ISLANDS

8

IN THE 1830s a boy named John Banvard left New York and set out for the West. His father had recently died and Banvard, who was just fifteen, was forced to seek his fortune on his own. At that time the frontier wasn’t Wyoming or California; it was the Mississippi River. Despite Lewis and Clark’s journey to the sea thirty years before, anything beyond the river was still considered mysterious, uncertain, and wild.

In Kentucky, Banvard became an itinerant performer, impresario, set designer, and painter. Then, as a young man, for two years he floated in solitude down the river on a raft, sketching the eastern bank from St. Louis to New Orleans. When he returned, he built a barn and put his renderings of log cabins and steamboats, cottonwoods and river town life on an enormous canvas, which he mounted on rollers.

As the rollers turned, Banvard recounted his often tall tales of pirates and deprivation and the characters he encountered. With his “Three Mile” painting, as it came to be known, he captivated audiences from the rough-hewn crew of sailors in Louisville to Queen Victoria. For a time his panoramic vision made him the richest, most famous artist in the world.

People came night after night. After the success of the eastern bank, he returned to the river and painted the western bank. He added music and light, creating the world’s first multimedia show. He traveled all over the world, spinning stories of the river.

With the invention of the motion picture camera, Banvard’s fortunes changed, and in time his panoramas were forgotten. He was buried in a pauper’s grave, and his paintings, except for a few small panels, were lost forever, though some are believed to be used in the insulation of old houses in Watertown, South Dakota, where he lived his final years.

Ever since I read about Banvard, I wondered what made him so taken with the river. Was it the death of his father? Or just the need to make his way in the world? Was it escape or necessity? Or a bit of both? In the end I came to think of it as his obsession—one I am trying to understand. Just as I’m trying to understand my own. I imagine Banvard on his raft, drawing the river, making up his tales. Perhaps traveling not all that much slower than we are.

*   *   *

“The first rule of boating,” Jerry says, is “keep your nose into the current and the wind.” It’s after the storm and I’m standing next to him at the helm as the lecture begins.

“What’s the second rule?” I ask.

“Don’t forget the first rule,” he says, his voice, as always, bone dry. He explains that in a storm you go into the swells nose first. “You don’t want to go straight into the trough. Don’t let the boat broach,” he tells me, making a flipping movement with his hands, which I assume to be a broach. “You don’t want that to happen.”

He’s got his eyes on the horizon and he’s moving the wheel with his thumbs. “You want to keep the rudder indicator at zero, or as close to it as you can,” he says, pointing to a round instrument with a needle that moves to either side of zero. “You know, even keel. Just move the wheel easily along. Point her toward your farthest buoy. Here,” he says, not even looking my way, “you try.”

“Now?”

“Now’s as good a time as any.” Jerry steps aside and nervously I take the wheel. I’m looking at the rudder indicator as I move to the right or left, but I’m having trouble keeping it at zero. For whatever reason the boat seems to be steering me. It’s a little like walking a dog that weighs a thousand times more than you do. Heel, heel, I want to say. I am surprised at the tug of the river, at how hard it is to hold a straight line.

“Okay,” Tom says, “now she wants to go this way, but don’t let her. Don’t let her get away from you.”

“You want to keep a straight course between your buoys,” Jerry tells me. “You see the buoys? Set your bow toward a distant buoy.” I’m attempting to see the buoys and hold a straight course and not go crashing into the riverbank. But I was never very good at patting my head, rubbing my tummy, while jumping up and down on one foot at the same time either. “Keep your eyes on the horizon,” he tells me.

Jerry takes a clothespin and clips it on to the windshield. “Here,” he says. “Aim your nose at this.”

I try, but it’s useless. My eyes seem to be crossing and the clothespin is more a distraction than anything else. “Head for that red buoy,” Jerry says, “then straighten her out.” I keep trying to hold the rudder indicator at zero and aim for the red, but I can’t seem able to do the two things at once.

“You see that?” Jerry says, pointing at the blue gray surface of the river. I see nothing. “Over there where the water ripples. Those lines tell you there’s something there.…” I sigh because to me the water ripples everywhere. “That’s a wing dam. You wanta watch out for that.”

I am watching for something I cannot see and I do not even know what it is. I have no idea how to read the surface in order to know what lies beneath. This is what Captain Horace Bixby once tried to teach a young and apparently not very swift cub pilot named Samuel Clemens. “You only learn the shape of the river,” Bixby in Life on the Mississippi warns a disbelieving Clemens, who will soon take his pseudonym from the river and become Mark Twain, “and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that’s in your head, never mind the one that’s before your eyes.”

I don’t have any river in my head yet. I hardly have it in front of my eyes. I cannot tell a wing dam, whatever that is, from the normal flow. A deadhead could leap up and grab our rudder and I wouldn’t know. I’m a person who tends to see mirages anyway. But here mirages are everywhere. The surface seems to ripple in the same way no matter what, unless the wind has raised it out of its bed. But for the next half hour I manage to stay between the red and green buoys, avoid a few logs drifting by, and not rip the bottom out of our hull.

The river is not the same as when Twain was a cub. Now there are the locks and dams. The Army Corps of Engineers manages and dredges the main channel and the corps has provided fairly accurate navigational maps. But this does not mean we can’t run aground or ruin our keel on what we do not see. We can still get caught on a snag or battered in the shoals.

Take the main channel. If I look at the maps and follow the buoys and daymarkers, I should pretty much be able to stay within the channel. Apparently I cannot. There are times when the river turns into a maze of competing rivulets, when what looks as if it should be the main channel is really a poorly dredged chute. I’ve come to such a spot where there appear to be several ways to go. “Look for your buoys,” Jerry says.

To my right the river is vast, but the buoys appear to the left down a narrower chute. “But this is where it’s wide.”

Jerry shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. That’s the main channel. That’s where it’s dredged.” He points to an instrument. “This is your depth finder. We’ve got a draft of 3.5 feet. I’d like twice that beneath us.”

As we approach Lock and Dam 9, Jerry takes over and Tom gives me a high five. “You did great,” he says, nearly breaking my hand. “Except you covered about five river miles in ten.”

“What do you mean by that?”

And he makes a zigzagging motion with his hand.

*   *   *

As we enter Lock and Dam 9, it’s pouring again. A dark cloud has snuck above us, the remnants of our earlier storm, but the green light is a go and we breeze in. We are the only craft and have the lock to ourselves. It seems as if the lockmaster, who putters up to us on a little yellow golfcart in matching yellow rain gear, has little to do. There’s no traffic here.

I’m in my flip-flops and my New York City Marathon rain slicker, which was left at our house by a visitor years ago. Despite the rain, I remain excited as I hold the lines in my blue plastic gloves. As our boat descends and the water rushes out of the lock, I cling to my rope and push us off the wall.

My assignment this time is to prevent the bent-over satellite dish from smashing into the cement lock wall as we descend the ten-foot drop in the lock. But the rain is cascading and the deck is slippery and I’m having trouble getting a grip. It is actually not that easy to keep the dish from crashing into the wall. Jerry’s very nervous about this. And I’m getting soaked. The wind blasts under my slicker, threatening to raise me like a dandelion spore. I improvise and slip beneath the satellite dish, which provides a kind of umbrella as I keep my blue-gloved fingers pressed to the wall.

Tom, who thinks this is very clever, gives me a thumbs-up.

“You’re going to teach me how to have fun again, aren’t you, Mary?”

I am surprised by this comment. It seems as if Tom is nothing but fun. “I thought you were going to teach me!” I call back.

As we sail out of the lock and dam, we leave the storm behind. There is demarcation in the sky where the bad weather ends. Blackness, then light. Again it strikes me as almost a special effect, an almost unnatural line. I have never seen the weather so clearly defined. Suddenly it is a warm evening, without a cloud or trace of storm as we enter the east channel. “That’s Scrogum Island on port side,” Jerry says.

“Say what?” Tom laughs.

“Scrogum, Tom. Not Scrotum.”

9

TIME ON the river is a relative thing. Not like any other kind of time. We’re traveling at about eight miles per hour and three of those come from the river’s natural flow. Your average marathoner can do better than that. At this speed I can see the underside of a bird’s wing. The eyes of a disenchanted woman, hanging laundry up to dry. Children taunting a mongrel at the river’s edge. The bait, wiggling on a fisherman’s pole. The grimace of an old man, his life behind him now. It’s more poem than story, but the long, narrative kind.

River time, as far as I can tell from my now brief experience, bears no resemblance to land time. When you’re driving down the highway, you can say, well, if I’m driving sixty miles per hour and I’ve got one hundred and eighty miles to go, I’ll be there in three hours. You can calculate, give someone an ETA.

But here you can’t really account for time at all. A boater might tell you it takes two hours to get from Hannibal, Missouri, to Rockport, Illinois, which is a stretch of fifteen river miles or so, but if you’ve got a lock and dam in there, you might luck out and float through in ten minutes, or, if there’s a double barge in front of you, two hours. Or four. You might do better tying up for the night. It’s anyone’s guess.

Given our late start, two locks and dams, one tornado, and me weaving across the river for an hour, we did pretty well. We traveled on our first day sixty-six miles in about eight hours. Jerry says there is a dock at St. Feriole Island, where we can spend the night, and, after a long day, I am ready for dry land.

We arrive at this little “courtesy” municipal dock, an appendage to an old 1930s levee, where Jerry says we’ll tie up. “Really?” I ask. “Are we allowed?” I’m not expecting a red carpet and a marching band, but I thought we might be pulling into a marina with lights. And possibly a shower.

“Well, if we aren’t, someone will let us know,” Jerry says with a wave of his hand.

“We’ll get a parking ticket,” Tom quips.

“Besides if we get away early enough, they won’t come and charge longside.” This feels a little dicey to me, but then I’m a person who is uncomfortable with library fines. I mumble something, but Jerry ignores me. He’s annoyed because a fishing boat has tied up in the middle of the dock, but after some maneuvering, we sidle alongside. It turns out to be a very peaceful place with just the gentle ripple of water and wind. Two kids fish off the pier.

Jerry pauses to admire the levee, an old stone wall that’s fifty years old. “Don’t make’m like that anymore,” he says. It is our first mooring, and, as we secure our lines, Tom executes a fancy looping motion with the rope. He makes circles with his fingers as he pulls the line around like some cowboy doing lariat tricks. He gives a tug on the knot and practically lifts the boat out of the water. “That should hold,” he says.

“How’d you do that?” I ask, but he just gives a shrug. Then he picks up the rope and does it again around my ankle. “Easy,” he says, giving my leg a yank. The boys want to clean up, which in this case means take bottled water and splash it on their faces. But I want terra firma under my feet. Just eight hours on the river and I’m wobbly as a colt.

In the dusk I cut across a small park, illumined with amber lights and dotted with picnic tables, facing the river. A cool breeze blows as I scamper across the railroad tracks and head to The Depot, which was once the old railroad station and now, after all the floods, is the only restaurant in town.

“Hotel California” is playing. I take a table near the back and wait for the boys. Tom’s gone to walk Samantha, and Jerry says he’s going to get gussied up. There’s a pool table, and several dead animals hanging from the wall. There’s also a female bartender and four people at the bar. A woman with bleached blond hair, sitting at the bar, is laughing loudly, and a few moments later when Tom and Jerry arrive she comes over to take our order.

“So what’ll you have…?” the blond woman asks.

Jerry asks what’s on draft and Tom orders his usual—a diet Dew. I’m contemplating a vodka tonic when she says, “You want the same thing as your husband?” pointing to Jerry.

“That’s not my husband,” I say as Tom gives a big cough under his breath. Jerry’s got his face buried in the menu.

“I’m hungry,” I say and they both agree. “I’ll have a cheeseburger, medium rare.”

Tom pipes in. “I’ll have two but cook ’em well.…” He gazes at me sheepishly because he knows I’m paying for dinner, which is part of our agreement. “One’s for Sam.”

The blond woman stares at us, perplexed. “Oh, I don’t work here,” she explains, slurring her words. “I just thought you guys looked like you needed a drink.”

Johnny Cash comes on with “I Walk the Line” as our real waitress—a large woman in a very small miniskirt—comes to take our actual order. Neither Tom nor Jerry can bring themselves to look at her. Afterward Tom says, “That was the biggest miniskirt in the world.” Jerry laughs his head off. I grimace and look away as the drunken woman, who is now dancing with a man at the bar, gives me a wave.

Our burgers arrive. They are pretty tasteless and Jerry makes a face. “Tastes like your foot’s asleep,” I say and they howl.

“Did you make that up, Mary?” Jerry asks.

“No, my dad. He said things like that all the time. If he didn’t like something, he’d say it tastes like the bottom of an owl’s foot.”

“The bottom of an owl’s foot. Well, that’s a hoot.” Tom groans and Jerry goes on, not skipping a beat. “Where’d that come from?”

I shrug. I actually think it is a Yiddish expression, but I don’t want to say so. I have not told them that I am Jewish. We haven’t discussed our politics. This is the heartland after all and some things may be better left unsaid. “Oh, my dad. He always said things like that.”

“Musta been a funny guy.”

“Yeah,” I nod, thinking of my father’s dry sense of humor. “You know, he lived along the river in the 1920s. In Hannibal, Missouri, and Quincy, Illinois.”

They nod, chomping on their burgers. We have thus far exchanged little personal information and it is the first time I have mentioned my father. “He said he spent time on an island somewhere in between. On a farm.”

Jerry nods, picking at his fries. “I see.”

Just before I was to leave on this journey, I was going through my sets of stacked drawers. I have a dozen of these and each one is labeled for something I am doing. I toss ideas and notes into them. Scribblings on cocktail napkins or yellow pads. Story jottings. One is labeled “Mississippi” and in this drawer I found road maps, dining information. How to rent a paddleboat. News stories from the 1993 floods. Maps, scribblings, articles I’ve clipped for one reason or another. Some are obscure to me even now. Between “Prairie Islands on the Missouri” and “Mormon Town Flourishes in Illinois,” I found a crumpled sheet of yellow paper. I opened it and read what I knew was my father’s shaky hand.

Last spring I asked him to tell me what he could about the river and the places he’d lived as a young man. He was over 102 years old, but he still had his smarts. The more I thought about the river, the more I wanted to ask him. I was sitting, poised with yellow pad and pencil, but he was nodding off to sleep and gave me a wave. I went on an errand and when I returned, I found he’d scribbled something down.

It read, “We had a structural engineer who had twenty acres in the middle of the river. He had a couple dozen cows and milked them every day. They canned and sold the milk unpasteurized to drink. Wife and son ran the farm. This was seventy years ago. We used to boat in summer and sled in winter to cross the river to his farm.”

That was all. I had many more things I wanted to ask him. Where is this island? Who owns it now? Does it have a name? But he was sleeping when I returned and I had places to go. I had to leave. I kissed his forehead, combed back his hair. And I never saw him again.

“Good fries,” Tom says.

“My dad’s part of the reason why I’ve come on this trip,” I tell them. They both nod, then push their plates away.

“Let’s get some shut-eye,” Tom says.

“Do you want to shoot a round of pool?” I ask. I’m not sure I really want to shoot pool, but I’m not ready to return to the boat either. But they decline.

“Been a long day,” Jerry says.

We make our way back to the boat. The amber lights glow along the walk across the railroad tracks, through the grove of trees and picnic tables, back to the river. A crescent moon casts its reflection on the slow-moving water of the east channel.

It is our first night together. I wait for Jerry to pull his bed out, but he just lies down on the narrow sofa in his sleeping bag at the helm. Tom has staked out a place on the flybridge under the stars. Once on his air mattress he puts on his headphones, tucks Samantha Jean in (“She’s my bed warmer,” he says), and goes to sleep.

I draw the lime green curtain, which is all that separates me from these men. It is the only privacy and safety I have in the world right now and it is flimsy to the touch. Since we are bedding down, I go to the bathroom. I use bottled water to wash, brush my teeth, and flush. When I am finished, I can’t open the door. It budges about an inch, but that’s all.

I struggle, then try to figure out what is wrong. It seems that the shower door has come ajar just enough so that I am unable to open the bathroom door. The two doors have become locked in some kind of triangulated death grip.

I start to call. “Jerry,” I say softly. Then louder. I know he is hard of hearing and if he is sleeping on his good ear, he won’t hear me. I know this because, as a girl, I used to cry out to my father in the night and he never heard me either. I call again, more loudly now. “Jerry!”

Then I begin to bang. Tom is also deaf in one ear and, if he has his headphones on, which he does, he won’t hear me at all. I bang and bang. Then I start to shout. Samantha must hear me because she barks and like a chain reaction that wakes Tom, who shouts to Jerry. “What is it?” Jerry calls out, startled.

“I’m stuck in the bathroom.”

“Where are you?”

“The bathroom!” I scream.

He shuffles over and starts fiddling with the doors that have become entwined. “Hmm,” he says, “this could be a problem.”

“It is a problem,” I tell him, but he doesn’t reply. He unhinges the stuck doors, slams the shower door closed, and without a word turns back toward his couch, stretches out, and goes to sleep.

I pull back my curtain, grateful to that little dog who saved me from spending the night in the head. After reading for a few moments by the light of a flashlight, I lie there, adrift on the river, aching for sleep. My heart beats like a hummingbird’s in my chest. I gulp down an anxiety pill and wait for it to work.

What did Emily Dickinson write? “Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul.” Inside of me it feels as if it is trying to fly away. Shallow breathing is fear, I’ve heard my yoga teacher say. For months I’ve woken with this pounding of my heart. At home I take my husband’s hand and place it on my chest. I make him keep it there until the racing stops.

But some nights if he is tired, I don’t want to wake him. I worry I’m becoming a burden. I get up and walk around. When I am this way, I can’t read or think or write or answer mail. I’ll go to the blue chair in our kitchen by the window. This chair was my father’s. He sat and read in it all the time. He watched the news. When he moved from Chicago to Milwaukee, he sent it to me. I can sit in it for hours and just stare outside. I’ve watched the sun come up in that chair.

10

MY FATHER was living in Sharon, Pennsylvania, when a gypsy predicted his fate. He was dating a “shiksa,” a woman he knew he’d never marry, and she had a nine-year-old daughter. He told me once that he was most fond of the little girl. The woman wanted my father to go with her to a soothsayer to have her fortune told. She persuaded my father to take her, perhaps hoping the soothsayer would tell my father to marry her. He agreed to drive her, but said he wouldn’t go inside.

He drove this woman to a neighborhood of tenements and slums and waited in the car. The woman went in and a few minutes later she emerged, distraught. “She wants to see you,” the woman said. Reluctantly my father went in.

The fortune-teller was a large black woman and she told my father that he would receive a letter from someone he loved. In that letter would be a request and my father would accept the offer. He would return to Chicago. He would meet a woman, marry her, have two children, and live near a lake. She also told my father that she’d had nothing to say to the woman who had brought him here. That nothing in her life was ever going to change.

A week later my father received a letter from his brother, Sidney, whose hospital robe I still wear. The letter told him that his architectural business was failing and begged my father to return to the Midwest and become partners with him. My father accepted and left the woman and her nine-year-old daughter behind.

After Christmas my Aunt Ruth, who was married to Sidney, went to Saks Fifth Avenue to return a peach-colored nightgown her husband had given her for the holidays.

The woman who would become my mother was selling lingerie. I picture her helping women pull up corsets, slip heavy breasts into industrial-strength bras. I imagine her telling a bride-to-be that a particular nightie will do the trick. My mother had studied fashion design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a scholarship after a designer from Saks recognized her talent but had to drop out during the Depression when her father wouldn’t give her the nickel she needed for bus fare.

My mother truly had an artist’s flair. She could do anything with her hands. I recall her quilting my bedspreads late into the night. She spent seven years on these. Or painting a portrait of a woman—half her face black and the rest of it blue. She explained to me that the black was a shadow. Just a few years ago we went to an exhibit of Picasso portraits at the Museum of Modern Art. My mother swept through the gallery. “Now that one, you see, it’s very good.” She pointed to a charcoal sketch. “He was very free when he did that. He didn’t overthink it.” A small crowd soon gathered around us. They thought my mother was a guide of some kind.

But she never finished school. She returned to Saks and had been selling lingerie ever since. And now a woman she seemed to recognize came in to return a peach-colored nightgown. They had gone to grammar school together, but hadn’t seen one another in twenty years. “My brother-in-law has just moved back into town,” my Aunt Ruth said. “Shall I give him your number?”

It took a while for my father to call. When he finally did, he said, “I was going through my pants before I sent them to the cleaner and I found your number.” Hardly the most romantic opener, and perhaps it should have been a sign, but my mother was glad he called. A week later they went on their first date. My mother was not a young woman, in her thirties, living at home with my grandmother, her brother-in-law and sister. She had been waiting for a long time for her life to begin. And he was a forty-four-year-old bachelor. My mother wondered at first if something wasn’t wrong with him.

Before leaving on her date, she told my grandmother, “If I don’t like him, I’ll be home by ten.” At a quarter to ten my father told her he was tired and took her home. When she walked in at ten o’clock, my grandmother said, “Oh, you didn’t like him.”

“I’m going to marry him,” my mother replied.

He called her on Sunday from a skating rink and asked if she liked to skate. She loved to skate, she said. In truth she had skated only once before in her life, but she went down to the rink anyway and sprained her ankle. The following weekend he took her to dinner and she ate soft-shell crabs. When she vomited all the way home, she was sure she’d never hear from him again.

He didn’t call the next day, and she knew it was over. She’d spend every New Year’s Eve for the rest of her life sitting with her sister and brother-in-law, childless as they were, embittered and alone. Then in the evening the phone rang and my father said, “I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier, but I thought you’d need to rest.”

He offered to drive her to work on Monday morning and she accepted. When he picked her up, my grandfather sat in the front seat. Every morning after that my father picked her up with his father in front. Then one Friday night he invited her home to dinner. My mother told me that Grandma Morris didn’t care if she was a two-headed monster with green hair. She was thrilled that “Sonny” was bringing a girl home. In her more bitter moments my mother would quip that she was the only Russian Jewish woman my father had met who could “pass” among his fancy German Jewish friends.

The following Monday when my father picked her up, his father got out of the car and moved into the backseat. They didn’t really know each other. I’m sure if they had, there would have been second thoughts, but they were married six weeks later. And I was born thirteen months to the day after that. They had another child and, as the soothsayer predicted, built a house near the shores of Lake Michigan.

11

IT IS odd to move through the world without caffeine. It produces in me a strange, sleepwalking state, as if I’m wrapped in gauze. Though I’m feeling rather Zenlike the next morning as I rise. I am not sure when I was last coffee-free. Perhaps in eighth grade. I am used to waking to the smell of dark beans brewing, the promise of an infusion to start the day.

But as I rise the next morning there is none to be had. Certainly not on board. We still can’t boil water and I’m sure the people who run The Depot are recovering from the night before. I pad onto the deck where Jerry is staring at the newspaper from two days before. “Good morning, Mary,” he says.

I give him a nod, then grab a water bottle from our cooler, which is now filled with floating shards of ice like an Arctic spring. In the head I pop my prescribed medications. I pee into my jar and brush my teeth with bottled water. Then, leaving Jerry muttering about yesterday’s news and Tom nestled topside on his air mattress, cooing sweet talk to Samantha Jean, I’m off.

It is a pleasant morning after the storm as I cut across the park, and for the moment I have no regrets. Albeit drugged, I made it through the night. I wasn’t raped or killed. The boys perpetrated no crimes against me as far as I could tell. To my complete surprise I slept rather well and enjoyed the gentle rocking of the river, which I found preferable to an electric storm.

There is a crispness in the air. A hint of fall. It’s the kind of midwestern morning I remember. A gentle breeze blows as I wander past a grove of trees on St. Feriole Island. From the plaques that line this island I learn that this was once an important gathering place for French-Canadian fur traders and Native trappers. It was inhabited until 1965 when floodwaters crested at 25.38 feet and inundated the island with more than five feet of water. One hundred families were moved inland under the federal relocation program. Now the Mississippi continues to flood periodically (in 2001 the island experienced a double crest flood with a height of 23.75 feet), and St. Feriole Island has become a park.

I pause in the grove where I take in deep breaths. It seems that a tornado does wonders for the quality of the air. I walk on, stopping to explore a large yellow brick building, abandoned and gutted, which was an elegant old hotel for decades. In its next incarnation it became a slaughterhouse owned by Armour until it was closed in 1965. I gaze into its gutted lobby, trying to imagine animals, bludgeoned to death in this vast, hollow space. I move on. Just beyond the grove and across the tracks sits the Villa Louis—“the house on the mound.” The Villa Louis is an elegant old home that has in recent years been refurbished and returned to its former splendor. I was hoping to visit, but it’s just past eight and a sign informs me that the villa doesn’t open until ten, at which time Jerry wants to sail. I’ve brought my journal and my watercolors with me and I am content to plant myself on a stone block in front of the villa and scribble and paint for an hour or so.

I have kept these journals for years—as I wandered the dusty streets and marketplaces of Central America, as I traveled across Siberia. I wrote in them when I lived in Paris and when I was under house arrest in Havana. On the inside cover I always write “Reward,” but I have never lost one, though once in Spain a young man raced off a train to give a journal back to me and I kissed his hand. And on the Vltava in Prague a boat vendor accepted one as collateral so my daughter and I could rent a pedalboat.

Mainly these are working journals, but inside of them I also keep a diary and paint. I cut and paste boarding passes, snapshots, local flora. What happens around me, what is said. The bizarre, the inane, the weather, the everyday. I write it all down here. I jot in the margins and paint the pages in the colors of my moods.

My first journal was a gift from my father. He gave it to me on September 12, 1967, before I sailed to France. This was thirty-eight years to the day before I left on this journey. He had my name embossed in gold and inside he wrote, among other things, “This book with its blank pages is for you to bring to life.”

My father never visited me that year. He was loathe to travel beyond the safe confines of his world as he defined it. At the airport his eyes filled with tears as he rushed back to his car and waved good-bye. Inside the journal he gave me I wrote of revolution. I hung out in the Latin Quarter with French students, determined to overthrow the state. When May 1968 began I found myself at the barricades, embracing the struggle. My last words in that journal were “Shit on them all.” It was my rebellious year.

My daughter, Kate, purchased for me the journal I am using now. She bought it when we were in Florence just weeks before I was to begin this Mississippi journey and Kate was heading off to college. We had always been close. In baby pictures you can’t tell us apart. We love olives, chocolate, and burned onions. I don’t know anyone else who loves these three things. And now she was leaving. Who would borrow my silver belt, my cashmere shells? With whom would I play Balderdash or work out at the gym?

But, despite our similarities, Kate and I had our issues. She was pulling away and I was desperate to hold on. I was petrified of her leaving and that made her all the more ready to go. We quarreled about this over the years as I think many mothers and daughters do. But I left my parents’ home and never went back. I assumed she would too.

I feared this trip to Florence would be our last hurrah. We had ambitious plans for our time together, but wound up spending most of our afternoons hanging out at a café in the Piazza della Republica. One morning I spilled espresso all over my journal and was upset. The pages turned wrinkled and brown.

Later we went to see an exhibit of drawings by Michelangelo. On the wall were framed pages of brown manuscript with drawings and writings in Michelangelo’s own hand. “What’s this?” I asked my daughter.

“Oh, just some other artist’s coffee-stained journal,” she replied. We went into a paper store and Kate bought me a new journal for my river voyage. “To my favorite traveler,” she inscribed on the inside cover. “You make everything beautiful.” On one of its creamy pages I begin to sketch. I’m not very good at this, but I enjoy passing the time. I’m trying to draw the villa. I do landscapes, still lifes, sleeping cats. I almost never paint when I’m at home, but I’ve done this for years when I’m on the road.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been here when a car pulls up and a man and a woman get out. They are nicely dressed, which I am not, and they look at me and smile. “What’re you up to?” the man says.

I’m embarrassed now. “Oh, I just like the building.”

He glances at my painting and nods approvingly. “Well, do you know what you’re sitting on?”

“Oh, no, I don’t.” I jump up, thinking that the cement block I’m seated on is some kind of heirloom.

“You see,” he goes on, “the carriages would pull up next to this stone block so that the ladies wouldn’t have to show their ankles when they stepped down. It was considered indiscreet. Come back later. You can take a tour.”

“Oh, I’d love a tour. It looks so beautiful. But I’m on a boat and we’re only here for a short while. We have to sail.” Even as I say this, I’m aware that “sail” isn’t the right word, but how do I call what we do? Float, putter, drift? Careen? Nothing seems quite right.

“Oh, yeah? Where are you sailing?”

“Down the Mississippi,” I tell them. “I’m writing a book about it.”

They seem intrigued. “Well,” the man says, “we’re expecting the wives of the governors of Illinois and Iowa at ten, but I think we could arrange a special tour for you right now, don’t you think, Linda?” He turns to the woman.

“I don’t see why not,” she says. And he unlocks the gate and I follow them inside. They open the doors to the villa and Linda Travis leads me around. We walk into the entryway with its chandelier and blue-papered walls as Linda lovingly shows me the grain painting of the woodwork, the Lincrusta walls, the brocatelle curtains.

She explains how this house came of age during the arts and crafts movement and also during the time of Frank Lloyd Wright. Both Wright and William Morris took a more simplified and organic approach to decor. Ninety percent of the house has been returned to its original form. Linda shares with me the resurrection of this private house into a public museum, complete with the family portraits, dolls, original silver and crystal, largely because family members returned their inherited possessions for the restoration of their ancestral home.

But I am more taken with the story of its former owners, Nina and Louis Dousman, a handsome, stylish St. Louis couple. Louis Dousman built the Villa Louis and they lived here with their five children. They were a loving family until Louis died suddenly of what appears to have been appendicitis at the age of thirty-seven. Nina was then advised to sell many of the assets, including Louis’s beloved racehorses. Nina married again and moved to New York. But after the failure of that marriage, she returned to St. Feriole Island to raise her children at the Villa Louis.

This house is also a story of the river and its changing fortunes, for Villa Louis had its heyday during the time of steamboats and fur trading. Prairie du Chien, the mainland city that lays claim to this island, was once a major trade center. But as the river economy shifted, the city came to depend more on farming and the local industries of clam fishing, button manufacturing, and a woolen mill. As fortunes fell, so did those of the Dousman family, and eventually they left this island behind.

As Linda Travis guides me, I linger at the cots where children slept. The bed where Nina dreamed alone. I wander slowly through the rooms where servants lived. I gaze at the kitchen where butter was churned. The garden with its artesian fountain. The cook’s garden with its heirloom bulbs. I am consumed by the fate of families, by vicissitudes of everyday life. Love and its loss haunt these walls.

My father built the house where I grew up on the banks of Lake Michigan. It was on the North Shore of Chicago in a town of ravines and bluffs and old Indian trails. When our house was being built, he often took me there. I was perhaps three or four, but the smell of sawdust and fresh paint still makes me think of home. My father would walk around with a set of blueprints, telling the contractor where to move the bathroom, where to put a door.

One day he was talking to his contractor upstairs in the unfinished frame of the house and I wandered off on the floor below. I found a double-edged razor blade, which I’d never seen before, and I sliced my arm. When I showed him, my father shuddered. “Oh my God,” he said. He wrapped my arm in his handkerchief, as blood dripped into the wood, leaving a stain. Eventually it was covered in tile. Even though I haven’t lived in that house in almost forty years, I like to think that this part of me remains.

I loved that house. I loved its white brick and green shutters, its garden and its proximity to the lake. Its address, 105, remains my lucky number to this day. If I get on a flight, and it’s #105, I know I’ll be safe. My father loved that house as well. After all, he designed it. He watched it being built.

My father told made-up stories about a brook and a bridge, about a lady who lived inside a pumpkin, and one about a little snowflake. He told them to me night after night. He embellished them and made them better and I loved the lilting sound of his voice. Each story had a theme, which boiled down to this: Never leave home. Don’t go away. Bad things happen if you don’t stay near. I suppose he should know. He hated travel, and, as I look back, I think there was something agoraphobic about him. He couldn’t stand anything he couldn’t control.

Every winter my parents did go to Florida for a “getaway” week without us, but my mother began to complain. He never wanted to do anything. He wouldn’t go in the water. He’d just sit on the beach. One year she told him that if he didn’t go in the water with her, she wouldn’t come down to Florida again.

So my father went into the sea. He was up to his knees when he felt something stinging him around the legs. He bent down and soon it was all over him, all around him. He was engulfed in the sticky blue tentacles of a Portuguese man-of-war. At the emergency room the doctors told him it was the worst jellyfish attack they’d ever seen.

After that he never went near the water. For the rest of his life he stayed high up on the sand in shoes with kneesocks, a baseball cap, and sunglasses, his eyes scanning the sea for predators. In his later years they wintered in Florida. When I went to visit and would go for a swim, he’d sit on the seawall with binoculars, scanning the water for sharks.

The truth was he never wanted to go anywhere. He loved the house he built. He loved the cherry tree in the yard. He would have lived his whole life there if he could have. But my mother wanted to move. She raised her children in the suburbs, which she abhorred. She worked for the PTA and been a leader of my Girl Scout troop. She marched in the Flag Day parades. Now she wanted the gritty streets of Chicago and its shops, not the tree-lined roads and lake below the bluffs that my father adored. She wanted to pound the pavement in her high heels.

Reluctantly he sold the house. The day we moved out, when I’d just returned from France, I woke to the sound of my father mowing the lawn. They moved into the city, into a skyscraper he and his brother had designed. A few weeks later my mother gave my dog away to a checkout girl at the A & P. He barked too much in the apartment, my mother said. Then she sold our piano, and my father never played again. He used to walk around the apartment with nothing to do, saying that selling that piano was the “dumbest thing” he ever did.

In his later years he seemed happiest in his lounge chair, in front of the television, alone. When he turned one hundred and they moved to Milwaukee to be closer to my brother, my father, using an old Prohibition term, described this solitary part of his life as “a dry run.”

I leave the Villa Louis and head over to the gift shop where “Bridge Over Troubled Water” plays poignantly. I’m looking at souvenirs, postcards, snapshots of the Dousmans. I’m grazing on a short history of the villa when I notice the time. It is past ten and Jerry was very clear about leaving at ten. I’ve never been known for my promptness. I’m sure there are complex reasons for this. My father ran a tight ship himself and he was fanatical about being on time. Hours before we had to be anywhere he’d start: “Are you getting ready? Are you going to be on time?”

I seem to have rebelled in this regard. It was one of the silent wars I waged, the only way I knew how to combat my father’s rages, which were not so silent. I would linger in jeans and T-shirt until just before we had to walk out the door. I had this timed perfectly in fact, enough to drive my father wild. “You aren’t going to get ready, are you?” he’d say. Then I’d appear, on the dot, all dressed, makeup, stockings, heels, just as they were heading for the door.

Given the fact that Jerry was once “Air Force” and given his somewhat protomilitary style, I decide to hightail it. I scurry out of the gift shop, sorry to leave this peaceful place behind. Heading past the villa, I catch a glimpse of Linda and her cohorts, now in turn-of-the-century reenactment garb, greeting the wives of the governors of Iowa and Illinois. But I must rush on. Ahead of me the railroad tracks that run between the river and the Villa Louis cut a slice through St. Feriole Island.

A freight train chugs my way. It stretches as far as I can see, car after car. If this train reaches the intersection before I do, I’m going to be literally on the wrong side of the tracks for a while. If the train has to stop on the island, it could be a much longer wait.

But the freight is approaching at about the speed our houseboat travels and I’m pretty sure I can beat it. I dash down the street, past the duck pond and the Villa Louis gardens. I rush toward the tracks as the train comes near. It can’t be going more than five miles per hour and is perhaps fifty yards away. I can see the engineer’s dark eyes. I give him a wave and he replies with a long, warning blast.

It is a sound of youth, a memory rising. When I think of childhood, I think of horse chestnuts, girls walking together to school, the trains. Camel hair coats and saddle shoes. The sound of my father leaving for work and coming home. The Chicago Northwestern he took twice a day. F. Scott Fitzgerald would agree. At the end of The Great Gatsby he wrote, “That’s my Middle West. Not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth.”

I hear the whistles. The 8:08; the 5:15. My father punctual as the railroad that carried him. On nice days he walked to the station, his arrivals and departures perfectly timed. More often my mother drove to pick him up or drop him off. When I had a bicycle accident and had to go to the emergency room, she made me get in the car with her so that he could see I was all right, even though I was bandaged like a mummy from head to toe. I can see his train pulling in. I see him, clicking his tongue, shaking his head when he sees me.

Still I think I can make it. I run like a rabbit, my backpack and paints and journal bouncing behind me, and the engineer honks again. Breathless I race to the other side and it still takes the train another minute or two to get to the crossing. As he passes, the engineer waves at me, pretending to scold. Then he honks once more.

*   *   *

The train chugs across the island, coming to a halt as I dash through the small park. The wind off the river is cool and fresh. The air smells of cut grass and leaves. On the dock beside our boat an old man is fishing. A worm hangs from his hook and I hear Jerry say, “Hey, where’d you get that worm?”

The man laughs, staring at his rod. He has no teeth.

“In your own backyard?”

As I approach I can see that the man is perhaps retarded or just very old and dotty. But he and Jerry are yukking it up. Now Jerry turns to me. “So, Mary, we now have a toilet and a fridge.” He pauses for effect. “I hope you can tell one from the other.”

I give him a smile. “I think I can.” Apparently he isn’t annoyed at my lateness. Indeed he seems quite relaxed.

It is clear that while I was at the Villa Louis, Tom and Jerry were working on the boat. The head is now operating and the water pump is hooked up. This does not mean that water actually flows, but it does mean that if we switch on the pump, we’ll get a trickle of cold water, though Jerry controls the switch at the helm and seems reluctant to use it. A shower appears to be a distant dream, but they tell me that they also have hooked up the gas. We can now boil water. I am oddly ecstatic.

I make my first cup of coffee on board. As the water boils, I drop in a Folgers Coffee Single (“tea bag”) which Jerry brought from home, and watch the water turn a light shade of beige. I’ve always believed that it isn’t coffee if you can see the bottom of your cup. I can definitely see mine. I add two more tea bags until it turns murky as the river we’re on, then I go on deck to sip it.

As I’m standing in the sunshine, enjoying my first Folgers aboard ship, Tom points to a half-built structure on the bluff a hundred yards south of where we’re docked. “See that place?” he says. “They were going to open a restaurant or something, but a guy hung himself in it last winter and now no one wants to use it.”

Somehow this shatters the peace of my morning. We all pause, unsure of how to respond. Then Jerry says, “So, was he well-hung?”

There is the usual guffaw. “Reminds me of that house where the man kept his mother in the freezer,” I say, deciding I can play the death-and-doom game as well as anyone.

“Oh, god,” Tom says, “that’s in my backyard. The day I moved in they were moving her out. I wanted to get the guy a sticker that says ‘My Mom’s Cooler Than Your Mom.’”

I start to laugh, then gag on my coffee.

“Aw,” Tom says, “Mary’s all choked up.”

“Okay,” Jerry says, staring at the river, “rock ’n’ roll.”

“I’m gonna warm up that cold-blooded thing.” Tom heads back to his engines.

“Roger,” Jerry says, giving the key a turn.

“Clear.”

“Contact. Jer, keep your rpms up for a moment if you could.” Jerry seems to be resisting and Tom calls out to him again, “Keep them up. I need you to give me more.”

At last the engines sputter to a start and we’re off. Tom comes onto the bow and stands right in front of my view. Jerry says, “Tom, get out of the way. I can’t see the buoys.”

“What do you mean?” He gives his girth a pat. “You can’t see the boys?”

I pull a chair to the side so I can see too and it scrapes against the floor. “Violation!” Jerry shouts. (“Violation” means you have done something very bad.) I’m a little stunned by his outburst. I can see this as a “technical error,” which is boatspeak for a boo-boo, but hardly a violation. Still Jerry snaps at me. “Pick that chair up and move it next time. We spent a lot of time painting that deck.”

“Aye aye,” I say, giving a false salute, though I am annoyed at being shouted at for a minor infraction. In fact I do not like to be shouted at at all. There is no place to go on this boat, really, if one is in a bad mood or wants to be alone. I sit at the bow. I can feel Jerry’s eyes, staring at my back. I spread out my journal and paints on the wooden worktable I have claimed as my own. It is an unstable, three-legged job with a peeling linoleum surface and Jerry says he’ll use it as firewood first chance he gets.

I’m just getting set up when a huge shadow looms, blocking out the sun. I gaze up and see Tom. “Excuse me,” he says, “but I need some of my things.” Tom stows all his personal items in the hold on the bow and he has to move my table to retrieve his razor, an extra jacket for Samantha Jean, any of his things.

Before I can say a word, Tom hoists my table, which is covered with scissors, glue, water bottle, journal, paints, and moves it out of his way. Amazingly nothing spills. He opens the hatch and disappears into the hold. Moments later he’s heaving shorts, razor, and various personal effects onto the deck. “I won’t be long,” he says.

We are living in close quarters, to say the least. Jerry and I are basically sleeping in the same room. Tom isn’t, but only by default. He’s camping out on the flybridge under the stars. I have no idea how or where we’ll all sleep in a storm. There is no space for clutter, for things not put away. All our clothes, our drug kits, anything personal must be stowed.

Tom keeps his bedding and air mattress in the dinghy and secures them with bungee cords, but the rest of his things are in the hold. Jerry stows his stuff in the cubby above the couch where he sleeps and in the cabin hold, along with the cases of beer and diet Dew and diet Coke that aren’t on chill, our screens which haven’t been installed, and whatever else is down there. It seems to be a kind of bottomless pit.

But Jerry doesn’t seem to have much. A few Hawaiian shirts, caps, a couple pairs of shorts, jeans. I’ve brought the most stuff. I guess I was thinking closet, drawers. Just shy of “cruise.” Wishful thinking, obviously, on my part. In the cubby above my bed I stow my underwear, T-shirts, and shorts. I also keep my emergency items there, such as my flashlight and batteries, my earplugs so I can read if the engines are roaring, and the jelly jar I brought in which to pee, not knowing what the sanitary conditions would be.

While Tom’s organizing his things, I go into the cabin to put mine away. I make my bed, which consists mainly of folding my sleeping bag, then start to tear my duffel apart. In the duffel I keep my jeans, my flannels, a slicker and all-weather gear, several nice shirts, and a pair of khakis, which I’m sure I won’t have occasion to wear. There are no hooks, nothing to hang anything on, except the showerhead. I begin what will become a daily ritual of folding and refolding my things.

I take my shirts and sweaters and sweatshirt and sweatpants, and lay them out on the bed. I begin to fold. I roll up my T-shirts and flannel pants, my slicker. Shoes I tuck in rows under the bed. What would my father say about all of this? He’d shake his head, give me that sardonic smile. He’d look at a crumpled blouse, jeans with a tear in the thigh. “You aren’t going to wear that, are you?” he’d say. Meaning, I guess I’m not.

My father was an impeccable dresser and he cared a great deal (inordinately I might add) about how people looked. If their nails were buffed, their shoes shined. I would not call him a dandy or even dapper. He was just a very well-dressed man. He had exquisite taste in fine herringbone or tweed jackets, cashmere coats and scarves, cashmere sweaters and fedoras. He had his silk ties made specially in Hong Kong and they all had matching handkerchiefs, which he folded carefully into his breast pocket.

The one thing about my father’s style that amused me were his toupees. When I was five or six years old, my parents were invited to a Suppressed Desire Ball. Guests were to invent costumes that depicted their secret wish, their heart’s desire. My mother went into a kind of trance. She bought blue satin and gossamer cloth. She cut out pictures of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal. On a mannequin in our basement my mother fashioned for herself a costume of the world.

My mother could do anything with her hands, but she used her talent mainly to design strange Halloween costumes for her children. In my life I have been a giant squid, a house of cards, and a money tree. She spent six weeks on her costume for the ball, but it was my father who won first prize. My bald father borrowed a wig from his barber and went as a man with hair. The judge said his was the simplest and most imaginative.

Afterward my father began wearing his wigs all the time. As he grew older, his toupees aged with him. They grew grayer, whiter, thinner. In his closet he kept several wig stands and, as a joke, someone painted my father’s face on one of them. At night with a grimace he’d unglue the toupee from his head and put it on his likeness.

As a girl I teased him. If he was engrossed in something, I’d put on one of his toupees and wear it around the house until he noticed and told me to put that “damn thing” away.

Now I cannot bear the thought of my father’s toupees or where they might be. I can’t stand thinking about his clothes at a church auction, a rummage sale. Donated. Being picked over. Tossed aside. Strangers in my father’s suits.

I loved the smell of my father. His talc and his cologne. Old Spice, I think. When I walk by a man on the street who smells this way, I want to follow him. I loved watching him dress, doing his tie. When I first met my husband, this fascinated me. I could sit beside the mirror forever and watch all the loops that are required in a man’s tie.

My husband still wears the yellow and cranberry and green sweaters my father handed down to him one by one, but what about the rest of his things? The toupees? The wig holder painted with my father’s face? “Do you want to know?” my brother asks when we speak on the phone.

“No,” I say back, “don’t tell me. Don’t tell me a thing.”

The wig stand, he will tell me later, he put in the trash.