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Show RIVER Rosie woke me up. "The raffs adrift," she said, shaking me out of a deep sleep. I stepped out onto the stern and looked out at the spinning, moon-gilded river. I was casual (and sleepy) enough to simply start the engine and drive the raft into shore where I drove deeper stakes and moored the raft again. Morning came on strong and cold. We pushed out onto a smooth, dark river before the sun came up and watched the sky turn red and the river turn blue. The only trace of the previous day's bad weather were a few clouds scattered across the sky. As the sun rose, it warmed the raft and we boomed along on a strong, swollen current. For breakfast, Rosie cooked dehydrated scrambled eggs on our last modern convenience, our work-worn Coleman stove. The morning passed quickly, gliding through the southern jungle. About noon we crossed another imaginary line, leaving Arkansas and reaching Louisiana at last. The scenery grew more southern by the mile. The banks were sometimes covered with scrub-like willows growing thick as needles in a pincushion, but usually there were a confusion of cottonwoods, pines, magnolias, and now tall, wide-spreading oaks draped in Spanish Moss. Almost once an hour we passed a large towboat and early one afternoon we passed the beautiful white towboat Mississippi pushing a vast load of forty barges. We saw several Army Corps of Engineers boats, some repairing the endlessly deteriorating revetments that shored up the riverbank, some dredging the channel. Every once in a while cabin cruisers wallowed past us, loaded with retirees bound for Florida. They always left behind the gift of a rocking wake. But sometimes, for hours, we'd have the river all to ourselves. Rosie and I took turns steering and even when we weren't on watch we kept company on the cabin top. We talked and read aloud to each other and sang -96- |