Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (18 page)

He pulled his right hand out of his pocket and wiped his nose on the sleeve again. “It’s the wife. She won’t do it. She used to like to go out on the boat, and sometimes in the summer we’d spend a night or two on the river. It was a lot of fun. When we were young we used to talk about doing it full time–after the kids were gone, and I was retired. But now she won’t even go out for a day trip. I built her a fine home and she doesn’t want to leave it. She wants nothing to do with the boat.”

With his hands still in his pockets, Ron shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “Oh well. What can you do?” He pulled his right hand out and pointed down the highway. “Let me tell you how to get to my place.”

Ron said his lot was about a quarter of a mile off the highway. It was three times that far. And when we got to it, had the hour not been so late, we would have turned around and walked back to the highway. Ron’s “lot” was actually a junk yard full of old rusty bulldozers, tractors with wheels missing, banged up trucks, a few wrecked cars–some laying on their sides. And there were piles of parts for all kinds of machinery everywhere. The place even had a couple of beat-up port-a-potties. And right in the middle of it all, on a trailer with a flat tire, was Ron’s house boat–The Island Queen.

It was a twenty-eight foot pontoon boat, with a cabin on it that looked like a travel trailer without wheels. “The Island Queen” was painted in brown letters across the back of the yellow cabin. Because of the flat tire, the boat was listing to starboard.

“Oh, my, God,” whispered Patricia as we stood facing the back of the boat. Ron was closing the gate behind us. “This is it? What are we going to do with Della?”

When Ron first offered us a place to camp, we asked if there was room for Della. “Oh sure. The lot is fenced, so you can turn her loose. She can’t hurt anything.”

While I looked around at the twisted metal, shards of glass, tangled steel cable and all the other junk, I had to agree with Ron. Della couldn’t hurt anything. But there were lots of things that could hurt her.

“You could tie her out across the road.” Ron said. “Plenty of grass over there. They’re going to subdivide it. No one will care.”

After we got Della taken care of, Ron gave us a tour of his boat. Because it was up on the trailer, we had to use a six foot step ladder to get on board. When he opened the door, it smelled like dirty socks in a locker. Ron turned to me. “Been a while since anybody has been in here. I’ll open the front door. It’ll air out pretty quick.”

He was walking through the cabin when he said, “My boy, and some of his friends, use it to play cards and drink beer every now and then. Keeps the wives off their backs.”

The cabin had a set of bunk beds on each side. Ron leaned against the top bunk on the port side. “Every once in a while I’ll spend the night here by myself. It’s not like being on the river. But it’s better than nothing.”

By the time Ron lit the heater and left, it was dark. We decided not to use the bunks. “I don’t know who did what on those things.” Patricia said. “I want my own bed.”

While I pumped up our bed, Patricia made cold cut sandwiches. I was detaching the hand pump from the bed, when my wife asked. “What would you do if you were Ron?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, after all those years of dreaming of living on the river, and then your wife says she won’t do it–what would you do?”

I had a feeling this was a loaded question. So I treaded lightly. “Well, that’s hard to say. I mean, they’ve raised a family and–”

Patricia interrupted me. “I’ll tell you what you’d do. The same thing he ought to do. You’d tell her, ‘You live in the house, I’ll live on the river. I’ll stop and see you now and then. If you decide to come along, you can.’” She paused. “And you would be right.”

I had to think for a moment. “Sounds like me.”

My wife handed me a sandwich. “That’s what I love about you. You’ve got the guts to be true to yourself. Most people are like water. They take the path of least resistance. Ron took the easy way out, and now his dream sits on a flat tire.”

As the cabin got warmer, the stink got worse. It smelled like rat urine, or a dead rotten critter. Or maybe it was the decay of an old man’s dream.

Louisville from the north bank
.

CHAPTER 8

A H
OME
F
OR
T
HE
W
INTER

“I am in love with America’s old river towns.
. . For me the princess of the rivers
(sorry, St Louis, forgive me Memphis) is
unquestionably Madison, Indiana.”

-C
HARLES
K
URALT
-

L
ONG BEFORE WE GOT THERE
, we had fallen in love with Madison, Indiana. We first heard about it back in Kentucky. Someone said, “If you liked those old buildings in Paducah, you’re going to love Madison!” The further up the river we got, and the more we heard and read about it, the more we loved “The princess of the rivers.” It’s a town of 13,000, and 133 blocks of downtown has been designated a National Historic District–the second largest in America. To quote travel writer Dennis Wissing, “There are enough pediments and columns and elaborate cornices in Madison to start a toga fad, . . .” In his book
Traveling The Ohio Scenic River Route
, Wissing quotes a first time tourist who said, “Madison is such a beautiful hip place, I half way expected the residents to be snooty. But they aren’t. . . (it’s) the kind of place where people sit on their front porches and talk to strangers.” Who wouldn’t love a place like that?

“Hello Patricia. How are you?”

My wife heard that question as she was bent over a produce case in the Jayco Supermarket downtown Madison. We had walked into town just the afternoon before, so she was shocked to hear someone call her name. When she turned around she found Sarah Green grinning at her.

We had camped on Sarah’s property the night before we walked into town. She and her husband Gene owned a farm three miles west of town. On the bluff where Highway 56 began it’s descent into Madison, their 150 acres skirted the edge of a bluff that overlooked the Ohio River

Sarah was a wisp of a woman with gray hair that was cut in a bob. For thirty-five years she’d taught home-economics at the local high school, and when she spoke there was usually a hesitation before the words came out. Sarah didn’t stammer or stutter. It was more like she double-checked everything to make sure that what she said was what she meant to say. “So, are you staying somewhere in Madison?”

We were camped in a lot on the west end of the city’s river front park.

“Are you going to be around here long?” Sarah asked

“We’ve fallen in love with this town,” Patricia said. “We hope to find some place close-by to spend the winter.”

The next afternoon, a reporter showed up at our camp to interview us for the Madison newspaper. He had only been there a few minutes when Sarah walked into our camp with a small baked ham and a bowl of homemade potato soup. While the reporter interviewed me, Sarah and my wife went to the other side of our camp to chat.

“Patricia, do you remember the old white house on our farm?”

Constructed in 1840, it was a grand two-story brick Federalist style home. A rectangle shaped house with a high pitched roof, a chimney on each end and a large porch with tall white columns on the front. Gene Green told us most of the building materials came from that property. The bricks were made from clay dug on the farm, and the timber in the house was harvested on the place. It had been built as a gift for a slave mistress.

“No one has lived in the house since my mother passed away three years ago,” Sarah said. “That is, nobody except Katy the cat.”

Sarah and Gene Green’s home was about a hundred yards from the old house. The farm also had two large barns and several other out buildings. But the Greens were not farmers. Gene was an executive for a local company that built lifts for auto repair shops. No animals were in the barns, and the Greens leased out the crop lands to a local farmer.

“Gene and I talked about you last night. We keep the old house heated for mother’s cat, and the water is on because I’m still watering her plants. And we have to keep the phone on for the alarm system. So if you don’t mind living with Katy you’re welcome to stay there for the winter.”

“Bud, maybe I should drive, Patricia said. “The speed limit is forty. Look at you. You’re white knuckled and you’re only doing twenty.”

The Greens loaned us their Datsun pick-up to fetch supplies for winter house keeping. Had we been downtown, in Old Madison, my driving would have been fine. But we were on top of the hill, on Clifty Drive in New Madison. Walmart, Mc Donald’s and all of the usual American joints were up there. My wife was right. I wasn’t fast enough for that crowd. In the past five months that we’d been on the road, I hadn’t driven a motor vehicle. The speed of my feet had been just fine for me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go any faster.

But the reality right then was that we were no longer traveling at the speed of our feet. We’d stopped to settle down for the winter, and we needed some things to do that. And a truck was the best way to get them.

It had been more than fifteen years since livestock had been on the farm. So fences needed mending, gates built and the barn had to be cleaned before Della could settle in for the winter. So a roll of barbed wire was among the things we fetched on our first trip to New Madison.

Although Sarah and Gene had maintained the house since Sarah’s mother passed away, it had been three years since anyone–but cats–had lived in it. So there was cleaning that had to be done. Hence, cleaning supplies were also on our list.

Since we hit the road, I don’t know how many parking lots we’d pulled into with Della and the cart. It didn’t take long to establish a routine. First, we tried to find something to tie her to. Like a light pole, sign post, dumpster or–the best of all–a tree. If we didn’t find anything, we just pulled into a parking space. Then I used Della’s water bucket as a seat and sat on it in front of her holding the rope, while Patricia went shopping. We usually made a new friend or few doing that.

It got to be such a common thing for us to do, that we never thought anything odd about it. When I parked that pickup at the New Madison Walmart and we walked in together, now that was strange.