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