I realized I was clutching the sides of the car seat on the highway as you drove. Cars, everything, seemed to be going so fast. It felt mad. I was glad—you said you were too—relieved really, to return the Chrysler to the trusting man, do the laundry, walk back to the boat with our clean clothes folded and stowed in our backpacks. We were glad to be walking, restored to the sanity of river time, river speed.
The towns on the Wisconsin side, from Maiden Rock and Stockholm past Pepin and Alma, were charming hamlets, their rough brick buildings cast at river’s edge against the swelling bluffs and magnificent heights that rose behind them. We got halfway across Lake Pepin, the big bulge in the river—too far to turn back to Red Wing, still distant from Wabasha at the lower tip—when the Coast Guard station came on the marine radio with a tornado warning. The sky, which had been pastel, looked suddenly bruised and angry. There was nothing to do but follow the channel, fingers crossed. Your face a mask of calm. But I could read you, alarm in your hazel eyes.
Luck was with us. The tornado dematerialized. We spent the night in a state of grateful reprieve, rocking under the tin-covered slip at the Wabasha Marina, the rain making pinging sounds on the corrugated roof as the barn swallows flew in and out. We lay in the cutty cabin, looking out the round hatch—at nothing, I thought—when a great blue heron sailed by, its flight caught in the frame of the hatch as if in the lens of a camera. An instant. Boats, tethered to the creaking wooden slips, rubbed against their bumpers, sighing and groaning like well-fed beasts.
Wabasha was our favorite marina. I was swapping out châteaus for boat slips—Let’s bring the boat down here next year for the whole summer! Your laconic reply from the helm: We could.
But Fountain City and Trempealeau, farther south, were our favorite towns, sweet old villages, their grandeur well behind them, but their locations a lasting reward, nestled below palisades where the river spread like a great creased cloak thrown before them in permanent homage.
“Wouldn’t it be great,” I said as we headed toward the municipal dock (there was no marina), “if Fountain City had a soda fountain?”
For once, wishing made it so. At the Corner Store, an old brick-face pharmacy turned into an antique store/soda fountain/laundromat, run as a hobby by a retired nurse named Fran, we ordered our sodas, chocolate (you) and caramel (me). A steady stream of children stopped by, checked their penny piles, stacks of their change Fran banked for them on the ledge above her old-style cash register, credit accounts she kept for each child.
As we headed into the back-channel marina on St. Feriole Island, having finally achieved Prairie du Chien, we could no longer ignore a distinct gas smell. The fume sensor was still on green, barely, but we docked knowing we had a problem.
The St. Feriole marina was a funky place, run by an extended family, everyone apparently related or married to someone else. Like so much of the life along the river this far north, it felt oddly southern, as if on a bayou backwater and not in Wisconsin dairyland. Here we found the mechanic of our marine dreams, a man who never gave us his name, who conducted himself like a great, aloof surgeon.
He saw instantly what was wrong. With the laconic manner that is the signal of authority in a mechanic, he set about repairing the engine. He did allow himself to remark on the numerous imbeciles with whom he had to consort: government gas pump inspectors, irresponsible boaters who had no business on the river, and especially the misguided mechanics across the river in McGregor who didn’t know how to work on engines like ours, men who contented themselves with the contemptible craft of servicing outboards. What kind of life was that? he wanted to know.
Somewhere, clearly, in the midst of his essentially benign contempt, there was a niche for us, city folk with an old boat we hardly understood. He did have respect for the boat itself. Unlike the admirers who complimented us along the way, he said nothing about the wood, the chrome, the fine plumb bow. He simply noted that if every engine were made as simply as this Hercules Flathead 6, life in general would present fewer problems.
We cast off the next morning, for the first time headed north. Toward home. Upriver on the Wisconsin side, the bluffs rose and fell in shades of green, strands of granite and sandstone showing in horizontal strips.
On the Iowa side, the shore mounted steeply in a dense canopy of trees. No houses, no railroad to be seen, no highway. Some driftwood and boulders, no real beach, just the forest rising abruptly from the river in great florets like giant broccoli.
It was another of the river’s uncanny seventeenth-century moments, the untouched waterway presenting itself with nonchalant majesty, sky and water contriving to convey an early morning muddle of pastel light and mist.
We emerged from the backwater, turned the old woody into the magnificent channel, seeing it freshly, even as Père Marquette had when he noted that first European sighting with such emotion, writing in his diary the summer of 1673. Though we were headed home, and not into the unknown as he was, we entered the river as he said he and Jolliet and their Indian leaders had—with a joy I cannot express.
* * *
—
The dog has stretched, and I think she wants to get off the boat. But no, she rearranges herself, curls more tightly into herself on the navy cushion. She’s the one deciding things now. She has me well trained. We’ll stay awhile longer, softly bobbing in the slip. Dusk, and the low-riding hulk of a three-barge chain goes silently past, its high white tow behind like a bodyguard.
I don’t use the boat for trips now. That big trip to deepest Prairie du Chien turned out to be the adventure of a lifetime. After all my gallivanting, my lust for Elsewhere. It was my comeuppance, barely two hundred miles from St. Paul, and the greatest travel experience of my life, the time when—almost—I touched history, was in it. You the pilot, I holding the charts as if I could read them.
I haven’t sold the old boat, not yet. It’s turned back now to its earlier stay-at-home self, a craft that is a cabin. That’s all right, one trip like that is enough for a lifetime. It’s everything. To go or to stay? In the boat, on the river, we could do both at the same time. Years of mending the paradox of choice, not just the life of being—that other elusive life. The life that portrays passing.
And didn’t we love, those weeks of the big trip to Prairie du Chien, just the same as here in our home slip, sitting on the back deck, idling away the night, taking our leisure in the morning? Letting time have its way with us, living Montaigne’s great idea:
We say; “I have done nothing today.” What, have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations . . .
The point the man in his old stone tower is making, still speaking to the woman alone in her old wooden boat, is that this life is not about accomplishment. Maybe it isn’t even about love, darling.
We are here, he says, to compose our character. This, alone, he insists, is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. To do this you must be idle. He says this in his Essai titled—what else?—“On Idleness.”
We loved the sound of the dove, you and I, the coo of longing that often woke us mornings on the river, though we never succeeded in luring one to the little courtyard garden by the alley at home. You researched dove nests, made one in the basement, mounted it in the poet’s tree—the laurel, the very sapling the city was planting the day I moved into the apartment above yours. The day you walked me to the garbage bins. And then we had a cup of coffee, and I saw your shelf of contemporary poetry books. You mounted the dove nest in the laurel tree and waited. Nobody came.
You wrote an impassioned letter to the Minnesota legislature protesting the legalization of a state dove hunting season. Left it on my desk: Drst: Edit this for me, will you? See if I’ve made my point.
We wondered if the word was mourning dove
—or was it morning dove? We meant to look it up—we were always looking things up. But we hadn’t gotten around to that. An argument could be made for either word—the sadness of the low cooing, the welcoming of the day when we most often heard that sweet aching sound. Mourning, morning.
Which is it, darling? Can’t remember or never knew. But I have the time now, don’t I? Another thing I really must look up.
Acknowledgments
For initial confirmation and substantial support for time and travel, abiding thanks to the University of Minnesota Regents Professor research fund, to the Corporation of Yaddo and the Bogliasco Foundation for welcome residencies, and for generous support from The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia where some of the ideas here first hatched.
Montaigne had his cold tower, but I have had generous friends offering warm perches in dream landscapes, providing companionship as well as solitude, a rare and paradoxical gift. With loving gratitude to Stacey Mills Heins and Samuel D. Heins, Rosemarie Johnstone and Ben Weinstein, to Rosanne Haggerty and Lloyd Sederer, to Maria Krausová and Dagmar Hlusicková, and to Annette Kobak on the road and in London. And to the late Phebe Hanson.
A book finds its readers because those essential first readers—agent and editor—believe there is a book in its pages. To Marly Rusoff, most valiant agent, and Paul Slovak, patient and acute editor, a deep bow.
Finally, to Terrence Williams, dearest reader, a heavy debt of gratitude I gladly bear with love, still and ever.
About the Author
Patricia Hampl is the author of six prose works, including A Romantic Education and, most recently, The Florist’s Daughter. Her work has appeared in many publications, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Best American Essays. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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The Art of the Wasted Day Page 22