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