The River Queen

by Mary Morris

  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

  IN 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 d
rags 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

  GREEN TURTLE 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.

  I make my Folgers with three “tea” bags and find Jerry on the landing. He’s chatting with someone he’s just met on the dock, a guy with a big cruiser named Bronx Cheer. As he sees me coming, I give him a wave. “Are you talkable to, Jerry?”

  “Roger,” he replies.

  “I understand you’re thinking about going up the Ohio and taking the River Queen down the Tennessee. Is that right?”

  “It’s a thought,” he says in his inimitable way.

  “Well, are you going to keep going?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I figured if we’re moving south, I may as well keep moving her.”

  I nod, taking this in. “Well, I was wondering, do I have to leave the boat at Cairo? I’d like to keep going.…” I find these conversations with Jerry inscrutable and incredibly complicated. But now I know what it is I want. “I’d like to go as far as you guys are going.”

  Jerry shows no emotion one way or the other. “Well, we’re going to end up somewhere in Tennessee.”

  “Then I’d like to go with you.” As it is with all decisions Jerry makes, nothing is said. It is just understood that this is what will happen. I’ll go where they go. Jerry and I stand, sipping our coffee, eyes on the river. Just then Tom’s cell phone rings and I hear him talking. When he is done, he opens the aft door and shouts to us, “That was big sis! She says this weather’s gonna be clear ahead.”

  “Great,” Jerry says and I agree.

  “But there’s tornadoes in Tennessee.” And then he gives us his big whooping laugh.

  * * *

  We need fuel before we can leave—an experience I’m starting to dread like a trip to the dentist—and I was hoping for a shower, but the one at Hoppie’s isn’t working. Jerry is annoyed because Bronx Cheer, which has just gassed up, is holding a space at the gas dock while his friend gasses up. This is slowing us down and for Jerry this behavior is rude.

  But I guess my disappointment is palpable because Jerry asks, “What’s wrong?”

  “I was hoping for a shower.”

  “Well, we could hook up that river pump again.” But I don’t want to. There are lots of boats moored here, some big fancy ones, and I just can’t see myself bathing on the dock. “Well,” Jerry grumbles, “I suppose you could do the shower.”

  The shower. Our elusive shower. The thing I have yet to try. I’m all over it. “Yes,” I say. But first there’s a hose that has to be hooked up and a warning that there’s no hot water. “I don’t care. Cold water is fine.”

  While they do the hose, I remove the axe, vacuum, and baseball bat being stowed there. I am actually going to shower, naked, on our boat. I wait a few moments and when they say they are ready, I slip in. I turn on the water.

  Nothing happens for a moment, but then it does. A trickle of freezing water sputters over me, chilling me to the bone. I stand under it for two minutes, shivering, not bothering with the soap or shampoo. I can hear the water pump, banging away, and picture Jerry standing there, timing me with his watch.

  * * *

  Fern and Hoppie are an aging married couple, two old salts, and they have braced their landing on the hull of a Civil War gunboat, Fern tells us. “We don’t know which side they were fighting for, but they went down here.” Fern leads me to the river’s edge, where I’m trying to warm up in the sun. In the water I see the remnants of the Civil War vessel. The front, she tells me, is a sharp rammer, used to bring other boats down. “We just don’t know if it was for the North or the South,” she says.

  A few other people join us. Two of the women have very large dogs—a Bernese Mountain Dog and an Irish Wolfhound puppy. It turns out they are doing the Great Loop. They’ve given themselves a year to complete this. I am amazed, not only that they are doing this trip, but that they intend to do it with two huge dogs.

  We’ve got a little time before we have to “rock ’n’ roll” and we sit down with Fern, who wears an anchor necklace. She adjusts her barrels of potted plants, then settles into a lawn chair. She lights up a cigarette and starts talking about women on the river. “I give lessons, you know.… Women need to know how to operate a vessel,” she says. “How to get help. They need to know how to anchor, dock, start, and operate.…” I’m nodding my head. I can now maneuver on the river. I can start the boat and I could anchor if I had to. But Jerry doesn’t let anyone but himself dock or go through the locks and dams.

  “Women need to know how to take care of themselves,” Fern tells me. “I take ’em out on the river and show them. I’ve taught
women to be first mates and captains. I don’t like to see a woman out there, not knowing what she’s doing. Men,” she says, “they don’t have the patience for teaching.”

  41

  IT IS a glorious day as we set off for Cape Girardeau. The end of Rita has left the weather cool and clear. Just warm enough, a sweet, precious day. We have maybe six hours and about a hundred river miles ahead of us. The boys are hungry as we depart, so I heat up some of the Italian sausage with some pasta leftovers and make a salad for myself. I slip Samantha Jean a little sausage and she licks my hand. Now I’m ready to listen to Fern’s advice.

  It is time for me to learn the basic seaman’s knot. I am tired of standing back as they tie up lines. I want to do it too. It is midday and I take a piece of rope. “Show me how you tie that knot,” I say to Tom and Jerry as we all relax on the flybridge.

  “You mean a bowline?” Jerry asks. “It’s easy.” He twists the rope into four or five directions, using the hand that is missing half its fingers.

  “Can you do that more slowly?” I ask.

  “Here,” Tom says, taking the rope from Jerry. He holds it between his hands. “The rabbit goes down in the hole, out of the hole, around the tree, and back in the hole again.”

  I watch as he twists the rope. Rabbit goes down the hole, out, around the tree. Down, out, around, and in. Down, out, around, and in. I’m watching, but it looks more like out, around, down, and in to me. They tell me to take the piece of rope and practice tying it to the chair or to my own leg. My own leg is actually easier and I hold it up in the air. Down, out, around, and in. No matter what I do it still resembles a kid’s shoelace knot.

  Tom takes the rope again into his big thick hands and makes it move like a trapeze act. He ties up to things he claims would hold a hundred-foot barge. He ties his knot to the captain’s chair and lifts it into the sky. I take my piece of rope back down to the bow to practice. Rabbit goes down or out. What exactly does it do around that tree?

  I envision a small furry bunny, a fluffy brown thing. Once when I was little a mother rabbit gave birth to four bunnies in our yard, but our dog killed them all. A few years later I got a white rabbit with red eyes as an Easter gift. I would hold that rabbit by the ears and toss it around the yard. It wasn’t the only animal I ever tormented. I killed my mother guppy when she ate her young. I tied up a neighbor’s dog and beat it with a stick, wanting it to obey.