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.
Burma Shavings
I hitched a ride back to St. Louis, and hopped a train home. Same train. Would it be the same conductor?
“Tickets,” I heard the conductor’s voice behind me as he worked his way up the aisle.
“Tickets.” He drew closer.
I fought the urge to peer around the edge of my seat. Instead I sat staring straight ahead, waiting in ambush. As he turned to punch my ticket, he saw my face. “John Robinson!”
“Jim Lagnaf! Man, am I glad to see you.”
The conductor was an old friend. We’d grown up in the same Jeff City neighborhood, so this trip was starting out a lot smoother than the nightmare with Brian the Conductor.
“Whatter you doin’ on my train?” Jim asked.
“Headed home. Been on tourism business.”
“Tourism. Hmm,” he grunted. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He continued up the aisle. “Tickets!”
* * *
I settled back in my seat and watched the scenery roll past my window. The train followed the river around a sweeping turn called Alert Bend, named after a boat, an early river pioneer that didn’t make it.
I knew the story. The Alert was steaming a few miles upriver from Hermann when it happened. A lookout at the bow of the boat spotted a sawyer at the edge of the channel. A sawyer is a limb that sticks out of the swift current. It’s attached to a submerged tree, so it’s a trigger, waiting to spring the sunken tree trunk like a mousetrap and punch a hole in a wooden boat hull. The lookout pointed to the sawyer so the captain would see. The captain already had seen it. Any captain would have seen it, because that’s how captains become captains. They see all the obstacles atop the water. But the good ones, the captains who endure, they know what’s under the water.
The Alert was a side wheeler, “like all early-day boats on the Missouri River,” wrote E.B. Trail, one of the Missouri River’s foremost steamboat historians. And she ran “an irregular trade on the Missouri.” That may have been the Alert’s undoing. “An irregular trade” means the captain probably didn’t know the river very well.
She had beat the odds so far, five years old, still going strong, built in Pittsburgh the same year Sam Clemens was born, 1835. But she had entered a river where most steamboats wouldn’t reach their second birthday. On the Ohio River or the Mississippi River, she could chug in relative safety at five or six knots and provide useful service for a dozen years, maybe more.
But this was the Missouri River—swift and turbulent, braiding, deadly.
The captain steered the boat safely past the sawyer and was rounding the tight bend into a narrow channel when he felt the jolt. His heart sank. The Alert had struck a snag. He had evaded the snap of the sawyer, but the sunken tree punched a hole in the wooden hull below the waterline. In minutes the river rushed into the gash and claimed another victim.
To the small fraternity of riverboat pilots whose two dozen boats braved the Missouri River in 1840, that spot became known as Alert Bend. Within the year, two more spots on the Missouri River would take their names from shipwrecks.
There would be more.
* * *
Like Jim the conductor, I grew up beside this river. So I’d heard the stories. This was the first highway of westward expansion. Steamboats shipped a million pioneer families on their first leg of a long journey west. Some families didn’t make it, buried in shipwrecks beneath the flood plain, tombs filled with enough provisions to satisfy a pharaoh in the first millennium of afterlife.
Living near the edge of Jefferson City as a kid, I could sneak out of the house on warm summer nights, and hike to the bluffs above the river as it moved silently through the darkness. Back then it was easier to find total darkness, away from star-erasing pollution caused by streetlights and security lamps. The river bluffs offered a clear view of the universe. The night sky entertained me with infinite vastness, rewarding my patience with a shooting star across the Milky Way. But I never waited long before a light saber would stab the black night, waving low across the river, focused laser sharp from the bridge of a towboat, a narrow beam of white light swinging from one fix to the next, marker to marker, buoy to bridge to bank and back again, bright enough to make a new moon full. Back then, riverboat spotlights were common as fireflies. On a dark treacherous river, these powerful beams helped show the way for gigantic rafts formed when daredevils lashed supermarket-sized barges together, two across, four barges long, and filled them with the harvest from America’s breadbasket. These daredevils rode the barges from Omaha and Sioux City and Bismarck, pushing their cargo day and night down to their destinations along the Mississippi.
Barge traffic finally died out when engineers dammed the river in the Dakotas. The dams do their best to control flooding in the spring, and they do a better job of offering recreation in the summer. But they also withhold the autumn waters that