Three rivers in one year! A confluence of tugs on a divining branch soul in search of adventure.
Notes and images ferment toward cohesion. Jack London's The Sea-Wolf read again. For now, a rough cut, one outtake of a two-week adventure—Lava Falls!
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Life on the Mississippi
No camera. This is how I start a lifetime adventure to float the Mississippi River for a few days with my friend Justus on his boat, Big Getter. It is like tubing down the San Marcos River X 1,000—worth more than 1,000 words.
I embark at Canton, MO and disembark at Hannibal, MO with a stop at Quincy, IL along the way. An adventure of three days and three nights. Evidence of the recent flooding is everywhere but not as severe as the media shows in places like Iowa. I think of the Guadalupe River flood where my grandparents lived. Receding waters leave a powerboat hanging high in a tall cypress tree, snagged in its branches as casually as an errant kite. Nothing that dramatic here, just flotsam of logs and branches plus the occasional soft drink bottle for target practice.
The first night's anchorage is a couple of miles down from Canton. We moor in one of the river's many side channels to stay out of the way of barge traffic that is beginning to pick up after the flooding. Tall trees and thick undergrowth hint at a frontier past yet history chronicles several generations of clear cutting and regrowth. Cries of herons, bald eagles and red-wing blackbirds fill the air, jungle-like, mimicking an even earlier past.
Our closeness to the bank invites mosquitoes to buzz our ears and show their distain for the sprayed on repellent with their bites. Justus suffers the brunt. Come morning, he hangs mosquito netting over the bunks. He is speckled with red welts that itch madly and has belated empathy for Rhys on the Mariscal Canyon canoe trip.
Bill and Max on the Evangeline are making a parallel trip down the Mississippi this summer. At Quincy, IL, they persuade the local NBC affiliate to do a story on the Evangeline and Big Getter. We motor downriver to make the 10:30am shoot. High heels don't stop Katie, the morning anchor, from climbing aboard each boat for a short ride.
Bill, a Big Getter blog reader, meets us in person at the boat ramp to make good his offer of a driving tour of Quincy. Fine houses built by riverboat captains line the streets close to downtown, testaments to the lucrative history of river commerce. He drives us through the grounds of the Illinois Veterans’ Home, a refuge founded for Civil War veterans in 1886. It is disquieting to realize that wars will continue to populate it for a long time.
Washington Park in downtown Quincy is one site of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. The park is under renovation for the sesquicentennial this year. I borrow Justus's camera to photograph the memorial for my friend Emma, a long-time organizer of the annual Lincoln-Douglas debates at home.
Lock 21 below Quincy finally reopens to pleasure craft. I have locked through before, on a 1971 trip to Washington state with my grandparents. We lock through to Lake Washington from Puget Sound. The lock is packed solid with pleasure craft, a party on every boat.
Lock 21 is immense, slow, weighty in its work to best a river. Prosperity, a barge tug, allows us to go through first though it’s already queued up to enter. Pleasure craft and barges don't share locks. Barges are so large they move through in pieces, sectioning forward as if a giant inchworm. We see so few other pleasure craft the river seems deserted. BG is dwarfed by this hydraulic marvel. The water level drops about one-half foot, not so much for us but probably considerable to the barge traffic.
The other mechanical marvel is the lift bridge crossing the river above Hannibal. Unlike a drawbridge, it has one complete section that rises like an elevator to allow river traffic to pass. It is odd to use these engineering wonders and pay no fee or toll. The strange things tax dollars fund!
Hannibal is very Twainy with much effort in the last few years to bring in the tourism dollars. It is overwhelming—signs for three different Twain impersonators within one block, another sign at the Twain museum saying impersonators need not apply.
Justus and I hike all over town, even up to Lover's Leap. Clemens Field, home to a minor league team in the 50's, is coated with red silt from the flood. The mud cracks like the worn edges of a leather mitt. It is disconcerting to see the many fine old buildings re-purposed as down-and-out bars. Like many older towns, Hannibal has grown considerably out of its downtown; it struggles to justify its continued importance and the considerable investment that importance takes.
I eat my last breakfast of the trip at the Becky Thatcher Café. Only the name is meant to attract tourists. Inside it is the time-frozen coffee shop where locals (mostly older men) stop in for their morning coffee and a smoke before heading out to check on things. The lone waitress on duty sees them get out of their vehicles and has a cup of coffee waiting for them by the time they sit down at their usual table.
The usual table is at the door by the front window. I hear their stories—most of them about flooding and continued rains. One man with grizzled face and lengthening jowls fusses about a flood-related drop in water pressure at his house. "I can piss harder than the water comes out of the faucet!" I laugh and think about the dinner table at my grandmother's assisted living home, about a conversation on high heels, about who should still wear them and who could still wear them, about its final "schoolyard" end in boasting , to a one, that they could, too, wear high heels, if they wanted to, that they could, too, still jump!
I gather my gear and step off Big Getter as two cross-continent bicyclists hand aboard their bikes. We meet them on a street corner in Hannibal the day before, and Justus invites them to join him for the leg to Louisiana, MO. I think they won't show.
I catch a bus back to Canton to pick up my rental car. On the bus, I visit with a young man who has just crewed a sailboat from Antigua to the Azores. On this adventure, I near the end of Joshua Slocum's Sailing Around the World Alone. Sometimes, small familiarities surface in a large world.
Mark Twain says that you really can't decide if you like or hate people until you travel with them. In 2008 I have had two life adventures on the water with members of the McL family. I like them.
I embark at Canton, MO and disembark at Hannibal, MO with a stop at Quincy, IL along the way. An adventure of three days and three nights. Evidence of the recent flooding is everywhere but not as severe as the media shows in places like Iowa. I think of the Guadalupe River flood where my grandparents lived. Receding waters leave a powerboat hanging high in a tall cypress tree, snagged in its branches as casually as an errant kite. Nothing that dramatic here, just flotsam of logs and branches plus the occasional soft drink bottle for target practice.
The first night's anchorage is a couple of miles down from Canton. We moor in one of the river's many side channels to stay out of the way of barge traffic that is beginning to pick up after the flooding. Tall trees and thick undergrowth hint at a frontier past yet history chronicles several generations of clear cutting and regrowth. Cries of herons, bald eagles and red-wing blackbirds fill the air, jungle-like, mimicking an even earlier past.
Our closeness to the bank invites mosquitoes to buzz our ears and show their distain for the sprayed on repellent with their bites. Justus suffers the brunt. Come morning, he hangs mosquito netting over the bunks. He is speckled with red welts that itch madly and has belated empathy for Rhys on the Mariscal Canyon canoe trip.
Bill and Max on the Evangeline are making a parallel trip down the Mississippi this summer. At Quincy, IL, they persuade the local NBC affiliate to do a story on the Evangeline and Big Getter. We motor downriver to make the 10:30am shoot. High heels don't stop Katie, the morning anchor, from climbing aboard each boat for a short ride.
Bill, a Big Getter blog reader, meets us in person at the boat ramp to make good his offer of a driving tour of Quincy. Fine houses built by riverboat captains line the streets close to downtown, testaments to the lucrative history of river commerce. He drives us through the grounds of the Illinois Veterans’ Home, a refuge founded for Civil War veterans in 1886. It is disquieting to realize that wars will continue to populate it for a long time.
Washington Park in downtown Quincy is one site of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. The park is under renovation for the sesquicentennial this year. I borrow Justus's camera to photograph the memorial for my friend Emma, a long-time organizer of the annual Lincoln-Douglas debates at home.
Mosquitoes, and now flies. Justus is plagued by biting insects. For once, I am not! In Quincy, I buy fly paper. It works well but I leave countless gray hairs stuck to it among the flies. I cannot seem to remember that it dangles there as I move about the cabin.
Lock 21 below Quincy finally reopens to pleasure craft. I have locked through before, on a 1971 trip to Washington state with my grandparents. We lock through to Lake Washington from Puget Sound. The lock is packed solid with pleasure craft, a party on every boat.
Lock 21 is immense, slow, weighty in its work to best a river. Prosperity, a barge tug, allows us to go through first though it’s already queued up to enter. Pleasure craft and barges don't share locks. Barges are so large they move through in pieces, sectioning forward as if a giant inchworm. We see so few other pleasure craft the river seems deserted. BG is dwarfed by this hydraulic marvel. The water level drops about one-half foot, not so much for us but probably considerable to the barge traffic.
The other mechanical marvel is the lift bridge crossing the river above Hannibal. Unlike a drawbridge, it has one complete section that rises like an elevator to allow river traffic to pass. It is odd to use these engineering wonders and pay no fee or toll. The strange things tax dollars fund!
Hannibal is very Twainy with much effort in the last few years to bring in the tourism dollars. It is overwhelming—signs for three different Twain impersonators within one block, another sign at the Twain museum saying impersonators need not apply.
Justus and I hike all over town, even up to Lover's Leap. Clemens Field, home to a minor league team in the 50's, is coated with red silt from the flood. The mud cracks like the worn edges of a leather mitt. It is disconcerting to see the many fine old buildings re-purposed as down-and-out bars. Like many older towns, Hannibal has grown considerably out of its downtown; it struggles to justify its continued importance and the considerable investment that importance takes.
I eat my last breakfast of the trip at the Becky Thatcher Café. Only the name is meant to attract tourists. Inside it is the time-frozen coffee shop where locals (mostly older men) stop in for their morning coffee and a smoke before heading out to check on things. The lone waitress on duty sees them get out of their vehicles and has a cup of coffee waiting for them by the time they sit down at their usual table.
The usual table is at the door by the front window. I hear their stories—most of them about flooding and continued rains. One man with grizzled face and lengthening jowls fusses about a flood-related drop in water pressure at his house. "I can piss harder than the water comes out of the faucet!" I laugh and think about the dinner table at my grandmother's assisted living home, about a conversation on high heels, about who should still wear them and who could still wear them, about its final "schoolyard" end in boasting , to a one, that they could, too, wear high heels, if they wanted to, that they could, too, still jump!
I gather my gear and step off Big Getter as two cross-continent bicyclists hand aboard their bikes. We meet them on a street corner in Hannibal the day before, and Justus invites them to join him for the leg to Louisiana, MO. I think they won't show.
I catch a bus back to Canton to pick up my rental car. On the bus, I visit with a young man who has just crewed a sailboat from Antigua to the Azores. On this adventure, I near the end of Joshua Slocum's Sailing Around the World Alone. Sometimes, small familiarities surface in a large world.
Mark Twain says that you really can't decide if you like or hate people until you travel with them. In 2008 I have had two life adventures on the water with members of the McL family. I like them.
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