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 for the opportunity to hang from the side of the boat and spill their guts all over a grateful showeree. I can testify that these solar water heaters work like a charm, and there’s no utility bill.
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
