AROUND THE BEND

24

EVERYWHERE I look there are stories. Around every bend. Everything you do, every line you throw. There’s a tale to tell. Jerry, it seems, has a story for everything, usually one involving mutilation or death. Every waitress, every cabbie, every person at a marina, every boatman you meet will have his or her own. One that will always top yours.

If you saw a storm, they saw a tornado. If you saw a tornado, they were in a tidal wave. If you saw a big catfish, they’ve always seen a bigger one, no matter how big yours was to start with. If you were in an accident or had a great pet, they were in a worse accident or had a dog who shopped for dinner.

As we go through Lock and Dam 16, Jerry, who is at the helm, says, “Boy I remember the last time we were here. It smelled like brownies. I asked about it, but the lockmaster denied it.” He’s steering us away from the wall as I take the line in the front and Tom takes his in the back. “I guess he didn’t want to give me any.”

Holding the line I take a sip of my coffee from my Citgo mug. The boat shifts and scalding liquid sears my tongue. “Ouch!” I cry out. “I burned my tongue.” It feels as if somebody sanded it.

Jerry starts to tell me about when he burned his whole mouth. “With this very mug.” He holds up his Citgo mug. “Now let her go a little, Mary,” Jerry says. “You’re holding too tight. Remember what happened to that woman from Trempealeau.” And Jerry makes a motion like a knife slitting his throat.

We are leaving the lock and dam, and river scum coats my hands. A sandbar to our starboard side is blanketed in birds. Pelicans, heron, egrets, cormorants, gulls. We’re running the engine at fifteen hundred rpm. Jerry says this is a good speed to run it and not burn too much fuel. I stand next to him in the cabin, my face to the wind.

The rhythm of the boat has entered me. The gentle forward movement as we drift at a clip of eight and a half miles per hour. The sound of the engines as they punctuate our journey. As if life is just about forward motion. To go back is a struggle upstream. I’m coming to understand the meaning of “going with the flow.”

I check the mile marker, then glance at our maps. We’re coming up on Hog Island at Mile 458. There seem to be many markers on this trip. There are the river markers and the day-markers, there are buoys and depth markers. There’s the log Jerry keeps. There are the markers on walls to indicate high water and flood crests and on bridges and dams for clearance. Then there are my own personal markers. Eight days on the river and I’ve stopped taking my pills.

25

“WE’LL KEEP you clean in Muscatine,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1927 when he worked for the Colliers Advertising Agency. I’m thinking of this as we are heading to Muscatine, a place I only know from Fitzgerald’s jingle. He had already published The Great Gatsby, but he needed a job. Writers have to do all kinds of things to stay alive, don’t they?

I have long identified with migratory patterns of midwestern writers. Cather, Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dreiser, to name a few. They went east for opportunity, but they never lost their feeling for the Midwest. Twain’s greatest works about thirteen-year-old boys in Hannibal, Missouri, were written from the vantage point of Hartford, Connecticut. Cather wrote her novels of the prairie long after she’d left for good. And Fitzgerald’s yearning for the Middle West was always there.

What is it about these flatlands and fields of corn and wheat that holds the imagination? Was it what Proust said in his masterpiece? The only paradise is the one we have lost. For me the Midwest represents a simpler time, one of great clarity and few deceptions. As a friend once said, “It’s a good place to be from.…”

In 1926 Fred Angell, a resident of Muscatine, steamed a hamburger, instead of frying it, added his own formula of spices, and offered the sandwich to a deliveryman, who declared, “Fred, you know, this sandwich is made right!” Somehow this got translated to “Maid-Rite” and the Maid-Rite sandwich.

Muscatine without Maid-Rite, the saying goes, would be like Muscatine without the Mississippi River. But the river continues to flow, though Maid-Rite, which closed its doors in 1997, is long gone. So are the pearl button factories that once kept this town employed. Once there were eighteen pearl button factories in Muscatine. Now there are three and they only make plastic buttons. The pearl buttons, made from Mississippi mussels, ceased being produced long ago.

Coming into Muscatine, we see old Victorian houses set on the hill above the levee, well out of the flood zone. This is what I’m coming to recognize on the river. The grand houses sit high. We are searching for a landing and hopefully a gas dock and we spot one just below the town. The marina is large and there’s a courtesy dock.

“You’ve got plenty of room,” Tom says to Jerry. “You can even back her in if you want.”

“Naw, I’ll just bring her in forward, I think.”

“Looks like you’re turning up some sand here.”

“Yep,” Jerry says, not too happy. “I’ve only got four feet.” But he makes it and we come into a cozy spot on the dock.

Muscatine. The Pearl of the Mississippi. I want to go to the button museum, but it is closed on Sundays. Instead I head for a stroll through downtown. I walk by a plaque. MISSISSIPPI RIVER, RECORD FLOOD CREST, 25.58 FEET, JULY 9, 1993. A mark on the wall shows how high the waters rose.

I walk past Lee’s Bakers and The Purple Hedgehog, whose window is filled with—guess what—big purple hedgehogs, fairies, wizards, a Bruce Lee poster, a Bob Marley “Mellow Mood” poster, and some very odd pewter figurines that appear to be dragons. I walk by Hubbies, which seems like a kind of men’s store/bar with a wooden Indian in the back, a humidor in front. Nothing appears open in downtown Muscatine—not a coffee shop or a pharmacy, not a corner store—though many shops look abandoned and have FOR RENT signs in the window.

Tucked between Hazel Green and Her Sewing Machine and a carpet store with banners for the Muscatine Muskies in the window is a pawnshop. Inside I see the usual items. A bowie knife, fishing gear, rifles. Bicycles. Elvis photos. Telescope. Television sets. Lava lamps. But then there are the things I don’t expect. Someone pawned his kid’s basketball, a toy John Deere farm silo, complete with barn. A pair of chopsticks ($2.75). An alarm clock made up of farm animals ($17.29), a lamp with an angel, guarding children ($39).

But the main thing this shop pawns is musical instruments. Dozens of guitars. Shiny blue ones, a black one with flames licking out of its hole. Plain wood acoustical. All hanging by their necks from the ceiling like so many broken dreams, going as far back into the store as I can see. Saxophones ($399). An antique steel reed accordion made in Germany, complete with its box ($159). A slide trombone ($179). A pair of maracas ($3.99). Two boys on scooters zip past me. These are the first people I’ve seen. They are followed by a pale child on foot. The boys on scooters seem to be Hispanic or perhaps Native American. Or Middle Eastern. One boy has a scar on his cheek. The other wears a Stars & Stripes Band-Aid across his nose. The boy who is walking has bad teeth.

They almost run me over and I have to dash out of their way. On the other side of the street I notice an antiques shop has its door open and I slip inside. It is your usual tchotchke store, filled with ceramic cats, frilly tablecloths, old postcards. I start flipping through the postcards, looking for pictures of the river from earlier times.

A tall man in gray pants comes in with his diminutive blond wife and he’s in search of coins. “I want old money,” he tells the woman.

I think to myself, “I could use a little old money too.”

“I like Civil War coins. Anything you’ve got.” She doesn’t have much in the way of old coins, but they start speaking in very loud voices about the price of silver and how it’s way up. How nobody can afford silver anymore.

“I’ve got a Little Daisy butter churn,” the wife pipes in. “I bought it at a yard sale. It didn’t have its top so I only got the bottom. I thought I’d be able to find a top.”

“Bet you haven’t,” the woman at the desk says as she swats the counter with her flyswatter.

“You’re right. I haven’t.”

“Well, those are real collector’s items now. You won’t find much in the Little Daisy line.”

“I’ve been having trouble finding those old coins as well,” the man booms. “Everywhere I go, I look for them, but silver is getting scarcer and scarcer.”

I pick out a few postcards of Muscatine from the 1930s and, as I go pay for them, I ask the owner if she knows where I can get a cup of coffee in town.

She shakes her head. She’s sporting a tattered pink sweater and has cropped orangish hair. Probably younger than me, but looks a lot older. She keeps swatting her own back with the flyswatter. “Can’t get any coffee in this part of town. You gotta go down to the malls for that.”

“Well, I don’t have a car. Can I walk there?”

She looks at me like I’m crazy. “You don’t have a car? How’re you getting around without a car?”

“I’m on a boat, actually.”

I may as well have told her that I was traveling by intergalactic spaceship. “You don’t have a car?” She’s shaking her head. “No way to get to the malls without a car. There’s no busses, no cabs.… You have to have a car or you can’t get a cup of coffee in this town.” She introduces herself as Cindy. “You know, back in the 1970s Muscatine was a booming town. There was a lot going on here. Good restaurants, things to do. Then they built the malls. That just killed the downtown. There’s nothing here anymore,” Cindy says with a wave of her flyswatter. “You can’t buy groceries. You can’t get toothpaste. You gotta drive to the malls. It’s a conspiracy if you ask me.”

“A conspiracy?”

“Yeah, between the chains and the auto industry. I wouldn’t put it past them.” She swats a fly on the counter, then swats herself again. “And there’s no public transportation here. No taxis. If you’re working second or third shift in the factory, you can’t get home without a car.” She’s still whipping herself with her own flyswatter as if in an act of self-flagellation. “Look at this downtown. There’s no restaurants. No cafés. You can’t get a loaf of bread or a cup of coffee here. Nothing. The malls ruined all of that. And the cars. They spent eight million dollars on riverfront restoration. Eight million. And what’ve we got? A nice place to take a walk. That’s all.”

Later I will learn something from my husband, who is Canadian. Apparently films that are supposed to take place in the river towns of Middle America (the “fly over” states) are shot in Canada. For example, a film that is supposed to take place in Kansas City is being shot in Winnipeg. This is because Winnipeg looks more like what Americans think river towns should look like—bustling centers of commerce and vitality, not dead centers where nothing happens outside of its strip malls—than Kansas City itself does.

I pay for my postcards and leave. On my way back to the boat, I pass another pawnshop. It too specializes in guitars.

*   *   *

One day, while driving around the Midwest, my father and his brother, Sidney, got an idea. World War II had just ended and my father had gone back to Chicago from Pennsylvania, where he’d been working in the war industry. He had come to run his baby brother’s architectural firm. I picture the day. A warm day of Illinois summer. The fields flat, the corn just starting to grow.

They looked at all this vastness and open space and an idea came to them almost simultaneously. What if we put all the stores in one location, they thought, instead of having them scattered all over the place or just on Main Street? What if you drive to these stores? With the war over, the economy was chugging along. So they began building the first shopping centers all over the Midwest. Elgin, Illinois; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Terre Haute, Indiana.

The buildings they built were precursors to the generic Home Depot or Costco boxes we have today. Charmless, depersonalized malls that began the depletion of Main Street and the downtowns. But then, in the 1940s and 1950s, it was all America wanted, and my father and his brother did well for a time. For two summers I worked in his office and I’d gaze at the sketches and models—the plastic trees, the fake families, the cookie-cutter stores. When he wanted to take me on an outing, we would go to a building or a mall under construction. I’d get a hard hat and we’d walk around, usually with an engineer and a set of plans. My father would say things like, “Let’s put dressing rooms in the back” or, “Can’t we open up those walls?” He seemed happiest walking along the wooden planks of sawdust-strewn floors.

My father had many dreams. One was to be a rich man, which he was for a while. And then he wasn’t. He watched his wealth evaporate in bad deals, lavish spending, and taxes on property sold. In some ways he died impoverished. In his final years, when my parents moved to Milwaukee to be near my brother, my father would dissuade his Chicago friends from driving up to see him. He was embarrassed at his fall from grace.

He had other dreams—those he’d put aside. To be a musician, to “angel” Broadway shows. When I visited him in the last year, we’d watch television, which he couldn’t hear. Or we’d sit and gaze at the squirrels building their nests. He marveled at how efficient they were. Other times he’d close his eyes and raise his hand and conduct Brahms or Ellington or South Pacific. He’d hum along, signaling for the trumpets to come in, for the drums to drop back. I could sit for hours watching him conduct the music he heard in his head.

I encouraged him to work on his memoirs for a while. After all he was a man who’d seen an entire century. And besides he wanted to be remembered for something he did. That mattered to him more than anything. One Christmas I went home and read the pages he’d written. There were dozens of them, single-spaced. They told of business deals he’d done, shopping centers he’d helped design. Real estate he’d developed.

For a man who was to me a musician and a great storyteller, these pages were incredibly dull. Devoid of imagination. I could barely read them. But perhaps most strikingly, there was no mention of my mother, my brother, or me. He even wrote about a shopping center he’d built the year I was born, but never acknowledged my birth.

“Dad,” I said when I put the pages down. “I’m not even in here. I want to be born.”

“You will be,” he told me with a laugh. “You will.”

But in the pages of his memoir I never was. We never were mentioned. He talked about bricks and mortar, about deals gone bad and others that came out good. But he never spoke of me. Or my mother. Or John. It was as if we never existed at all.

When he turned 102, he saw an item on the news. It seemed that a ferry called The Lake Express was being launched between Milwaukee and Muskegon, Michigan, and my father expressed a desire to go for a ride. I was stunned by this request. He was, after all, very old and frail, and it was a six-hour ride on what could turn out to be a cold and choppy voyage. But he was adamant.

Given that I am married to a newshound, I made a few inquiries. Apparently the public relations people for The Lake Express liked the idea that a man who was turning 102 wanted to celebrate his birthday on their ferry. Our family was offered free tickets and we were told the press wanted to interview my dad. He dressed that day in a navy jacket, a red and white striped tie, gray flannel slacks. He wore his beige cashmere coat and a gray fedora. Nobody looked as good as my father that day. In a folder in his lap he carried a file that read “Memoir.” I think he planned to hand this to the press. Instead they asked him one or two questions and snapped his picture.

In response to the question about why he wanted to take the ferry, he replied, “Because my arms will hurt less than if I row.” That made the headlines.

For six hours he sat on the deck while my mother, bored and annoyed, grumbled inside. He wore a blanket draped across his legs. When the captain announced that Mr. Morris had just turned 102, Dad gave a wave at the crowd. Strangers came up and congratulated him. He was in his element. He told tales of living through two world wars, of the Great Depression. “Yeah, I remember the invention of the airplane,” he quipped with one passenger. “I predicted it would never fly.”

But for most of those six hours he just sat, eyes on the water, staring straight ahead.

After he died, people sent me books on the literature of mourning, the nature of grief. A bereavement sampler. None of this did much good except I learned what I already knew. That grief is not a constant, the way love or anger might be. Grief is a sneakier emotion. It comes in waves, when you least expect it, sweeping across you and then it’s gone. A sudden storm that comes upon you, then subsides.

*   *   *

In the morning we gas up. Here it costs us $3.96 a gallon. With tax, for one hundred gallons, which is one hundred river miles, I get a fuel bill of four hundred dollars. Later in the year the attorney general of Illinois will charge gas stations with price gouging, but for now this is what I have to pay.

I’m starting to do the math. At this rate, if nothing changes, the fuel costs alone of going to New Orleans from where I am right now would be over five thousand dollars. And that’s just one way. If I go with Greg Sadowski, who has suddenly surfaced in Portage Des Sioux, the place where we are headed, he’ll have to bring his boat back. No wonder the river is empty. It’s not just Katrina or the drought that’s keeping barges and pleasure craft off the river. It’s the cost of fuel.

The truth is I can’t afford it either. As much as I want to get to Memphis and beyond, I’m starting to think that I just can’t. I’m going to need a free ride to get myself down the lower Mississippi. It comes to me that it would be perfect to have this boat take me to the end of the upper Mississippi. Then maybe I could hitch a ride south on a friendly vessel that won’t charge an arm and a leg. Or fuel costs at least. Jerry has his heart set on ending his journey at Portage Des Sioux, which is at Mile 212, and wintering the River Queen there, but I’ve gotten something else in my head. I want this boat to take me to Cairo. River Mile zero.

With a mug of coffee in hand, I step onto the dock and take Jerry aside. “Can we talk?” I ask him.

“Sure,” Jerry says.

“Look, I’m figuring this thing out and I’m thinking it would be better—well, it would be better for me—if you could get me to Cairo. I mean, I know you don’t want to go past St. Louis, but I’d really like to do the upper Mississippi with you. If you could just get me to Cairo. It’s the place where Huck and Jim missed the Ohio. It’s Mile zero. The end of Illinois. Then I can figure out my way from there.…”

Jerry’s listening, his gaze set on the river, but he doesn’t say a word.

“I mean, would you consider…?” I am nervous, shaking as I ask. “Would you think about getting me there?”

For a few moments he says nothing, but looks askance in a way that feels like “no.” “Not sure if I can. I’ve got to figure how many days up and back to Portage Des Sioux. Gotta figure the costs. I need to talk to Tom. And I gotta talk to Kathy.”

“Well, would you?”

“Well, I’ll think about it.” It’s not a flat-out no. That’s better than what I’d thought. He promises he will, but he doesn’t make a call. Later in the morning I take Tom aside.

“So,” I tell him, “I’ve asked Jerry if he’ll keep going to Cairo.”

Tom listens, taking this in. “So what’d he say?”

“He said he’d think about it. Do you think he will?”

“Hard to tell with Jerry,” he says. “Never know what he’s gonna do.” Tom gives me a slap on the arm. “I’ll work on him for you.”

They are getting ready to push off, but I don’t think I can go another day without bathing. I try to broach this subject gently with Jerry. Perhaps there’s a way to actually hook up our shower, but apparently this will require some work and time and it also means that we’d be using precious water, which we don’t want to run out of. Maybe there’s another option. I run this by Jerry. I’m willing to find a gas station that has showers. He shakes his head. “How’re you going to get to a gas station?”

I have no idea.

Jerry grumbles for a moment, then talks to Tom. It appears there is some kind of a water pump that they’ve been saving for just such an occasion. Jerry tells me to go put on my bathing suit and when I come back, they’ve got this pump operating. It’s pumping river water through a hose. The river here at the dock is, well, brown, but if I want a shower, what choice do I have? As Tom pumps and Jerry holds the hose, I stand on the dock, shampooing my hair, rubbing soap under my armpits. Discreetly they look the other way.

26

BOGUS ISLAND, Hail Island, Bell Island, Turkey Island, Otter Island. All these islands south of Muscatine have funny names, I think, as I gaze at the maps and we journey south. My tongue burns and feels numb at the same time from the scalding it took the day before. As I’m heading outside, map in hand, I smash my foot into Jerry’s toolbox. “Goddamn it,” I say.

Jerry looks up, startled. “Is my toolbox okay?”

“Thanks, Jer.” Wounded and chagrined, I take my place at the bow, resting my bruised foot on an extra plastic chair. There are dozens of things to trip on or fall over on this boat. There are mooring lines and anchor lines. There are the places where we pump in and pump out and the caps that are on these, as well as the cap where the anchor line goes. I’ve stubbed my toe literally half a dozen times on this one alone and the boys laugh heartily whenever I do.

There are three ice chests and plastic chairs, and the long stick and the short stick and firewood, and pretty much anyone’s shoes. On three occasions I have smashed my foot into the propped-up hatch above the port engine. When I complain about this, Tom says his engines need to “breathe.”

So do I, I want to say, but I resist.

If there is engine trouble, and there often is, I am afraid to come off the flybridge for fear of falling into the bowels of the engines themselves. And of course there is Samantha Jean, who seems to take sadistic pleasure, if a dog is capable of this emotion, in being underfoot. I have a yellow purple bruise on my thigh where I walked into the ice chest and similar bruises on all my toes. Then there are our buoys and fenders and life rings and, of course, the very anchors themselves, which, if they are not stowed, enter my worst dreams.

There’s dampness in the air. The edges of my journal and books curl. The cabin is full of flies. My burned tongue feels numb. The banks are lined with trees whose shallow roots are exposed. More pushovers, ready with the slightest shove to tumble down. The river itself is smooth and glossy, the reflection of trees along its bank like a mirror.

It’s a slow morning. I have phone reception so I decide to give Kate a ring. I can tell from her voice that she’s just gotten up and she’s rushing to class. “Hi, honey,” I say, “just wondering if you got that package.”

“I haven’t even gone to the post office yet.” Her voice is filled with fatigue and some annoyance. “Look, can I call you later?”

“Sure,” I say, “anytime.” We hang up and already I’m wishing I hadn’t called. I phone home to chat with Larry, but I get the machine. Judging by the time, he’s probably out for a run. I try to settle down at the bow while Tom has his breakfast of diet Dew and some sponge candy I picked up in East Davenport. Then he goes back up to his berth on the flybridge and cuddles with his dog. We float free through Lock and Dam 17 and hundreds of white pelicans greet us as the lock opens. “Have fun and be safe,” the lockmaster says. When Jerry sees the pelicans, he says, “Cowabunga,” and starts snapping pictures.

On the flybridge Tom whispers sweet nothings to Samantha Jean, whom he has tucked into his sleeping bag. “Give Daddy a kiss. Come on, Sammy. Big kiss.” Meanwhile Jerry starts talking about having me go from Cairo to Memphis in a towboat. He says that I can just hop a ride. Oh great. I can’t wait for that. “I’ll make a few calls for you,” Jerry says.

We float by a dredging barge that looks as if it landed from outer space. On the shore it’s made a huge pile of sand from the river silt it’s brought up. All along this part of the river are duck blinds. This must be a major migration route.

We’re nearing Lock and Dam 18 and there’s a tow and barge ahead. “Looks like she’s only six hundred feet,” Jerry says. “Maybe she can take us with.” But it seems we have to wait.

Jerry explains that when they built the lock and dam system in the 1930s the plan was to build auxiliary locks so that smaller pleasure craft wouldn’t have to compete with commercial vessels for lockage. “Then World War II happened, and…”— he makes the hand motion he makes when a boat broaches—“that plan went down the tubes.”

The sky darkens and the air has a hot, muggy feel. Suddenly a big storm is upon us. Lightning and thunder explode. A deluge pours down. Tom has left his sleeping bag to air out in the dinghy and in minutes it is soaking wet. He races outside and drags all his bedding into our tiny cabin to dry out along with his bomber jacket and the rest of his things, including, of course, Samantha Jean, who is also soaked to the skin. The cabin has an enclosed, musty smell, not to mention that of wet dog. Fork lightning is everywhere and I recall all the cautionary tales from my river planner as Samantha Jean freaks out and races under my bed.

We are locked out by the barge and tow and Jerry puts the marine band radio on Channel 13 so we can hear what the towboat plans to do. I listen to an incomprehensible voice with what sounds like a thick Louisiana accent. “They’re all from the bayou,” Jerry says. “Cajuns. All them towboat drivers.”

It appears we have some time on our hands and not much to do except sit there in the rain, so Jerry lets me maneuver the boat. Gently he shows me how to adjust the shift, which moves the boat forward and in reverse. “Lean into her,” he tells me. “You wanta make a right turn, you do the shift like this. Left, you go like this.” He shows me how if you pull the shift all the way down she’ll go into reverse.

With rain pelting the windshield (and no wipers), I’m not having much luck. On this boat shifting is strictly a right-hand maneuver and I am a lefty. Jerry is also left-handed and I ask him if this isn’t difficult for him as well. He thinks about it for a moment. “I suppose it would be,” he wrinkles his brow, “if I hadn’t been doing it for so long.”

“Well, I’m having a hard time.…”

I’m struggling with the small adjustments I must make with my right hand as I turn the boat right, then left, but I can’t quite get the hang of it. I’ve long grappled with the perils of being a lefty in a right-handed world—can openers, hotel computer mouses, Metrocards for the New York City subway (which all require right-handed maneuvers). I’m definitely feeling challenged here. “Hey, Jer, what happens if I accidentally throw the shift into reverse rather than neutral?”

“Hmm,” Jerry says, “now that’s a good question. Let me tell you what happened to my friends, Pete and Jenny. They had a bad marriage to start with, but they were out boating one day and he was going too fast so she wanted to slow them down and he said no so she got angry and went over, trying to pull the throttle back, but she pulled the shift instead and threw the boat into reverse. Melted down the whole transmission.” Jerry pauses for effect. “The marriage ended shortly thereafter.”

I am careful in the wind and rain as I lean into the shift. A few moments later we get a call from the lockmaster and I breathe a sigh of relief. For whatever reason, the tow and barge has decided to fall back and let us go ahead. “Why’re they doing that?” I ask as Jerry takes the wheel to maneuver into the lock. “Well, it could be he has to wait for something. Or it could also be, because of the storm, that he just wants us out of his way. My guess is he wants us gone before he goes ahead.” As we move into position on the lock, the barge workers wave. One waves from the rear, but I don’t see him so I don’t wave back until Tom says, “Mary, he’s waving at you,” so I wave again.

We pass the tow and barge, slosh a little in its wake as we ease our way into the lock. The lockmaster in a yellow slicker awaits us. “Not a bad day to be a duck,” Tom greets the lockmaster as we wait for him to let us through.

“Ducks know enough to stay out of the rain,” the lockmaster says. Just then a huge bolt of lightning cracks above us and I scream my head off.

“Bow into the wall,” Jerry says.

“Well, you don’t have to get pissy,” Tom snaps back.

“Hey,” Tom says to the lockmaster, pointing to the back of the lock as the gates are closing, “you sprung a leak.”

“Yeah, gotta fix that one,” the lockmaster says as the water rushes in behind us. I’m standing in the pouring rain. Another crack of lightning right above us, the kind that sounds like a firecracker going off in your brain, and I scream again. Tom laughs his head off. The lockmaster laughs too.

“You can go ahead when I open,” he tells us. “No need to wait for the horn on a day like today.” The lockmaster leaves us now. “Have fun,” he says. “Be safe.”

As we leave behind Lock 18 we are listening to the National Weather Service. Chance of rain 60 percent, which I could have told them. Rain may produce hail. Jerry doesn’t like this. Hail can damage a boat. Hail is not good for the windshields or the nicely painted fiberglass coat.

“What d’ya think, Tom? Should we head south or tie up behind the wall? Maybe under some trees or something?”

I’m praying for south. I do not want to stay in this fork lightning storm. I really do not want to stay in one place. Tom’s staring at the sky. I have no idea what he’s looking for or what he sees. “Just looks like a lot of rain. I think we’re okay to head south.” Though there is no hail, we are on a river of driving rain. Everything in the cabin is wet and lightning crackles all around us. We opt not to stop in Burlington, Iowa, though I’d wanted to. In this storm there’s no point.

In the gray mist and drizzle we spot a tow, pulling a boat upriver. It comes upon us like a phantom, and, as she approaches, Tom and Jerry realize that the tow is dragging the Princess back to La Crosse. This is the boat Jerry was supposed to move south before he decided upon doing our trip. It is also the boat that Greg Sadowski was piloting when Katrina hit.

On the radio we hear a tow driver refer to her as “an elegant yachtlike boat,” but now we see her for what she became after the storm. Her hull has a deep, battered gash. The windows on her starboard side are smashed and boarded up. There is a silence on board as she passes us going north. Jerry shakes his head. “She’s a shadow of her former self,” he says.

I lie down to take a nap. As I curl up in my nook, I hear a sound under the bed. A desperate, heavy breathing. I look down and see the bleary eyes of Samantha Jean, terrified by the lightning, who has found a safe refuge below me. I ponder this for a moment. Then get up and go to the fridge. I return with a scrap of salami and slip it to her under the bed.

27

IN THE 1840s Joseph Smith claimed he was guided by an angel to a place where he found gold plates on which prophets had written divine revelations. Smith founded the Mormon church in upstate New York, then led a small band of followers to Nauvoo, Illinois. Within a few years his following rose to ten thousand and Nauvoo became the second largest town in Illinois, after Chicago.

Considered to be a charlatan by some and a philanderer by others (apparently his belief in polygamy grew out of his own marital woes), Smith made enemies along the way. During a bloody conflict the original temple was destroyed and Joseph Smith was killed. Soon afterward the Mormons set off on their journey to Utah. Two years ago the fully refurbished church, closed to non-Mormons, was reopened.

The new church looms high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. Nauvoo was once the center of the Mormon world and is still viewed as a sacred place by the church. Smith had referred to Nauvoo as “the loveliest place and the best people under the heavens,” and I wanted to see it. Jerry did too. But, as we approach after the storm, there is no boat landing. The bank of the river on the Illinois side is all farmland. Then Jerry spots a grain elevator and beside it are two barges. Tom and Jerry look at each other and give a shrug. “We’ll tie up here,” Jerry says.

I am astonished. “But that’s private property.”

They look at me as if this is a foreign concept. “As they say in Thailand”—Jerry throws up his arms—“c’est la vie.”

We are like pirates as we make our way toward the rusty barge, which is riding low in the water. The grain elevator is operating. Yellow kernels fly down a belt, then up into the silos. Others rain down onto the ground. Jerry maneuvers the River Queen against the side of the barge. But he doesn’t like where he’s come in so he reverses and moors our bow to the stern of the barge.

We tie up and Tom opts, as he almost always does, to stay with Samantha Jean and the boat. Jerry will go exploring with me. Tom steadies me with his strong arm as I leap onto the rusty barge, which shifts under my weight. Then I jump to the land. It is the first time on this journey that I put my feet on Illinois soil. I feel the solid earth, corn kernels beneath my sandals. It is not so different from Iowa, but it’s home to me.

The path from the barge to the loading dock is paved with golden corn. Everything around us is corn. Jerry and I tromp through muck and corn around the silo, which churns and grinds and the noise is deafening. Jerry finds his way around the silo and inside to talk to the elevator operator. Kernels rain down as the operator explains he can’t be responsible for what happens to us or our boat, and he’s going to pretend we aren’t here.

This is fine with us. “We won’t be more than an hour,” Jerry says, checking out the sky and time of day. We cut across the silo property where Jerry points to the safety ladders coming down the sides. “This way you only fall six feet instead of sixty.” I nod, glad he explains things in this way to me.

Heading into Nauvoo, we walk by an old quarry from which the original Mormon temple here was built. We pass fields of corn, historic houses with little plaques on them that give a feel of what life was like in the 1840s. We keep trying to get to the temple, but the closer we get, the further it seems to drift away. It is a mirage, an illusion.

There are no shops, no town. At least nothing we can walk to as we keep trudging toward the steeple. Just these historic red brick houses with no one around. There is a ghostlike feel, as if the place had been struck by a neutron bomb. On a tennis court we come upon a group of kids, maybe two dozen teens, playing some kind of game with a sheet and a volleyball. They are all blond and smiling. They seem to be having too much fun. They don’t notice us as we pass. The temple remains far away, even as we approach it.

Nauvoo spooks us out. Jerry starts calling the place “Nauvoodoo.” “Let’s get out of here,” he says and I agree. As the light is fading, Jerry goes ahead of me to get the boat ready and make sure the engines are going to start. He definitely wants to leave before dark. I am slower and, as I walk on the path that takes me through the grain elevator, I see that the operator is in the office.

The office is filled with small plastic boxes with labels that read WALK PROGRAM CORN, BUTTER AND HARDY PROGRAM CORN. The grain operator is a short, stocky man with a round face, wearing a hard hat. He seems uncomfortable when I walk into the office.

“Excuse me,” I say, “I’m sorry to bother you.” He doesn’t say anything. “But I’m with that boat. The one that’s tied up to your barge.” He still doesn’t say anything and I have a feeling he’s afraid that somehow he’s going to get in trouble. “I’m a writer,” I tell him, and then perhaps to make him more at ease, “a journalist. Can you tell me something about the grain here? Have you been slow because of New Orleans and the drought?”

“Well, don’t quote me, all right? I mean, I wouldn’t want you to quote me.”

“I’m just curious…”

“Well,” he tips his hard hat back a bit, “we were running low for a couple weeks, but we’re riding hot and heavy now. We’re getting ready to load.” I ask if he thinks this means the Port of New Orleans is going to be opening soon and again he asks me not to quote him, but, “We’re getting ready to load.” Our corn, he tells me, goes all over the world. But mostly to Japan.

“Japan?”

“For beer,” he says. “The Japanese buy almost all our corn for their beer.”

*   *   *

All across the prairie, golden wheat blew in the wind. There were miles of it, flat and waving, seas of winter wheat. When it was ready, the farmers of Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa harvested it, separating the grain from the chaff, then drove their truckloads to the grain elevators where the farmers were paid by the bushel. Winter wheat had already been bought in autumn. September wheat was sold in July.

The farmers were never happy with the price their crops brought. They grumbled and complained among themselves but in the end they had no choice. They took what was offered whether it was a dollar or seventy-five cents to the bushel. They took what was offered because already, months before, some manufacturer had already bought their wheat.

Then Pillsbury or General Mills purchased the grain to make bread and cakes, store-bought items, and what had once flowed like a sea in the prairie was now shipped to the giant mills. As he sat in the order booth, my father tried to make sense out of the journey of the wheat. Or the corn. How it was so young and went so far. How so much happened in its short life. He pictured it in fields and silos, on trains and mills. He was a man who wanted to go places and he was filled with envy.

His hands shot up from the booth as the orders came in. Buy and he waved toward his chest. Sell and he pushed his hand away. A closed fist meant a dollar. Five shakes of the fist, five dollars. Thumbs-up was seven/eighths of a dollar. He showed me once how, when he worked on the Board of Trade, he shot back the same signals, confirming purchases and sales.

During World War II my father lived with a Quaker family. When he talked, they hung on his every word. Once he asked them, “What is it? How is it possible that everything I say is so interesting to you?”

The Quakers laughed and explained they weren’t listening to his words. “You talk with your hands,” they said, keeping their own demurely folded in their laps.

My father did talk with his hands. It was as if he was conducting a conversation, rather than just speaking it. He talked about business. Futures, commodities. The grain markets. Soy, wheat, barley, corn. He’d point to his chest. “Buy!” I’d shout with glee. Or gesture away with a raised fist. “Sell!”

*   *   *

We sail from Nauvoo beneath a popcorn sky—a bucket of bumpy white and yellow clouds that spill across the horizon. We’ve taken on swarms of flies and Tom jokes that “this is why they call it the flybridge.” Tom says we took them on at the grain elevator where we tied up at Nauvoo. “Lots of flies there,” Tom says as he swats them with his bare hands. I’ve gone topside and am piloting as Tom smashes flies with his broad, bloodied palms on this clear, summer evening. Then he flicks them off the deck into the wind.

The channel is wide and goes into a gentle bend so Jerry thinks the risk of me wreaking havoc is slim. “Keep an eye on her, will you, Tom?” I must admit that I don’t like being spoken of in the third person when I am sitting right there, but I try to ignore it.

“So you liked Nauvoo?” Tom asks as he brings his wide hands together and mushes another fly between them. He picks the fly up by its still quivering wings and flicks it overboard.

“Not really,” I tell him. “Spooky place.”

He nods. He’s brought the tin of molasses cookies Jerry’s mother made and, between fly smashing, reaches in and eats them by the handful. “Nauvoodoo,” Tom says, imitating Jerry. He offers me the tin.

“Naw. Thanks.”

“You know what you need,” Tom says, munching on a cookie with his bloodied mitt. “You need to kick off your heels and relax.” He whacks at the air and catches two. He rubs my head before I can flinch. I’m praying for a marina with showers at Keokuk, where we’re headed.

“Hmm…” I’m a little stuck on how one kicks off one’s heels. I think it’s heels you kick up and shoes you kick off. But for the time being I’m just trying to stay in the main channel.

He smashes a few more flies, wipes the blood on his trousers. “Oh, you know. Lighten up, goof off.” He jabs at my arm with a bloody paw. “Rock ’n’ roll.”

“I’m trying,” I say. “You mean be an idiot like you?”

“That’s right,” he says, dipping back into the cookies. “You sure you don’t want some?”

“No thanks. I’ll pass.”

The popcorn sky fades and turns a deep purple. As soon as it gets dark, Jerry takes over below. He is getting nervous. I can feel it. It’s palpable on board. He doesn’t like the river at night. There are deadheads and wing dams and snags you can’t see. It’s not like when Mark Twain traveled in these parts, but both Jerry and Tom assure me you can still meet your maker here.

On our radio we chat with a nearby tow, the Mark Schonen. He’s pushing a six-hundred-foot barge downstream—one of the first barges, riding hard and heavy downstream, we’ve seen. Even I recognize his Cajun accent by now. We’ve been passing him and following him in the storm we were in all day. Now it is the blackest of nights and Jerry has a big frown on his face. The tow captain tells us to follow him and he’ll get us to a marina in Keokuk.

I don’t understand what we’re doing, but, as it gets darker, we travel in the Mark Schonen’s wake at five miles per hour. I find this pace in the darkness so tedious I could scream. “Why’re we going so slowly?” I ask Jerry. I am ready to eat, relax, walk on the planet Earth. And once again I am longing for a shower.

“Because he knows the way,” Jerry says, his voice tinged with annoyance. “Because he has radar.” His eyes are fixed on the river and he hasn’t got time or the inclination to talk to me. We follow at this impossibly slow speed, only slightly faster than if we cut our engines altogether. We hang back in the wake of the tow and barge and in the blackness it feels as if this will take forever.

It is close to nine o’clock when the towboat pilot shines his beacon at a landing. We gaze toward the west bank and there is a dock. As we approach Keokuk, the towboat lights our way. Once he sees that we’ve spotted the landing, he gives two blasts of his horn, then he disappears into the darkness, but for a long time we can see his wake.