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Show RIVER maelstrom, but we had survived America, the worst, we figured, that the river had to offer. The end of the trip was the craziest time of all. Our idyll on the wild river ended abruptly at Baton Rouge. We rounded the last point above the city and fifteen miles of straight, narrow river channel opened up before us. It was a desolation. The river was jammed with ocean going freighters from all parts of the world, many of them stained rust-red with nitrates, some riding at anchor in mid-river, some nestled up to huge steel docks. The shore was an unbroken landscape of oil refineries and industries that belched fire and smoke from a forest of smokestacks. Rising above this dismal plain was the lone tower of the state capitol building, the legacy of Huey Long. We docked the raft at a boat store and went ashore to look at the city. We went to the capitol building and rode the elevator to the top, past the marble slab where Huey had died in a hail of gunfire. From the overlook we could see the flat Louisiana countryside reaching to the horizon, smoky and fungus green, the landscape laced with ominous sinks of black and turquoise water. Up close, around the city, lay the legacy of industrialized civilization: huge square dumping pools bright green with chemicals, steel oil tanks as big as blimps and thick as melons in a patch, and the poisoned river snaking its way through the country like a stainless-steel python. The air on the horizon was heavy and brown. When we got back to the raft, we found an old man seated on a barrel smoking a pipe. "Hey," he said in a thick Cajun accent. "How much you want for zee raft?" A gray, wrinkled old timer, if I'd had to personify the Mississippi, he'd look a lot like that old man. "I don't know," I said. "We hadn't thought about selling her." -99- |