The River Queen (31 page)

We keep searching for buoys but the visibility is low. Tom is at the wheel, shaking his head. He eyes our captain for guidance. “I'm looking,” Jerry says.

“I'm looking at a pile of rocks, Sir,” Tom replies. At river marker 193.5 at Chain of Rocks Canal, we have almost no visibility. “I'm not going to get lost, am I, Sir?”

Jerry, using his binoculars, says back to him, “It looks like it's a straight line. Just steer her ahead.” He pauses to pat Samantha Jean on the head. “Samantha is the biggest dog of her size I've ever seen,” he says by way of senseless non sequitur, then gazes back at the river. He stares down at the Army Corps of Engineers maps, trying to get our location, and realizes I've already flipped the page. “Violation,” he says, “but not punishable.”

Tom checks the instrument panels. “We're going nine point eight, Sir, but it feels as if we're going a lot slower.”

Jerry nods. “We are. We're about one point five miles per hour slower. We don't have the power of the river behind us here in Chain of Rocks. This is a man-made cutoff. I was trying to make Hoppie's last January with Captain Greg. We had a 150-foot ship made by SkipperLiner in La Crosse. We had to break ice to go.
The Majestic.…
Rode her from La Crosse to Florida and up to Montauk. Almost did the Great Loop, but not quite.” The Great Loop is a trip through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, up the Atlantic Coast, back to the St. Lawrence, returning to the place where you began. Many people we met on the river would be making this journey.

I'm staring out at the grayness and the rain. Then I start to tell them about the man who talked to me last night in the Soulard district. How he'd been in Katrina and now in Rita. “I told him he should get some help.”

“He should get a boat,” Tom says. “If you've been in two hurricanes like that, you need a boat. What did God say to Noah? How long can you tread water?” Tom chortles to himself, then pauses. “Oh-oh, something's coming my way. Barge ahead.”

I look out at the gray water, the obscure horizon. “How can you see that?”

“I can just feel it coming. Sometimes you can see something better by not looking at it.”

I am pondering this when a voice comes over the radio. Another incomprehensible Cajun accent, a barge pilot. “Looks like he wants to take us on the starboard side,” Jerry says.

Now the barge, just barely visible, comes into the horizon. Tom reaches down for Samantha Jean, who lies buried beneath several coats. “How'ya doing, Brown Eyes? Rain's letting up,” he tells her, which it isn't. “Looks like I could run an engine check.” The wind has shifted and Tom apologizes for the smell of his engines. “But some high octane is good for the head.”

I disagree. My head is full of fumes. But there isn't anything we can do. One huge barge comes alongside and passes us like a giant beast, gray, waves rising against our hull from its wake.

We are coming up to Lock and Dam 27. “This is pleasure craft
Friend Ship,
requesting lockage,” Jerry calls in, but the lockmaster does not reply. “Guess he's having lunch,” Jerry says as he idles the engines. There's a barge coming up behind us with a tow. “Maybe he's going to put that barge through first.”

But the lockmaster calls.
“Friend Ship,”
he says, “give us a few minutes.”

Now the red light starts flashing yellow. “Okay,” Jerry says. “Get ready.” We can't see the lock gates opening, but we see the green light. I've got Tina Turner playing “Proud Mary” on my computer and our mood is more elevated than it's been. In the driving rain and mist Jerry moves into the lock and we tie up on the port side to a short, thick post that Tom calls a bollard.

As we move into position, we see the tow and a huge barge coming in behind us. Jerry gets on his radio, “Lock 27, this is
Friend Ship.
Is that tow coming with us?”

The lockmaster says back in a scolding tone, “Yes, it is. You were supposed to call.” The lockmaster is obviously irritated and I look at Jerry, who is irritated as well.

“But we did call,” I say.

Jerry shuts off his radio. “Nothing to be done.”

Tom turns to Samantha Jean. “Get up on your jacket, Sam. You're worse than your mother.”

Jerry makes a snap decision that we need to move our boat over to the western side of the lock so that the barge and tow can have as much room behind us as possible. “I'm going to the other side,” he says. Tom and I are on deck in the pouring rain as we cross the lock to the first bollard.

“There's a plant growing out of this one, Sir,” Tom says.

“I don't want that one. We're going up ahead. Tie to the mid-cleat. I want to give him all the room he needs.”

We tie up, then in the downpour wait for what seems to be a long time. Tom keeps the cabin door open with his pole sticking out against the wall and once again the cabin is filling with flies. I'm not in the mood for more. I'm also nervous that we will all have to spend the night together in the cabin, along with the flies. “Tom,” I ask in my sweetest voice, “can you close the door around the pole?”

He gives me a look, then walks out into the driving rain and pulls the door shut with a bang. I look at Jerry. “I didn't mean for him to go outside. I just wanted him to close the door.”

“Well, you created a minor firestorm,” Jerry says. Then he adds his own annoyance. “Don't mess with a man doing his job.” I look outside and see Tom standing in the rain, and I go outside.

“Tom,” I say, rain sliding down the back of my neck, “I'm sorry.… I didn't mean for you to leave the cabin.” I'm standing in my New York City Marathon rain slicker and flip-flops, holding our lines. “I just didn't want the flies…”

Tom stares at his stick and at the cement lock wall. “It's okay,” he says, not looking me in the eye.

“I'm making sandwiches. Ham, roast beef?”

“Whatever,” he says. Then as an afterthought, “No mustard on mine.” This is our truce, as good as it gets with Tom.

As I head in to make lunch, I hear Jerry. “We've got company,” he says. We all look back as the barge and tow move into the lock and after a few moments Tom and Jerry exchange glances. “He needs more room,” Jerry says. “We've got to move forward.” He revs the engines as Tom unties us from the bollard. Jerry moves the
River Queen
up to the very front of the lock gates, which are huge, looming in the driving gray rain. Even I can see that our nose is too far forward and that if these gates open now and we are in this position, we will be crushed.

“Okay,” Jerry shouts at us, “we've got to push her back! Get her front tied up to that bollard! Push hard! Now!” Tom and I are pushing off the wall, trying to get our nose away from the lock gates, which at any moment will open and, as far as I can tell, pulverize us with their massive power. I cannot help but feel somewhat as if I am sitting in the front row at an IMAX theater, except this is actually happening.

Jerry is maneuvering the boat into reverse when suddenly we hear the silence. We all hear it. It is an unmistakable sound. The starboard engine has died. “Tom!” Jerry yells.

“Can't do anything about her right now, Sir. You gotta go with one.” Tom and I are shoving the
River Queen
as hard as we can, tugging on the lines, trying to move an eighteen-thousand-pound boat backward before the enormous lock gates open and smash our bow. I feel the power in my own hands as we move our boat, down by an engine, backward in the driving rain. Just as we get her pushed back and tied, the huge lock gates begin to open right at our nose.

A wave, created by the gates, strikes our bow, but the gates open smoothly and we clear them by a few feet. We all breathe a sigh of relief, shaking our heads. “Now that was a close one,” Tom says.

“Too close for comfort,” Jerry replies.

Ahead of us is more gray, driving rain. As we move out of the lock, we are in the same gray soup as we were before. But we are lockless now. It's open river from here to Cairo. The lockless monster, I call ourselves. We can barely see anything ahead. The sides of the riverbank are obliterated in the mist and fog.

Suddenly we reach the confluence with the Missouri River. In the storm we almost miss it. Like a quiet herd of elephants, it comes upon us, gray, placid, barely noticeable. But I recall the fury of its flood, which I'd witnessed in Kansas City in 1993. Marquette had seen it as well. As told by Parkman, here they met with a real danger: “a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi; boiling and surging and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees.… They reached the mouth of the Missouri, where that savage river descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarians, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentler sister. Their light canoes whirled on the miry vortex like dry leaves on an angry brook. ‘I never,' Marquette writes, ‘saw anything more terrific.'”

CONFLUENCE

39

I
N
1803 Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and his friend William Clark upstream on a mission from St. Louis. Their goal was to reach the sea, but they fully expected to find woolly mammoths and mastodons along the way. What they were hoping for was a water route to the Pacific. They found an overland passage instead. Clearly the Lewis and Clark expedition was the highlight of Lewis's life. He committed suicide three years later. But Clark went on to father ten children and live a full and fruitful life.

Now we come to the point in our journey where they began theirs. I have only seen this place once before, from the air. In 1993 when I flew over this confluence, the Mississippi and Missouri had converged into a single body of water. Now with what is left of Rita, I can hardly see a thing. “I can't see any buoys, Sir,” Tom says.

“Just keep in the main channel,” Jerry replies.

We are coming down from Portage Des Sioux to the north and are only just now drifting by St. Louis, which we can barely discern. The Gateway Arch resembles two hands rising out of a grave, disappearing into the clouds, a half circle, no longer complete. The city is obliterated as we slip past, but the river seems wider than it did from the land and the water level appears to have risen slightly with the storm.

The day drags on and we must make Hoppie's. It is our only landing ahead. In the rain and fog the day feels long, but now darkness falls. Passing a river dredge, we are once more navigating at night, trying to find our way. The dredge is illumined like a Christmas tree—all red and green and yellow. Suddenly we are in shallow water and Tom sounds an alarm. “Sir,” he says, “we are in four feet. The water is very thin.”

Quickly Jerry maneuvers into a deeper part of the channel and there is a heavy sigh. I have made us some kind of dinner on boat—a pasta dish with Italian sausage and parsley. They gobble it down as we look for our landing for the night. The storm is breaking up. I see it in the sky. Little patches of blue gray appear where it had been just dense, socked-in clouds. The river turns glassy. A fog rises as we call ahead to Hoppie's and they say they'll have a place waiting.

We come out of the mist into the blackness of night. It is as if the storm just comes to a stop. We have reached its edge and ahead of us is a starry night. Jerry shines the beacon light and it bounces off the banks of the river. We scan the water with our binoculars, searching for debris, logs, snags, anything that might catch our rudder, grind into our gears.

We are silent as we search the water, eyes on the beacon, looking for Hoppie's. A ghostlike haze skims the surface. We pass a brilliantly lit paddleboat that churns slowly upstream, then see the string of lights for Hoppie's. White with a shade of pink on the river, lighting our way.

Before he died, I had this dream about my father. I dreamed we were on a river at night in a speedboat, going to a party. Ahead of us Japanese lanterns illumined the way. My father pulled up to the dock. I thought he was going to tie up, but instead he stayed at the wheel.

“Aren't you coming?” I asked as he started to leave. He shook his head.

“I'm not going with you,” he told me as he headed upstream. “You'll be coming back alone.”

40

G
REEN
T
URTLE
Bay. I have no idea where this is, but I like the sound of the name. I envision turtles, the color of moss and evergreens. A quiet cove. I wake to hear Tom and another man talking about it. They are speaking in loud voices and don't seem to care that I am sleeping. I hear the man say, “It's a good place to leave a boat in Tennessee.”

Tennessee. Annoyed at being awakened in this way, but taking in their conversation, I perk up. Jerry has made a decision I don't know about. He will not return to Portage Des Sioux or leave his boat at the Woodland Marina where his friends moor theirs. He has decided to go farther south. Up the Ohio and down the Tennessee. Below the freeze line. It never occurred to me that Jerry wouldn't just go back up the Mississippi to Portage Des Sioux. That he'd want to keep going. As much as I want to get to Memphis and beyond, the fact is, I'm pretty much broke. When I budgeted this trip, it was fuel at $1.50 to $2.00 a gallon, not $4.00. But something else beyond finances is sinking into my brain. As difficult as this is for me to admit, I want to stay with these guys. I don't want to change boats, hop a tow. I want to stay with the
River Queen
for as long as she'll carry me.

As John Banvard understood, and perhaps this was the source of his obsession, the river is its own story that many will want to find the way to tell. But it's coming to me now that the upper river is my story and I want to tell it in my own way. I am starting to know this river in my head. I can see it with my eyes closed. I don't know that I have to do all two thousand miles of it when this part of the journey has already brought me home.