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Show RFVER about almost any sort of civilized place. It was all in our heads-we were in the heart of America, not the wilderness-but there was something completely free about being on the river. Even though settled for two hundred years and bounded by levees thousands of miles long, here the river still had a wild heart. When we were on the water we felt alone and untouchable. We got close to the wind and the water and the slow steady rhythms of dusk and dark and dawn: the music of the river sang in our ears twenty-four hours a day. In the towns we met many kind and friendly people, but we also ran into cops and rednecks and drunks and the general tension that lies just below the surface of any small southern town. We got to Memphis on a Saturday afternoon and were able to buy a new set of maps from an Army Corps of Engineers supply boat. We walked up into town and stumbled into a black protest march on Main Street. The marchers made a fine parade but the motorcycle cops looked like they wanted to kill something. We'd planned to spend the night, but we took a short look at Beale Street and then went back to the raft, left Memphis, and hid in a bayou. When we were a day or two below Helena, Arkansas, we camped out in a chute that cut off from the meandering main river. Being out of the main channel, I'd expected that we wouldn't have much in the way of barge traffic to disturb our slumber, but the chute cut four or five miles off the channel's route around the meander and lots of barges passed us during the night. There were no trees growing along the beach where we'd camped and I'd driven stakes in the soft sandy ground to tie up the raft. During the night, passing towboats dislodged the stakes and we wound up adrift, caught in an eddy that spun the raft around like flotsam in a whirlpool. -95- |
