by Mary Morris
* * *
“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
TIME 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.
“Well, if we aren’t, someone will let us know,” Jerry says with a wave of his hand.
“We’ll get a parking ticket,” Tom quips.
“Besides if we get away early enough, they won’t come and charge longside.” This feels a little dicey to me, but then I’m a person who is uncomfortable with library fines. I mumble something, but Jerry ignores me. He’s annoyed because a fishing boat has tied up in the middle of the dock, but after some maneuvering, we sidle alongside. It turns out to be a very peaceful place with just the gentle ripple of water and wind. Two kids fish off the pier.
Jerry pauses to admire the levee, an old stone wall that’s fifty years old. “Don’t make’m like that anymore,” he says. It is our first mooring, and, as we secure our lines, Tom executes a fancy looping motion with the rope. He makes circles with his fingers as he pulls the line around like some cowboy doing lariat tricks. He gives a tug on the knot and practically lifts the boat out of the water. “That should hold,” he says.
“How’d you do that?” I ask, but he just gives a shrug. Then he picks up the rope and does it again around my ankle. “Easy,” he says, giving my leg a yank. The boys want to clean up, which in this case means take bottled water and splash it on their faces. But I want terra firma under my feet. Just eight hours on the river and I’m wobbly as a colt.
In the dusk I cut across a small park, illumined with amber lights and dotted with picnic tables, facing the river. A cool breeze blows as I scamper across the railroad tracks and head to The Depot, which was once the old railroad station and now, after all the floods, is the only restaurant in town.
“Hotel California” is playing. I take a table near the back and wait for the boys. Tom’s gone to walk Samantha, and Jerry says he’s going to get gussied up. There’s a pool table, and several dead animals hanging from the wall. There’s also a female bartender and four people at the bar. A woman with bleached blond hair, sitting at the bar, is laughing loudly, and a few moments later when Tom and Jerry arrive she comes over to take our order.
“So what’ll you have…?” the blond woman asks.
Jerry asks what’s on draft and Tom orders his usual—a diet Dew. I’m contemplating a vodka tonic when she says, “You want the same thing as your husband?” pointing to Jerry.
“That’s not my husband,” I say as Tom gives a big cough under his breath. Jerry’s got his face buried in the menu.
“I’m hungry,” I say and they both agree. “I’ll have a cheeseburger, medium rare.”
Tom pipes in. “I’ll have two but cook ’em well.…” He gazes at me sheepishly because he knows I’m paying for dinner, which is part of our agreement. “One’s for Sam.”
The blond woman stares at us, perplexed. “Oh, I don’t work here,” she explains, slurring her words. “I just thought you guys looked like you needed a drink.”
Johnny Cash comes on with “I Walk the Line” as our real waitress—a large woman in a very small miniskirt—comes to take our actual order. Neither Tom nor Jerry can bring themselves to look at her. Afterward Tom says, “That was the biggest miniskirt in the world.” Jerry laughs his head off. I grimace and look away as the drunken woman, who is now dancing with a man at the bar, gives me a wave.
Our burgers arrive. They are pretty tasteless and Jerry makes a face. “Tastes like your foot’s asleep,” I say and they howl.
“Did you make that up, Mary?” Jerry asks.
“No, my dad. He said things like that all the time. If he didn’t like something, he’d say it tastes like the bottom of an owl’s foot.”
“The bottom of an owl’s foot. Well, that’s a hoot.” Tom groans and Jerry goes on, not skipping a beat. “Where’d that come from?”
I shrug. I actually think it is a Yiddish expression, but I don’t want to say so. I have not told them that I am Jewish. We haven’t discussed our politics. This is the heartland after all and some things may be better left unsaid. “Oh, my dad. He always said things like that.”
“Musta been a funny guy.”
“Yeah,” I nod, thinking of my father’s dry sense of humor. “You know, he lived along the river in the 1920s. In Hannibal, Missouri, and Quincy, Illinois.”
They nod, chomping on their burgers. We have thus far exchanged little personal information and it is the first time I have mentioned my father. “He said he spent time on an island somewhere in between. On a farm.”
Jerry nods, picking at his fries. “I see.”
Just before I was to leave on this journey, I was going through my sets of stacked drawers. I have a dozen of these and each one is labeled for something I am doing. I toss ideas and notes into them. Scribblings on cocktail napkins or yellow pads. Story jottings. One is labeled “Mississippi” and in this drawer I found road maps, dining information. How to rent a paddleboat. News stories from the 1993 floods. Maps, scribblings, articles I’ve clipped for one reason or another. Some are obscure to me even now. Between “Prairie Islands on the Missouri” and “Mormon Town Flourishes in Illinois,” I found a crumpled sheet of yellow paper. I opened it and read what I knew was my father’s shaky hand.
Last spring I asked him to tell me what he could about the river and the places he’d lived as a young man. He was over 102 years old, but he still had his smarts. The more I thought about the river, the more I wanted to ask him. I was sitting, poised with yellow pad and pencil, but he was nodding off to sleep and gave me a wave. I went on an errand and when I returned, I found he’d scribbled something down.
It read, “We had a structural engineer who had twenty acres in the middle of the river. He had a couple dozen cows and milked them every day. They canned and sold the milk unpasteurized to drink. Wife and son ran the farm. This was seventy years ago. We used to boat in summer and sled in winter to cross the river to his farm.”
That was all. I had many more things I wanted to ask him. Where is this island? Who owns it now? Does it have a name? But he was sleeping when I returned and I had places to go. I had to leave. I kissed his forehead, combed back his hair. And I never saw him again.
“Good fries,” Tom says.
“My dad’s part of the reason why I’ve come on this trip,” I tell them. They both nod, then push their plates away.
“Let’s get some shut-eye,” Tom says.
“Do you want to shoot a round of pool?” I ask. I’m not sure I really want to shoot pool, but I’m not ready to return to the boat either. But they decline.
“Been a long day,” Jerry says.
We make our way back to the boat. The amber lights glow along the walk across the railroad tracks, through the grove of trees and picnic tables, back to the river. A crescent moon casts its reflection on the slow-moving water of the east channel.
It is our first night together. I wait for Jerry to pull his bed out, but he just lies down on the narrow sofa in his sleeping bag at the helm. Tom has staked out a place on the flybridge under the stars. Once on his air mattress he puts on his headphones, tucks Samantha Jean in (“She’s my bed warmer,” he says), and goes to sleep.
I draw the lime green curtain, which is all that separates me from these men. It is the only privacy and
safety I have in the world right now and it is flimsy to the touch. Since we are bedding down, I go to the bathroom. I use bottled water to wash, brush my teeth, and flush. When I am finished, I can’t open the door. It budges about an inch, but that’s all.
I struggle, then try to figure out what is wrong. It seems that the shower door has come ajar just enough so that I am unable to open the bathroom door. The two doors have become locked in some kind of triangulated death grip.
I start to call. “Jerry,” I say softly. Then louder. I know he is hard of hearing and if he is sleeping on his good ear, he won’t hear me. I know this because, as a girl, I used to cry out to my father in the night and he never heard me either. I call again, more loudly now. “Jerry!”
Then I begin to bang. Tom is also deaf in one ear and, if he has his headphones on, which he does, he won’t hear me at all. I bang and bang. Then I start to shout. Samantha must hear me because she barks and like a chain reaction that wakes Tom, who shouts to Jerry. “What is it?” Jerry calls out, startled.
“I’m stuck in the bathroom.”
“Where are you?”
“The bathroom!” I scream.
He shuffles over and starts fiddling with the doors that have become entwined. “Hmm,” he says, “this could be a problem.”
“It is a problem,” I tell him, but he doesn’t reply. He unhinges the stuck doors, slams the shower door closed, and without a word turns back toward his couch, stretches out, and goes to sleep.
I pull back my curtain, grateful to that little dog who saved me from spending the night in the head. After reading for a few moments by the light of a flashlight, I lie there, adrift on the river, aching for sleep. My heart beats like a hummingbird’s in my chest. I gulp down an anxiety pill and wait for it to work.
What did Emily Dickinson write? “Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul.” Inside of me it feels as if it is trying to fly away. Shallow breathing is fear, I’ve heard my yoga teacher say. For months I’ve woken with this pounding of my heart. At home I take my husband’s hand and place it on my chest. I make him keep it there until the racing stops.
