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Show RIVER "You really think so?" said Ralph. "You think thaf s as far as it goes?" "Sure. Maybe it goes farther, but it goes at least this far. Look at the police station-how's that for a symbol? Or the ghetto. Cairo. Good God." "Maybe so," said Ralph. "Maybe so." That night I built a large driftwood fire and watched the towboats roll by, black ghosts on a blacker river. Their searchlights swept the water like the tentacles of a monstrous insect and the air vibrated with the distant rhythmic pounding of their engines. The two rivers seemed even more enormous in the darkness, unbounded, world engulfing. For the first time I began to appreciate the power of the place. I smoked a lot, thought deep thoughts, and dreamed strange dreams all night. I was eating breakfast out of a can of peaches the next morning when a black-and- white towboat with four stacks pushing a mid-sized load of tows came cannonballing down the Mississippi like a charging elephant. She was exactly opposite the point, banking down her engines to make the turn up the Ohio, when I read the name plate on her pilot house and saw that this was America, the largest and most powerful riverboat ever seen on the Mississippi. I'd seen her before when she was black and yellow, but I didn't recognize her new paint job. The huge four-decked boat looked good in her new paint and I watched wordlessly as she rounded the point and stopped in the middle of the Ohio to make up a new tow. The size and power of America are legendary all along the Mississippi. She's the stuff out of which true folk tales are made. Along with her sister ship, United States, she was the largest towboat on the river, generating ten thousand horsepower to push up to fifty-six barges. Everybody who lives along the river -33- |