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Show RIVER are towboats down there that are four times the size of anything you ever see up this way. The worst of them is a big four stacker, the America, and she kicks up a ten-foot-high prop wake that bounces off the riverbank for miles. A boat like that can suck forty feet of water away from the shore and then throw it back again. So be careful, always! That damn river doesn't need more corpses." His last bit of advice was, "Don't run at night. Do anything else you want to do, but don't run at night. The river will kill you if you do." Vince and Julia volunteered to drive the van to our first rendezvous downriver. Rosie and I stood in the bow with a sapling I'd cut to use as a sounding pole and Rick cranked up the engine. We cast off and pointed the nose of the raft toward the harbor mouth. Slowly, we rounded out of the lagoon and onto the river. Our dreams were finally real: we were on a raft on the Mississippi River. A sharp wind hit us as we reached the open river. Coming up close to the Illinois shore was the towboat Reliance, not a monster riverboat but big enough for us. The shining black mounds of coal heaped in her dozen barges rose above the river like mountains. Like a great sea serpent, the towboat crossed our bows and we rode her wake, rolling up and down in the long swells. It suddenly hit me that we knew practically nothing about the river, but I felt triumphant that we'd survived our first encounter with a towboat. By the time we were through the wake we had made it to the river's channel. High gray clouds were scattered across the sky and a strong south wind churned up the river until it appeared to be flowing northward. The river suddenly seemed so huge and I began to think on how little we knew about the river. Our ignorance was astounding. Up on her stocks and even riding in the -64- |