River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (26 page)

I
T WAS THE KIND
of mistake I was happy to make: Commerce, Missouri, had not yet been entirely washed away. Other than the white church and steeple, there were several houses, a post office, and a small winery nearby, but the rest of what was once there—the name notwithstanding—was a motley few beat-up and shut-down buildings, and no one selling gasoline or anything else. Northward along a diminishing road below a wooded bluff was the Williams home, a small cabin added on to over the years so that it was a warren of dim rooms. Inside, the air lay compacted into a single scent of children, cooking food, and river-bottom damp; it was a heavy air, but one generated by breathing people, the very sort we were relieved still to be among.

Annie, Dariel’s wife, offered us appetizers of bologna on white bread, to be followed by catfish—blues and flatheads—he had taken from the river; she battered the big chunks in cornmeal and fried them in an iron skillet. “Is there enough?” Pilotis said. “I mean, with all your family?” “It’s hard to run out of catfish here,” Dariel said.

While the dinner crackled in the skillet, we sat at the kitchen table. Dariel operated heavy machinery at a quarry, a dangerous job requiring him to move rock around the edges of the pit. The Piper took out his fife and played an old Erie Canal tune, and children, Williams’s nephew and nieces, came from unseen corners of the house: a young girl just recovering from chickenpox, a ten-year-old boy, and his elder sister. The boy, Michael, sat absorbed in the music, the teenager trying not to be, and the little girl alarmed. Michael soon began pouring out questions. Where had we come from? Had anyone drowned? Did we think our boat would sink? When he heard Pilotis mention New York City, he stood up. “You saw the Statue of Liberty? I’ve only seen her in a book.” We told our tale, the boy alight with fascination at one more strange thing the Mississippi had washed up into his life. His excitement grew until his questions turned into a narrative of his own. He had a slight speech impediment, the result of a perforated eardrum affecting his hearing, something a recent operation should correct, but still his words required attention. What I heard as “Thomas” was “Commerce,” and “hatchet” was “statue.” He reported the indignities his elder sister visited on him and his attempt to sell her up in Farmington once, a try that brought an alleged offer of fifty dollars. To that she said, “Quit it!”

He talked so much I said, Son, I think you’ll run for governor one day. “No,” he said, “I want to be an author.” “It’s about the same thing,” Pilotis said. “Slinging the bull.” Michael reached for a pencil. “I’ve got my signature ready,” and he carefully demonstrated it for us. You need to write a book before you can sign one, I said. “I’m about ready,” he said. “My first title will be
An Outline of Missouri.
You think that’s history, but it’s not. It’s about a ten-year-old boy who has no sisters and walks around the border of Missouri with his dad. They cross the Missouri River okay, but when they get to the Mississippi the father drowns, so the boy has to go on by himself. After he reaches his starting point, he goes to see the governor who gives him a million dollars, and the boy becomes a legend.”

Nodding toward me, Pilotis said, “Watch what you give out in front of him. He’s been known to appropriate a story or two. That’s probably why his pen’s working right now.” “He can have it,” Michael said. “I’ve got more. Like
The Ghost of the Mississippi.
It’s about this ghost with pale blue eyes, no nose. Long, bony fingers that can claw girls’ necks.”

At that point, the room went dark. After surprised exclamations from around the house and a shriek from an elder sister, Dariel guessed the flood was responsible, and Pilotis said to the boy, “I think you’ll be an author all right because coincidences take to you. That’s how our skipper gets by.”

Annie pulled out a kerosene lamp. By its lambent wick and the flickering blue flame under the skillet, we began to eat while she kept the catfish coming, crisp and moist and sweet, and the talk rolled along. The boy told how river people when they really needed food “fished intelligent,” if illegally, by cobbling together a simple battery-powered device inside a snuff can that could make a catfish dance on its tail and sometimes even jump into the boat. The little shock boxes were almost better than food stamps.

The house got so close in the warm darkness we all went onto the porch and stood looking out at the river, now agleam with moonlight, more lovely than lethal, and Dariel said, “The current’s bad in this section because the river’s narrow and it goes over hard bottom. Tomorrow you’ll catch it pretty good from here on up past Cape, and the river’s still rizen. And the Missouri’s worse.”

Honeysuckle and tree frogs and mosquitoes drenched the muggy night, and our conversation was a staccato of slaps and sentences until someone said, “Oh my god, look out there!” Down through the thick moonlight came a single barge, twisting in the currents, a juggernaut broken free and in search of a collision to stop it. “If there’s one loose barge, there’s six more,” the boy said, and a few moments later came a horrendous thud, a deep and ominous sound, and Dariel said, “That’s another one hitting the railroad bridge at Thebes, three and a half miles upriver.” When Pilotis and I went aboard
Nikawa
for the night, I lay swatting at mosquito whines and listening to the awful thuddings of berserk barges roaming the dark.

H
AVING SLEPT
with mosquitoes that entered a pilothouse that seemed to have only imaginary bulkheads, we got up as if we had chickenpox (two weeks later, the Piper did come down with it), but an early breeze blew the insects back into the woods, and the sun so struck the flood in its rush for the sea that the water seemed to throw off sparks like another ancient element, hard earth: corundum against iron. The river overnight had risen eight more inches. We set out on it, engines pushing us among the usual accouterments of flood: drift, foam, boils, steel barrels, a propane tank, barges askew in the trees, and bobbing nun-buoys playing peekaboo in the current. We were no longer much concerned about fuel, assured by Dariel we’d find it at Cape Girardeau. So the Monday morning was good, even as we passed under the old Thebes train bridge, one that bargemen detest, its position noted on the chart as “an area typically more difficult to navigate,” a warning especially to long, down-bound tows that must execute a sharp turn and then a broad one before realigning quickly to clear between the stone piers. Early towboatmen claimed that railroads, competing with paddlewheelers for freight, deliberately placed some bridges at angles to encumber and endanger vessels.

That section of the river breaks through a distant outreach of the Ozark Mountains at the top of what was once the Mississippi Embayment, a very long arm of the Gulf of Mexico. When the great sauropods and forty-five-foot crocodiles were in their last days, this former mouth of the ancient river probably poured over a three-hun dred-foot-high precipice, a massive cascade twice the height of Niagara, to enter the Gulf. Had Commerce been around, it would have been a seaport.

At Cape Girardeau, we looked for gasoline but found the flood had either closed or damaged two different fuel docks. We couldn’t risk going farther, so I turned
Nikawa
downstream again and pulled up on the inside of a big Corps of Engineers floating dry dock. I climbed the ladder and walked into a small lounge. Workers sat drinking coffee, and I asked whether we might tie up there for an hour till we found gasoline. “No, you can’t! Get out of here!” a bloated man said. “Get your craft out of here!” I said we were in a real pinch, what with this flood. “I told you to get your damn boat off this dock!” Okay, I said, just direct me to some other place to tie up. “I told you all I’m gonna tell you except this—you aren’t going to stay here!” I said, leaving, Thanks for your help, you swampsucker.

We prowled along the high floodwall. There was but one possibility, an inundated concrete ramp, or what looked like a ramp, a thing useless except for a boat trailer, where four men stood staring at the flood. With no idea what was under us, I edged through the rough water on one motor, Pilotis giving me the sounder readings until we were close enough to ask the men about the ramp. “It’s not a ramp!” one yelled, and picked up a piece of drift and plunged it in to show the depth. “It’s a straight wall!” Good news. We approached slowly, got our fenders down low enough to ride against the ledge, and tossed a line to them to hold
Nikawa
steady in the barge waves threatening to slam her onto the concrete.

The men were down-and-out, had no vehicle, and the gasoline was up on the highway, too far to walk, so I stood bewildered. Pilotis asked, “Waiting for a coincidence?” It’s all we’ve got, I said. “Again.” So we passed the time: took snapshots, counted trees coming down the river, someone told a flood joke involving a chicken and pig. Then a man carrying his daughter on his shoulders walked up to show her the bad Mississippi misbehaving. He asked about
Nikawa.
I told him about her, spoke of our voyage, and his expression became intense. His name was David Keiper, and he once had sailed a trimaran from San Francisco to New Zealand. He understood exigencies. “So you need some gas?” Indeed. While I checked the fenders, Pilotis said, “There’s one person in the entire state who’s sailed across the Pacific, and he’s the one who strolls right up to us.” And the Piper said innocently, “Duck soup.” I quoted Ernest Hemingway after he walked away from an airplane crash in Africa: “The luck, she is still running good.”

In an hour I had canisters of gasoline, and we were under way again, waved onto the flood by our benefactors, and I said I was glad to have come across the swampsucking orzizzazz—his role made for better drama. “Yes,” said Pilotis, “but your Pacific
deus ex machina
was too much. The audience won’t buy it.” Given the pressure, it was the best I could do, I said.

For lunch we ate peanut-butter-and-preserves sandwiches on sourdough bread, mine with sliced sweet pickles. The twenty-eight miles up to Tower Rock was a generally straight run full of low swells that impeded us on the upside and rocketed us forward on the downslope, and driftwood formed into floating islands, some so large we could only tractor through as if we were in a small Sargasso Sea.

South of St. Louis, the Mississippi is somewhat lacking in exceptional scenery, but much of the best of what is there occurs between Cape Girardeau and Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. In that stretch the most celebrated landmark is Tower Rock, or the Grand Tower, the latter name not really accurate in either word, although the stony outlier is distinctive with its creviced striations of yellowed limestone capped by oaks and cedars, a thing even jaded towmen like to look at. From the late seventeenth century on, travelers—Marquette and Jolliet, Lewis and Clark, explorer Stephen Long, ethnographer Prince Maximilian and his artist Karl Bodmer, John James Audubon, Mark Twain—have noted or sketched the Tower, the earliest accounts speaking of the fear and reverence Indians held for the rock and its swirling waters. Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal:

This [Tower] seems among the watermen of the mississippi to be what the tropics or Equanoxial line is with regard to the Sailors; those who have never passed it before are always compelled to pay or furnish some sperits to drink or be ducked. . . . These strong courants thus meeting each other form an immence and dangerous whirlpool which no boat dare approach in that state of the water; the counter courent driving with great force against the East side of the rock would instandly dash them to attoms and the whirlpool would as quickly take them to the botom.

Concerned not about hard water but rocks, we approached only closely enough for photographs and then went on.

If you’ve seen the movie
In the Heat of the Night
, you may remember the high, slender bridge the police captain uses to overtake a fleeing man suspected of murder. The span links Missouri to Chester, Illinois, atop the eastern bluff, with a state prison below it and northward a plainly handsome French-colonial house Pierre Menard built in 1802 on the low bank of the Mississippi, elevated just enough to stay dry. Menard, a merchant and legislator, was an alert immigrant who troubled himself to study the territory and adapt to its ways. During muggy summers, he piped chilly drafts from his springhouse into his home to make it one of the first air-cooled places in America; there he comfortably entertained Lafayette and Indian chiefs and became wealthy by understanding and respecting two native forces: the Mississippi and the aboriginal people.

Among those not giving the river or the Indians their due were the priestly founders of Old Kaskaskia, platted in 1703 on the floodplain just below the spot the Kaskaskia River issues into the Mississippi—a bonehead location that nevertheless managed to last almost two centuries before the rivers sent south this once most important river village above New Orleans and, for a couple of years, the first capital of Illinois. On the bluff above, earthen ramparts of Fort Kaskaskia remain, overgrown in large trees, a haunting place where John Dodge, an acquaintance of George Washington, took up despotic rule from the abandoned fort in 1784. He tyrannized the wilderness residents and murdered messengers sent out for help. A priest, Father Gibault, wrote of the iniquity: “Breaking of limbs, murder by means of a dagger, sabre, or sword (for he who will carries one) are common, and pistols and guns are but toys in this region. The most solemn feasts and Sundays are days given up to dances and drunkenness, with girls suborned and ravished in the woods, and a thousand other disorders which you are able to infer from these.” It took troops under George Rogers Clark, William’s elder brother, to set things right.

Four miles around the big bend upstream from these troubles, we found a small dredged-out harbor near the old French village of Ste. Genevieve. Despite some of the boatworks lying underwater, we pulled in for the night and, for the first time, broke out the kayak to get us to shore to a small bar—not one of sand but rather the other kind—and we ordered a round of quenchers and toasted our surviving another day. I coaxed the smiling bartender to take us across Bois Brulé Bottom into Ste. Genevieve when she got off work. As she drove us into one of the first towns west of the Mississippi, she said, “So you’re on a little ol excursion trip?”