The River Queen (29 page)

Tom has rarely traveled and only been in an airplane once. He flew to Chicago on a job. He said he didn't like flying very much, but he sat next to the engine and as the plane flew, he liked listening to its sound. Tom is listening now. I can tell he wants to do a more extensive repair. At about four o'clock, when it's as hot on the river as it will ever be, we come to Lock and Dam 25. Jerry and Tom see the barges ahead of us and groan. “It's gonna be a long one,” Jerry says.

Again I can tell from the tone: This is all my fault. The laundry, the late start. I'm going overboard, that's for sure. We all know that sitting still on this river in this heat is going to be a scorcher, but, given the lateness of the afternoon and the time we will be getting to Portage Des Sioux in Missouri, it is decided that we'll cook dinner now.

Jerry takes my worktable and puts the small grill we bought for $3.99 back in Davenport on it, fills it with charcoal, and sets them aflame. I can't take the heat. The cabin is as sweltering as either of our two decks. I feel oppressed, trapped with nowhere to go. Even the bimini doesn't provide shade because of the angle of the sun. While the grill is heating up, I want to go for another swim. But, given that we've lost Tom's air mattress, I'm not sure what I'll use for flotation. “You can jump in the river,” Jerry says, “but you need your life jacket.”

While he stokes the coals and Tom fiddles with the starboard engine, trying to revive it once again from its coma, I get into my bathing suit and put on the life jacket I borrowed from my neighbor across the street. It's one of those orange jobs with the plastic snap-on clasps. The kind people wear in movies like
Life Boat
or
Titanic.
I am not a small-breasted woman, and as I snap it on the vest sticks pretty much straight out.

Not wanting to be seen, I jump into the river, but immediately the life vest floats up around my head. I try to push it down, but it rises around my neck, choking me. This seems counterintuitive, but I am having trouble keeping the thing from wrapping itself around my throat. I'm clinging to the boat when Jerry sees me. “My god,” he says, “I thought you had a modern life vest. That thing will kill you.”

He tosses me a life ring (the “man overboard” ring, Tom calls it), and I heave my life vest back onto the bow step, then work my way around the boat to the swim platform, upon which I fling my body. So much for my swim. Jerry's got some chicken going on the grill, which in this heat I find incomprehensible. When it's cooked, he takes his plate and sits at the table. He doesn't bother getting me or Tom chairs. I know what's on his mind. If I hadn't caused us to have a late start because of my laundry, we wouldn't have wasted half the day at these locks and dams.

Jerry sits at the table with the grill still on it, eating, not talking, and Tom takes his meal and sits on an ice chest. I go into the cabin and eat alone.

At last, almost two hours later, we are given the go-ahead. We are happy to be moving, to catch a breeze again and head out of the heat. As we approach, I see a sign that reads
NO LOCK LOCK
.

“What's a ‘no lock lock'?”

Jerry shakes his head. Then we realize there is an arrow underneath. “No lock” is to the left. “Lock” is to the right. I wonder how many people misread this sign. It is dusk as we sail through, and the heat of the day abates. After waiting more than two hours, we are locked in, floating free, and through in ten minutes.

36

T
HE WHITE
cliffs of Illinois rise, sculpted, to the east. I think of the White Cliffs of Dover. Of home. The sun sets fuschia on the river. Cormorants, lined up like cartoon figures, sit on an upside-down canoe. Darkness falls and a tension comes over Jerry. He has hooked up a beacon that he can flash on the river as we all scan it for detritus, snags, debris, other boats, whatever can bring our boat down. We've had our harvest moon night and our starry nights and our nights with the riverbanks lit, but this one is pitch-black.

It seems to grow darker as the night goes on, an inky blackness. On the map I spot Criminal Island and try to imagine what species of man dwelled here, but I cannot see it. There are no lights along the river. Nothing to illumine our way except for our beacon. We are silent on board, all eyes glued to the river and what it might bring.

I think of Captain Bixby's warning to a young Samuel Clemens: “You've got to know the shape of the river perfectly.” I wonder at its shape. As I look at it, even in daylight, I have no sense of where it goes. I confuse the main channel for sloughs. When it is wide, as it is right now, it is infinitely mysterious. And in the dark it is unfathomable.

Gazing at the maps with my flashlight, I see the shallows and the islands, sloughs and other rivers that join the Mississippi here. It is the darkest of nights and we are looking for a small lighthouse on the west bank where the main channel merges with a wide slough. We have to make a turn and go up the slough to find the Woodland Marina. Jerry is not happy to be doing this in the dark. I am reading the charts, trying to figure out where we make our turn. We pass a huge dredging barge that has a wide cable coming off of it that at first we do not see.

The depth finder reads 17 feet of good water under us, but Tom quips that you can always tell the water you've got on top. It's the water underneath you don't know about. Jerry agrees, eyes fixed on the river. He's wishing he had radar. He shows me how to use the GPS (global positioning system), which is like a car navigator. “It's not so important to know where you're going,” Jerry mutters, “as to know where you're at.”

Finally we spot the lighthouse far off the starboard side. It is a very small lighthouse, so at first we aren't sure. “That must be it,” Tom says. I am studying the maps.

“Yes, that's it.”

Carefully Jerry makes a wide turn up the slough and suddenly there are lights—all the marinas. We pass one after the other until we see the sign for Woodland. Very slowly Jerry makes his turn. Across the marina in the dark two men wave us in. “That's Greg and Glen,” Jerry says. We enter a marina of huge houseboats with names like
Whatever
and
Mint-to-Be.
Somewhere on the radio I hear John Lennon singing “Imagine.”

We are greeted by a small crowd of people, who have been waiting for us, and two old dogs named Matt and Tux. Matt was found floating down the river during the flood of 1993 on a pile of debris. And Tux, they tell me, just wandered in.

*   *   *

Captain Greg, as they refer to Greg Sadowski, is the river pilot who was supposed to take me on a fast boat from Memphis to New Orleans. Greg and his twin brother, Glen, have shared a houseboat for the past twenty years. Bachelors, they have made their home at this marina. The brothers also both have their one-hundred-ton captain's licenses, which means they can move huge vessels, though Glen has opted for a land job. Greg is gone much of the time. In a day or so he will be en route to La Crosse to take a paddleboat and move her south.

Everyone is thrilled to see us. Thrilled that we have made it here in one piece. Donna and Bill, Larry and Dixie all give me handshakes and hugs. They live on neighboring houseboats and all invite us to come over for a beer and popcorn. The mosquitoes are biting like crazy, but Donna says she's got a fan going on her porch to keep the bugs away.

We've been sitting on her porch for about five minutes when Donna asks me to come and help her make popcorn. “I'll give you a tour of my boat,” she says. Inside, her husband, Dan, is already putting popcorn into the microwave and Donna takes me by the hand. She opens folding doors that display her pantry, pulls out compartments that contain her downward-loading dishwasher, her washer/dryer.

I am struck by her dishes, her well-appointed bar, the cut-glass carafes filled with single malt whiskey, her ceramic tile shower with little fishes swimming all over it, her toilet with a special push button, which she flushes twice to demonstrate its unusual suction.

As I ooh and aah over her cupboards of dishes, her closets with hangers and hooks, her bubbly lava lamps and fish-motif decor, she asks, “What've you got on your boat?”

I think of our meager
River Queen.
My wash dangling from the railing, having to beg Jerry to turn on the water pump so I can do the dishes. My clothes folded in duffels and in cubbies above my head. The green curtain that separates my sleeping area from his. “Oh, the usual stuff,” I say.

“Well, I'd love to see it,” she says. I can tell that this must be houseboat etiquette. She's shown me hers; now I show her mine.

“It's a little messy right now,” I say. I feel like the poor relation, the country mouse visiting the city mouse. “How about another time?”

She gives a shrug and I can tell she's miffed. But what's a girl to do? I want to stay inside the coolness as the smell of fake butter fills the room, but we are expected on deck. It is a sweltering night. Rita is due to make landfall in a day or so and the hot, sultry weather you get before a hurricane presses in around us.

We are sitting in the dark on the deck of Donna and Larry's houseboat. The fan is churning. As we sip our beers and eat popcorn, I ask Captain Greg, who was moving the
Princess
down to New Orleans when Katrina hit, to tell us what happened during the storm.

We all lean in to listen as Greg tells his story.

“We were on the river on a time schedule, really pushing to get to New Orleans, but the forecast kept changing. At first we thought we'd see some wind but didn't anticipate a direct hit. We didn't know that a Category 5 storm was coming our way in twenty hours. We just stayed steady on our course. Then the day before she hit, they said it had intensified and was going to be a direct hit at New Orleans and the Gulf. We were at Mile 112. But as the crow flies, that was only fifty miles to the Gulf.”

We are all silent, mesmerized, with only the whir of the fan in the air. “So we had two choices,” Greg's voice continues in a flat monotone that betrays no emotion. “We could go back upriver, but at that point the river flows more east/west than north/south. If we'd gone upstream, we would have been going west. At this point the storm was moving west. We'd have a tough time making it to Baton Rouge.

“It might have been safer for the boat to move as far upstream as we could, but I was more concerned for the safety of my passengers and my crew. There were five of us on board, including myself. We had a couple traveling with us and they evacuated. They got a ride north and took it. But me and my crew opted to stay with the ship.”

“Could you leave?” I asked, and, “Weren't you scared?”

“Well,” Greg goes on, turning his beer can in his hands, “I could leave, but the people who own the boat, they didn't really give us permission, and, well, I didn't think it was the right thing to do. As to being scared, I have a lot of respect for the river. And for the weather. I know what they can do. But I also knew we were pretty far from the Gulf, so I wasn't worried about the surge. But I figured we could get hit hard.

“I was concerned that the
Princess
would sink. So we tied her up with everything we had. We found a couple barges and tied her to that. We spent the afternoon putting out a lot of lines and fenders. We found some old truck tires and we used those as fenders. Tied her up to some twelve-foot steel pilings with extra cable we found on the barge.

“The hurricane winds were swirling by then, so we pointed her port beam into the north/northeast wind. Next to the barge where we tied her was what's called a quarters barge. This barge was anchored to the shore, so we weren't worried we'd drown. It's where barge workers sleep. It's kind of like a hotel below deck. So we brought some mattresses and supplies, water and food, over to the quarters barge. We got some sleep before Katrina hit us. She hits us hard at about five a.m. We stayed below, but every now and then I'd come up and check on things. The water rose about twelve feet.” When Greg says this we are all amazed. We look out at the river and try to imagine a sudden rise of twelve feet. “One of the barges tied near us broke free and went downstream. Two barges sank. It went on like this for about five hours. But the worst was for two hours. The barges kept banging together. You can't be scared. It's not going to help, being scared. You just have to keep a clear head and keep checking on things. It was during this banging that a window blew out and the glass cut my elbow open. Right after the hurricane the weather was good. Someone gave me a ride to the emergency room and I could see on the way that all the power lines and all the trees were down.”

When Greg is done, he puts down his beer. The fan whirs. The hot, muggy weather tells us that another storm is near.

37

E
VEN
T. S. Eliot, that most serious of American poets whom everyone seems to forget was from St. Louis, perhaps because of his British accent, writes, “I don't know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god, sullen, untamed, and intractable.” Eliot is also known to have said, “The sea is around us, but the river is in us.”

This may have been the case in Eliot's time, but I have a friend who grew up in St. Louis who tells me he never thought about the river. He also says it's the worst town in America. He has told me that his sister, who is rich and lives in the suburbs, has contracts with her servants so that they will never reveal where she lives. This is considered a crime deterrent in the affluent outskirts of the city.

St. Louis native Jonathan Franzen seems to share my friend's view, at least in his novel
The Twenty-Seventh City.
It is the story of a police chief whose ostensible agenda is the revival of St. Louis (once ranked the nation's fourth city and now its twenty-seventh) through the reunification of its depressed inner city and affluent suburbs. I'm going to spend the weekend in St. Louis to see for myself and Tom and Jerry are going to stay at Woodland Marina on the boat. Our plan is to meet up Sunday morning at the airport and we'll be on our way.