I’d never met? After some background checking, I committed to the journey of a lifetime.
I was one of maybe a dozen conscripts who volunteered for the three-month journey. Every one of those volunteers quickly realized that none of us could spend an entire summer floating down that big river. I tempered my dream with a realistic plan. I’d sign on to crew from St. Louis to the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. That would cover a part of the Mississippi I hadn’t traveled.
It wasn’t a big boat. In terms of cubits, it was a two-by-four. But it had a big backyard, a mile wide and 1,800 miles long. And it became the summer palace for a big thinker who has no problem translating big thoughts into action. Even his name was bold, fit for a John Wayne movie.
Justus McLarty has dipped his paddle in rivers throughout the world. Amazon. Yukon. Patagonia. Colorado. He’s plunged kayaks down forty-foot waterfalls and shared the unfamiliar food of a dozen different tribes. But the Mighty Mississippi had eluded him.
No longer.
Most big thinkers don’t progress past the idea stage. Justus not only planned the adventure, he built the boat. He spent the better part of a year in the driest of dry docks, in his garage in a tiny West Texas town where the surrounding seas are subterranean black gold. That might seem like a problem, transporting a dream from tumbleweed country to the headwaters of America’s seminal waterway. But remember, Justus McLarty thinks big.
He had the luxury of summertime to complete the journey. His job goes dormant during the summer when his employer, NBC’s Saturday Night Live, takes a production break.
Unlike an SNL rerun, you never step in the same raft twice. A raft always has a changing view, and a different danger lurking around the bend.
So what kind of vessel would deliver a passenger from Sorenson Landing, Minnesota, to Head of Passes, Louisiana, in relative comfort and safety?
The design bounced around McLarty’s brain for years. Unlike too many of us whose dreams die unfulfilled, Justus was swift and sure. From his own mental design, he began a trial-and-error process that produced a creature as unique to this universe as Mary Shelley’s monster or the zilla of God.
At first glance, the boat looked nearly as freakish. The cabin was framed by welded aluminum joists and fit with bright yellow plywood decking. Walls of waterproof nylon, canvas, and clear plastic protected the passenger from the elements and rolled up during a breezeless swelter. The whole house sat atop two bulbous pontoons, blue as a Simpsons sky. The pontoons were tough rubber carcasses that sported a patchwork quilt of repairs incurred in a previous life, when the pontoons took a thousand trips down the Colorado River. The boat even had a tiny outboard motor.
So the raft was a bit more sophisticated than a Huck Finn production. But Justus McLarty was determined to guide his craft like a raft.
The interior offered the rudimentary comforts of home: a stove, a sink, an ice box. Running water flowed from refillable plastic tankards. Ample shelving supported all the things a body would need for ninety days: kitchenware, food, flashlights, books, even a boom box loaded with a billion river tunes. Since interior space was devoted to cooking, sleeping and storage, the living room sat atop the flat roof, furnished with folding lawn chairs. Not a lot of shade.
Mark Twain endowed us with more than literary masterpieces. He gave us a lasting river lexicon. America’s exclusive fraternity of riverboat pilots 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
