OCR Text |
Show RIVER The old man laughed. "You know this river below Baton Rouge, eh?" he asked. I shook my head. "He is a killer who will take your life and not even notice." He paused. "Besides, you get your raft to New Orleans, who will buy it?" He stopped and let this sink in. Then he offered us $200 for the raft. We were flat broke and we'd already seen a couple of derelict rafts, so the offer sounded pretty good, but we were determined to take the raft all the way to New Orleans. We turned him down, but everything the Cajun said about the river turned out to be true. The stretch of river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans was as rough as it was ugly-and it was plenty ugly. It took us a week to go the 115 miles. The poisoned river narrowed to a half mile and the current nearly disappeared as we approached the sea. The narrow river was ditch-like, bare of islands and jammed with all sorts of traffic. The freighters were especially frightening. They came flying up the Mississippi at an astonishing speed, quiet as a hawk on the wing. Coming downriver the damned things would sneak up on us and they had a motherkilling wake, much deeper and more powerful than a towboaf s. I hated them. The riverbank was covered with stunted shrub growth where it wasn't littered with the marvels of the mechanical age, ferries and docks and gravel piles and garbage. It was heartbreaking to see the river lose its good looks and lose them so badly: the river seemed to have lost its very soul to progress. The raft was battered and the Seahorse engine was in even worse shape. On the first morning below Baton Rouge I cast off and tried to start the motor. The -100- |