DOWNSTREAM

1

IT’S FOUR in the morning and I’m sitting upright in bed. I’ve been awakened by a fork of lightning that illumines the sky; thunder rattles the boat. I’m lying on top of my sleeping bag in a nook near the engines and next to the head. The bed is on wheels and, as water strikes the hull, it rolls into the wall, then bangs back into the nook. I was hoping that by September I’d feel a hint of fall. But it’s pouring out and hot and muggy on board. My clothes, the sleeping bag, everything is damp.

My river pilot, Jerry, who has gone to his other houseboat for the night, says I’m safe unless there’s an electric storm—which there is. I’ve got my river planner open to the page that reads: “Lightning: Not the Type of Electricity to Mess With.” I read a brief description of something called a dielectric breakdown and a tale of an exploding boat. The advice under these circumstances is quite specific: Get off the river. But I’ve got nowhere to go.

I am in a place called Richmond Bay at a marina located on the Black River. Four miles downstream the Black merges with the Mississippi. There is an Ojibwa saying: At the place where the three rivers meet, there will be no wind. That place is La Crosse, Wisconsin, where this marina is located. According to the Ojibwa, there will never be a tornado in La Crosse and there never has been.

But there is a great deal of lightning and thunder. And there’s also a deluge. In the heaviness of the air mosquitos buzz. In the morning we are supposed to sail down the Mississippi on this houseboat. But when I arrived last night from New York, where I live, it was obvious that a good deal remained to be done. We have no running water. No electricity. The refrigerator isn’t hooked up. Neither is the stove.

There are no screens on the windows above my bed. If I crack one, the cabin fills with bugs. Our marine toilet lies in pieces on the bathroom floor, along with the instructions for assembly, which I have briefly perused. I’m not sure what else we don’t have, but I believe there is an issue with the starboard engine.

The drugs I’ve been taking these past few months for sleep and anxiety have worn off. Since my father’s death last May, I’ve awakened in the night, short of breath. Now it is the storm that frightens me. I hear strange noises—footsteps, and, I think, voices. Maybe it’s a radio. Someone or something runs along the pier.

In the shower stall, which is being used for storage, there’s an axe and a baseball bat, which Jerry showed me before he and Tom, our mechanic, left for the night. For now I’m alone as bolts shoot from the sky and waves slap the hull. My bed rolls as other houseboats clang into the dock.

In the flashes of light I see a mist rising, blending with the fog and rain into a gray soup. An electric palm tree, which marks this harbor, glows green in the night. There’s a gun on board, but Jerry didn’t say where.

*   *   *

When I look at the Mississippi and all its tributaries, I see the left hand of a musician with a twelve-note reach. A big hand that stretches clear across the country with its palm covering the Midwest. The thumb comes down somewhere in upstate New York, not far from Lake Ontario, first knuckle in Pittsburgh. The little finger keeps the beat in Helena, Montana, while the middle fingers play the blues up north in Bismarck, Minneapolis, Chicago. The wrist narrows at New Orleans.

My father played jazz piano years before I was born. He played house parties, bar mitzvahs, and for his friends. He never played on the South Side of Chicago, though he went to the “black and tans” on a Saturday night. He used to tell me he wasn’t very good, but that’s not how I remember it.

He still did what he called “fiddling” when I was a girl. He accompanied himself to corny tunes like “Smile” or “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” or lively ones like “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover” with a little Art Tatum or Eddie Duchin swing. My mother claims, for reasons of her own, that I never heard my father play. He was a businessman, she’ll tell me, not a musician. But I recall the wide reach of his fingers. His foot tapping and head shaking as he kept the beat.

In the 1920s my father lived on the banks of the Mississippi and I was raised on his river tales. He sold ladies’ garments at Klein’s Department Store in Hannibal, Missouri, and my childhood was peppered with stories of the bucolic life. He had friends who kept a farm in the middle of the river on an island between Hannibal and Quincy, Illinois, and he spent his weekends there. For a time he told me he lived next door to Mark Twain’s boyhood home and that Twain’s house wasn’t any bigger “than a shoe box.” He said you could throw a stone into the river from his front porch.

The Mississippi, if you include its major branch, the Missouri, is over four thousand miles long, making it the longest river in the world. Only the Amazon and the Congo have as large a drainage basin—over 1,250,000 square miles. On a normal day the Mississippi carries one hundred thousand cubic feet downstream per second. At the peak of the great floods of 1993, which I witnessed from the vantage point of a hotel room in Kansas City, it carried one million cubic feet per second.

All my life I’ve thought about the river. I grew up in Illinois, and the Mississippi was its western border. I imagined that cowboys, Indians, and pioneers fought bloody battles on the other side. The first time I crossed the river was on a train going to Idaho. I was no more than five or six, but I had the run of that train, which had a dome car where I spent hours up high, watching the prairie zip by. That evening we sat in the dining car as the orange sun was disappearing behind the grassy plains. I’d never had dinner on a train before and I remember the white linen tablecloth, a red carnation in a vase, the Illinois towns speeding past.

We were going for a summer vacation, but my father wasn’t with us. He had stayed in Chicago for work and would join us in a week or two. My mother sat primly, riding backward, across from my brother, John, and me. In her blue dress with patent leather purse and white gloves resting in her lap, my mother puffed on a Pall Mall, wishing she was heading to Paris or Rome instead of to Idaho with her two rowdy children. Trains and dust and horses weren’t her idea of a dream holiday, but they were certainly, for a time at least, mine.

My brother and I were amazed that we could eat a hamburger on a moving train. We kept our eyes glued to the miles and miles of fields as they sped by. We pointed, shouting, “Cows, a barn!” Suddenly we clanged onto a bridge and there it was—wide and blue and churning. The river seemed to go on forever, and we were silent as we crossed it. As soon as we were on the other side, my mother turned to us and said, “Well, that’s it. We’re in the West now.” Then she glanced at the menu and ordered Dover sole and a Rob Roy.

After that I traveled back and forth across the Mississippi many times—going to Idaho in the summers, to camp in Colorado, driving with a rather wild cousin to her college in St. Louis—but the river never lost its allure. It became part of my landscape, my natural terrain. My father’s stories of living in Hannibal and his friend’s farm on the river took hold of my imagination. It became a piece of what I called home.

Unlike my mother who hungered for the big cities of Europe, and a man who’d take her there, my father always wanted a farm, and he spoke longingly of this one. Cattle grazed on these islands and the scent of apples filled the air. The house was white and clean and there wasn’t a sound except for rushing water and laundry flapping on a line. In the winter the water froze and you could put on your skates and glide across. He’d put his hands behind his back and slide along the carpet of our suburban home to show me.

At my house in Brooklyn I have a picture of him, taken in the 1920s. He is wearing a linen suit, a fedora, leaning against a Model T. The car is stopped on what looks like a dirt road and my father has a woman in a flapper dress on each arm and a cigarette dangling from his lips. He looks dashing with a slightly gangster air.

I hardly recognize him. I like to think he’s on his way to a speakeasy or a private club on the Indiana Dunes. He’ll stay until the wee hours, listening to the great cornet player Bix Beiderbecke and the Wolverines. I’ll never know who those women were hanging on his arms.

2

IN THE morning I wake to the sound of hammer on metal and someone shuffling on deck. Peering out from behind my green curtain, I see Jerry, who looks a bit like an aging Jimmy Buffett in his khakis, Hawaiian shirt, and baseball cap, carting provisions on board. He must hear me rummaging about. “Aloha,” he says. I gaze at my watch and it is just past six.

“Good morning,” I mutter back, still half asleep. The banging gets louder and seems nearby. Pulling the curtain on the aft door, I find myself staring at Tom’s burly back in a sleeveless, red Harley-Davidson T-shirt, muscles bulging, bent over the engine, not two feet from my sleeping nook. Grunting to himself, Tom stands inside the engine pit. At any moment I expect his girlfriend, Kim, will show up as well.

Tom’s big hands dip into the bowels of the engine, as he shakes his head. Around him are assorted wrenches, bolts, screws, things that look like fan belts. He’s got a can of diet Dew and about a dozen Chips Ahoy sitting on a rag. I hear a loud bang. “Hey, Tom,” Jerry shouts, “what’s happening?”

“Hole in the exhaust manifold, Sir,” Tom shouts back across the nook as I pretend to sleep.

“Hmm,” I hear Jerry mutter. “Can you fix her?”

“Gonna try.”

There is a yanking noise, like the guts of something being ripped out. “Violation!” Jerry shouts.

“Only way to do it, Sir.”

I am not a mechanic, but I know this does not look good. My head is reeling from the drugs I finally took to get back to sleep. Ativan, half an Ambien. Whatever the doctor would allow. I never used to do this. Pop pills. But after my father died, I found myself with my heart pounding in my chest. When my doctor asked how I was doing, I told him, “I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s as if something keeps jumping out from behind a door and shouting ‘boo!’”

He sent me to a therapist who sent me to a psychopharmacologist. A very nice man. The first time I met him I cried for two straight hours. “It hasn’t been a good summer,” I said. I told him that my father had just died and I wasn’t speaking to my mother, who refused to mourn his passing. My daughter, Kate, was leaving for college, and my last book hadn’t done very well. I told him I was heading down the Mississippi River in a houseboat with two strangers, and my husband was planning on spending his weekends doing road trips with our dog and some Creedence Clearwater Revival tapes.

When he asked how I was dealing with my anxiety, I replied, “With vodka.” He made a special note of this.

Since then I have been on an assortment of medications. Zoloft to make me happy, Ativan to calm me down. Ambien to make me sleep. I’m trying to wake up, but the cocktail is taking its toll. I’m groggy. I’m also desperate to pee into something that is not a jelly jar and have a cup of coffee, none of which seem imminent.

I ease my way out of my nook into a pair of flip-flops and my Uncle Sidney’s hospital robe from thirty years ago, which for some reason I have brought along, and pull aside the lime green curtain that separates me from the galley and the helm. Jerry greets me with a double shot of mocha from a machine in town and a copy of USA Today.

“Thanks,” I say.

He mentions that Tom’s girlfriend, Kim, has “aborted the mission.” The night before I had dinner with Kim as she made her case for going down the river with us. She ambushed me over sauteed trout, telling me she’d worked hard on the boat and wanted to come with us. When I said no, there wasn’t really room, she asked if she could just sail with us for a day or two. I couldn’t say no to that.

“I got a note from her,” he explains. “She’s not coming with.”

“Really?” I could still see Kim, a blue-eyed woman with a mane of auburn hair, talking nonstop about her five children and the farm they all live on. Kim told me, “I’ve got pigs, cows, and lambs. I raise them by hand. I cuddle and give them names. They come when I call. When it’s time to harvest, I take out my .44 and shoot them right between the eyes.”

“Maybe it’s for the best,” I reply.

Jerry shrugs. “Kim’s a good woman. She worked hard to get this boat into the water.” He pauses, “But, as they say in Norwegian, less to worry about.”

I glance at the headlines of USA Today. It is September 12, 2005, just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. “Some Say Congress Is Going Too Far on Aid; Officials: Rush May Encourage Waste, Fraud.” And “Disaster Stays on New Yorkers’ Minds.” An image of people sleeping on cots in the Astrodome catches my eye. This journey was to take me to New Orleans. But nothing is certain now.

Clutching my towel and cosmetic bag, I clasp my robe around me. “I think I’ll get a shower.”

“Oh, take your time,” Jerry says, and I have a feeling he means it.

*   *   *

The boathouse up the hill is a kind of warehouse filled with machines, pumps, a message board, assorted boating manuals, sporting-life magazines, a refrigerator, showers, and a toilet. In the shower I put the water on full blast. I slip out of my Uncle Sidney’s robe, though I am careful to keep my flip-flops on (athlete’s foot, my daughter swears, loves communal showers). Hot water spills over my body.

As I walk out, towel-drying my hair, I find Tom with a large metal object that resembles a horse’s stomach in a vise. He’s poking a finger through a rusty hole. “I’ve gotta fix this manifold before we can sail,” he says.

“Yes.” I’m standing on the concrete floor in my bathrobe, looking at his grease-stained finger. “I can see the problem.”

“Well, you know, Mary, you sleep right next to the engines.” He looks at me with his dark, serious eyes. “I don’t want you to die of exhaustion.”

It takes me a moment. “Right, thanks. I wouldn’t want to either.” Tom turns back to the manifold with his soldering iron. Carly Simon is singing the words “Don’t go away” on his boom box. On the wall there’s a poster of half a dozen golden retriever puppies and a sign that reads IF THIS IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF MY LIFE, THEN I’M IN REAL TROUBLE.

In the parking lot I walk by a pickup truck. A little black dog with beady eyes and wiry hair sits in the driver’s seat. It looks just like Toto. When I go up to say hello, the dog goes nuts, barking, flipping in the seat, baring its teeth, ready to rip my throat out. “Jesus,” I say, backing away.

“Hey!” Tom shouts as he comes out of the boathouse. “Samantha Jean, cut that out!”

“That’s Samantha Jean?” I recognize the name of Tom’s houseboat, and I know it’s named after the dog who will be traveling with us.

“Yeah,” Tom says. “She’s a little territorial about the car.” He goes over and bends his face toward the rat terrier. “Aw, she’ll get used to you after a while. Just don’t go near her or try and pet her or anything like that until she comes to you. Sammy, you be a good girl now. That’s right. Gimme five.”

And the dog slaps his hand with her paw.

As I head back down to the boat, I ponder why I am doing this. I have a nice house, a loving husband, a dog that doesn’t want to kill me. Surely I could have stayed home. But for whatever reason, this river has gotten under my skin. Shuffling through a shaded picnic area, I pass two old guys, one pudgy, one thin, pouring their morning coffee from a thermos. I smell the rich, dark liquid steaming in their plastic mugs.

I’m sniffing the air and trying to sneak by when one of the men—moon-faced with glasses—says, “So you going downriver with those fellows?”

“Yes, I am,” I say. He takes a big sip of coffee. If he offered me some, I wouldn’t say no. But he doesn’t.

“And that dog?”

“That’s right.”

He raises his mug at me. “Well, I wish you luck.” He goes back to looking out at the river. “I used to keep a boat and a slip here.”

I sit down at a table a few feet from theirs. “You don’t take her out anymore?”

He shakes his head. “My wife’s got Alzheimer’s. She’ll tell you the day of the week when our daughter was born, but she can’t remember if she left the gas on. Can’t leave her alone anymore.” His eyes gaze down the bank and settle on our boat. A pair of swans with their cygnets swim by. “I’m gonna sell mine soon.”

“You ever been downstream?” I ask them.

“Oh, yeah,” the thin man says. “But I like it up here between Wabasha and Dubuque.”

“Naw, I like it further south,” his friend chimes in. “From Davenport to Alton. There’s more to see.”

“It’s God’s Country where we are,” the other replies. “Hey, that big guy, Tom, he used to work on boats before, didn’t he?”

“Before what?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I think something happened.…”

“What happened?” I ask.

He waves it off with his hand. “Oh, if he’s going downriver with Jerry, I’m sure he’s a good guy.”

“Yeah,” the thin man nods as if he’s trying to convince himself. Suddenly Tom emerges from the boathouse, holding up the manifold in a clenched fist like a barbarian with his spoils. He shouts down to the boat to Jerry, “I think she’ll hold for now!”

“For now?” I ask, “What does that mean?”

Tom looks at me through disgruntled eyes. “For as long as she holds.”

This seems to satisfy Jerry, who begins transporting the food he’s been keeping in the marina workshop fridge onto the boat and into the cooler on the deck. Eggs, orange juice, the largest loaf of Wonder Bread I’ve ever seen. Milk, a two-pound slab of Wisconsin cheddar. A family-size package of Chips Ahoy, which Tom stows above the fridge and devours by the fistful. There’s also two loaves of chocolate bread and a huge tin of molasses cookies.

One of the cronies turns to me and says, “I’ve never seen so much food going into Jerry’s boat. Lotsa beer. But never that much food.”

Jerry carts cases of diet Mountain Dew, diet Coke, and La Crosse beer in a wheelbarrow, and I follow in my flip-flops and robe. “Beer’s for ballast,” Jerry quips as he dumps a case into the cooler and smothers it with ice.

My husband, Larry, suggested running a background check on these guys, but I resisted. I was seeing myself as Katharine Hepburn in the African Queen, but Larry was thinking Natalie Wood. Traveling with two river pilots named Tom and Jerry seemed like a safe bet to me. I envisioned a cartoon cat chasing around a savvy mouse. Now I’m not so sure.

I’ve read stories of pilots who, for one reason or another, needed to lighten their loads. Before the river was managed and dredged, ships often ran aground. About a hundred years ago in the late fall when the river runs low, a packet ship filled with German immigrants got wedged onto a sandbar. In order to get off, the packet boat unloaded the sixty or so immigrants and their families. They unloaded their luggage. Then, as the boat floated off the sandbar, the crew left them in the middle of winter on Island 65 with minimum provisions, never to be heard from again.

The river is filled with hundreds of nameless islands and secluded backwaters, those dark spaces on the navigational maps only experienced river pilots know. Ideal for depositing human remains. If I complain about the coffee or if I don’t want to swab the deck, what’s to stop them? The eagles would pick me down to the bones. The truth is, I don’t know these guys from Adam. I’m going on instinct and, as my husband is quick to point out, I’ve been wrong before.

3

IT WAS at my nephew Matt’s wedding two years ago that the idea of going down the river got into my head. Matt, a nationally ranked wrestler with a cauliflower ear and a bone-crunching grip, was marrying a lovely girl named Gail, a black belt in karate, who could “kill him” with swords, as Matt likes to brag. The wedding was being held in La Crosse on the banks of the Mississippi.

The ceremony looked like a convention for bouncers. Matt’s wrestling team served as ushers, and they ate all the shrimp, then went to work on the mushroom caps. It was raining and gray, but as the strains of the wedding march were heard, the sun came out and the river glittered like gold—“a miracle,” the guests would later recall. After the reception the wrestlers built a bonfire and we sang “This Land Is Your Land” and “Little Boxes,” accompanied by an acoustic guitar and a set of bongos, as the river, dark, mysterious, and beckoning, churned by.

The next day Larry and I went for a walk. It was a clear and crisp May afternoon and we needed to decompress from so much family time. As we strolled along the river, I spotted a houseboat. It was small and white with neat blue trim, shutters, an upper deck, white curtains in the windows—just sitting there, as if expecting company. I liked its name. Reckless Abandon. “Let’s have a look,” I said, and we wandered over.

It was a small vessel, but it had a sweet galley, a nice roof deck, and some cramped sleeping quarters. Gazing through a window, we could see that the whole inside wasn’t much bigger than a kitchen in a Manhattan studio apartment. I walked around to the back where a man with a grizzled face sat with a fishing line in one hand, a cigarette in the other. “Is this your houseboat?” I asked.

“Yes it is.”

He flung his cigarette into the water and introduced himself as “Smokey” [sic]. “That’s cuz I smoke so much, but I’m gonna quit.”

“Can we see it?”

“Sure,” Smokey said. And he took us inside.

I’d never been inside a houseboat before, but this was cozy. I liked the curtains, the windows, the open feel. “The nice thing about the Mississippi,” Smokey told us, “is that you can moor up wherever you go. If the weather gets rough, you can tie up to an island. You know, like Huck Finn, you can just go wherever you want to go.”

As I looked out across the river, I tried to imagine what it would be like—going down the river in a houseboat like this one. Or maybe even this one. “Don’t let this river fool you,” Smokey went on. “She can be a bitch.”

“How far can this boat go?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as she wants, I guess.”

“Could she go to Dubuque?”

He gazed down the river.

“I don’t know why not.” Smokey shrugged. “Never been there.”

“Well, what about Hannibal?”

Smokey considered this as he lit another cigarette, which he gripped in his yellowed hands, then puffed between his yellowed teeth. “Never been there either.”

“Well, do you ever rent your boat to anyone? Would you ever think of that?”

Smokey smiled through stained and ragged teeth. “Don’t know why not, if the price is right.”

While Larry stared at me, dumbfounded, I handed Smokey a slip of paper and he wrote down three or four phone numbers: where he worked, where he tended to sleep, where he was supposed to live, and who might know where to find him.

As we walked back to the hotel, Larry said to me, “You aren’t seriously thinking about traveling with that guy?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. And under my breath, “Maybe I am.”

Six months later I started calling Smokey. For a while, as I planned this journey, I had my heart set on renting his boat. I talked to him a few times. First he had an accident on his Harley and was out of commission. Then he left the ammo plant where he worked the graveyard shift. After that I kept calling and calling the numbers he gave me, but, much to my husband’s relief, I never reached him again.

*   *   *

When I made my decision to do this trip, I asked Matt to put up signs at the local marinas: WRITER SEEKS RIVER PILOT WITH HOUSEBOAT TO GO DOWNSTREAM. No one answered my ad. So I flew to La Crosse and Matt and I hung out at the Pettibone Marina on a sweltering July afternoon long enough for the harbormaster to tell us to go talk to Tom Hafner. Tom, he said, lives on a houseboat called the Samantha Jean on the other side of French Island. “I don’t have his number,” the harbormaster said, “but just go over there.”

As we drove on to French Island toward Tom’s place, Matt pointed to a derelict house where a man kept his dead mother in the freezer for four years. “It wasn’t murder,” Matt assured me. “He just wanted to collect her Social Security.” We both gazed at the ramshackle house with its weedy front yard and collapsed Venetian blinds.

“I guess nobody wants to live there now. But otherwise,” he said, with a sigh that did not inspire confidence, “La Crosse is safe. Just don’t go to La Plume Island at night. That’s where the bodies tend to wash up. It’s not that people are murdered at the marinas, but for some reason, maybe it’s the current, they wash up there.”

We found the Samantha Jean moored in a grove of dark trees at the bottom of a slope and I sent Matt ahead on the wobbly dock and called out politely, “Tom? Is Tom Hafner here?”

The boat rattled and water sloshed and soon a huge, forty-something man with a graying beard, bulging biceps, and considerable girth emerged. He seemed to favor one eye, or perhaps it was one ear, more than the other, but the slant of his face gave him a vaguely ominous look. “Howdy,” Tom said, crushing my fingers in his. We sat down and the boat rocked again, then seemed to sink. Small waves hit the sides.

A mosquito bit my ankle as Tom offered us a can of diet Mountain Dew, which we declined. He popped one open as I explained that I wanted to go down the Mississippi River in a houseboat and I was looking for someone to teach me how to pilot. “After I learn how to pilot, I was thinking about renting the boat and doing the trip on my own,” I said.

Guffawing laughter poured out of Tom and shook the boat. “First, you can’t do it on your own. Oh you could putter around a little here and there, but you can’t go through the locks and dams on your own, and you’ve got about twenty of those between here and St. Louis. You need a person to steer and at least one other to hold the lines. Really you need two. You can’t tie up on your own. How’re you going to anchor by yourself? What’re you going to do if you find yourself in fog? With a barge coming upstream? You probably don’t know how to navigate, do you?”

He took a gulp of diet Dew, crushed the can, grabbed another. “You probably don’t even know how to stay on the main channel. And how’re you going to sleep on a riverbank alone? I wouldn’t let my girlfriend do that. I wouldn’t let my dog do that. Basically, forget about doing it on your own.”

I agreed to forget it.

“What you really need,” Tom went on as he popped open his second can of diet Dew, “is someone who wants to move a boat. You don’t want to hire an outfitter cuz that’s gonna cost you an arm and a leg. You know, fuel downstream and back because they gotta come home. You need to find a person who has a boat and wants to take it south. If I had a boat, I’d take you, but I don’t.…”

I looked at the boat we were standing on. “Well, what about this one?”

“Believe me, I wish I could.” He shook his head. “She’s not made for travel. Oh, she’s fine for around here, but I wouldn’t trust her in a storm. What you should do,” Tom said thoughtfully, “is talk to Jerry Nelson. Jerry was one of my first tormentors. He got me into my first boat. I’d trust him with my life. Jerry moves boats, big boats sometimes. You could just go stow away on one. Maybe just stick out your thumb and hitch a ride.”

4

THE FIRST time I was ever on a river was with my father. We had rented a boat on the Fox and my father steered. I was surprised that he knew how to pilot, but it seemed he had lived a different life before I was born, one I would rarely be privy to. My mother had packed a picnic of fried chicken and potato salad. My brother, John, and I were navigating. As we cruised the river, Dad said things like, “Mark seagull on right; mark tree on left.”

We laughed because, of course, we understood even then that you cannot mark seagulls or trees. The seagulls will fly and the trees are everywhere. But we laughed because it was funny. Because my father laughed. We were happy that day, which wasn’t always the case.

I hadn’t thought about that time on the Fox in years, but it came back to me as Matt and I pulled up to the French Island Yacht Club, where Jerry Nelson moored his boat. The docks were lined with houseboats with colorful awnings and painted trim, screened-in porches, and gas barbecue grills on the back. I admired the window boxes, where plastic flowers bloomed, and the beautifully appointed decks with vinyl furniture, where you could dine as the river drifts by. And they had nifty names like Shady Lady or Martin’s Fling, and, my personal favorite, Naughty Buoys.

We wandered up and down the wooden planks, shouting for Jerry Nelson. After a few moments a tall and fit sixty-year-old man, pale for someone who spent all his time on the water, appeared on the bow of a houseboat. He wore khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. “Are you Jerry Nelson?” I asked.

“Yes I am.” He had a quizzical smile and just stared at me. I explained that I was a writer and I wanted to take a journey down the Mississippi. “I’m looking for someone who has a boat he wants to move,” I said, parroting what Tom had told me to say. “Someone who could take me down the river.”

“Oh,” Jerry said. “I see.” He stood perfectly still as if he were frozen in space, and Matt and I were motionless beside him. He cocked his head at me in a way that I recognized from my father. I could tell that Jerry, like Tom, was hard of hearing in at least one ear.

I grew up with a deaf man. My father had scarlet fever when he was a boy. Though he could hear music, he often couldn’t hear what was being said. Restaurants were particularly difficult. For the first fifteen years of my life, until he had a surgery, he never heard footsteps, the sound of a train’s wheels when he rode on it, voices on the telephone. In order to communicate, he shouted. In the end he shouted about many things.

My father was charming, handsome, debonair, and people said he looked like Cary Grant. Greer (as in Greer Garson) and Cary, that’s how people referred to my parents. At one time he was considered to be Chicago’s most eligible Jewish bachelor. He was very much in demand, a fact that made my mother jealous, not of other women, but of his allure.

But underneath, as my brother and I knew, my father was a very angry man. Seething in ways few could imagine. Street angel, house devil, the Yiddish expression goes. His temper was reserved for those closest to him and limited to peccadilloes, the smallest of things. To lights left on and dishes in the sink. Bread not broken before it was buttered. The offenses varied, but the result was the same.

His anger was never physical. It was only words, but, as I’ve learned over the years, words can kill. The pitch of his voice would rise. I was always a little afraid of him. We all were. To this day his outbursts are incomprehensible to me. He never apologized. He never acted as if anything was wrong. He’d blow up and call us names, then make us popcorn or take us to play golf, as if nothing had happened.

Now Jerry, with his head cocked the way I’d seen my father’s a hundred times, still hadn’t moved. I could tell that he was turning something over in his mind. After what seemed like a long while, he said, “Actually, I’ve got a boat I’ve been thinking about taking south.”

“You do?” I was stunned.

He nodded. “It’s an old houseboat. I want to start wintering in Mississippi on the Tenn-Tom. I’ve got some friends down in Portage Des Sioux who said I could dock with them over the winter, then I’d move her farther south next spring.”

Jerry paused again and I took this as my cue. “So you have a boat that could make a trip like this?”

“Well, not all the way, but…” He nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“This boat?” I asked, pointing to the one we were standing on. It looked big and roomy with nice curtains and an outdoor grill. Jerry shook his head.

“Nope. Another boat.”

“Oh. Where is this boat? Can I see her?”

Another pause. “Sure,” he said, not moving. “You passed her coming down.”

He pointed to the parking lot, then slowly headed that way. I followed him up to where boats in various states of disrepair sat on trailers in dry dock. I had passed her coming down, but hadn’t noticed. That’s probably because she wasn’t much to look at. The paint was peeling from her hull in strips and it looked as if you could poke holes through the wood. A line of greenish brown muck that reminded me of pudding oozed from her baseboards. The railings were rusted away and smashed-up plastic chairs were piled on the stern. She had a FOR SALE sign taped to her back door and scribbled below it in pencil the words River Queen.

“She’s been out of the water awhile,” Jerry offered by way of explanation. Three years in fact, he said as I climbed the rickety ladder onto the deck. The windows were so dirty I couldn’t see inside so Jerry popped open the door. It was about 140 degrees in the cabin and the floor was covered with power tools and cardboard boxes filled with junk. Dust and grime coated every available surface. “So what d’ya think?”

I was thinking that I’d seen other houseboats with their window boxes and Weber grills, sun awnings and deck chairs, but my options seemed to be running out. This was truly a wreck of a vessel, but I’d already taken leave of the college where I teach, my family and friends, and, some might add, my senses in order to make this journey in September. I’d squirreled away the money I’d need. If I was to begin in the fall, I had to come up with a plan.

This seemed like a boat I could afford. Definitely within my budget. And she was only going one way. Besides, for whatever reason, perhaps a drug-induced haze, I had a vision of this little ship all white and shiny, carrying me downstream. Somewhere beneath the rust and peeling paint, I thought she had class.

“Will you fix her up? I mean, before our trip?” Jerry looked puzzled as if he wasn’t sure what I meant. “You know,” I explained. “Clean her up.”

“Well,” he said. “She could use a paint job. I’ll take care of that.”

“And maybe get some … chairs? And, urn”—I gazed at the top deck—“some shade?” He nodded in what I assumed to be agreement. “Would she make it to Memphis?” I asked, trying to hide the skepticism in my voice. She looked as if she wouldn’t make it to the first lock and dam.

“Oh, she’ll make it. She was built for Lake Michigan where the waves get high. But I’m only going to St. Louis.” The wheels in my head started to turn. I didn’t want to have to change boats in St. Louis. I wanted this boat to take me farther south.

“Well, I have to get as far as Memphis … on this leg.” I had decided that I’d go to Memphis, take a break, then finish the trip.

Jerry grumbled. “I don’t like the lower Mississippi very much. You ever looked at that part of the river? It can be boring and monotonous. You need to bring a very long book.” This coming from Jerry gave me pause.

I had looked at the lower Mississippi. If you turn the map on its side, it looks like somebody’s very agitated EKG. As Mark Twain wrote, the lower Mississippi, which begins at Cairo, Illinois, is the “crookedest” river in the world. You go almost twelve hundred miles while the crow flies six hundred. Often on the lower Mississippi you are traveling as much east and west as north and south. And many of those miles had levees that kept you from seeing much beyond the riverbank itself. “But we’ll see,” Jerry said, nodding his head. “Memphis isn’t that much farther.”

“Can you go slow?” I asked.

“The only thing I do better than slow,” Jerry said, “is stop.”

5

IN THE fall of 1965 when I was applying for college, my mother told me to go east. She said that sometimes in this life an opportunity presents itself and you have to grab it. I know when she said this she was wishing she had. Though I had never had any intention of leaving Illinois, it is what I did. I went east and never looked back.

With AAA maps marked in thick blue Magic Marker, my parents drove me to college. They rode in the front and I spent the entire ride staring at my mother’s thick red hair, rolled in a tidy French twist. She was once voted Redhead of the Week at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. There was so much luggage in the backseat that the customs officials in Windsor didn’t know I was there. We went to Niagara Falls and put on yellow rain slickers. I stood with my parents on the ledge behind the falls, water spraying our faces. Then they dropped me off in Boston, and they were gone.

Years later I opened a drawer by my father’s bedside table looking for a pen. As I began to rifle through, I came upon hearing-aid batteries, assorted Father’s Day and birthday cards, photographs of grandchildren as babies, my brother’s college graduation diploma from 1973, a Life Magazine from 1962.

Then I found the maps. They were old and folded, salvaged from the glove compartment of a car we hadn’t owned in years, but as soon as I saw the thick blue lines, I knew that these were the AAA maps with the route that had been drawn for my father. I followed the arrow up past Lake Erie and Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Albany, and finally Boston, where they dropped me off. Another arrow pointed the way back to Chicago. It followed a southern route, one I never took because I never returned, but my father probably kept them because he believed that one day he’d bring me home.

I thought I’d left the Midwest behind. Though I longed for the flatlands of my youth and wrote about them in my novels and stories, returning wasn’t in my mind. The river, like childhood, drifted into memory. Years went by. I moved from Boston to New York. My parents kept waiting for me to return, but I had my reasons, and I suppose they were good ones, for not moving home.

While the Midwest always had an allure, I was rarely back for long. A restlessness grew in me I couldn’t squelch and I began to wander the world. I moved to Mexico for a couple of years, then to Rome. I took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Beijing to Berlin. I was known by some to be a drifter, though I had an apartment in Manhattan, sometimes a job, and often a cat.

Then, in the spring of 1993, when I lived in Brooklyn, with a family of my own, I was invited to Kansas City, Missouri, to give a talk. This was not supposed to be a momentous, life-altering experience. Just a visit with an old friend, a day of sightseeing, then Sunday brunch with a book group.

Normally I like an aisle seat, but for some reason this flight was heavily booked and I got a window. I was a little crammed in by a large man sitting beside me who turned out to be Cole Younger’s great-great-grandson (of the notorious James-Younger gang). He was president of the Cole Younger Historic Society and talked my ear off about his famous relative and how many people he’d killed and banks he’d robbed.

After a while I grew weary of him. As we flew over the Midwest, I turned away. I gazed out the window and what I saw below astonished me. Though I knew the rivers were flooding that summer, I did not anticipate that the two great rivers—the Mississippi and Missouri—had converged into a giant lake. Indeed, there was barely the shape of a river below. Only huge pools of water. Farmhouses had the numbers of their insurance policies painted on the roof. Others had just written the word “Help.”

But Kansas City seemed immune. At the airport I was met by my hosts, who took me to my hotel—a charming historic building along one of the tributaries of the Missouri River. The hotel was right in the heart of downtown with a lovely river walk and a gentrified shopping area, and here the river flowed smoothly by with none of the fury and devastation I had witnessed on my flight.

That night I went to Stroud’s for fried chicken, then tried to walk it off with a stroll along the Missouri’s branch just outside my hotel. It was a clear, warm night and the walk was illumined with old gas lamps, providing a quaint view of downtown Kansas City. By ten o’clock I was tired but also restless.

I couldn’t get the river out of my mind. Finally I fell into a deep sleep, but was awakened in the middle of the night by a roar. At first I didn’t know where I was. Then I remembered—in a hotel in Kansas City. The roaring came again and it sounded like rushing water.

I had no idea where it was coming from. I walked around the room in the dark, not wanting to turn on the light as the sound grew louder. I went to the window of my hotel and pulled back the curtain. I looked down. I thought because of the darkness and my fatigue, my eyes were playing tricks on me. It did not seem possible that what I was seeing was there.

A torrent filled the street. It was black-and-white and seemed to go in several directions at once. Where the river walk had been was now a coursing flood, dark and roiling. This flood ran down the road, spilling into the side streets. It blocked, as far as I knew, my only exit from the hotel. It was as if that river had suddenly changed course, leaped over a wall, and was now just a few floors below my window.

The noise was deafening, like an engine revving over and over. And I was afraid. This was not some slow river, some “old man” river. This was a churning creature, seemingly with a mind of its own. How far would this water rise? Could I get to the roof? Could I get away? Or would I be swept away in its current? I am a strong swimmer, but I knew I would drown.

I sat at the window, unsure of what to do. The sun appeared, a pale violet in the sky, and the river disappeared from the street and slipped back into its banks, like some monster in a child’s bad dream. And I was left to wonder if that raging water had been there at all.

6

IT SEEMS if Jerry was right about anything, it’s “slow.” The morning is inching toward noon and Tom’s still trying to get the manifold installed. I’m starting to think that we are never going to leave. As I’m getting dressed behind the lime green curtain, Tom comes into the galley and grabs a handful of chocolate chip cookies and another diet Dew. I hear him crush an empty can in his bare hands.

While Jerry is on his knees with a caulking gun, trying to attach the toilet bowl to the base, Tom’s putting the starboard engine back together. Tom’s coming along was part of our “deal,” such as it was. Since I’d wanted to do this trip alone, it seemed to me that two people was more than enough. But as we negotiated our journey, Jerry told me he needed Tom. “He’s a good mechanic,” Jerry said. “And besides, Honeybun wants him along.” “Honeybun” is Jerry’s wife, Kathy.

“You mean Tom is our…”—I hesitated to say the word—“chaperone?”

“Something like that,” Jerry replied.

Now I gaze at Tom, yelling at his engines (“Come on, you lazy little girl!”) as Jerry tries to make the top of the toilet hold. “Getting there, Sir!” Tom shouts. “We’ll heat her up soon.”

“Whenever you’re ready, Tommyboy.”

“You’ll be the first to know, Sir.”

Jerry gives the toilet a shove. When he’s satisfied, he stands up and stares at it for a long time. Then he looks at me and says, “Well, hopefully it won’t leak.”

I am reluctant to christen it (and besides, we still have no water with which to flush as our water pump isn’t hooked up), so I make several more trips up to the boathouse, where the cronies sit, taking this all in. I pause, gazing down at the River Queen. Her polished trim glistens in the sun.

In the six weeks since we made our “agreement,” which consisted of a handshake and some vague financial arrangements, Jerry and I shared many phone calls in which he’d tell me how the paint job was coming, how they’d gotten the bimini shade up on the flybridge. He’d refurbished the engines and secured the davits for the aft transom, which was to hold the dinghy. In most of these conversations I had no idea what he was talking about.

Then a week ago Jerry phoned to say they’d launched her. “You mean she’s in the water?” I asked, ebullient.

He paused as he tended to do. “Not ‘in the water,’ Mary. We like to say ‘on the water.’ It’s better if a boat’s on it than in it. Do you catch my drift?”

Yesterday when I arrived, the River Queen was floating on the water, exactly as I’d imagined her, all white and shiny. Her bimini shade was up and the captain’s wheel on the flybridge was a brassy brown. She looked shipshape to me. But as I came on board, lugging my duffels and suitcases and backpack with computer and binoculars and yoga mat and Eddie Bauer drinking mug and waterproof matches and all-weather gear, the orange life jacket circa 1950 I borrowed from a neighbor at the last minute, sticks of half-skim mozzarella cheese and twelve individual servings of tuna fish I tossed in “just in case,” I saw that things weren’t as they seemed.

The deck was a mess of muddy footprints. Inside the cabin was still filled with junk, much of it appearing to be the same I’d first seen. All the surfaces were covered with cables, power tools, boxes of screws and bolts. My “bed” was buried beneath tarps and drills and a blown-up air mattress. A layer of grime, which I correctly believed to be axle grease, was everywhere. The round hollow of a toilet seat lay on the floor. Outside Tom stood, holding engine parts in his blackened hands.

I tried to put on a good face, but I was despondent. I had no idea how this boat would come together in any way in the next twelve hours, let alone be the cozy little houseboat I’d envisioned myself traveling on. But somehow all the clanging and banging have led to something and just before noon, when I was ready to despair, Tom gives a shout. “We’re ready to rock ’n’ roll!”

“Holy buttocks,” Jerry quips. And then in a more serious captain’s voice: “Are there any unauthorized personnel on board?” Jerry asks.

“Just Mary,” Tom says with his big guffaw.

“Ha ha,” I say as I start to untie the lines. I’m fumbling with the ropes when a man approaches.

“I’ll take care of that,” he says. His name is Dave and he’s just appeared on the dock. With a seaman’s expertise and a few deft strokes, Dave unloops the line from the cleats and hands it to me as if I know what to do with it. “Well, Jerry,” he says as we proceed to start our engines, “good luck.”

And the laconic Jerry replies, “Thanks,” as he takes the line out of my hands and ties it to the bow. Now Dave starts to push us away from the dock. It appears as if we really are leaving.

“Jerry!” Tom shouts. “I need you to fire them up! Start with a half throttle, okay?”

“Roger,” Jerry says.

“Clear!” Tom yells.

“Contact.” There is a sputter, then nothing. We begin again, same routine. Another “clear!” “contact.” Finally there is a roar, like a great beast waking, a fart of exhaust that fills the cabin and my sleeping nook. I head to the back to close the doors.

“Don’t worry about that!” Jerry shouts. “The fumes will go out once we’re under way. Clear!” Jerry yells.

“Contact.” Now the engines scream to a start. Some of the cronies have come onto the dock with wry smiles. We still have no water, electricity, working toilet, fridge, screens except at the helm, whistle, siren, night-light, or shower, but we appear for now to have two engines. Basically we are a hull, traveling downstream. The cronies and a few extras give us a shove, then start waving as we putter, trailing a plume of smoke and a few backfires, onto the river.

I wave back. We are on the Black, which in a few miles will feed into the Mississippi, and I feel the tug. I am like some feckless explorer setting off to find the New World. I stand at the bow, waving frantically, a mad, wild figurehead. And it is clear to everyone, especially to me, that I have no idea what I am doing.

Tom takes over the wheel on the flybridge and Jerry says he’s coming up too. I decide to join them. I go through the cabin to pick up my White Sox cap on my bed. Thrilled to be sailing, I spring out the aft door and smash my head on the steel frame. “Oh-oh,” Jerry says as I exit, rubbing my skull. “Low clearance.”

*   *   *

On the flybridge Tom’s got Samantha Jean sitting in his lap. She growls when she sees me coming and Tom tucks her into the black bomber jacket, covered in dog hair, that takes up the only available plastic chair. “That’s her jacket,” he tells me. “Don’t ever touch that jacket.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t think of it.” Samantha Jean gazes up at me with her rheumy eyes.

“I mean, she wouldn’t bite you or anything, but she’d make a big noise.”

“No problem,” I say.

It is a warm day in late summer as we head south. Jerry’s come topside as well and he takes the wheel as we approach a railroad bridge. He scrunches up his face, surveying it. Then shakes his head. “Hey, Tommy, you think I’m gonna make it?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, but Jerry ignores me.

“You’ll clear her,” Tom says, “but we should take down the bimini.” Quickly we peel back the bimini shade. “You got her.” He reaches up and touches the bridge with his fingertips.

Jerry whistles through his teeth. “Way to go, Tommy.”

Tom and Jerry have known each other for years. They have worked together. Tom, whose mother died when he was nine and father when he was seventeen, looks up to Jerry as a father. I am the third wheel. Or fourth if you include Samantha Jean.

We approach the Xcel Energy generating plant, where an old pal of Jerry’s has been waiting since seven a.m. to take our picture. As he comes out of a small outdoor office with his camera, Tom pretends to moon him and we’re off.

After a few moments Jerry says, “You take her above, Tom. I’m going below.” Tom slips into the captain’s chair, dog in his lap, happy as a clam.

“Is there anything I can do?” I ask.

They both look at me and shrug, wondering what there is I could possibly do. “No,” Jerry says, “you can just relax.” But I don’t want to relax. I want to be busy. I don’t want to be a passenger; I want to be part of the crew. On the other hand we’ve only been sailing for three minutes and I have no idea what there is to do.

I climb below and settle into a seat at the bow. I am squinting in the afternoon sun, the wind at my face as the Black merges with the Mississippi. Here the river is wide and rolling, its surface a blue gray sea. To my right is Minnesota with its hilly, mountainous rises. On my left, Wisconsin is flat, not from glaciers, Jerry tells me; the river just carved this gully for itself.

As we enter the main channel, I begin to weep. It is inexplicable to me because I haven’t cried in weeks. But now I weep for my father, who can’t see this, and my daughter, who has left home. I cry because I have no idea why I am here or what I am doing. I am sailing into a great unknown with strangers. I do not know what awaits me, and I weep for those times that will never return.

I am crying as Jerry taps on the glass. I pull my White Sox cap down low so he can’t see my eyes. “A pair of bald eagles,” he says, pointing. “At three o’clock.” At first I’m not sure what he means. Are a couple of eagles due to arrive in the afternoon? But then I understand this is seaman’s talk.

The sky becomes a cosmic watch, time emblazoned there. Jerry hands me my binoculars. High above I see the eagles, circling one another, dancing in the sky.