Читать книгу Coastal Missouri: Driving On the Edge of Wild - John Drake Robinson - Страница 6

The days were getting warmer when I got a call from a good friend alerting me that an adventurous soul was about to experience the dream of every American river rat. He’d built a raft, and was looking for crew members to help him drift from St. Paul to the Gulf of Mexico.

Holy Huck! I’m in!

But would I trust my life to somebody I’d never met? After some background checking, I committed to the journey of a lifetime.

I was one of maybe a dozen conscripts who volunteered for the three-month journey. Every one of those volunteers quickly realized that none of us could spend an entire summer floating down that big river. I tempered my dream with a realistic plan. I’d sign on to crew from St. Louis to the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. That would cover a part of the Mississippi I hadn’t traveled.

It wasn’t a big boat. In terms of cubits, it was a two-by-four. But it had a big backyard, a mile wide and 1,800 miles long. And it became the summer palace for a big thinker who has no problem translating big thoughts into action. Even his name was bold, fit for a John Wayne movie.

Justus McLarty has dipped his paddle in rivers throughout the world. Amazon. Yukon. Patagonia. Colorado. He’s plunged kayaks down forty-foot waterfalls and shared the unfamiliar food of a dozen different tribes. But the Mighty Mississippi had eluded him.

No longer.

Most big thinkers don’t progress past the idea stage. Justus not only planned the adventure, he built the boat. He spent the better part of a year in the driest of dry docks, in his garage in a tiny West Texas town where the surrounding seas are subterranean black gold. That might seem like a problem, transporting a dream from tumbleweed country to the headwaters of America’s seminal waterway. But remember, Justus McLarty thinks big.

He had the luxury of summertime to complete the journey. His job goes dormant during the summer when his employer, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, takes a production break.

Unlike an SNL rerun, you never step in the same raft twice. A raft always has a changing view, and a different danger lurking around the bend.

So what kind of vessel would deliver a passenger from Sorenson Landing, Minnesota, to Head of Passes, Louisiana, in relative comfort and safety?

The design bounced around McLarty’s brain for years. Unlike too many of us whose dreams die unfulfilled, Justus was swift and sure. From his own mental design, he began a trial-and-error process that produced a creature as unique to this universe as Mary Shelley’s monster or the zilla of God.

At first glance, the boat looked nearly as freakish. The cabin was framed by welded aluminum joists and fit with bright yellow plywood decking. Walls of waterproof nylon, canvas, and clear plastic protected the passenger from the elements and rolled up during a breezeless swelter. The whole house sat atop two bulbous pontoons, blue as a Simpsons sky. The pontoons were tough rubber carcasses that sported a patchwork quilt of repairs incurred in a previous life, when the pontoons took a thousand trips down the Colorado River. The boat even had a tiny outboard motor.

So the raft was a bit more sophisticated than a Huck Finn production. But Justus McLarty was determined to guide his craft like a raft.

The interior offered the rudimentary comforts of home: a stove, a sink, an ice box. Running water flowed from refillable plastic tankards. Ample shelving supported all the things a body would need for ninety days: kitchenware, food, flashlights, books, even a boom box loaded with a billion river tunes. Since interior space was devoted to cooking, sleeping and storage, the living room sat atop the flat roof, furnished with folding lawn chairs. Not a lot of shade.

Mark Twain endowed us with more than literary masterpieces. He gave us a lasting river lexicon. America’s exclusive fraternity of riverboat pilots adopted a term for disciples of Twain who act on their fantasies of wild river adventure: Tom’n’Hucks. Because the boat McLarty built made a cartoonish first impression, it attracted skeptical curiosity from river veterans and barge pilots. That’s understandable. The barge pilots are professionals, guiding billions of tons of commerce between the red and green buoys that mark the river’s navigable channel. They view primitive rafts the way you view a skateboard on a highway.

They soon learned that our boat was not primitive. They saw it was solid and seaworthy. And its captain earned their tolerance, maybe even begrudging respect. More important, McLarty showed respect to the big rigs and stayed out of their way. In one radio conversation, he patiently answered a tow captain’s queries. “Yes, I have a motor.” And charts. And navigation experience. And lifesaving gear. And respect for the Mississippi and its rules.

It was after this radio grilling that McLarty overheard his inquisitor talking to another tow pilot. “He’s OK,” one pilot reassured the other. “He’s not a Tom’n’Huck.”

There’s another telling difference. Best I can recall, Big Jim and Huck Finn never named their raft. Justus has a name for his craft.

From the earliest idea stage, observers pestered him with the same question: “What’s the name of your boat?”

“No name yet,” he replied. For months he heard suggestions. “Huck Too” . . . “Mighty Miss” . . . Good God Almighty.

No, really, Good God Almighty, there must be 2.4 billion of those corny names on the posteriors of otherwise respectable boats.

McLarty even had an offer to sell the naming rights. But he resisted the temptation to call his floating home the Acme Bag of Chips or the Tip Top Toilet Bowl Cleaner. He’d poured years into this project, and his goal had nothing to do with marketing or making money. As launch time approached, he patiently awaited the name to come to him. And he was comfortable with the thought that the boat might not have a name until well downstream.

As with all good ideas and most newborns, the name arrived on its own schedule. In a conversation about the project, McLarty recalls his grandfather saying, “Well, my Grandma Alexander always said the worst thing of all is to go through life with a great big wanter and a little bitty getter. So keep your getter bigger than your wanter.”

The Big Getter was born.

All summer long, river folks gravitated to this hydro-nomad perched on bulbous blue balloons. From a hundred docks, through the locks, along the river bluffs, from the decks of paddlewheel steamers, onlookers tempered their first impressions with one of two thoughts.

“I’d never do that,” said the people who rarely step out of their comfort zone. But a larger group felt a sense of envy. The spirit of adventure. Justus routinely invited them to join him. “Drop what you’re doing and climb aboard.”

Along the entire length of the river, Justus McLarty welcomed a revolving door of passengers and crew, friends and strangers from all over the nation. Each arrived with notions of rafting on Mark Twain’s Mississippi. Each departed with a dozen stories to tell and practical knowledge in oarsmanship.

The oars were called sweeps, which looked like long hockey sticks on steroids used to guide a free-floating raft through swift currents. They resembled the flatboat oars in a George Caleb Bingham painting. And although McLarty’s boat had a small outboard motor for use in emergency situations, he didn’t plan to rely on it much.

But he also didn’t plan the weather.

Early in his trip, weather sprung an unrelenting test of the boat’s integrity and of the skipper’s resolve. Justus launched his boat on June 1, and for three weeks he endured rain and tornadoes and rain and cold and rain and wind and rain—enough water to cause the biggest flood since ’93. The flood waters crashed through levees, swamped downtowns, and attracted politicians eager to smile for the news cameras while they sandbagged swollen levees. The flood covered campsites and marinas and reached into the forests to loose a dozen years of dead timber, turning the Mississippi into a flume of driftwood. In a river where snags sink boats, McLarty was sitting on two vulnerable rubber pontoons among a thousand wooden torpedoes.

I hadn’t joined the boat yet, waiting for it to get to St. Louis. As I tracked the Big Getter’s progress on McLarty’s website, he fell farther and farther behind his published schedule. I emailed him at one point, passing along a news story I’d watched about shrinking clearance between the rising river and railroad trestles. Sure enough, in an early close encounter, the top of McLarty’s raft came within inches of crashing into the bottom of a bridge deck. The next day, for a few days, several of the river’s twenty-seven locks were closed to pleasure boats, so Justus laid over to sightsee the Quad Cities.

I wasn’t worried about his ability to cope with adversity. But I did get nervous about finding the boat. Timing my jump aboard the Big Getter was a bit like anticipating when the message in a bottle will drift by.

Meanwhile, my window of opportunity was narrowing, too. We talked by phone and email a few times, to recalculate my leg of the journey and where I would hop aboard. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reopened the locks, the Big Getter rode the flood crest, making up for lost time, reaching Hannibal, then Clarksville, then Alton, Illinois, and nearing my point of embarkation, among the barges near the base of the St. Louis Arch.

I didn’t meet Justus until minutes before I boarded the raft.

It was late at night when my daughter dropped me and a duffel bag off at Cunetto’s, an Italian restaurant on the Hill in St. Louis where Justus and two other new crew members were loading up on carbs.

I walked into the restaurant knowing only that I was looking for three people with whom I would spend the next four days in close proximity. I spotted them as easily as they spotted me, since all of us had adopted the keen senses of river rats.

Justus greeted me like an old friend, and introduced Margot from Washington, D.C., and her beau Kenny from San Francisco. They had just flown into St. Louis from opposite directions and were as new to the raft as I. Kenny immediately hit the “small world” button when he asked me if I knew a Rocheport luthier who had made Kenny’s mandolin. Rocheport is a tiny town that neighbors Columbia, my home.

“Indeed!” I lied to him in the spirit of good conversation. “Well, sorta. Friend of a friend.”

We talked and planned and picked up some supplies from a local grocery, then headed for the boat.

My first glimpse of the Big Getter came under the light of a full moon. It sat like an aquatic incarnation of The Little Engine that Could, dwarfed on three sides by the rusty hulls of empty barges, towering a dozen feet above the raft. The open side looked downriver toward the city’s main train trestle across the Mississippi, backlit by the full moon like an x-ray negative. All night long, freight trains and Amtraks and more freight trains repeated a chugging rhythm that seemed to match the churning of the swift river current. Good sleeping.

Despite the close quarters, there were sleeping stations all over the boat. Each bunk or cot featured the single most important tool on the entire craft: mosquito netting. Seriously, it saved our lives. Of all the dangers we encountered on the Mighty Mississip—from barge tows the size of small towns, from felled trees floating like Mother Nature’s Minuteman missiles to the phobia of being swallowed by a river turned backward by an earthquake, or consumed by a giant catfish worthy of a Peter Benchley read—the most immediate calamity happens every day at sundown, when a billion tiny Draculas emerge from the shadows to suck your blood.

Other dangers may pose more risk, but they don’t cause you to slap yourself so much.

That night, a dozen barge tows passed as I slept, their vibrations relaxing like magic fingers, their wakes rocking me to sleep.

“Where’s the shower?” I joked at sunrise, assuming that bathing would come courtesy of muddy Mississippi water.

“On the roof,” Justus responded, dead serious. I climbed onto the roof, to find two black water bags. The bags absorb heat from the sun and wait patiently for the opportunity to hang from the side of the boat and spill their guts all over a grateful showeree. I can testify that these solar water heaters work like a charm, and there’s no utility bill.

Toilets? There are two. One is a tiny portable throne aboard the craft. The other, well, it’s as big as the great outdoors. Take a shovel.

On this morning, I took advantage of my last connection to modern convenience, borrowing the National Park Service bathroom at the base of the Gateway Arch to rinse and repeat. Then we cast off all lines and floated free, out into the main channel.

Barge tows look more menacing when observed at river level, dead on. McLarty’s new team learned quickly how to maneuver the craft and stayed a safe distance from those commercial giants.

Stabbing the sky from one corner of the roof, the boat’s golden flag adopted the message broadcast by the original thirteen colonies: Don’t Tread on Me. No, this flag wasn’t a Tea Party sentiment. Our trip predated all that noise. Instead, the flag sent a heartfelt request, since this collapsible craft would be no match in a tangle with a tow pushing forty-two barges. Just in case, an aluminum canoe hung suspended below the starboard deck. Not to worry. This is a big river, and Justus McLarty had no plans for close encounters with barges, so the canoe functioned as a ship-to-shore taxi.

Years ago, when I had a job in tourism, I got some disturbing news that St. Louis tourism officials had discouraged a New York Times reporter from rafting down Twain’s Mississippi. “Too dangerous,” the St. Louisans pleaded. I guffawed at the time. “You can’t get a better story,” I told St. Louis. “Anyway, a drowned New York Times reporter would add depth to the sense of adventure on this river.”

Now, I was testing that very concept, skating on thin ice, figuratively. I felt safe. Of course, that was because Justus McLarty is no Tom’n’Huck.

In my lifetime so far, I’ve traveled three quarters of the Mississippi. I’m always amazed at how small the city riverfronts are in relation to the endless miles of forested shores. Minutes from the bustle of the downtown St. Louis riverfront, the river assumes a peaceful demeanor, absolutely beautiful, as we passed the big Belgian brewery, and just downriver, visible among the trees atop the bluffs, stood the old Jefferson Barracks, the historic army installation where Grant and Lee and a thousand other military leaders put in time.

We drifted past the mouth of the Meramec River at Arnold, and stopped at Hoppy’s, an oasis for fuel-hungry pleasure craft motoring between St. Louis and Cape Girardeau. We didn’t need fuel, of course. We’d just heard about the legendary Hoppy’s, the waterfront welcome mat that leads to the tiny tourist community of Kimmswick. We sat with Fern and Hoppy on the sprawling dock in a mismatched set of Elvis-era overstuffed chairs, and for hours we watched the river roll by while feasting on river tales. Hoppy is among the last of the lamplighters, the guys who made sure the channel-marker buoys had enough kerosene to burn through the night as beacons for anybody silly enough to be on this river after dark. The lamplighters were replaced in 1954 by a system of electric lights.

A couple of neighbors boated in. Roger and Scott brought fresh stories about their recent circumnavigation of the eastern third of the United States. They started from Hoppy’s, headed down the Mississippi, hugged the gulf shore around Florida, up the inland waterway along the Eastern Seaboard to the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and down the Illinois River back to their Mississippi home base. Justus listened intently, asking about their boat, sailing conditions, rough spots.

For dessert, we hiked a half mile to the world famous Blue Owl, where Mary Hostetter bakes big pies. How big? Some pies have their own zip codes. I delved into a Levee High Apple Pie. Mary’s love for baking evolved into the classic business success story. After winning just about every baking competition around, she started selling her sweets in a Kimmswick tea room in 1985. The business took off, though it almost got washed away. The tiny arts community survived the Great Flood of ’93 thanks to townspeople who pitched in on a heroic sandbagging effort to keep floodwaters at bay. Today, Mary employs six dozen people in this town of ninety-four residents.

Joining us at our table was a youthful adventurer we’d encountered a few miles upriver. He introduced himself as Adam Book, and his current chapter focused on piloting a kayak down the entire Mississippi. From Adam’s perspective, as his faster craft overtook us, the Big Getter seemed luxurious, more accommodating. Adam wasn’t yet twenty-one, but he had guts and stamina to challenge the Mother of All Rivers by himself in a seven-foot boat.

Next day we bid adieu to Kimmswick, and to Adam, who rose with the sun and swiftly slid downriver out of sight. Unlike McLarty’s experience on the turbulent upper Mississippi, our weather featured the traditional August forecast: sunny and hot, perfect for a river sojourn.

Around a sweeping bend we noticed thick black smoke that signaled one of the rarest sights on the river, at least nowadays. Sure enough, a paddlewheel steamer appeared, churning toward us. As the distance closed between our two craft, the steamer stopped dead in the water, the pilot thrusting his paddlewheel into forward and reverse to hold the Mississippi Queen’s position in the strong current. We drifted within spitting distance of the big steamer. The captain appeared on the bridge and shouted down to us. “Better move out of the channel. Big barge coming down around the bend behind you.” We knew that. Still, we thanked him for his courtesy. And we endured every one of the 200 passengers who appeared on the big steamer’s Texas Deck to observe our curious craft and to yell at us, “Get out of the way! Big barge coming!” We debated thanking them in the traditional sign language from small craft to these big floating wedding cakes. But mooning those octogenarian passengers after their well-intended advice seemed beneath crass.

As we drifted past the big boat, her pilot signaled the engineer to step on it, and the Mississippi Queen chugged up around the bend and out of sight. Minutes later, the big barge tow overtook us and passed without incident.

Taking a brief respite from a Mississippi River journey, our crew navigated our raft through a narrow inlet to port Ste. Genevieve. Appropriate, I thought, since this was the first highway into town, used by explorers and settlers and Lewis and Clark, and maybe even the Duke of Bilgewater and the lost Dauphin, the royal poseurs who tried to sucker Huck Finn. We drifted way back into the protected bayou, greeted by a ghostly dock that had been abandoned after the last big flood. We lashed to the dock and overnighted, never seeing another soul in this overgrown inlet, save a few fishermen in johnboats and 2.6 billion mosquitoes.

Some people in Ste. Genevieve would like to reclaim the dock and the port and open for business to river visitors. But alas, they realize the quest is quixotic, up against a lack of money and a recession and a lack of money and time and materials and a bunch of loudmouth doubters and a lack of money. State and federal agencies appear reluctant to help dredge the inlet to keep it from silting up. And let’s face it, tourist traffic from the river probably wouldn’t pay for the upkeep.

I walked toward Ste. Genevieve, a distance of about a mile, mostly atop levees. I began to see the town, older than Thomas Jefferson. Built by folks named Balduc, Bequette, and Beauvais, the town leaves no doubt about its heritage. These settlers were from the same French stock that settled southern Louisiana, where their appellation shortened to Cajun.

Thirsty, I stopped into the historic Ste. Genevieve Hotel and ended up dining on the restaurant’s signature dish, liver dumplings. The accent was on the dumplings, with the liver cooked to an almost puree, soupy base. An acquired taste for sure, but delightful. Thus fortified with enough iron to attract magnets, or sink mosquitoes, I set out to explore this, the oldest community in Missouri, founded in 1732. The oldest record at the historic Catholic church is a 1759 baptism of one of founder Felix Valle’s slaves.

The houses were unique in two ways. First, three homes featured a rare French creole vernacular vertical log construction. And second, they were still standing, despite threats from fire, flood, time and man. These structures even survived the 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes, the most violent shakedown in the recorded history of the North American continent.

The town was a quiet walk back in time, thanks to four miles of insulation that separate Ste. Genevieve from the plastic modernity that proliferates along the interstate up the hill.

Next morning we left the abandoned dock, an eerily silent refuge, and worked our way back out to the river, passing a pair of unfriendly bubbas standing on shore beside their old towboat, concealed from the river, illegally burning contaminated fuel on the bank. Suddenly the characters we were encountering on this trip had taken a tilt toward the adventures of Huck Finn. I felt powerless to admonish the polluters. But through the morning mist, as we made our way into the main channel, hope bobbed to the surface, because we were headed to Chester, Illinois, the home of America’s legendary enforcer, Popeye.

The mist evaporated, and we sliced up a lunch of mangoes and cheese and crackers. A few hours later, Chester’s first icon appeared. Hugging the river on the north edge of town is Menard Correctional Center, one of Illinois’ oldest prisons. Poised on the bank beside the prison walls was a camera with a familiar face behind it, snapping photos of our crew as we managed the sweeps and oars. Downriver just past the highway bridge, we disembarked at the Port of Chester.

The Port of Chester is nothing more than a concrete slab to launch fishing boats. It has no Popeye Marina or Olive Oyl Cafe, not even a sign denoting this home of Poopdeck Pappy’s favorite son. The photographer, magazine publisher Gary Figgins, chauffeured our dirty, hungry crew to a local buffet to gorge ourselves in Popeyian fashion. Stuffed to the forearms, we launched Justus McLarty and the Big Getter back into the Mississippi’s main channel, and he sailed solo downriver out of sight.

The raft story doesn’t end there, of course. Justus hadn’t even reached the Ohio River yet. Little did he know that downriver a ship was sinking, an oil slick was spreading, and a hurricane was brewing, poised to pound New Orleans. And although I warned him that below the Ohio River, the levees were so high that the scenery would be limited, Justus reported that the Lower Mississippi turned out to provide the most beautiful landscape of all.

So what happens to a houseboat when the owner reaches the end of an odyssey? As a bona fide big thinker, Justus had a plan. He pulled the boat onto the bank and deflated the pontoons. He got out his wrench, unbolted the decks and took the frame apart. Like a one-man carnival, he folded the whole thing into the back of a rental truck and drove toward the West Texas sunset. He beat Hurricane Katrina by a few days.

True to his great-great-grandmother’s advice, his ideas for the Big Getter keep getting bigger. He wants to travel a giant circle around the eastern third of the United States, as foreshadowed by the two boaters on Hoppy’s deck.

Such a journey will test his limits. He’ll need a stronger structure to withstand waves. He’ll get a bigger motor to battle ocean currents and open seas. He’ll need to carve out a year away from work, and the comforts of a landlocked home. He might have to kiss SNL goodbye.

No problem for a big getter whose getter is bigger than his wanter.

Since his journey to the gulf, a disaster hit Louisiana, one bigger than 10,000 sinking ships and more lasting than the effects of Katrina. Stretches of beach east of Gulfport, Mississippi, were coated in a reflux of tar balls from the world’s worst oil spill, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. If Justus ever makes his trip along America’s gulf shore and eastern seaboard, he’ll probably find plenty of oil. The end is near.