Everything in it was in imitation of something else. The nautical junk that furnished it was faked; so were its walls of plastic leather books; so was the girl singer who was churning out old Barbra Streisand numbers to a Magnavox organ and a drummer who spent the entire evening in a state of near-coma, wiping his skins with a pair of wire brushes.

I licked the frost of sugar from the rim of my whiskey sour, glad at least of the gloom in which the place had hidden its tackier bits of artifice.

My fellow drinkers looked as if they had been purchased in bulk along with the plastic library walls. They were all aged thirty-four and three-quarters, with identical sets of cropped curly hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and catfish mustaches which gave their faces a single expression of bewildered solemnity. Since the elderly young men were telling each other jokes and showing off an enviable expanse of costly bridgework, these mustaches were ill-chosen accessories. It might have been a good idea if their wearers had come to an agreement to take them off their upper lips and put them in their vest pockets for the evening.

The great-grandfathers of these men could have been in on the beginnings of St. Paul. If one of them had arrived here in 1847, he would have found a dismal collection of traders’ cabins set above the river and called, with a frankness uncommon in these parts, Pig’s Eye. In 1849, two hustlers named Henry Rice and John Irving decided to turn Pig’s Eye into a metropolis. Rechristening it was the first step. Then they laid out a street plan which—like most street plans in the West at that time-was a piece of pure prophetic fiction. Tracts of cut-down timber were labeled as hotels, churches, factories, warehouses, government buildings, tenements, newspaper offices, stores and schools. In five years, amazingly, they had conjured up a population of seven thousand people. St. Paul became the state capital of Minnesota, and by the 1870s, people were writing of it as if it were as old, genteel and venerable a place as Boston. Minneapolis was the “new city,” and by comparison with its twin, St. Paul legitimately considered itself a crusty social superior. People who forgetfully referred to it as Pig’s Eye were ridden out of
town on a rail. In the telescoped version of history that has been a Midwestern necessity, St. Paul has always dated “from way back.”

Six months after the evening in Admiral Benbow’s, when I was back in London, I found a book tided
Information for Immigrants
published by the United States Immigration Bureau in 1872, right at the peak of German and Scandinavian settlement in Minnesota. It was a manual of homely statistics, covering all the middle and western states and territories, designed to help the prospective settler fix on a destination in which he could afford to build his new life.

In 1872, Minnesota already had more than four hundred thousand people living in the state. It was long past the stage of being anything like a frontier. Most of its railroads were built; cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul were nationally important; the basic pattern of its trade, agriculture and industry was set solid. An immigrant in 1872 would have been a latecomer.

Yet if he pored over
Information for Immigrants
, he might have been astonished to find just how open Minnesota still was. He might, for instance, especially if he was German and used to working on a farm in Europe, think of trying his luck in Pennsylvania among his fellow “Pennsylvania Dutch,” who were really Pennsylvania
Deutsch
. Or he might try Ramsey County, Minnesota—the riverside county that contained St. Paul.

As an agricultural laborer, he would earn about $2 a day in Minnesota, but only $1.35 a day in Pennsylvania. A pound of Pennsylvania beef cost 17 cents; in Minnesota it cost 12 cents. A barrel of flour: $4.30 in Minnesota, $7.53 in Pennsylvania. At $5.12, a pair of “strong boots” would cost 32 cents more in Pennsylvania than in Minnesota.

If my imaginary immigrant had a little capital, he might want to buy a “small improved farm”—already fenced and plowed, with a log house and stable. In Pennsylvania, such a place sold for about $200 an acre as against $20 to $30 an acre in Minnesota. If he bought a hog to truffle in his backyard, a Minnesota pig came at $5, while its Pennsylvanian cousin cost $15.

In Pennsylvania there were only scattered openings for labor, and wages were generally a shade lower than in Minnesota. Around St. Paul, though, there was a tremendous demand for all sorts of manual workers: on railroad gangs and public works projects; in the flour and timber mills; in woodcutting; on farms; in machine shops and factories; in carpentry and plastering and every other trade connected with the riot of new-house building.