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Show RTVER stayed more than a mile and a half wide-"powerful wide" as Huck Finn said- for some thirty miles as they surged into the South. I lay against the gunwales and drank up the sun. Toward noon, America passed down close to the Missouri side where the channel lay, smoke pouring out of her four stacks as she pushed her forty-two barges downriver. She was almost a mile off but she was nonetheless huge and strangely alive, with wakes that rolled past like swells on the ocean. I settled in close to the Kentucky shore and watched the bluffs spin by through the slow, lazy afternoon. The natural river was always quiet: its enormous flood moved with a barely detectable murmur. Aside from the towboats and the rhythmic throbbing of their engines, steady as a heartbeat (and even this heartbeat was carried away if you were upwind of the beasts), the loudest sounds on the river came from birds and wildlife. Their calls echoed far out over the water. Skeins of geese migrating north to Canada and summer, singing in spring with blaring honks as they flew high overhead, made the biggest noise on the river. Their ungainly bodies were graceful in flight and they sang with the enthusiasm of a high-school marching band. Every honk sounded as if it were born of pure ecstasy. Each time I saw a flock of geese it was like a gift. The Ohio had been completely barren of islands. The only island I'd seen so far had been in the mouth of the Tennessee River and somebody was raising pigs on it. Now I drifted past the first true island in the stream, Wolf or Wolfs Head Island. It was typical of the islands on the Mississippi except that it was uncommonly large. At its upper end was a wide beach, many feet of fine yellow sand, the sort of beach that gives these islands the name "towheads." Beyond the -150- |
