It’s dangerous out there. And if you’re gonna ride into the wilderness, you need a trusty steed. My ride is a 1999 Pontiac Sunfire named Erifnus Caitnop, and she’s sleek and red and hides 120 horses under her hood, and I’ve rode ’em all, just to get her back to safe haven. Every time I went to the edge of civilization and jumped into the wilderness, she delivered me there.
Her top shows the scars from my canoe, and she’s hauled it 10,000 miles or more, dropping us beside dozens of remote riverbanks. I guess there were times that she wondered if she’d ever bring me back home, as she waited for my canoe and me to cover a lot of water.
There’s a surprising amount of water in America’s middle.
Some folks are silly enough to believe that we’ve tamed it.
Belching Steam
It was one of my first memories of Hannibal. Mark Twain had been dead for forty-five years. I had been alive for four. From behind the front seat of our ’49 Chevrolet, my heart jumped, feeling my father edge our old sedan closer to the Mississippi, that giant river whose black waters blended into the dark night sky. Inching down the cobblestone bank that has been Hannibal’s welcome mat for two centuries, we parked among a hundred other cars. Together, we sat bathed in the popcorn glow of a thousand yellow lights outlining the decks of the Delta Queen. The Queen filled our windshield picture, wider than the eyes of a four-year-old. In an instant, steam the color of Sam Clemens’ hair began belching from a topside calliope, its maestro tapping out the familiar syncopation of “Down Yonder.” As the calliope’s last throaty steam whistles echoed back across the black water, applause burst forth in a most unique manner. Horns honking and lights flashing, the cars came alive in their enthusiastic approval of a sound, a style, and a mode of travel that the internal combustion engine had driven to the edge of extinction.
But not quite.
The Delta Queen was still the grande dame of the rivers.
A few years back, our family rode the Delta Queen from St. Paul to St. Louis, a voyage of seven days, with stops in a half dozen river towns along the way. When Cheryl and I first stepped aboard, we lowered the average age of passengers to eighty-five. It’s too bad that young travelers have no patience for Victorian pace, no taste for Gilded Age grandeur. With a passenger-to-crew ratio of two to one, we were never more than an arm’s length from superb service.
On the day we steamed into Hannibal, passengers went ashore to scour the town, whitewash a fence, get lost in a cave, and generally relive childhood adventures. As the time to depart Hannibal grew near, Cheryl and I sat on our stateroom balcony, reading. For half an hour, the Delta Queen’s whistle had blasted steam signals, calling passengers to get back aboard the boat. The last long whistle echoed between the bluffs as I looked up to see a lady running, nearly out of control, down the hill toward the steamer, arms loaded with packages. The lady’s family and friends shrieked and waved frantically from the Texas deck, hoping the pilot would wait for her to board.
“Cast off all lines,” came the call. Surely the captain wouldn’t penalize her for having too much fun retracing the trails of Tom Sawyer.
With cinematic flair, and no time to spare, she leapt onto the stage—lubbers call it a gangplank—and the Delta Queen shoved off, setting a course downriver to St. Louis.
From the cozy comfort of our stateroom veranda, we heard the calliope hiss and spit a chorus of “Down Yonder,” and watched townspeople trade farewell salutes with riverboat passengers. We raised our wine glasses to the town as it grew tiny in the wake of the churning sternwheel.
Our pilot navigated downriver, between forested bluffs that for the most part remain surprisingly unspoiled by civilization.
* * *
Nothing beats the sunset on the Mississippi. Unless it’s dinner on the Delta Queen. Dinner aboard a riverboat eclipses any feast on a giant modern cruise ship. Every bite is better, as you’re seduced by the elegant intimacy of America’s inland waterways.
On the second night, Cheryl and I donned our best attire to dine with the captain. After the appropriate ice-breaker chit chat, I asked him directly, “Why don’t you take this boat up the Missouri?”
He looked as if I had summoned the Devil to dine with us.
“Dangerous river,” he drew out his words for emphasis. “Swift current, treacherous bends. My steamer will not travel up the Missouri.” Captain John Davitt was true to his word. With a rare exception in the past three decades, when a steamboat visited St. Charles, the royal sisters—Mississippi Queen, American Queen, Delta Queen—avoided the waters of the Missouri River.
As we ate, we watched the scenery through big picture windows. Ol’ Man River unfolded to the steady beat of those eighty-year-old pistons that turned the paddle wheel, pounding out a gentle, hypnotic rhythm.
We prepared for another great night’s sleep. Next day, we’d fly kites off the stern, then retreat back to a favorite read while sitting on our personal veranda, mimosas in hand, watching Mark Twain’s Mississippi from the inside out, the way he intended. Well, it’s one of the ways he wanted us to see it. At the time I wasn’t aware that the river and I would meet again many times, and I would experience her from whole new perspectives.
* * *
The rules of the river, as reported by Sam Clemens, remain intact. We awoke the next morning to thick fog rising from the water. The ship was noiseless, engines silent. Fog is nature’s great eraser, and it had forced each boat to stop and tie up to a tree or two along the river bank. We choked a stump, in riverboat parlance.
The biggest change from Clemens’ time is not the shore line, but the river itself, transformed into a chain of lakes thanks to some of our ancestors who thought they could improve on the beaver. During the 1920s, Congress ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a series of locks and dams on this river. The Corps balked, knowing that it couldn’t control flooding on this mighty waterway, the continent’s main drain. But nowadays, the river is the Corps’ domain, and now Congress balks at the cost of taming a river with aging dams.
These broad lakes have spawned hundreds of pleasure boaters and water skiers who dart around the Delta Queen and cut across her bow. Looking like a cover on a Mark Twain novel, the Delta Queen casts a magical spell over boaters, who routinely sidle alongside the ship, and moon the passengers. Twain would heartily approve, I suspect. So do most of the octogenarians on board.
Moons notwithstanding, the views along the river serve deep inspiration. But the best inspiration often comes from within. It was a revelation at dinner that propelled me to continue my journey inland, to further explore the backroads, to drive every mile of every road in Missouri. It may have been the third dinner course, maybe the seventh, I don’t remember. At some point, I tossed my napkin into my plate and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. The ornate designs of the tin ceiling stared back at me. And I wondered out loud, “Who came up with that gaudy shit?”
Cheryl looked surprised at my blurt, but before she could speak, the server, always at hand, said, “Right in your backyard.”
“Do tell,” I said.
“There in Nevada, Missouri. There’s a place been makin’ tin ceilings for more’n a hunnert years. . . . ”
I made a mental note to find that tin stamping company. But even as the server pulled the last plate away from the table, a clarinet wailed like a Gershwin, and the dance band lurched into a tango, luring out the most elegantly dressed elderly ladies I’d ever seen, each on the arm of a handsome young dance partner. The ladies wore evening gowns, mostly black, in memory of their dead husbands, I’d like to think. And their jewelry, purloined from Cleopatra’s gem box, sparkled in the eyes of their dance partners, these