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Show VIII. TORNADOES Someplace between New Madrid and Caruthersville nightfall caught me on a barren stretch of shore with no good place to camp-and with a tornado blowing up. I was drifting in the channel, close to the Missouri side, and the bank was covered with revetment, an uninviting invention of the Army Corps of Engineers that consists of broken rocks and boulders. Now and then I saw asphalt revetments, but these were clearly inferior to the usual riffraff revetments. The river ate up the asphalt like it was ice cream. There's a lesson here: even the Army Corps of Engineers can't pave the Mississippi. It was a hell of a place to try to land a small boat, especially a wooden boat, but the Tennessee shore was low and flooded and I could tell from my maps that there was nothing better for miles down the river. Dark was coming on fast and quite suddenly the air had become still and warm, with a thick, heavy feeling of menace that made me sure a tornado was brewing. I remembered the tornado I'd slept in up on the Ohio and I wasn't thrilled at the prospect of camping out in another such storm. I recalled the bodacious rain and twisting wind I'd encountered in my previous tornado. The hot, calm prelude to this new storm made Thor nervous and I pulled up on to the rocks of the revetment with a lot of work to do before the storm hit. I unloaded the boat, got most of my gear under tarps, and hauled the empty shell up onto the rocks, cursing the Army Corps of Engineers, wishing great evil upon their souls. A towboat was plowing up the river and I just managed to get my boat out of the reach of her wake. The riverboat was a fully loaded petroleum barge, low and heavy in the water, and it passed not thirty yards from shore. Even in the -160- |
