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Show RTVER been raised and the river pounded and surged around them, making a muffled roar. Being Sunday, the work site was deserted and in the wind-blown fog the pilings looked more like a ruin than something that was being built. In the gray afternoon I spotted Delta Queen coming up the river. The last passenger sternwheeler still plying the Mississippi, she added to the dreamlike quality of the fog-haunted afternoon. I'd never seen Delta Queen on the river before and she looked just like an old time steamboat, painted and delicate and proud. Above the back line of her hull, her startling white paint and stacked, progressively shorter decks-lower deck, cabin deck, Texas deck, and sun deck-made her look like an ornate wedding cake gone adrift. The cabins on the lower deck appeared to extend all the way to the sides of the boat, their slab-sided walls notched with tall, rectangular, heavily curtained, double-sashed windows. Above the lower deck, the cabins were set back by promenade decks that were fenced with square white railings that gave the appearance of gingerbread to what was actually a surprisingly spare design. The railings were broken on the center of the Texas deck by a single small lifeboat. A crane stood on her bow supporting a gangway that projected over the river like a bowsprit. Due to the weather (or maybe it was just meal time), the decks were bare of passengers. A box-like pilof s house stood above the head of the foreshortened sun deck. Two gangways extended at right angles from the pilof s house, reaching out over the water. A single squat black smokestack-not throwing any visible smoke from the boaf s diesel engines-stood directly behind the pilof s house. As she drew past me, Delta Queen's magnificent sternwheel came into view, cascading a waterfall of white water into the gray-green river. The enormous -172- |