GHOST RIVER

12

“NOTHING REMAINS to me now but my life,” Joliet wrote after a shipwreck swallowed the maps and journals that recorded his discovery of the Mississippi. As we approach river marker 630.6 Jerry calls me out to the bow and points to a narrow, unnavigable rivulet, clotted with fallen trees, merging with the Mississippi. I gaze at the trees, lying with their roots in the air. Pushovers, Jerry calls them. Trees that grow in shallow water, shaky soil. Trees you could just walk up to and give a shove.

Gazing at the navigational maps where Jerry’s got his finger planted, I see that we have reached the choked mouth of the Wisconsin River. A disappointing trickle, barely noticeable, hardly the place I envisioned. But it was here, just three miles below St. Feriole Island, that Joliet and a Jesuit priest, Father Marquette, first entered the river that the Indians up north called The Big Water.

Tribal leaders warned them that this river was filled with “monsters that devoured men and canoes together.” Along its banks warriors who would “break their heads with no cause” roamed. They would face a searing heat that would turn them black and kill them. Marquette thanked them for their advice but “told them I would not follow it because the salvation of souls was at stake, for which I would be delighted to give my life.”

In May of 1673 Father Jacques Marquette and the French Canadian explorer and geographer Louis Joliet, armed with compass and astrolabe, left Illinois country in birch bark canoes and traveled along the northern rim of Lake Michigan until they came to the limits of the French penetration into the continent. On the tenth of June they paddled up a sluggish stream, which was the Fox, until they reached the portage, where their guides, refusing to go on, left them. They carried their canoes until they found the broad and beautiful Wisconsin River and on the seventeenth of June Marquette and Joliet entered the Mississippi “with a Joy that I cannot Express,” Marquette wrote in his journal.

Marquette and Joliet began making careful notes about the current and depth of the river, on the fish and game along its course. They saw wildcats and what they described as “swans without wings” and “monstrous fish” (probably giant blue catfish), but it was the “wild cattle” that excited them. Herds of bison darkened the prairies and the plains and Marquette and Joliet were the first Europeans to see them.

Now just after noon on our second lazy day we arrive at the place where Marquette and Joliet first saw the Mississippi. As we pass the mouth of the Wisconsin, we come to an open stretch, bordered with savannah-like wetlands that could be found in Africa or the Amazon. If I didn’t know where I was, I’d think I was in another country. A flock of snowy egrets rises. A lone white pelican soars over our heads. Blue heron, fish dangling from their mouths, glide over the surface of the smooth water. It is a wild, seemingly undiscovered place and I feel what the early explorers must have felt.

As Jerry guides our ship, I stand beside him. Other than our vessel and these birds, the river is breathtakingly empty. There’s not a house or man-made structure on either side. We are at this juncture on a beautiful day and there isn’t a pleasure craft or a barge in sight. Not a tow or a fishing boat. I am seeing the river as Marquette and Joliet saw it. Perhaps as no one has in hundreds of years or more. Deserted, abandoned, frighteningly so. As we pass the confluence, we are traveling down this ghost river alone.

13

ON A Saturday in August two weeks before I was to depart, Kate sulked in her room. She had been gearing up to head for college, but the previous night she’d walked into our piano bench (which the child of a friend had moved into the middle of the living room) and smashed her foot. Her toes turned a shade of eggplant, tinged with green. As she sorted out her clothes, Kate hobbled around on a pair of crutches she’d found discarded near our house.

Somehow this accident was my fault. I was responsible for the piano bench being in the middle of the floor. But I was also the reason why she was walking through the living room in the first place. It seemed we had an infestation of Japanese water beetles. I had never seen the beetles because they are nocturnal, but so is Kate. And I had not called the exterminator. Kate was going through the living room to avoid the kitchen where the water beetles roamed when in the darkness she walked into the bench.

She was to leave in two days for a college orientation program that involved hiking along the Appalachian Trail, which now seemed dubious. I would be leaving myself for the river just ten days after her. How odd it felt to be going our separate ways after all these years. When she was born, I had this dream. I dreamed that on her first day of her life she was a baby and on the second day she crawled. On her third day she left for school and by the fourth she was gone. I thought of this dream as I helped her pack for college. I had no idea where the time had gone.

Our belongings were spread across two rooms and working their way downstairs. I was distraught, trying to stay upbeat, at a loss for things to say. “Honey, would you like to take the drying rack?” I asked and she gave me one of those anatomically impossible looks only teenagers can muster, which roughly translates to “You aren’t serious, are you?”

I had the news on, but I wasn’t really watching. I was studying Kate’s housing assignment from Smith College. The letter that had just arrived informed us that Kate Morris would be living in Morris House, named for deceased alum Kate Morris. I was trying to determine if this was a sick joke or the makings of a horror film when the phone rang. I wanted to ignore it, but Kate picked it up. I heard her chat for a moment and assumed it was for her as it usually was. Then she called out: “For you.”

It was one of my childhood pals. I have a group I’ve known since kindergarten and we check up on one another from time to time. My friend Laurie wanted to know if I was still planning on taking the trip down the Mississippi River. I looked at my duffel, my sleeping bag, my all-weather gear. “Of course I’m still going. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, you know, with that storm…”

I hadn’t been paying much attention to the news. I’d been shopping for school supplies and soap and underwear and duffel bags. I’d been dealing with Kate’s foot, helping her sort out her things, taking pictures down that had hung on her bulletin board for the past ten years. I’d been trying to borrow a life vest from our neighbors across the street. “What storm?”

“That hurricane. Katrina.”

I knew that a storm had hit Florida, but I hadn’t heard much more. I didn’t know that it had crossed the Gulf and was heading toward New Orleans. Or that it was a Category 5. And, most startlingly to me, I hadn’t gotten the news yet that New Orleans was being evacuated. I stopped what I was doing and went into the den. For the first time I saw the long line of cars heading up Highway 10.

My arrival time in New Orleans was over two months away. I had a river pilot, named Greg Sadowski, a friend of Jerry’s, who was planning to take me the rest of my journey from St. Louis or Memphis on a cruiser. I assumed New Orleans would be all right by then. But the Doomsday forecasters were chatting away. Worst-case scenarios abounded and if I were to listen to these, I’d never get past Memphis. Predictions were being tossed around of skyscrapers toppling, a thirty-foot storm surge that wouldn’t subside for three months destroying everyone’s homes and businesses. There was talk of toxic gumbo, a concoction of oil, gas, sewage, and coffins, which in the Big Easy rest aboveground.

Kate came into the den, holding her parka. “Mom,” she said, “should I pack my winter clothes?”

“I don’t know,” I told her, now glued to the television. “I’m listening to this.”

In my heart I believed that this storm would veer or dissipate as they tended to do. I understand the entertainment value of a big storm, an unsolved murder, a crisis of proportions beyond imagining. I was hoping that much of this was news hype. Still, I was beginning to wonder if I would leave on this journey. If it hadn’t just been ill-fated from the start.

But late that night, after we’d packed Kate’s winter clothes and closed her trunk, I switched on my computer and saw an e-mail pop up from my nephew, Matt. I opened it and there she was. The River Queen. Still on her trailer in dry dock, but looking whiter and brighter. I saw plastic chairs on her deck and on the fly deck. A shade up top. I was hoping for good weather. A peaceful passage under the stars.

*   *   *

In the morning it appeared New Orleans had been spared. The worst of the storm hit Gulfport and Biloxi. The tragedy of Mississippi was profound, but it seemed as if the Big Easy could relax. I breathed a sigh of relief as well. In a few days Kate would be at college, though not hiking, and I would be on my boat, heading downstream. I went back to packing and planning, to tying up loose ends.

That evening I met a friend in a café, and she arrived distraught. Her parents had gone to New Orleans for the weekend on a lark (they had some frequent flyer miles they needed to use) and she was waiting to hear from them.

“They fled a little while ago,” she told me.

“They fled…?”

“Yes, you didn’t hear? The levee broke.”

“It broke?”

“Yes, about an hour ago.…”

When I left her, I headed home, where I watched the horror unfold. Water streamed in from the breached levee along the 17th Street Canal, causing the worst urban flood in United States history. People, who had lost everything, stuck in the Superdome and beneath a highway overpass, were now being called refugees. The pictures were wrenching. Mothers clasping babies, who were screaming for milk. An old woman in a wheelchair, a sheet over her head. Blacks, the poor, the disenfranchised. Those with nowhere to go.

I began trying to reach Greg Sadowski. When we last spoke, he was moving a huge, brand-new boat to New Orleans. But the circuits were busy and I couldn’t get through.

The following Saturday Larry and I piled Kate’s things into the car and drove her up to school. In the car she listened to her iPod, then slept with her dog. How do others do this? I wondered. Say good-bye to the people and places they love most in the world. But having watched those images from Katrina, clearly we were the lucky ones. When we arrived at Smith, we unloaded the car. We dumped everything into her room, then spent an hour or two helping her unpack. But after a while, it was clear she wanted to do this with her roommate, who had yet to arrive.

We found a housemate to take a picture of us on the porch of Morris House under a banner that read: “Morris: The Best Place to Live.” Then Larry and I said good-bye and got in the car. Kate was ready for us to leave, so we did. We drove about a hundred yards to the end of her street, where her father and I sat on a park bench and wept. Then we got back in the car and drove home.

14

SILENTLY A towboat named Genesis tugs a barge past an old limestone quarry. This is the first sign of life we’ve seen in a while and, along with the name, this moment has an almost biblical feel. The pilot gives a long wave as he rides by and we wave back. The barge he pulls is “riding high,” which means he’s empty. “High profile,” Jerry explains. Until now I have only understood this as it relates to celebrities. “Look at the watermarks,” he says. “You can tell if they’re empty or full.” Then he shakes his head.

The quarry itself is still. No work is being done. We pass other barges that are showing a low profile, clearly full, but neglected at the river’s edge. With the Port of New Orleans closed, these barges have nowhere to go. Jerry stands by the railing, shaking his head. As we slip past them, he stares, then goes back inside to look at his maps.

Jerry spends much of his time staring at things. He stares at the motor. He stares at maps. He gazes at birds, the sky, the movement of the waves. He looks deep into the hold and at the sink. If something isn’t working, he gapes at it. Or if it presents or is going to present a problem, he stares. Often he just stands on the deck and gawks at whatever is behind him or ahead.

Sometimes he is just looking at the river. He’ll be gazing and then make a pronouncement, almost for no reason, as if to himself, “Take her to port. There’s a wing dam.” Or a snag. A log. A piece of debris. I don’t know how he sees any of these things. Jerry reads the ripples and the places where the water turns smooth. He’ll say, “See that line in the water? You want to avoid that.” But I’ll see nothing beyond the ripples the surface makes. If a boat is coming toward us, Jerry keeps his eye on its wake. He stares through his binoculars or camera lens. He is like a heron, eyes on the water, before making his move.

Once the Genesis is behind us, it’s open river again. Jerry’s piloting, eyes straight ahead, and I’m standing beside him. Then he steps aside. “You wanta give it a try?” he says. I’m not sure if I do, but he lets me take the wheel. Somehow it doesn’t feel right. The current is stronger than it was the other day. It’s as if I’ve caught a giant fish and I’m trying to reel it in. Or it’s trying to pull me out.

Jerry keeps reaching over and bringing me back to zero. “You gotta keep her steady,” he says, and I think I hear some impatience in his voice. Or perhaps fear for his boat. But she keeps getting away from me and I find myself jerking her back. Jerry shakes his head and I think I hear him going “tsk tsk.”

“I don’t think I’m very good at this,” I say.

“Naw, it’s just that this wheel has a lot of play. You have to move it for an inch or two before it connects to the boat.”

“I can see that,” I say. But my steering feels like the nautical equivalent of a poorly dubbed film. One of those spaghetti westerns where the words coming out have no relation to the movement of lips. There’s a delay between when I turn the wheel and when the boat actually moves. And I’m having trouble anticipating it as we edge closer to the riverbank.

“Point her straight,” Jerry says. “Look at your depth finder.” I look at the depth finder, which reads 5.5 feet. We have a draft of 3.5 feet and Jerry is happier with more river beneath us. “You’re getting into the shallows. Keep her nose toward that red buoy ahead.”

It’s been years since I’ve taken driver’s ed, but I’m sure I couldn’t learn to drive a car now. In fact I’ve been trying to learn to drive our stick shift that we acquired from a friend at a price we couldn’t refuse. Last summer I managed to lock gears on the Long Island Expressway at sixty miles per hour as I shifted into fifth. I haven’t gotten behind the wheel since, and anyway, my daughter won’t let me. Nor will she ride with me. It was Larry who drove her all the way to college and me home.

Steering this boat might also fall under the “old dog, new tricks” category, I’m thinking, as Jerry reaches for the wheel and gives it a yank. “Keep your focus,” he snaps. I’ve definitely gone too close to shore. A glance at the depth indicator shows we’re only in 5 feet of water. As I jerk her around, she pitches to an awkward angle, though hardly enough to capsize. Topside I hear Tom squeal, “Roller-coaster ride.”

“I’ll take over,” Jerry says, his voice flat with what I can only interpret as disapproval.

“I was just trying to stay near the green buoy.”

“Yes, but we’ve got a wing dam there.” He points at a ripple that looks like all the rest of the river. Another one of those mirages I don’t see. I’m a flop. I know I am as Jerry shouts up to Tom on the flybridge, “Tommysan, take her topside.”

“Aye aye, Sir.”

I’m feeling like the hometown team that just lost. There’s a small public humiliation here. I also realize I’m hungry. Food will provide a change of subject. It’s close to noon and, outside of coffee, I haven’t eaten all day. “Lunch anyone?” I ask.

“Affirmative,” Jerry says as he scribbles in his log. I can only imagine what he’s writing. “Girl can’t steer.” “Female unreliable.” Words to that effect.

“Ah, well, shall I make something?”

“That’d be great.” It’s clear he isn’t offering to help. I have a sense that certain tasks on board are going to fall along gender lines and galley work will be mine. But I like to cook and pride myself on it. “Stick to what you know,” that voice in my head says. It is the way to a man’s heart, after all.

I assess our larder, something there wasn’t much reason to do before we had the gas and refrigerator hooked up, and make note of what we have. In the cubby above the sink I find two cans of Campbell’s Chunky Chili With Beans—the Sizzlin’ Steak version. Two cans of Chunky Chili No Beans—the Hold The Beans version. Two cans Chunky Chili With Beans—Tantalizin’ Turkey. Two cans of cut spinach. One can of sliced beets. I make a silent vow. My mantra becomes this: I will never eat out of a can. I will hold on to whatever decency I can muster on this journey by not eating from cans.

I continue my inventory. Two boxes of Folgers “tea bags”—one caffeinated, one decaf, for me. Two jars of peanut butter. One jar of reduced fat Hellmann’s, mustard, ketchup, salt, pepper, paper plates, paper towels, plastic knives and forks. A giant bag of Cheerios, Kellogg’s Raisin Bran (for me). The fridge has eggs, cheese, some lunch meats, and dozens of cans of diet Dew, diet Coke, and vast quantities of beer. Above the fridge Tom has his stash of Wonder Bread, Chips Ahoy, which he eats by the fistful, and assorted Snickers, Milky Ways, and a two-pound box of malted milk balls, none of which I will get even a nibble of.

I open all the cupboards, looking for pots and pans. “They’re inside the oven,” Jerry says without looking around. In the oven I find a small Teflon frying pan, a tiny pot for boiling water, and an omelette pan with a fifty-cent tag on it from Goodwill. These are my working utensils.

I have brought with me a few cans of tuna fish, a green apple, a package of smoked chicken, some cheese sticks. I cut up the chicken and make a small salad for myself with the green apple that’s starting to go bad. I put it into a Tupperware bowl and give it a shake.

For the boys I make smoked chicken sandwiches on Wonder Bread with mustard and mayo. I put chips on paper plates and slip Tom’s to him through the small window above the helm where he pilots on the flybridge. I cut a piece of Wisconsin cheddar and slip it to Samantha Jean, who rips it out of my hand.

Afterward I go up to collect the trash. “How was your sandwich?” I ask Tom.

“Too much mustard,” he says, shaking his head. “Don’t give me any mustard next time.”

*   *   *

After lunch, I plant myself at my battered wooden table on the bow. An old loneliness settles in. I call Larry, but he’s not home. I’m longing to talk to Kate. It’s only her second week at college and I had promised myself I wouldn’t phone her. I wanted to give her time. But now I want to hear her voice. I give a call and get her voice mail. Or rather I get the rap music of a group unknown to me. After a few choruses I hear my daughter’s voice. “It’s Kate. I’m not around…” Where is she? I wonder. At the library, studying. Or in her room. It is so odd that I do not know the books she is reading, the face of the girl she hangs out with down the hall. Does she see that it’s me calling? Is she screening her calls?

I leave a brief message, then open my journal. I begin working on a painting of the riverbank, the islands ahead. I dab a little blue, wash in some green. Soon it starts to look like something. I create dark pines, the reflection in the water. I layer in more colors—some purple and red. I let them bleed and blend.

When I am satisfied, I reach for my glue. As I grasp it, the small painting blows away. Both Jerry and I see it go. It flies into the air and is about to sail into the river when it hits the gunwale and is pinned by the wind against the side.

“Thank you, River Queen,” Jerry says, heaving a big sigh.

I ask him why.

“Because any other boat and that’d blow away.… She’s got good sides, this old boat.” Then he adds, “But next time put a book or something on top of it.”

I’m starting to see that things don’t just fall on a boat. They fly, they skid. They soar and slide. They are carried by the wind. They disappear for good. If they are lightweight, like your letter home or your paintbrush, they will be gone in a heartbeat. Every object that isn’t heavy must be weighted down. Each piece of paper has to have a book, a set of keys, a coffee mug sitting on it. Every coffee mug must have a lid.

To look at a map you have to remove whatever is holding it down. To read the poem you have just written you must take it out of the notebook where you’ve tucked it for safekeeping. Nearly empty drinking glasses will spill their remains, paper plates will hurl like Frisbees into space. The third rule of boating seems to be this: Anything that can fly away will. If something matters to you, hold on to it for dear life.

15

THE MILWAUKEE Heart Hospital sat in an industrial park parallel to the main highway that heads north to Green Bay. It was off a major road that felt more like a service road, surrounded by warehouses, towers for high-tension wires, some malls that sit far back from the road. We recognized it right away by the giant red heart that looms from its main wall.

It had taken us ten hours to get here, due to storms all across the Midwest—whirling, black thunderclouds. In the summer there are often these storms in Wisconsin—ones that can lead to tornados farther inland, away from the lake. The big, beating down, scary kind.

It was literally a dark and stormy night. The sky had a greenish glint, the kind no midwesterner wants to see because of what it might bring. The parking lot had five cars in it and the only sign of life was a flock of Canada geese that padded across the newly seeded lawn.

“What is this?” I asked my husband. “The Twilight Zone?” He shook his head.

“It’s a hospital,” he replied.

“But there’s no one here.” It was a brand-new thirty-bed hospital, state of the art, in the middle of nowhere, that had, it appeared, no patients except for my father. My father, Sol Henry Morris, was almost 102 years old. He was so old that when we had his prescriptions filled, the druggist had to call them in because the computer would default and think my father was only two. It seems that you cannot administer blood pressure medication to a two-year-old.

In his youth he used to walk miles every day and attributed much of his longevity to exercise and temperate habits. “Nothing in Excess” was his motto. We attributed it to his rotten disposition. (Articles have linked longevity to bad tempers.) Whatever the causes, my father was as old as a land tortoise. His age has always been a cause of both fascination and concern.

I suppose there are reasons why my father didn’t marry until he was forty-four. Or my mother, for that matter, until she was thirty-four. He spoke with nostalgia for the friends, the speakeasies of old Chicago, and the girls of his youth. He admitted to me once that his bachelor days were better than his married days. I had the old photos to prove it.

For years my father joked about his age. As he got older and older, he looked twenty years younger than his chronological age. Once he repeated his motto “Nothing in Excess” to a group of aging widows as the secret to his longevity, but apparently they misunderstood and heard “No Sex.” When he saw their troubled faces, he corrected the error.

Whatever his secret, my father was very old. He remembered the invention of the automobile, the airplane, moving pictures. He saw one of the first automobiles rumble down a Chicago side street. He was a young man during the Jazz Age. He grew up between the wars. He was still in his twenties when the stock market crashed. He was too old to fight in World War II, though he tried to volunteer.

Doctors studied him. At ninety-five he had the physical stamina of someone seventy. Indeed, people took him for seventy. Until he was a hundred, he remained handsome and strong. He was the oldest patient his urologist or cardiologist or pulmonologist had ever had and keeping him alive became their private calling. To me my father simply seemed invincible.

But the day before my arrival in Milwaukee, my brother called to say, “If you want to see him, you’d better come now.” If my mother had called, I would have assumed it was a tactic to get me to come home. She has done such things before. But not John.

As we approached the hospital, fork lightning skirted close to the high-tension towers. The glass doors slid open, cool air blew our way. Before I could say a word, the elderly receptionist looked up. “Oh,” she said, “you’re here to see Mr. Morris.” She knew who we were coming to see. How was this possible?

Except for the sounds of whirring machines, the hospital was eerily still. There were no voices, no footsteps, no one crying out in pain. In fact there was nothing. No signs of life. I held tightly to Larry’s sleeve. We took the elevator and got off on the second floor and found ourselves in a circular corridor filled with empty hospital beds, empty rooms, waiting rooms, conference rooms, offices. Travel pictures of the Pyramids of Egypt and Mount Rushmore hung on the wall.

We followed the circle until we came to a corridor filled with light. In the first room lay an enormous woman with tubes coming out of everywhere, machines pumping away. At her bedside was a man, silently sobbing. In the next room lay a thin, young woman, also connected with tubes.

At the nurse’s station two or three nurses and what I assumed were a few doctors were working. One of the doctors was talking on the phone. He rattled off organs: Kidneys, heart, liver. No one looked up at us. No one paid any attention to us at all. Across from the nurse’s station a large man lay almost naked on a gurney. Tattoos covered his arms and chest. Snakes, women, a wolf. A rose bloomed on his chest.

In the next room I found my father. He was sitting up in bed, eating vanilla ice cream and watching television. On the screen in black-and-white a woman stood on a dock beside a swamp. A group of men who appeared to be scientists were with her. Beneath the dock a creature that looked like a man in an iguana suit swam, trying to grab the woman. Its claws reached out of the water toward her feet, but the woman, unaware, walked off the dock unharmed. And the creature disappeared back into the darkness from whence it came.

My father, engrossed in Creature from the Black Lagoon, didn’t see us come in. Then he looked up. “Hi, kids,” he said, “thanks for dropping by.” He put down his dish. “Lousy ice cream,” he went on. “They’re gonna kill me in here. Lousy food. Lousy service.” He talked about the Milwaukee Heart Hospital as if it had three Michelin stars and was about to lose one. “See my doctor?” He pointed to the nurse’s station where I did see his doctor on the phone. “He’s running some kind of racket. All he does is talk on the phone. Making deals.”

“Actually, Dad, I think he’s arranging for organ donations,” I told him. My father’s eyes widened. “I think all the other patients in the hospital are brain-dead,” I said. “You’re the only one who’s alive.”

This gave him pause and the complaints stopped. Just then my father’s doctor came in. He explained to me quite simply that last night my father had zero kidney function. We both looked at my father, eating his ice cream, watching television. “Basically,” Dr. Brown said, “if I had his kidney function, I’d be in an irreversible coma right now.”

My father put his hand to his ear. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Are you talking about me?” He smiled his whimsical smile. On the television the woman dove into the lagoon and swam as the creature, circling beneath her, tried to pull her down.

16

TOM’S ON the flybridge, talking to Samantha Jean. He’s telling her to be a good girl and stay in her jacket. “No, don’t give me those sad eyes, Sam.” I can hear him as I step across the starboard engine, which has its hatch open, and climb what Tom calls the “Jesus” ladder. This is because if you’re about to sail off of it in a storm, you’d yell “Jesus!”

But Samantha Jean is standing up, begging with her big brown eyes.

When Tom sees me coming, he gives a special stern look to his dog. “Okay, Girl,” he says, “big leap,” and the dog catapults into his arms. “Now you stay in Daddy’s lap.” I give Samantha Jean wide berth and sit on the bench across from Tom, but the dog follows me with her gaze.

It’s only day two on the river and early afternoon at that, but it feels as if we’ve been sailing forever. I’m looking for a change of scene. I like it up here on the flybridge, though Tom, unlike Jerry, will talk my head off. In a way it’s just another side of loneliness, but the vistas are wide and the breeze cool. And I’m ready for a little company.

Tom steers, hugging his dog to him. “Sammy likes the boat because it’s a nice smooth ride. See how relaxed she is?”

I look across at Samantha Jean and smile. “Yes, she seems relaxed.” For now, I want to add.

“Oh, yeah, this is her vacation too.” He nuzzles his face against hers. “Look how smooth the ride is. You know, this River Queen, look how nice she handles,” Tom tells me, staring straight ahead. “She’s like the Thunderbird of houseboats. You know, an old skirt and cardigan sweater. Ten-cent hamburgers. They don’t make them like this anymore.”

“They don’t?”

“Naw, she’s a vintage boat. About 1969 or so. You don’t see many of these around.”

“I knew she had class,” I say, running my hand along the shiny trim. I didn’t know that the boat I fell in love with was a vintage, that she came of age as I did. A girl of the sixties. I am starting to understand her appeal.

“Yep,” Tom says, “you don’t see many boats built the way she is. Do we, Baby?” Tom says to Samantha Jean, who licks his nose. “Don’t build ’em like this anymore. We sanded her three times before we painted her with the fiberglass paint. Up until midnight doing that.” We are silent for a moment as I think of the work Tom and Jerry put into this boat to get her on the water. I’m taking in the wide river, the sunlight streaming down. Tom’s hands move the wheel gently and it is a smooth, easy ride.

Then, he looks at me with that slightly ominous eye. As if reading my mind, he says, offering me the wheel, “You wanta take over?”

“Naw, it’s okay.” The river is open without a vessel in sight, but I am hesitant. “I didn’t do so well this morning,” I say, thinking back to Jerry losing patience with me.

“Aw, you’ll get the hang of it,” he says as he buries Samantha Jean in her black bomber jacket. “Don’t you even think about getting out of there.” Then he relinquishes his captain’s chair to me. I settle into the high chair with the cushioned seat for the first time and almost topple over backward.

“Oops.” Tom catches me. “Don’t lean back.” (Later we will retire this chair.) As I reach for the wheel, I’m having visions of destruction and mayhem. As with our stick shift back home, I’m sure I’ll never learn how to drive this thing. “Keel over” has taken on new meaning for me. “Just like a woman driver,” my father would say.

But as I take the wheel and begin to steer, the boat responds to my touch. This wheel seems to have less play than the one below. If I turn, the boat turns with me. When I straighten her, she goes straight. I feel her move with me in a watery dance à deux. I move her back and forth and she glides. Also I can see the river much better from this vantage point. I see why Tom likes it up here on the fly.

I ask him for the binoculars and he hands them to me. The sun warms my face as I scan the river. Tom stares straight ahead. “Just hold her steady now,” he says. “Keep an eye on your buoys.” I seem to be able to do this better from above. At least I am able to keep us off the riverbanks.

Once Tom sees I’m handling her well, he turns his attention to his dog, who, despite orders, has left her bomber jacket and whines at his feet. He gazes down at her as if she’s just a stubborn child, which in a way she is. “Okay, Sammy, you win, big jump,” and once again the little dog leaps into his brawny arms. “I can never say no to her.”

The river makes a wide turn and I follow the bend. Then I’ve got a straight shot down and it’s easy. “I’m sorry Kim couldn’t come with us,” I tell him. We haven’t really had a chance to talk privately and I’ve been wanting to tell him that. “Oh, it’s all right. It would’ve been fun if she came, but it’s fine. This trip is really about me having time with Samantha Jean.” Tom cradles the little dog in his huge arms. “She had breast cancer, you know.”

“Kim?”

“No, Samantha. But Kim helped me find the vet who would operate on her. I figured she could lose a tit or two. She’s got about a dozen.” He rubs Samantha Jean’s belly. “Anyway, Kim helped me save her life and I’ll never forget that.” Tom explains to me how he has two dogs by two mothers. Samantha Jean was given to him by one of his girlfriends. “But when I thought I was gonna lose Sammy I got Monster Dog. He’s a Jack Russell and drives Sammy crazy. So it’s good for her to be on this trip. Gives her some time with just me.”

Apparently Monster Dog’s mother works in a petting zoo. “I don’t date her anymore,” Tom says, “but I go back to see the snakes. Ralph and Ezra. I call Ezra King Tut. I can get him to stand five feet high in the air. Just a trick I taught him. Sammy doesn’t like it when I touch the snakes.”

Tom gazes down at Samantha Jean, giving her belly a big rub. “Oh, you’re not jealous of old King Tut, now, are you, Girl? Come on, Sammy, doggy hug. Doggy hug.” And Samantha wraps her paws around his neck and plants a wet one on his lips.

Tom’s just rambling and I’m not really listening. I’m piloting the boat. I still don’t see the ripples in the water, but with my binoculars I scan the banks as any seaworthy captain would. And I am holding eighteen thousand pounds of ship on a steady course. “Do you ever think of getting married?” I ask him. “To Kim or anyone?”

“Oh, I think about it,” Tom says. Then he caresses Samantha Jean’s paw. “But you know in a way I already am.”

“You mean…,” I gaze at the dog with her wiry hair, her beady eyes.

He’s still stroking her paw. “I kinda am.” I reach out to stroke Samantha Jean’s paw as well and she looks up at me and growls so I turn back to the wheel.

*   *   *

At Lock and Dam 10 we luck out. A huge fuel barge is just coming through, heading north. “We’d have been sitting here for two hours,” Jerry says, poking his head through the cabin window, “if she was just locking in.” His jaw drops when he sees me at the wheel, but he doesn’t miss a beat. “I’ll take her below.”

“Aye aye, Sir.” I’m getting good at my “aye ayes.”

When I feel him take the wheel, I let go. Jerry maneuvers us into position and the lockmaster, a woman this time, greets us. “Are you Barb?” Jerry asks, friendly as always.

“I sure is,” Barb replies.

“Well, pleased to meet you,” Jerry replies.

It’s a standard six-hundred-foot-long lock, 110 feet wide, and once again we have it to ourselves. I tug the rope, holding the line, and in ten minutes we’re through. Guttenberg, Iowa, which is right ahead, has a fuel dock. Jerry doesn’t want to stop at this little marina, but I’d like to visit the town.

I convince him. “What if we don’t make Dubuque by tonight? We need fuel, don’t we?” He shakes his head, clicks his tongue. He points out that even if we run out of gas we’d still be sailing downstream at three miles per hour. Then he shakes his head again. “Not safe, though. You don’t want to travel that way.”

Just ahead is the fueling dock and we pull in. There’s no one there, but there is a telephone and across it a note that reads “For Gas, Dial Randy,” and an extension. Randy answers and says he’s up at the hotel and, a few moments later, a young man with searing blue eyes who reminds me of Brad Pitt appears. A little too good looking, I think, for this tired river town.

But Randy is all smiles, an all-American kid, and we kibbitz with him a bit. As he’s pumping, Tom’s got Samantha Jean in the waves. “Hey!” Randy shouts. “You don’t wanta walk in the shore barefoot there. The clam shells are razor-sharp!”

He seems like a nice kid, I think, though I’m looking at the gas prices, which I’m going to have to pay, and I feel a lump in my throat. $3.86 a gallon. I now know that we get a mile a gallon and that this fuel bill will be almost four hundred dollars. I gasp when our automobile gas at home comes to thirty dollars, but this seems like a lot more than I bargained for.

“So, where you guys headed?” he asks as he pumps fuel into our gas tanks.

“St. Louis,” Jerry says.

“Maybe Memphis,” I quip.

“Wow, that’s gonna cost you,” Randy replies. “But it sounds like a great trip.”

Once we’ve fueled up and I pay for the gas, which may as well be liquid gold, I head into town. I walk past Lock 10 Hair and Tanning Salon and pass a sweet place where I’d love to stay called The Courthouse Inn. A few blocks off the main drag I come to a supermarket where I pick up some ground beef that’s looking a little brown, salad fixings in a plastic bag, a bottle of merlot, pale pink tomatoes, and onions that look like they’ve seen better days, green peppers, bowtie pasta. I am determined to cook a meal for these guys in my three little pots.

It’s a beautiful day and I don’t feel like rushing back to the ship. I’m enjoying having earth beneath my feet. I pop into the Café Mississippi for a cold drink. The bartender, a young college-age girl, is at the bar, smoking. She pours me a club soda, which is flat. But the view of the river is gorgeous. “Pretty town,” I say to her as I sip my club soda.

“Yeah. Kinda small,” she says, taking a drag. “And getting smaller.” She stubs out her cigarette and hands me my check for seventy-five cents. If only our boat could run on club soda. I leave two dollars on the bar.

On the way back to the boat my phone rings. It’s Kate calling. “Hey there,” I say, picking up on the second ring. I am thrilled to hear her voice that sounds so grown up. Friends often confuse her with me on the phone. She tells me about her poetry class where there are students who have already been published in anthologies, her roommate with whom she is now “joined at the hip,” and a bizarre initiation dinner in which she had to dress in pots and pans. We’re laughing away as I head back to the dock. She’s on her way to a class right now. “I’ll call you back later,” she says.

“You know where to find me,” I reply.

Tom who’s working on deck sees me say good-bye. “So was that your daughter?”

“Yes, it was,” I tell him proudly. “Wanta see her picture?”

I have brought with me a small album with pictures of our family—of Larry, our house, our dog, and snapshots of Kate. Last summer she worked at the New York Aquarium with marine mammals. I have a picture of her on her last day of work. She’s leaning over a pool and a beluga whale is jumping out of the water, nuzzling her cheek.

Later that afternoon my cell phone rings once more. “Is that the Whale Kisser again?” Tom asks.

“Who?” I have no idea who he’s talking about.

“Your daughter,” he laughs. “The Whale Kisser.”

I glance at my caller ID. “Yes, it is.”

It was my father who told me to have this child. I was thirty-nine years old and traveling through China with my companion of five years. Jeremy and I had walked the Forbidden City and sailed through the now-destroyed gorges on the Yangtze. We had climbed to the Potala Palace in Tibet. But Jeremy, a renowned legal scholar, had to leave me in Shanghai. He was returning to New York, then flying on to New Zealand to deliver a series of lectures on the rights of the Maori. After months of trying to get him to alter his plans, I decided to continue across Asia on the Trans-Siberian Railway alone.

I was in search of family roots on the outskirts of Kiev.

The year was 1986. Just as this Mississippi journey was marked by Katrina, my trip to Kiev was marked by disaster as well. The nuclear accident in Chernobyl occurred two weeks before we left and my venture into Ukraine was looking dim at best. But it was still my intention to persevere. On the six-day train ride to Moscow I was sick and lethargic, the result I assumed of too much vodka, which flowed quite freely on that train, and travel. But by Leningrad I knew. Jeremy and I were going to have a child. I was looking at forty. We’d been together five years. It never occurred to me that we would not marry.

I reached him with the good news. “I’m pregnant,” I told him. “I’m going to have a child.”

The transatlantic silence was shattering. “Are you sure?” he finally asked.

“I’m sure,” I told him.

“Well, a child is a wonderful thing.”

“I was thinking we should make it legal.”

There was another long pause. Finally he replied, “Legal in what sense?” He had written over thirty books on international law. He had pleaded cases before the World Court. Surely he knew what legal meant.

It was during the months of “white nights” in Leningrad. Like Raskolnikov, plagued by anguish and guilt, I walked the canals. Clearly Jeremy had no intention of marrying and I knew I could not have this child on my own. I wandered into a bar, filled with the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. They were like mannequins with their dark eye shadow, their pointy breasts. They were prostitutes, waiting for men from Finland, and they thought I was trying to hone in on their weekend business. I wandered out and walked some more. Half the night I walked, then went back to my hotel room, a study in curtains and lace, and called my mother.

In tears I told her I was pregnant. I said that Jeremy didn’t want the baby and I was coming home to have an abortion. “Are you sure this is right?” she asked me. “Are you sure it’s what you want to do?”

“What else can I do?” I sobbed into the phone. And I made her promise, “Don’t tell my father. You have to swear.”

“I swear,” she said.

Half an hour later the phone rang. It was my father. “Mary,” Dad said, “I hear you have a problem.”

I cried uncontrollably when I heard his voice. “Yes, I have a problem.”

“Well,” he said, his tone surprisingly modulated, “in my opinion there are no problems. Only solutions.” Always his aphorisms. “You know,” he went on, “men come and go.” He paused as if he knew of what he spoke—as if he was thinking about something he didn’t want to say. “But a child is forever.”

“Can you live with that?” I asked tentatively. I had never spoken with my father like this before. I peered out of the window at the sunny streets of Leningrad at four a.m.

“I can live with a lot worse,” he said.