Authors: Jonathan Raban
“And now we see how Brigham Young prophesied the coming of the automobile. Look at these streets, laid out by Brigham Young many decades before the invention of the first internal-combustion engine. You see how wide they are? When Brigham Young laid out that plan, guided by the Lord, he made provision for a median strip, as you see here. And not only that. Look closely at the picture. Here he arranged a left-turn lane. Imagine that! Forty years before the world’s first automobile, a median strip
and
a left-turn lane! So the street plan of Salt Lake City was a prophecy. Okay?” He fixed me. I nodded. Okay.
It was a perfect day for moving on. While the Pope, this time in Washington, was conducting his last open-air Mass in the United States, I slipped my moorings and launched on a long southerly swing of calm water. There wasn’t a wing dam marked on the chart; the sky was empty, the river a deep reflective blue. I reckoned that Elder Tiptree was as near to churchgoing as I need come this Sunday. If the weather held, I could catch up on a lot of lost miles.
The day belonged to Pope John Paul. He was in all the papers. His American journey had been more like the ride of Caesar to the Capitol in a Roman triumph, gilded, garlanded and drawn by white horses, than a round of parochial visits by a priest. I had watched him on television, and seen him as a twinkling demagogue. He looked frail, hardly strong enough to take the weight of his gloriously colored robes, but he had the populist genius of a latter-day Huey Long. In the course of a week, a whole industry of memorial junk had grown up around him: there were bumper stickers for the Pope, flags to wave for him, lapel buttons to announce that their wearers loved him. I had listened to hardened drunks in bars going lachrymose as they said that the Pope … that guy … he told it like it was. And I had learned, without enthusiasm, how to tell it like it is: no contraception; no abortion; no sex outside marriage; no ordination of women; no divorce; no relaxation of the vow of priestly celibacy.
No, no, no, no, no, no
. This recitation of blank prohibitions seemed to me to be narrow and complacent. Yet this, in its present mood, was exactly what America wanted to hear. Wherever the Pope went there had been a few protesting feminists; they had been shouted down by brigades and battalions of “pro-life” campaigners. The Pope had arrived in the United States at a moment when the President of the country was being jeered at as a nervous nincompoop. The week before, President Carter, out fishing, had been “attacked” by a swimming rabbit which he had beaten off with an oar.
Shit, that guy’s running so scared, even a goddamn rabbit can tree the bastard
. If this massive contempt was one side of the coin, then a deep, unsatisfied capacity for hero worship was the other; and the Pope had walked into an enormous adoring wave of the stuff. Where the President dithered on brink after brink, the Pope came out with his
no, no, no’s
, and America loved him for them. Had he been running for the presidency himself, the Pope would have carried every state. The only consolation that I could see in this holy circus was that by comparison with the Pope, Ronald Reagan was beginning to look tainted with an encouragingly dangerous shade of pink.
I had to stand off the lock and dam above Keokuk, Iowa, to let the
Delta Queen
come through. The great white museum piece was puffing away thoughtfully in the lock chamber, its red stern wheel still splashing in the water. It was no beauty. A new towboat, with a fleet of barges up front, had an altogether dandier line than the
Delta Queen
with its snub front and four tiers of balustraded decks. Its appeal lay in the fact that it was a relic of a storybook American past when life was simpler, more heroic, when moral values were certitudes, when America was really something else. There was a connection between the Pope and the
Delta Queen
. The expensive river voyage up from St. Louis was supposed to take one back into a world of frontier pastoral. The stops along the way were cunningly selected to reveal only the most “historic” and quaintly restored versions of life on the Mississippi. The
Delta Queen
promised the tourist a long, comfortable wallow in a vision of America as a still-uncorrupted Eden. Tour guides would shield him from harmful contact with his own century; sustained by gourmet food and vodka martinis, he would be safely coddled in the illusion that he was refreshing his spirit in the brave simplicities of the 1840s.
The steamboat waddled slowly upriver toward Nauvoo. Elder Tip-tree was going to have a busy day. The city of Keokuk drifted past me on the current. Another painted steamboat, drawn up high and dry in the middle of an empty parking lot, made an optical trick come momentarily true. The Mississippi was two rivers. They lay right beside each other, but flowed in opposite directions. The steamboats, the historical markers, the fancy Golden Age hotels, the scenic bluffs and gift shops were all going one way, while the river on the charts, with its tows, grain elevators, slaughterhouses, factories, water towers and gantries, was going in quite another. I had done my share of traveling on the first river, but it was a cute irrelevance compared with the deep, dangerous, epic power of the real Mississippi.
On the second river, the Des Moines River added itself to the stream
on the right bank below Keokuk. Iowa was over, and Missouri had begun. My fifth state. I felt that I was within smelling distance, at least, of the South. The little towns, half hidden now behind high levees, looked more elderly and groggy. Only a hundred miles or so back, it had been an object of remark to see a black face on a street. Here there were black longshoremen on the wharves, and less of the disquieting sense that one was moving through a pretty white ghetto.
Keen to first-foot in Missouri, I beached at a town that looked like an unkempt graveyard. The houses on the flats nearest the river had been left behind long ago. A brick cottage, its roof fallen in, its windows out, stood in a garden that had gone to jungle. Someone had painted across its front in large, uneven letters:
KEP OFF NO TPESPPINC
. The message was ambiguous, to say the least, and I felt guiltless as I snooped around its ruined yard. There were rusted beer cans, a fender from an automobile, the mortal remains of what had once been a chair stuffed with horsehair. A few rotten boards were left of its veranda. Picking my way through the ribs of the thing, I looked through a window frame. A sickly river birch had taken root in the floor of the living room. As I stumbled against a joist, a dozen gobbling pigeons clattered off the branches of the tree and rose through the roof.
It was almost dark when I made Hannibal. Throughout the day, I had grown more and more suspicious of the river’s placidity. I had been lapped in its current, moving from sheet to sheet through the charts, barely awake, letting my head drift as the water drifted.
She’ll lull you to sleep, and then she’ll do you in
. Something had happened to my vision. There were banks and islands; they were marked on the charts. But all I saw was water, scrolled with hairlines around the bow of the boat, darkening with the sky, slick as the top of a vat of molasses. I came to briefly, to go through Lock 21 below Alton, then forgot it as soon as I was out in the main channel again. In some small cavity at the back of my mind, there were alarm bells ringing; this pleasant, hypnotic trance which had been induced in me by the river’s unwavering eye was a thing I should be afraid of. I had always wanted to be absorbed by the Mississippi, to feel that I was as much a part of its flow as the logs around which I now steered without consciously noticing them. That afternoon I thought,
I could drown in this river, and it wouldn’t matter; I wouldn’t mind
. The current would just open to admit one, close seamlessly over one’s head, and keep on going. It would all be as easy and idle as a daydream.
I shook myself awake in a cold twilight. The bridges of Hannibal
were two miles downstream, and a long string of waiting barge fleets was moored off Zeigler Island, the lights in their towboats making a snug floating town. I could hear lazy voices coming from the open windows of their galleys. Everyone else had settled down to supper and TV. Shivering, alerted to my own solitude, I hurried on down.
The old Mark Twain Hotel on the waterfront at Hannibal was a derelict wreck. Its owner had purportedly gone bankrupt. He worked as a night watchman now. I had tried its locked door, attracted by what I thought was a light inside, and a car had pulled up on the street beside me. “You trying to wake up ghosts, or something? That place has been dead for years. You want a room? I got a new motel, two blocks uptown.” It was a disappointment. I had seen the Mark Twain, glooming steeply over the river, and had thought it looked just right as a base to mark the overlapping point between Huckleberry Finn’s voyage and my own. Instead I had to settle for a bright, sterile cabin, with
Dallas
on television in hideous acrylic color, and not even the ghost of a ghost to commune with. I was just in time to catch the last serving of dinner in the lounge/restaurant. My place mat said
WOOO ARE YOU? WELCOME NITE OWLS
! It was seven thirty-five. When Twain disguised Hannibal as St. Petersburg, he did describe it as “sleepy,” but I felt that if this was what he meant, he might reasonably have been a shade more explicit. By the time the waitress had said “you-all” six times, and I’d seen from the breakfast menu that there were hominy grits with everything, I felt that Hannibal was trying a little too strenuously to live up to its fictional reputation as a sleepy Southern town.
Still, a few adventurous insomniacs were up and talking over beer in the motel lounge. An off-duty waitress in her forties was telling the wife of the owner about another American journey.
“I saw Kansas City last week. God. Made Hannibal look like a real dump. The buildings, you know, they was so
new
. All so
tall
. They was all lit up. It looked like the pictures you see of New York. I kind of hated to come back. I had to go get
Eileen
. She run off.”
“To Kansas City?”
“Yeah. God, that’s someplace else.”
“Why?”
“She missed her mother.”
“That sounds like a good old-fashioned reason,” I said. I’d gathered that Eileen was her daughter-in-law.
“But she took the baby too. So I had to go get her.”
“She want to come back?”
“Oh … yeah; she was good and ready.”
There was one of those long bar silences in which the patrons all investigated the insides of their glasses as if they hoped to find tadpoles breeding there. The waitress, though, wasn’t yet done with her story.
“Eileen’s mother’s moving to California.”
“You won’t be able to get
there
and back in one night.”
“I sure
hope
that girl runs off to California! I never been to California. Hell, even Kansas City … that was something … it was that pretty. But California …”
She had the grapes of Eshcol in her eyes. A man across the bar said, “Well now, Josie … she used to run off once. Same reason. Trouble was,
her
mother only lived up at Palmyra.”
The waitress put on her coat and left. The owner’s wife asked me if I wanted to watch TV. I said that I didn’t.
“Me neither. I don’t watch it now, except for the religious programs. I watch
them
. There’s a great revival going on now. You ain’t religious in England much, are you?”
“Certainly not in the way that you are here. Why do you think this great revival’s happened?”
“Oh … I guess everybody … why, they just kind of tried everything else and somehow they don’t seem to have gotten any satisfaction. So they’ve come at last to the Lord. Take my husband. He never did go to church much. But he was dissatisfied … felt there was something missing out of his life. Then one day he was watching Channel Six, and the
700 Club
came up. You know the
700 Club?
They have all these folks on who’ve had testy-moaney. Like celebs, and such. There was that guy, used to be on the
Today
show … what’s-his-name? Tom Garraway, ain’t it, Harry? He had testy-moaney. Anyhow, my husband was watching the
700 Club
and he heard these testy-moanies, and he got to thinking … Weren’t that the way it was, Harry?”
“Oh … er … yeah …” said her husband, squinting into his beer, resentful and embarrassed at hearing the story of his own conversion.
“After that, we went around trying just about every church around Hannibal. We went to the Spiritualist church.… There’s a guy there, he speaks one time in Polish, the next he’s speaking Arabic.… I believe in Speaking in Tongues. Then there’s the Church of the Assembly of God. You ought to go to that; you’d get a real kick out of it—”
“Yeah,” said Harry, evidently relieved at this shift of focus.
“Now, Harry’s brother, he was a real spiritual guy. Weekends, his home was like a re-sort. He’d have a hundred pounds of ribs out there. Every Saturday. And by Saturday night—you’d better believe it—there wasn’t one rib left, he was that good a person. Everyone loved Joe.”
In 1884, Twain described Huckleberry Finn as “the pariah of the village.” Poor Huck. He had made horribly good. A hundred years later, he was Hannibal’s darling. The untamable boy who had run away from the smug piety and good manners of Twain’s archetypal small town had turned into the pivot of that town’s tourist industry. There was the Huck Finn Shopping Plaza out on the Interstate, a huge, windy carpark with branches of Rexall’s, Bergner’s, Sears and J. C. Penney lording over it like a gang of bland corporate fat cats. There was the Tom ‘n Huck Motel, lost in the neon strip of gas stations and fast-food joints that was strung out along the bluff a mile or so west of the river. You could put up in your trailer home on the Injun Joe campsite and make with the pizzas at the Mark Twain Dinette and Drive-In. Meanwhile your poodle could be shampooed at the Mark Twain Pet Center and your buckled fender repaired at the Mark Twain Body & Frame Shop. In the light of all this, the last words of Twain’s novel had taken on a further irony which even Twain, the supreme American ironist, would have found hard to swallow.