The River Queen (6 page)

Whitecaps build and Jerry keeps pointing us into the waves. The boat rocks. We hear something snap and Tom looks around, shaking his head. We do not speak as Jerry drives in and out of the chop. For twenty minutes or more the world around us is black as night, and we are being tossed and hurled, then suddenly we come into brightness and the river smooths out as calm as it was before.

“It's moved east,” Tom says.

Jerry nods. “It's behind us now.”

Tom's cell phone rings and we learn from his sister that a funnel cloud touched down forty miles north of daymarker 660 where we first saw the storm. “Too close for comfort,” Jerry says.

We assess our damage. The pipe holding up our satellite dish has snapped in two. (I am actually somewhat relieved by this, for I feared beer-drinking bouts of
Monday Night Football.
) The screens over the windshield have blown away and Jerry is particularly upset about these because they have to be custom made. The plastic deck chairs got banged around and all Tom's things topside are soaked. “We got off easy,” Tom says.

We stay in the cabin as the boat is drying out in a blaze of afternoon sun. “Well, I'm glad that that's over,” Jerry says. “In all my years on the river I've never seen that before.”

“You're kidding?” I can't believe this is true.

Tom is shaking his head. “And I hope I never see it again.…” They are focused on whatever that wall of water was that chased us. “Never seen anything like that. The way the wind picked the river right up.”

“So it wasn't good, right…?”

They look at me as Tom pops a diet Dew and Jerry sticks a beer into his silver aluminum mug. “Nope, not good,” Jerry mutters, taking a sip. I am starting to think that I could liken boating to what my ob-gyn once said about delivering babies. He said that 99 percent of the time it's routine and dull. And that 1 percent of the time you are scared out of your wits. Now I understand what he means.

“Was it a tornado?”

“Well,” Jerry says, “technically it was a tornado, but a tornado never touches down on a river. I don't know why. It will hop right over the river, but it doesn't touch down.”

“So it was … a waterspout?”

They look at each other and nod. “It was something like that. The important thing is we're more or less in one piece.” Though Jerry is still upset about the windshield screens.

Before us the river is a glossy sheet, calm as if nothing ever happened. Like a man with a bad temper that flares, then recedes. It is hard to believe that half an hour ago these waters rose and came chasing after us. Now our course is smooth with gentle bends. A stream of gold sunlight, pouring down from heaven, lights our way.

ISLANDS

8

I
N THE
1830s a boy named John Banvard left New York and set out for the West. His father had recently died and Banvard, who was just fifteen, was forced to seek his fortune on his own. At that time the frontier wasn't Wyoming or California; it was the Mississippi River. Despite Lewis and Clark's journey to the sea thirty years before, anything beyond the river was still considered mysterious, uncertain, and wild.

In Kentucky, Banvard became an itinerant performer, impresario, set designer, and painter. Then, as a young man, for two years he floated in solitude down the river on a raft, sketching the eastern bank from St. Louis to New Orleans. When he returned, he built a barn and put his renderings of log cabins and steamboats, cottonwoods and river town life on an enormous canvas, which he mounted on rollers.

As the rollers turned, Banvard recounted his often tall tales of pirates and deprivation and the characters he encountered. With his “Three Mile” painting, as it came to be known, he captivated audiences from the rough-hewn crew of sailors in Louisville to Queen Victoria. For a time his panoramic vision made him the richest, most famous artist in the world.

People came night after night. After the success of the eastern bank, he returned to the river and painted the western bank. He added music and light, creating the world's first multimedia show. He traveled all over the world, spinning stories of the river.

With the invention of the motion picture camera, Banvard's fortunes changed, and in time his panoramas were forgotten. He was buried in a pauper's grave, and his paintings, except for a few small panels, were lost forever, though some are believed to be used in the insulation of old houses in Watertown, South Dakota, where he lived his final years.

Ever since I read about Banvard, I wondered what made him so taken with the river. Was it the death of his father? Or just the need to make his way in the world? Was it escape or necessity? Or a bit of both? In the end I came to think of it as his obsession—one I am trying to understand. Just as I'm trying to understand my own. I imagine Banvard on his raft, drawing the river, making up his tales. Perhaps traveling not all that much slower than we are.

*   *   *

“The first rule of boating,” Jerry says, is “keep your nose into the current and the wind.” It's after the storm and I'm standing next to him at the helm as the lecture begins.

“What's the second rule?” I ask.

“Don't forget the first rule,” he says, his voice, as always, bone dry. He explains that in a storm you go into the swells nose first. “You don't want to go straight into the trough. Don't let the boat broach,” he tells me, making a flipping movement with his hands, which I assume to be a broach. “You don't want that to happen.”

He's got his eyes on the horizon and he's moving the wheel with his thumbs. “You want to keep the rudder indicator at zero, or as close to it as you can,” he says, pointing to a round instrument with a needle that moves to either side of zero. “You know, even keel. Just move the wheel easily along. Point her toward your farthest buoy. Here,” he says, not even looking my way, “you try.”

“Now?”

“Now's as good a time as any.” Jerry steps aside and nervously I take the wheel. I'm looking at the rudder indicator as I move to the right or left, but I'm having trouble keeping it at zero. For whatever reason the boat seems to be steering me. It's a little like walking a dog that weighs a thousand times more than you do. Heel, heel, I want to say. I am surprised at the tug of the river, at how hard it is to hold a straight line.

“Okay,” Tom says, “now she wants to go this way, but don't let her. Don't let her get away from you.”

“You want to keep a straight course between your buoys,” Jerry tells me. “You see the buoys? Set your bow toward a distant buoy.” I'm attempting to see the buoys and hold a straight course and not go crashing into the riverbank. But I was never very good at patting my head, rubbing my tummy, while jumping up and down on one foot at the same time either. “Keep your eyes on the horizon,” he tells me.

Jerry takes a clothespin and clips it on to the windshield. “Here,” he says. “Aim your nose at this.”

I try, but it's useless. My eyes seem to be crossing and the clothespin is more a distraction than anything else. “Head for that red buoy,” Jerry says, “then straighten her out.” I keep trying to hold the rudder indicator at zero and aim for the red, but I can't seem able to do the two things at once.

“You see that?” Jerry says, pointing at the blue gray surface of the river. I see nothing. “Over there where the water ripples. Those lines tell you there's something there.…” I sigh because to me the water ripples everywhere. “That's a wing dam. You wanta watch out for that.”

I am watching for something I cannot see and I do not even know what it is. I have no idea how to read the surface in order to know what lies beneath. This is what Captain Horace Bixby once tried to teach a young and apparently not very swift cub pilot named Samuel Clemens. “You only learn the shape of the river,” Bixby in
Life on the Mississippi
warns a disbelieving Clemens, who will soon take his pseudonym from the river and become Mark Twain, “and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, never mind the one that's before your eyes.”

I don't have any river in my head yet. I hardly have it in front of my eyes. I cannot tell a wing dam, whatever that is, from the normal flow. A deadhead could leap up and grab our rudder and I wouldn't know. I'm a person who tends to see mirages anyway. But here mirages are everywhere. The surface seems to ripple in the same way no matter what, unless the wind has raised it out of its bed. But for the next half hour I manage to stay between the red and green buoys, avoid a few logs drifting by, and not rip the bottom out of our hull.

The river is not the same as when Twain was a cub. Now there are the locks and dams. The Army Corps of Engineers manages and dredges the main channel and the corps has provided fairly accurate navigational maps. But this does not mean we can't run aground or ruin our keel on what we do not see. We can still get caught on a snag or battered in the shoals.

Take the main channel. If I look at the maps and follow the buoys and daymarkers, I should pretty much be able to stay within the channel. Apparently I cannot. There are times when the river turns into a maze of competing rivulets, when what looks as if it should be the main channel is really a poorly dredged chute. I've come to such a spot where there appear to be several ways to go. “Look for your buoys,” Jerry says.

To my right the river is vast, but the buoys appear to the left down a narrower chute. “But this is where it's wide.”

Jerry shakes his head. “Doesn't matter. That's the main channel. That's where it's dredged.” He points to an instrument. “This is your depth finder. We've got a draft of 3.5 feet. I'd like twice that beneath us.”

As we approach Lock and Dam 9, Jerry takes over and Tom gives me a high five. “You did great,” he says, nearly breaking my hand. “Except you covered about five river miles in ten.”

“What do you mean by that?”

And he makes a zigzagging motion with his hand.

*   *   *

As we enter Lock and Dam 9, it's pouring again. A dark cloud has snuck above us, the remnants of our earlier storm, but the green light is a go and we breeze in. We are the only craft and have the lock to ourselves. It seems as if the lockmaster, who putters up to us on a little yellow golfcart in matching yellow rain gear, has little to do. There's no traffic here.

I'm in my flip-flops and my New York City Marathon rain slicker, which was left at our house by a visitor years ago. Despite the rain, I remain excited as I hold the lines in my blue plastic gloves. As our boat descends and the water rushes out of the lock, I cling to my rope and push us off the wall.

My assignment this time is to prevent the bent-over satellite dish from smashing into the cement lock wall as we descend the ten-foot drop in the lock. But the rain is cascading and the deck is slippery and I'm having trouble getting a grip. It is actually not that easy to keep the dish from crashing into the wall. Jerry's very nervous about this. And I'm getting soaked. The wind blasts under my slicker, threatening to raise me like a dandelion spore. I improvise and slip beneath the satellite dish, which provides a kind of umbrella as I keep my blue-gloved fingers pressed to the wall.

Tom, who thinks this is very clever, gives me a thumbs-up.

“You're going to teach me how to have fun again, aren't you, Mary?”

I am surprised by this comment. It seems as if Tom is nothing
but
fun. “I thought you were going to teach me!” I call back.

As we sail out of the lock and dam, we leave the storm behind. There is demarcation in the sky where the bad weather ends. Blackness, then light. Again it strikes me as almost a special effect, an almost unnatural line. I have never seen the weather so clearly defined. Suddenly it is a warm evening, without a cloud or trace of storm as we enter the east channel. “That's Scrogum Island on port side,” Jerry says.

“Say what?” Tom laughs.

“Scrogum, Tom. Not Scrotum.”

9

T
IME ON
the river is a relative thing. Not like any other kind of time. We're traveling at about eight miles per hour and three of those come from the river's natural flow. Your average marathoner can do better than that. At this speed I can see the underside of a bird's wing. The eyes of a disenchanted woman, hanging laundry up to dry. Children taunting a mongrel at the river's edge. The bait, wiggling on a fisherman's pole. The grimace of an old man, his life behind him now. It's more poem than story, but the long, narrative kind.

River time, as far as I can tell from my now brief experience, bears no resemblance to land time. When you're driving down the highway, you can say, well, if I'm driving sixty miles per hour and I've got one hundred and eighty miles to go, I'll be there in three hours. You can calculate, give someone an ETA.

But here you can't really account for time at all. A boater might tell you it takes two hours to get from Hannibal, Missouri, to Rockport, Illinois, which is a stretch of fifteen river miles or so, but if you've got a lock and dam in there, you might luck out and float through in ten minutes, or, if there's a double barge in front of you, two hours. Or four. You might do better tying up for the night. It's anyone's guess.

Given our late start, two locks and dams, one tornado, and me weaving across the river for an hour, we did pretty well. We traveled on our first day sixty-six miles in about eight hours. Jerry says there is a dock at St. Feriole Island, where we can spend the night, and, after a long day, I am ready for dry land.

We arrive at this little “courtesy” municipal dock, an appendage to an old 1930s levee, where Jerry says we'll tie up. “Really?” I ask. “Are we allowed?” I'm not expecting a red carpet and a marching band, but I thought we might be pulling into a marina with lights. And possibly a shower.