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Show RFVER railroad bridge on a bucking, spring-crazed river requires experience and nerves of steel. A pilot once told me, "Don't ever trust the river." The Mississippi is as treacherous as a mule: it will wait ten years just to kill you once. I loved the river, but knew I did not understand it. The river and my encounter with Fred and the veterans made me consider my remarkable freedom. I had no job, responsibilities, duties, debts, or obligations. Every new day was an adventure, and I was at perfect liberty to do whatever struck my fancy. Like all mortals I operated within constraints-for example, I had only money to handle basic survival-but they seemed to impose few limits on the possible. And not only was I free, I appreciated the astonishing dimensions of that freedom. As a quick cold March darkness descended on Cairo Point, I made up a bed on the picnic table closest to the point. All night there was a lot of barge traffic and it seemed like each towboat turned its light on the point and held it there a long time. I was so fuzzy with sleep that I thought they were trying to figure out what the lump on the table was, but they were probably just lining their lights up with the mileage marker and gauging their distance from the shore. It was like sleeping in a snowstorm of light. In the morning a harbor tow came down the Mississippi, rounded the point, and tied up on the Ohio shore. It dropped the barge it was pushing, came back around the point, and moved right up next to the beach and my boat. A skinny, tall kid stood on the bow and I could see a grinning old pilot up in the wheelhouse. "You want a ride?" called the kid. I clambered through the gumbo and up over the low, bluff bow of the tow. -23- |