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Show RFVER from another rig coming downriver:. I got off and they went back to work. I spent a lot of the afternoon thinking about becoming a deckhand. It was Sunday, mild and fair, and all day people came and went at the park. Carloads of families bound to and from St. Louis and Nashville and Chicago and Louisville would stop, get out, look at the two rivers, load back up, and hit the highway again. I met one old boy from Mississippi, already in the early afternoon deep into some white liquor, who'd come up to trade coon dogs with another old boy from Missouri. I talked with anybody who wanted to pass the time of day. I was interested in people, all kinds of people, and I liked practically everybody. In the middle of the afternoon a haggard longhair came walking down the Ohio shore, followed by three howling black kids who waved bamboo fishing poles and fishnets as they ran in whooping circles around him. He looked tired but unhassled, like Jesus after a hard day, and he was almost oblivious to the three rampaging boys. His long dark hair was matched by a full beard beginning to turn gray and patient brown eyes. The lines and wrinkles on his face were those of a young man growing old fast. "Hey Ralph!" yelled one of the kids when he spotted me. "Lookit! Another hippie!" "Soul brother," said Ralph, without any excitement. The two words were tinged with a New Jersey accent. We stared at each other like the two trappers in the old Remington drawing "I Took You for an Injun." "What the hell are you doing here?" Once again, I explained. You might think that as many times as I explained that I was rowing a little peanut shell of a boat down the great Father of Waters -25- |