It was tough saying goodbye to this old steamer with its link to the past, its commitment to style, and its doting crew. We docked beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and I stepped away from Mark Twain’s Mississippi, unsure when I’d ever touch it again.
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Less than a shotgun blast from the Arch, Eads Bridge stands against time. The old bridge, made of iron and stone, was the first span across the Mississippi, and it’s nine years older than the Brooklyn Bridge. In the shadow of this historic old bridge, the riverfront is called Laclede’s Landing, named for one of the city’s most prominent fathers. Today, Laclede’s Landing offers a carnival atmosphere of food and drink and music and gambling. There’s even a place where you can rent wax figures. Kinda like a Midwest Madame Tussaud’s, for hire. No shit, the Laclede’s Landing Wax Museum, Chamber of Horrors, and Ice Cream Parlor rents wax figures for parties and events and such. You can rent an old Missouri legend, maybe a Steve McQueen, or Satan.
I almost bit. After all, it’s lonely on these backroads of Missouri, and I could use some company, a reliable companion who wouldn’t talk much, and might scare away hijackers or Sasquatch. So I thought about checking the cost to rent Jesse James or Jesus to ride with me into the bush. You know, the ultimate protection. But at a minimum of $300 per day, these wax bodyguards were expensive, plus they would have to bend to fit into Erifnus’ shotgun seat. My biggest concern was for Erifnus: What if things got hot, and Jesse James melted in the car?
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Erifnus took me west a few miles down old Route 66—now called Chippewa Street—to the Hill, the home of great Italian culture in St. Louis. This is the neighborhood that nurtured Yogi Berra’s words to live by and Joe Garagiola’s gab. It’s a tidy community with modest homes surrounding great old storefronts painted green and red, framing big plate glass windows, and cast-iron doorways leading into Italian produce grocers and old-fashioned meat markets.
And restaurants. For lunch, you can’t beat the cafeteria fare of Rigazzi’s, a favorite of locals, where you drink Budweiser from a giant frosty fishbowl the size of your head. There’s nothing fancy about Rigazzi’s, and that’s what makes it authentic. There’s no need for pretenses. You come for the food.
I had fried catfish and mashed potatoes and gravy with stewed tomatoes and a side of mostaccioli.
With a full belly and a satisfied soul, I set our compass east a few blocks to the edge of Tower Grove Park, where St. Louis Botanical Garden unveils its floral treasures. Its nickname is Shaw’s Garden, in honor of founder Henry Shaw, one of the preeminent movers and shakers in St. Louis during the mid-nineteenth century.
Shaw was a major landowner, an investor and philanthropist. His botanical garden is his crowning achievement. The highlight of my walk through this cultivated jungle was the garden tribute to my idol, George Washington Carver, patron saint of recycling and crop rotation. Yet the monument to Carver left me feeling a bit conflicted, knowing where I was headed later that day, to confront a flaw in Henry Shaw’s character.
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A couple of miles up St. Louis Avenue sits the Griot Museum of Black History and Culture. At the museum entrance, setting the tone was a 170-year-old raffle poster. It announced that a “Dark Bay Horse named Star and a Mulatto Girl named Sarah” will be raffled for chances at one dollar each.
Museum curator Erica Neal met me and showed me around. I saw inspirational exhibits featuring some of St. Louis’ greats: Miles Davis, whose horn couldn’t hide his emotion. Josephine Baker, who left racism for Paris. Clark Terry, the trumpeter who taught me a bit of his mumbles routine. The museum commemorated the life of George Washington Carver and the trials of Dred Scott.
Throughout the museum, reality smacked me, showing a nasty underbelly of our culture. I folded like an embryo to fit in a life-sized recreation of the hold of a slave trade ship. Even without the threat of seasickness and dysentery and starvation—and the shackles and chains of enslavement—sitting in the cramped underdeck of this display made me physically ill. The saddest part of my museum experience was the realization that not enough children will see what I just saw. And we’re doomed to a culture of ignorance. The end is near.
Wide-eyed, I thanked Erica. Erifnus took me back to the river.
Driving to the Mississippi, we followed the Riverfront Trail north to see Mary. But we were 150 years too late. On this river bank, at the site of an old Coast Guard station, there stands a modest monument to Mary.
Back in 1855 on this spot, a vigilante coast guard busted a boatload of folks trying to make it to freedom. Mary was their leader. Like her husband, legendary teacher John Berry Meachum, Mary Meachum was a free black. John established a school on a riverboat in the middle of the Mississippi so young black Missourians could be educated, while Mary risked her life to help local slaves escape through the St. Louis underground railroad.
From this spot, Mary arranged for a group of runaway slaves to launch a boat by the moonlight to cross the Mississippi to the free soil of Illinois.
But Henry Shaw had other ideas. As great as Henry Shaw was with his plants and gardens and science and money and benevolence, some of the people in this boat were his slaves, and he wanted them back. He got them back, too.
Mary’s crossing was in vain. Only recently has the city publicly acknowledged this conflict in its history. The Mary Meachum monument is small, compared to the Gateway Arch and Shaw’s Garden, and it’s accessible only by taking a back road and crossing to the other side of the tracks.
We drove to the Chain of Rocks Bridge, a span that attaches itself to rocky shoals in the Mississippi. The bridge makes an abrupt thirty-degree turn in the middle of the river. For a time, the Chain of Rocks Bridge was part of Route 66. And throughout its history, there have been many bloody wrecks and even murders on its decks. Erifnus couldn’t cross it, since the bridge has been closed to vehicles for decades. Pedestrians and cyclists cross the bridge freely, connecting hiking/biking trails on either side of the river.
I walked to the middle of the bridge, where it makes its deadly turn, and looked out over the deadly shoals that can shred boats careless enough to try to navigate this section of the river. That’s why the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a canal to circumvent this part of the Mighty Mississip.
As I stood in the middle of that bridge, I had no way of knowing that one day soon I’d be paddling into this river in the dead of winter.
Winter Water
The air was cold, a few degrees above freezing. Three of us pushed one long canoe away from shore and paddled out of a swirling eddy into the main stream, thus surviving the most dangerous phase of the trip: the launch into a swift current.
It was early February, and we’d dressed in layers over wetsuits. But the bone-chilling cold reminded us that our canoe was balanced atop a giant swift-moving stream of hypothermia. We paddled away from the Columbia Bottoms access point into the middle of the river. Here, the Missouri is easily half a mile wide, pouring its entire collection of western waters toward the end of its 2,315-mile journey, and the end was almost in sight, a few miles downriver where it greets the Mighty Mississippi.
All three of us were experienced canoeists, and we were confident we wouldn’t fall into the icy river. But I guess no explorer plans to spill or crash or drown.
“The Missouri River moves fast when the channel comes close to the bank,” Mike Clark said. Mike was our guide. If he were boastful, he could boast about his 20,000 miles of river experience on some of the world’s most revered waterways. But even though he’s a world traveler, he makes his home just a few miles from this spot. And why not? He knows what the earliest inhabitants of this area have always known: This meeting of the continent’s two great rivers is a sacred spot, a giver of life for the billions of birds that follow the flyways and for the fish that don’t know the names of these rivers but know the rivers’ distinctly different personalities.
I felt comfortable on this big fast water, except