Authors: Jonathan Raban
“You mean, all you got to do is just kind of lallygag around all the way down to New Orleans?”
“It’s the writing afterward that’s the hard part.”
“It don’t sound too bad a sort of life to me. Maybe I should’ve set up to be a writer. That
writing
, though, that’s never been much in my line. Lorraine, that’s my wife, now, she’s an English teacher. Teaches fourth grade. She does most of the writing round our place. She’s always picking me up on my grammar and such. I reckon the only way we could work it out is if I was to do all the lallygagging, and Lorraine, if she was to do all the writing.” Jim laughed. It was a prospect of Paradise.
The walleyes, with their narrow, sharkish build, canine teeth and large, muscled fins, were the fish I was interested in. They grew as big as salmon. Fast, predatory and hard to catch, they sounded as if they might revive my faltering enthusiasm for going fishing.
“You want to look for the fast water, that’s where the walleyes are. Right in those pools behind the wing dams … close in to the shore … wherever you see a rip in the current, there could be a walleye under there.”
We anchored downstream from a wing dam and tried casting under the trees where the Mississippi ran fast and shallow over a sandy bottom.
“They’re
rascals
, walleyes. They’re rat-sharp, too. If you’re going to catch a walleye, you got to think clever and mean.”
If a walleye was about, skulking down there in the quick water, he must have thought that we were trying to insult his intelligence. We lobbed our jointed wooden dummies far out and twitched our rod tips to make the plugs dart and dive like real minnows. If I’d been a walleye, I wouldn’t have been taken in for an instant. As the plugs came scurrying back to the boat they looked to me almost exactly the same as they had looked in the hardware store—improbable artifacts, too stiff and gaudy to pass for anything in nature. There was one moment of high hope, when I snagged mine on a root; another when Jim claimed that he’d had “a touch”—but I suspected that he was saying that only to keep my spirits up.
“There’s walleyes
in
there.”
“We’re going to need a stick of dynamite to get them out, though.”
The wake of a big downstream tow pulled the water away from the wing dam; just for a second it lay exposed, a serrated line of rocks like a jawbone of blackened teeth.
“Look! See why you got to keep to the main channel? Don’t ever go messing with wing dams.” The river slopped back. Now the dam was a
faint, broken shadow on the current; I had to concentrate to see that it was there at all.
We agreed to leave the walleyes to enjoy their private lives of stealth and rapine. Jim ran the boat across the river to the Wisconsin bank, found the entrance to a dark alley in the woods, slowed the motor and coasted up the narrow channel between the trees.
“This ain’t something
you
ought to do. These backwaters are kind of tricky. Every month we get some hunter from out of town, thinks he’s smart, loses himself up a slough someplace. Oh, there must be better than a hundred miles of cricks and sloughs in here. If you don’t know them, they all look the same. And this wise-guy hunter, he’s pretty happy, banging birds out of trees, till the sun goes down. Then he gets to be kind of scared. He shoots off up some crick, and it’s a dead end. Then he don’t know which slough he was in to start with. Then he hollers good and loud. Ain’t nobody shouts back. If he’s lucky, someone back in town remembers seeing him go out. Then they leave him to roast for a while. Then we have to go out and look for him.”
“And all you find is his skull, eaten clean by the ants.”
“You got hold of the general idea, there.”
The farther we moved up the “crick,” the more the air smelled of rot. Big bubbles of gas burst on the water, which opened out into a stagnant lake. The high forest around us grew out of a black swamp of leaf mold and fallen timber. We followed a continual clatter of wings as the ducks and egrets took off at the sound of our motor. On almost every stump and overhanging bough, there were lodged whole families of snapping turtles. Their long, leathery necks were stretched straight up to take the sun. They had the faces of bored elderly clubmen; age had set the skin under their jaws in brittle creases and given their slit mouths a supercilious twist at the corners. Only the babies scrambled into the water as we went by; the big ones merely blinked and went on sunbathing, as if they were too bored with life now to be able to stir themselves to anything as enervating as fear.
If Jim hadn’t pointed to them, I would never have seen the snakes. They were perfectly disguised as dead twigs and branches, lying out any-old-how along the trunks of the uprooted trees which had fallen into the edges of the lake. Jim ran the boat alongside one of these trunks to check the snake’s I.D. I expected the thing to spring back with a sudden hiss and a show of bared fangs but it went on sleeping. Its only sign of life was a faint repetitive tremor in the flattened, scaly bag of its belly.
“He’s only an old water snake. I thought, from over there, he might be a rattler.”
“Is it poisonous?”
“No, he won’t do you no harm at all. Not up here. The water snakes we’ve got up North, you could have them in the bathtub with you. Down South, though, they’re something else. When you get down to Tennessee and Arkansas, you better look where you’re going, especially if you ever have to step out into that water. That’s cottonmouth country. You get into a slough off the main river down there, you’ll see more cottonmouths than you can count. And they’re real deadly. There ain’t but a few snakes in the world can beat an old Arkansas cottonmouth for poison.”
“Why are they called cottonmouths?”
“When they open their mouths to take a nip at you, it’s pure white in there. And if you don’t get to a doctor real fast, that’ll be just about the last thing you’ll ever see. So if I was you, I wouldn’t take too much time writing out the description of it in that book of yours.”
“Have you ever taken a look inside the mouth of a cottonmouth?”
“Nope. And I don’t want to, neither.”
We glided past a beaver dam but saw no beaver. Jim navigated the swamp as if it were a city, taking shortcuts down side streets, crossing squares of open water, finding forested avenues and crooked paths through garbage heaps of brushwood and marsh grass. We were in deep forest when Jim cut out the motor on the boat.
“Hear that?”
Nothing at all except the leaves in the trees. Then a faint
tick-tick-tickety-tock;
the sound of dice being shaken in a wooden cup.
“That’s a rattler. He’s in there somewhere.”
Tickety-tickety-tickety
.
“He’s moving away from us now. He was right close up when I first heard him.”
The noise of the snake was lost in the rustle of the leaves.
“A while back, this was a real good place for rattlers. You don’t see too many now, though. When I was a kid, we used to come out and hunt them. You got twenty-five cents for every rattle then. They was trying to exterminate them. Then a whole lot got drowned in the summer floods. I was out in my jonboat in the floodwater, and there was rattlers all over, trying to climb aboard. They was just desperate to get on anything that was floating … logs … boats … I guess they weren’t discriminating too much. It wasn’t me they was after, it was just a ride on my boat. I tell you, I ran the engine just about as fast as it could go, out of that slough. But there must have been thousands of them that died then. This year, you come out, and you’re lucky if you see one rattler.”
He started up the motor again and turned the boat around. The bass we had caught earlier in the morning were beginning to add their own smell of mortality to the rancid atmosphere of the swamp. The everglades of Pontoon Slough were as close as I’d ever been to real jungle, with their dozy reptiles, bubbling gas, and a forest whose excessively vivid head of spreading green was counterbalanced by the way in which its feet stood in an excessively deathly mire of rotting compost. Jim Curdue was at home here, a man pottering comfortably in his backyard. I wasn’t. I was primly shocked by this wanton, spendthrift Nature in which everything was either living too easily or dying too easily.
Yet it explained a great deal about the character of Wabasha. This was exactly how the landscape must have first appeared to the town’s founding fathers—the Smiths, the Kuhns, the Jewells … the Lowells and Cabots of this particular neck of the woods. As we cut across a putrid lake and headed down Indian Slough toward the open river, I felt that I could see, through half-closed eyes, the inspired arrogance that had gone into the building of the infant city. To lay down that grid of streets in the classic style of American Rectangular … to fill it in with dimly remembered bits of Athens, London and Vienna … to turn an infested bog and an impenetrable bluff into a humming nineteenth-century metropolis: these things meant flying triumphantly in the face of Nature. Old Kuhn and Jewell were touched with the mania of Phaëthon; the least they could do was set the world on fire with Wabasha. As it had eventually turned out, the first, certain imaginative stroke of Main Street had been the last. Since then there’d been a lot of tinkering, of timid sketchwork on the fringes of the master plan, but nothing to touch Kuhn’s Block 1874 under its now crumbling architrave. Just imagining what Wabasha
might
become had somehow exhausted the resources of the town. Now, like the turtles, it was tired and elderly, apparently content to squat by the side of the river doing nothing much except take the sun and let the leathery creases under its chin hang out.
When we got back to town, Main Street was lined with vintage cars. They were on a round-the-state rally and had stopped in Wabasha for tea. The Legionnaires and their wives padded around the automobiles, leaning on sticks or humping themselves along on tubular walking frames. Most of the people were older than the Model T’s. Jim and I joined the crowd around an especially handsome Panhard, its polished brassbound radiator snorting steam. The Bermuda-shorted granny whom I’d spotted the day before was saying, “Beautiful. Just
beautiful
. Now,
ain’t
that somethin’ else?” The nonvintage drivers trooped out of
the Anderson House and got their machines going. As the rally trailed, stalling and backfiring, down Main and around the corner of City Hall, we all stood waving them goodbye. After they had gone, we could still hear them rumbling out west on Route 61, and there was a curious, post-something
tristesse
in the crowd that they had left behind. Later, eating catfish and French-fries in Lyla’s Idle Hour Restaurant, I tried to puzzle out exactly what it was that we had been saying farewell to. It was certainly a more complex object than a line of old cars.
I had taken a window seat in the restaurant. Outside, a big illuminated yellow sign said
IDLE HOUR
. Beneath it hung a pulsing heart of scarlet neon. The old, banal symbol of love kept on flashing unrequited in the darkness. I was the only diner in a red desert of oilcloth-covered tables, each with its ketchup dispenser and bowl of Coffee-mate packets. There were no headlights on the highway. A ceiling of low cloud had blotted out the stars. The plastic heart throbbed and throbbed, across the black wheat country, for nobody. My half-finished plate of food was taken away by a speechless waitress. I looked down at my place mat. It said,
SMILE—GOD LOVES YOU
.
Walking back down the middle of the long, straight, empty highway, I listened to the sounds of anonymous rodents scuffling in the grass at the sides of the road. They sounded large, and I quickened my step to the pace of a jog, then a breathless run. In Kuhn’s vision of things, this should, I supposed, have been in the neighborhood of South Twenty-second Street. It should have been bright with wrought-iron gas lamps and tall with fine brick houses. As I raced in panic between the dark harvested fields, I wondered if I was just infecting the town with my fit of private loneliness or whether Wabasha itself was really mourning its own isolation, seeing in those vintage cars some shadow of the past which had left it stranded here as lonesome as a half-built house.
The next day the river was so gentle that it seemed to have forgotten that it was the Mississippi. The sun was up; the wind was barely puckering the water. For the first time since I’d started out on the trip, my nerves didn’t tighten with fright as I slipped the boat into the buoyed channel and set off down the long, wide southward swing out of Wabasha. This was picnic weather, and up in the front of the boat I had turkey sandwiches and white wine. Today, I was going to live easy. I would fish and loaf and generally have myself a holiday. By Buffalo Slough, a lounging deckhand on a towboat waved at me as we crossed each other’s paths at a safe distance; it was nice to be thought of as a fellow traveler, a paid-up member of the society of the river.
The Mississippi was keeping its true nature hidden in more ways than
one. I was afloat on one river while the chart in front of me showed quite another. The river I could see was a neat affair, lined on both banks by forest, so narrow that even I could have swum from shore to shore. It looked no wider or more scary than the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Only the chart revealed that the river was telling me lies. On paper, it was three to four miles from bank to bank. The wooded channel was just a single, arbitrary path through an enormous maze of forest, sand and open water. There it was, mapped in green and blue, a fantastically elaborate scribble of loops, scrolls, dots and spurs: the river writing its signature in its inimitable Gothic script.
Alerted, I looked for breaks in the trees and saw through them to the real river. Slowing on the current, I drifted past a hundred-yard gap in the false shore on the west side; it was no more than a sliver of woodland on a bar. Beyond it a watery stump field stretched away as far as I could see, the low stumps arranged with infinite regularity, like the flat tombstones in a Muslim graveyard. That, said the chart, was Weaver Bottoms. I had to extend my thumb and forefinger full out to measure it … four miles by three. It would have been a wicked place in a wind. Now, though, with the sun on the still water, it had the eerie brilliance of a dreamscape, with the jagged reflections of the stumps dancing on the looking-glass blue of the sky.