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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Navigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, Jonathan Raban opens himself to experience the river in all her turbulent and unpredictable old glory. Going wherever the current takes him, he joins a coon-hunt in Savana, falls for a girl in St Louis, worships with black Baptists in Memphis and hangs out with the housewives of Pemiscot and the hog-king of Dubuque. Through tears of laughter, we are led into the heartland of America – with its hunger and hospitality, its inventive energy and its charming lethargy – and come to know something of its soul.But the journey is as much the story of Raban as it is of the Mississippi. Navigating the dangerous, ever-changing waters in an unsuitably fragile aluminium skiff, he immerses himself as he tries to give shape to the river and the story – finding himself by turns vulnerable, curious, angry and, like all of us, sometimes foolishly in love.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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When Jonathan Raban was seven, and the nearest water was a slip of a stream at the bottom of the street, he read Huckleberry Finn and dreamed of a Norfolk transformed into the Mississippi in a 16-foot aluminium skiff with an outboard motor and cruised down the river for most of its length. He set out, I suspect, to tell us about Americans on the pretext of checking Huck’s patch, and he succeeds in this better than anyone I’ve read for a long time.
The Times
A combination of keen reportorial observation and a bitter wit and the writing felicity to exploit them both … shrewd, keen, malicious, touching and funny.
Spectator
An extraordinary picture of the American nation at a particular junction of its history. He writes with insight, clarity and precision. You are a good man to ride the river with, Jonathan Raban.
Listener
Raban is a wonderful writer, with great powers of description, and above all the ability to interpret with elegant tact and lightness, in the sort of tone one might use to criticize someone else’s child without giving offence.
New York Review of Books
Mr Raban has a keen ear, but for the river itself, he has to evince not only a keen eye but a capacity to use a painter’s palette. He gives us the strong brown god in all its rage, sullenness and beauty.
Observer
Old Glory
An American Voyage
JONATHAN RABAN
For Linda Taylor
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget.
T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
One man may paint a picture from a careful drawing made on the spot, and another may paint the same scene from memory, from a brief but strong impression; and the last may succeed better in giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact.
J. F. Millet, on landscape painting from memory
True and sincere travelling is no pastime but it is as serious as the grave, or any part of the human journey, and it requires a long probation to be broken into it.
H. D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Contents
One
THE RIVER
IT IS AS BIG AND DEPTHLESS AS THE SKY ITSELF. You can see the curve of the earth on its surface as it stretches away for miles to the far shore. Sunset has turned the water to the colour of unripe peaches. There’s no wind. Sandbars and wooded islands stand on their exact reflections. The only signs of movement on the water are the lightly-scratched lines which run in parallel across it like the scores of a diamond on a windowpane. In the middle distance, the river smokes with toppling pillars of mist which soften the light so that one can almost reach out and take in handfuls of that thickened air.
A fish jumps. The river shatters for a moment, then glazes over. The forest which rims it is a long, looping smudge of charcoal. You could make it by running your thumb along the top edge of the water, smearing in the black pines and bog oaks, breaking briefly to leave a pale little town of painted clapboard houses tumbling from the side of a hill. Somewhere in the picture there is the scissored silhouette of a fisherman from the town, afloat between the islands in his wooden pirogue, a perfectly solitary figure casting into what is left of the sun.
It is called the Mississippi, but it is more an imaginary river than a real one. I had first read Huckleberry Finn when I was seven. The picture on its cover, crudely drawn and coloured, supplied me with the raw material for an exquisite and recurrent daydream. It showed a boy alone, his face prematurely wizened with experience. (The artist hadn’t risked his hand with the difficulties of bringing off a lifelike Nigger Jim.) The sheet of water on which he drifted was immense, an enamelled pool of lapis lazuli. Smoke from a half-hidden steamboat hung over an island of gothic conifers. Cut loose from the world, chewing on his corncob pipe, the boy was blissfully lost in this stillwater paradise.
For days I lay stretched out on the floor of my attic room, trying to bring the river to life from its code of print. It was tough going. Often I found Huck’s American dialect as impenetrable as Latin, but even in the most difficult bits I was kept at it by the persistent wink and glimmer of the river. I was living inside the book. Because I was more timid and less sociable than Huck, his and my adventures on the Mississippi tended to diverge. He would sneak off in disguise to forage in a riverside town, or raid a wrecked steamboat; I would stay back on the raft. I laid trot lines for catfish. I floated alone on that unreal blue, watching for ‘towheads’ and ‘sawyers’ as the forest unrolled, a mile or more across the water.
I found the Mississippi in the family atlas. It was a great inkstained Victorian book, almost as big as I was. ‘North Africa’ and ‘Italy’ had come loose from its binding, from my mother’s attempts to keep up with my father’s campaigns in the Eighth Army. North America, though, was virgin territory: no one in the family had ever thought the place was worth a moment of their curiosity. I looked at the Mississippi, wriggling down the middle of the page, and liked the funny names of the places that it passed through. Just the sounds of Minneapolis … Dubuque … Hannibal … St Louis … Cairo … Memphis … Natchez … Baton Rouge … struck a legendary and heroic note to my ear. Our part of England was culpably short of Roman generals, Indians and Egyptian ruins, and these splendid names added even more lustre to the marvellous river in my head.
The only real river I knew was hardly more than a brook. It spilled through a tumbledown mill at the bottom of our road, opened into a little trouty pool, then ran on through watermeadows over gravelled shallows into Fakenham, where it slowed and deepened, gathering strength for the long drift across muddy flatlands to Norwich and the North Sea. All through my Huckleberry Finn summer, I came down to the mill to fish for roach and dace, and if I concentrated really hard, I could see the Mississippi there. First I had to think it twice as wide, then multiply by two, then two again … The rooftops of Fakenham went under. I sank roads, farms, church spires, the old German prisoner-of-war camp, Mr Banham’s flour mill. I flooded Norfolk; silvering the landscape like a mirror, leaving just an island here, a dead tree there, to break this lonely, enchanted monotony of water. It was a heady, intensely private vision. I hugged the idea of the huge river to myself. I exulted in the freedom and solitude of being afloat on it in my imagination.
Year by year I added new scraps of detail to the picture. I came across some photographs of the Mississippi in a dog-eared copy of the National Geographic in a doctor’s waiting room. Like inefficient pornography, they were unsatisfying because they were too meanly explicit. ‘Towboat Herman Briggs at Greenville’ and ‘Madrid Bend, Missouri’ gave the river a set of measurements that I didn’t at all care for. I didn’t want to know that it was a mile and a quarter wide, or that its ruffled water wasn’t blue at all but dirty tan. The lovely, immeasurable river in my head was traduced by these artless images, and when the doctor called me in to listen to the noises in my asthmatic chest I felt saved by the bell.
Then I saw a painting by George Caleb Bingham. It showed the Missouri, not the Mississippi, but I recognised it immediately as my river. Its water had a crystalline solidity and smoothness, as if it had been carved from rosy quartz. The river and the sky were one, with cliffs and forest hanging in suspension between them. In the foreground, a ruffianly trapper and his son drifted in a dugout canoe, their pet fox chained to its prow. The water captured their reflections as faithfully as a film. Alone, self-contained, they moved with the river, an integral part of the powerful current of things, afloat on it in exactly the way I had been daydreaming for myself. The French fur trader and his half-caste child joined Huck Finn – the three persons of the trinity which presided over my river.
Crouched under the willow below the mill, I lobbed my baited hook into the pool and watched the water spread. The Mississippi was my best invention; a dream which was always there, like a big friendly room with an open door into which I could wander at will. Once inside it, I was at home. I let the river grow around me until the world consisted of nothing except me and that great comforting gulf of water where catfish rootled and wild fruit hung from the trees on the towhead-islands. The river was completely still as the distant shore went inching by. I felt my skin burn in the sun. I smelled sawn timber and blackberries and persimmons. I didn’t dare to move a muscle for fear of waking from the dream.
Now, thirty years later, the river was just a hundred miles ahead.
The road was empty – not a truck or a car in miles. If it hadn’t been for the bodies of the dead racoons, I might have taken my rented mustard Ford for the only thing on the move in the whole of Wisconsin. The coons had the dissolute repose of sleeping tramps, their splayed limbs hidden under rumpled coverlets of greasy fur. Poor coons. Supremely talented, in a schoolboy way, at night exercises, at noisy raids on garbage cans, at climbing trees, they had no gift at all for crossing roads. Bright lights mesmerised them, and they died careless hobos’ deaths on the wooded edges of tiny unincorporated towns.
Hunting for company, I twiddled my way through the burble on the radio.
‘Good afternoon to all you Labor Day weekenders out there in Northern Wisconsin …’ The announcer sounded like a naval captain in a 1950s movie, a honey-bass throbbing with authority and inner calm. ‘This is WWID, Ladysmith. Your Good News station.’
The road sliced through a broken, hilly landscape of forest, corn and cattle. It had been like this for hours: the white-painted farms set back behind good fences, each one with its grain store topped by an aluminium cone like a witch’s hat, the long sweep of freshly harvested valleys reduced to hog’s bristle, the slaughtered coons. No one about. In Goodrich and Antigo, Ruby, Bloomer and Cornell, there’d been the same Sunday somnolence in the standing heat.
At Goodrich I’d stopped for gas, and had had to wake the station’s owner who was asleep under the funnies-section, framed between his ice box and his Coke machine. ‘Shit,’ he’d said; then ‘Where you going?’ as if my presence on the highway was a violation of some Sunday blue law.
From the hillbilly fiddles, electric harmoniums and tabernacle choirs on the radio, a girl’s voice broke through with manic brightness and clarity.
A song of peace, a song of joy,
A song for every little girl and boy,
A song that says, ‘God loves you!’
She dropped to a bedtime whisper. ‘God loves you,’ she crooned, while the strings and triangles went hushabye, hushabye in the background. ‘He really loves you.’ Stroking and snuggling her way into the hearts of the Labor Day weekenders, she said, ‘This isn’t just a song for children, darling. Adults need love just as much, too.’ I squirmed in my car seat while she went on murmuring He loves you, He really loves you, He loves you, and faded out, leaving the airwaves full of breathed kisses.
‘Carol Lawrence,’ the announcer said. ‘Born-again Christian lady. “Tell All the World About Love.” The love of God. That’s what we’re here to share on WWID, twenty-four hours a day, except for Monday mornings. Telling the good news. And we tell everybody because faith comes by hearing it. We have to get it out. It’s twenty-two before six.’
Swaddled and babied by the Good News station, I drove on west. I was full of that receptive good humour which marks the beginnings of journeys – a time when everything is coated with the bloom of newness, and one’s eyes and ears skitter like minnows, seizing excitedly on every humdrum scrap. A sleeping dog! They have sleeping dogs in Wisconsin! A pile of cut wood! They cut wood here! Look, cows! Look, a water tower! Look, a gas station! Everything shapes up to the same astonishing size. The Falcons had beaten the Saints, the Bears had beaten the Packers, a hurricane called David was making its way up the Florida coast. Key Biscayne had been evacuated. In Dominica, four hundred people sheltering in a church had been swept to death when a river changed its course. And a group called the Longstroms were singing:
Well, I’ve found something that money can’t buy,
I’ve found a goldmine beyond the blue sky,
I’ve found the land where I’ll live when I die,
I’ve found the Lord – a rich man am I.
The cows were casting longer shadows now, and when the trees met over the road they formed a dark church nave. In the farmhouses, lights were coming on one by one and their white barns were turning black against the sun. Connorsville. Forest. Somerset. New Richmond. Then the steep climb down into the valley of the St Croix River.
‘Christian witness …’ said the announcer. ‘Here’s Len Mink.’ Len Mink was a sobbing tenor backed by a choir of lady angels.
I have returned to the God of my childhood,
To the same simple things as the child I once knew;
Like the Prodigal Son, I long for my loved ones,
For the comforts of home and the God I outgrew.
He returned and returned and returned. He went back to the God of his father. He went back to the God of his mother. After half a dozen stanzas he was returning to ‘the Yahweh of Judah’, his voice breaking down in the effort to recapture that lost Eden of the spirit. Finally he was shouting, ‘I have returned! I have returned! I have returned!’ in an exultant, if implausible, carol from the womb.
Well, I was returning too. I had never quite given up dreaming of the river and still found comfort in the idea of that lovely, glassy sweep of open water. The rivers I fished, on weekend escapes from the city, were always shadowed by another, bigger river, broad and long enough to lose oneself on. Once, I’d actually seen the Mississippi, but it was from the window of a jet thirty thousand feet up, and the river looked as remote and theoretical as the twisty thread on the family atlas. It glinted like a piece of ravelled fusewire. One sip of a Pan-American highball, and it was gone.
Its after-image lodged obstinately at the back of my head. In London, I had gone stale and dry. I felt that I’d run out of whatever peculiar reserves of moral capital are needed for city life. I couldn’t write. For days on end I woke at five, confused and panicky, as the tranquillisers that I’d taken lost their grip. I listened to the jabbering sparrows in the yard and to the restless surf of overnight traffic on the road beyond. I lay clenched, struggling to get to sleep, and found myself thinking of the river, the great good place of my childhood. It was still just visitable. The dream was heavily overgrown now and there were prohibitive notices and stretches of barbed wire to pass before one could get back to the old spot where the water spread away for miles then dissolved into sky. Here, already half-asleep, I let myself drift out into the current and watched the rising sun loom like a gigantic grapefruit through the mist.
Going down the river turned into an obsessive ritual. I had to relearn the child’s trick of switching instantly into an imagined world. Soon I could work the magic with a few bare talismanic symbols – a curling eddy, a reed bed, an island, and a canister of photographer’s smoke. It wasn’t long before these daily dawn voyages began to suggest a real journey and a book.
The book and the journey would be all of a piece. The plot would be written by the current of the river itself. It would carry one into long deep pools of solitude, and into brushes with society on the shore. Where the river meandered, so would the book, and when the current speeded up into a narrow chute, the book would follow it. Everything would be left to chance. There’d be no advance reservations, no letters of introduction. One would try to be as much like a piece of human driftwood as one could manage. Cast off, let the Mississippi take hold, and trust to whatever adventures or longueurs the river might throw one’s way. It was a journey that would be haphazard and full of randomness, but it would also have the insistent purpose of the river current as it drove southward and seaward to the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s hard to make travel arrangements to visit a dream. The voyage I was planning was on a river which existed only in my head. The real Mississippi was an abstraction. I studied it with impatience, feeling that the facts were just so many bits of grit in my vision of a halcyon river. I learned, without enthusiasm, about the construction of the lock and dam system. Figures began to swim in my head where the dream ought to be. In 1890, thirty million tons of freight had been carried downriver; in 1979, after a long and catastrophic decline in river trade, business was up again to forty million tons. The Civil War and the coming of the railroads had almost smashed the river as a commercial highway, but the oil crisis of the 1970s had brought the Mississippi back to life. A river barge, I read, ‘can move four hundred tons of grain a mile on a gallon of fuel, compared with only two hundred tons for a locomotive’; and a lot of people were now wanting to move a lot of tons of grain because the United States had raised its quota of grain exports to Russia. So the port of New Orleans was busy with ships carting Midwestern wheat and corn and soybeans off to Murmansk and Archangel. To someone somewhere, I suppose, this kind of information has the ring of industrial poetry; it didn’t to me. It was reassuring to find that the river was important again, a central artery linking north and south in a drifting procession of towboats and barge fleets, but I found the details of its renaissance grindingly dull. They threatened to contaminate that great, wide, open stretch of level water which was far more actual for me than these tawdry scraps of intelligence from the real world.
I went for long walks by the Thames, following the ebb tide as it ran out through Kew, Chiswick, Barnes, Putney, watching the way that it piled against the bridges and came to the boil over deep muddy holes in the river bottom. It was the simple movement of the water that I liked, and its capacity to make the city which surrounded it look precarious and makeshift. The pastel cottages on the bank, with their bookshelves, net curtains, standing lamps and potted plants, stood on the lip of a real and dangerous wilderness. A freak tide, a careless shift in the current, and they could be swept away. The river, as it sluiced past their doorsteps, carried plenty of evidence of its deadliness. There were dead dogs in it, and stoved-in boats, and the occasional bloated human corpse. Once I found the body of a drowned woman. She was spreadeagled on the shore; her coat, of sodden leopardskin, had ridden up over her torso and covered her head. Her tights were laddered. Her boots were very new. At the coroner’s inquest on her death, I heard that she’d left a note. It was rambling, disjointed, full of resentment and depression, but it didn’t actually say that she intended to kill herself. It seemed rather that she had come to the river without knowing what she was going to do. Perhaps she believed that the mess and tangle of her life would somehow resolve itself if she could put it in perspective beside the bleak placidity of all that drifting water. It was probable, said the coroner, that she’d thrown herself into the river without premeditation; not really meaning to commit suicide, merely trying to assuage her misery and confusion in the comforting void of the Thames. He announced his verdict: death by misadventure.
I felt I understood what had drawn the woman to the river. I wanted to lose myself too. I had no intention of landing up in some small Midwestern city morgue, but I ached to run away from the world for a while, to put myself in the grip of a powerful current which would make my choices for me, to be literally adrift. The woman had gone to the river for solace, and had ended up drowning in it; I was going for much the same motive, but meant to stay afloat.
I hardly gave a thought to the mechanics of the voyage. It was, after all, a dream journey, and like a dream it was supposed to unfold spontaneously without effort on my part. Obviously I would need a craft of some kind, but I knew almost nothing at all about boats. A raft would turn the trip into a piece of quaint play-acting; canoes capsized. I vaguely assumed that somewhere at the top end of the river I’d come across a leaky tub with a pair of oars, and cast off in that.
To make the voyage come true, I began to talk about it. At a party in London I met a man who had seen the Mississippi at St Louis and had gone on a half-day tourist cruise up the river.
‘It was amazingly depressing,’ he said. ‘Totally featureless. An awful lot of mud. You couldn’t see anything over the top of the banks except dead trees. The only bearable thing about the entire afternoon was the ship’s bar. It was full of people getting dead drunk so that they didn’t have to look at the sheer bloody boredom of the Mississippi.’
‘That was just round St Louis, though.’
‘Oh, it’s all like that, I gather. That’s what it’s famous for, being very long and very boring. The only reason people ever go on the Mississippi at all is because after you’ve spent a couple of hours looking at the horrendous bloody river, even a dump like St Louis starts to look moderately interesting. I think God made the Mississippi as a sort of warning, to prove that things really can be worse than you think.’
He had an air of mighty self-satisfaction, having delivered me at a stroke from the lunatic fantasy with which I’d been possessed. Actually, I’d been rather excited by his description of the river. It had given it something of the melodramatic awfulness of a landscape by John Martin, a touch of Sadek in Search of the Waters of Oblivion with its dwarfish hominid scrambling into a world of treeless crags and dead seas.
‘I suppose you thought you were going to do it in a rowing boat,’ the man said, snuffling with amusement at the notion. I didn’t like the way he had consigned my trip to the past subjunctive tense.
‘No, no. I’ll have a … an outboard motor.’ I had had one experience with an outboard motor. I had driven myself from one end of a small Scottish loch to the other, where it had coughed and died. It had taken three hours to row back through a rainstorm.
‘You’d get swamped. Or be run down by one of those tow-things. When we were in St Louis, people were always getting drowned in the river. Went out fishing, never came back, bodies recovered weeks later, or never recovered at all. So bloody common that it hardly ever made the local news.’
Some days afterwards, I ran into the man again.
‘You’re not still thinking of going down that river, are you?’
‘I’ve written off about getting a motor.’
‘It’d cost you a hell of a lot less if you just swallowed a packet of razor blades. According to the Euthanasia Society, putting a plastic bag over your head is pretty much the best way to go.’ He introduced me to the woman he was with. ‘He’s going to go down the Mississippi in a dinghy,’ he said.
‘What a lovely thing to do,’ she said. ‘Just like Tom Sawyer – or was that Huckleberry Finn?’
The man smiled with exaggerated patience. It was the smile of a lonely realist stranded in the society of cloud cuckoos. That smile. I’d got used to it over the last few weeks. It said I was a jackanapes. Now, studying my route in the pale glow of the car maplight, a scramble of lower-case names, otisville, houlton, lakeland, hudson‚ I imagined the smile broadening. In Minneapolis a boat was waiting for me. I was going to ride the river for as long and far as I could go, and see whether it was possible to stitch together the imaginary place where I had spent too much of my time daydreaming and that other, real, muddy American waterway.
I was being interviewed by the radio pastor of WWID, Ladysmith.
‘Have you said yes to Jesus yet?’
No.
‘It’s by his grace you’re saved through faith. Exercise your faith and say, “Lord, I’m receiving you as my lord and saviour.”’
My headlights picked out the twin marmalade eyes of a racoon in the road. I swerved just in time.
‘Henry Slotter tells the news at nine, straight up, and then Sunday Hymnsing to follow, on this second of September, Labor Day Weekend. Now hear this. The Oklahoma Baptist Festival Choir. It is Well with My Soul. That says just about all that needs to be said, folks. It is Well with My Soul.’ The opening chords on the electric organ quivered with pious tremolo; then came the voices, the sopranos sounding as if they were crying for joy, the baritones and basses adding a counterpoint of moderation and commonsense, as if getting on the right side of the Lord was just good business practice. I turned up the volume and joined the Interstate Highway, singing my way into Minnesota along with the Oklahoma Baptist Festival Choir. After all, I was in no position to jeer at other people’s dreams of personal salvation. I had my own hopes of becoming a born-again something, even if it wasn’t a Christian. It is well with my soul, pom, pom … well with my soul.
I was jolted back into an America I recognised without affection. The bald glare of the sodium lights over the highway had flattened the landscape and robbed it of shadow and colour. The exurban fringe of the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul was the usual mess of neon doodles. Curlicues of mustard. Trails of ketchup. The motels, taco houses, radio shacks and pizza huts stretched away in a bilious blaze of American mock-alpine. I remembered poring over the Victorian atlas, playing with the exotic syllables of Minneapolis as if they spelled Samarkand. Even now I wasn’t quite prepared for the thoroughgoing charmlessness of this five-mile strip of junk food, porno-movies, and the kind of motels where you expect to find blood running down your shower-curtain. There was a brief, merciful break of darkness. Then the illuminated crap began again.
It was only after I had gone on another mile or so that I realised that I’d crossed the Mississippi. I had crossed the Mississippi. It had dropped through a crack in the lights of Minneapolis, and I hadn’t even seen it go. The smile on the face of my London acquaintance would have been so superior that it would have joined up with his eyebrows in a perfect oval. It was a jackanapes’s way of ending a pilgrimage and starting an odyssey.
I pushed on deeper into Minneapolis until I found myself driving up a street that felt like the heart of something. Hennepin Avenue. Louis Hennepin had been a seventeenth-century Franciscan friar who had been chaplain to the La Salle expedition which had charted the upper Mississippi in 1680. I’d just been reading about him in Francis Parkman’s La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West‚ and was interested to see how his name had been commemorated here. Hennepin Avenue was blocked solid with gay bars, massage parlours, bright little boutiques with vibrators and dildos displayed in their windows, and the offices of pawnbrokers and bail-bondsmen, now shuttered and padlocked for the night. Perhaps Father Hennepin had been an altogether merrier priest than Parkman had made him sound. Or perhaps the ruderies of Hennepin Avenue were intended to convey what Protestant Minnesota thought of foreign papists.
I stopped at a bar which looked and sounded rather more butch than its neighbours: ‘Moby Dick’s – For a Whale-Sized Drink’. Having just missed out on one American epic by oversight, I had better catch up with whatever classics I could find. A few doors down the street, no doubt, there’d be a sex shop called ‘The Scarlet Letter’.
In the three-quarters dark, the walls of Moby Dick’s were bright with sweat. It was the kind of place where all the loose ends of a city tend to shake down together. A glazed-looking Indian in a booth had a pitcher of beer for company. Two blacks, wearing enviably sharp hats and suits with lapels as narrow as switchblades, were feeding the jukebox with quarters. At the bar, a drunk was getting nowhere with the barmaid as he tried to sweet-talk her into betting on the outcome of the New England–Pittsburgh football game.
‘Come on, honey. Just a little bet … A gennelman’s bet … Whaddaya say?’
On the TV screen above his head, someone dressed up in medieval armour was running for a line.
‘A dollar.’
The barmaid squirted whisky from a tube into my glass.
‘I said gennelman’s bet. One dollar. What’s a dollar between friends?’ He sprawled across the bar towards the girl in a sudden excess of inspiration. ‘Hey, honey … you can take Pittsburgh.’
‘Straight up or soda?’ said the girl to me.
‘Go on, what’s a dollar?’
‘Food, clothing and a place to sleep,’ I said. Bob Hope had said that in a movie once.
The girl faced the drunk for the first time in minutes. ‘It’s too early in the season, I ain’t into the teams yet.’
Defeated, he settled on me, grabbing at my sleeve as I started to leave the bar. ‘Where you from, fella? Where you from? I can tell you ain’t from round here,’ he said with the triumphant cunning of a man who has got the better of half a bottle and can still pull off feats of amazing detection.
I headed for the empty booth next to the pickled Indian’s.
‘Hey, where you going? Where you going, fella?’
Far away, I hoped. South with the Monarch butterflies. Downstream.
Two
CASTING OFF
ON LABOR DAY, NO ONE WAS TAKING CALLS. The phone pealed unanswered in the boatyard. I pulled aside the heavy drapes of my hotel room window and looked down on the emptied streets of Minneapolis, already beginning to fry in the early sun. I wondered where the Mississippi was. Its course must be a well-kept secret, hidden somewhere in the crevices between the city’s squat little skyscrapers of smoked glass and steel.
In this high room, with the expensive air-conditioner breathing hardly louder than a sleeping child, I felt I was as far from my river as I’d ever been. My morning orange juice stood islanded in a silver tureen of crushed ice. I propped Parkman up against it and went back to my favourite bit, where La Salle, Tonto and Father Hennepin see the Mississippi for the first time.
The travellers resumed their journey … and soon reached the dark and inexorable river, so long the object of their search, rolling, like a destiny, through its realms of solitude and shade.
Here it rolled obscurely through realms of insurance companies, cattlefeed factors, television stations and chain hotels. I put an admiring pencil line under the phrase ‘through all the perilous monotony of its interminable windings’, and tried it out loud. It sounded terrific.
I went to the window to stare at the city, trying to find a gap or a shadow, a sign of a winding, but the man-madeness of it all looked seamless. I had spent a lot of time dreaming of losing myself on the river; it had never once occurred to me that it might be possible simply to lose the river. There must be a reason for the way in which Minneapolis behaved towards the Mississippi as if the river were the skeleton in the city’s family closet. That was something else that I would have to find out.
There was no clue on the streets outside as to the whereabouts of my river. Lost by a series of forced right-turns, I took a long boulevard where the shadows fell towards me and hoped that that meant East. Mine was the only car about. The traffic-control system of Minneapolis had been switched on specially for my benefit. ‘Walk’ signs flashed ‘Walk!’ and ‘Don’t Walk!’ to whatever ghosts haunt deserted cities. Blinking filter-arrows sped imaginary columns of automobiles down empty avenues. Somewhere, many streets away, a police car went whooping just for the sake of whooping, like a lonely kid whistling to keep himself company. The sweet stink of a brewery lay leaden in the heat. No people. No river.
Then, suddenly, I was part of the crowd. The street had merged into an expressway, and the expressway was jammed solid. We were elbow to elbow in the crush, a grumbling herd of dusty pick-up trucks, all windows down, all radios turned full up. I spoke to my nearest neighbour, a colossal jellyfish in a plaid shirt and a cowboy hat with a wide curly brim.
‘Where’s everybody going?’
‘You goin’ to the Fair, man. Hey, Butch – guy here don’t know where nobody’s goin’.’
‘He’s goin’ right to the Fair,’ Butch said from the driver’s seat.
‘I just told him that. Hey, where you from? You ain’t a Norwegian, are you?’
‘I’m from England.’
‘England. Shit. Guy’s from England. Reason I asked if you was a Norwegian fella is because I’m a Norwegian myself. Got a Norwegian name. Olen. That’s Norwegian, Olen, ain’t that right?’
‘Sounds right to me.’
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
