The River Queen (10 page)

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.

GHOST RIVER

12

“N
OTHING 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

O
N 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

S
ILENTLY 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.”