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Show RIVER was the harvest moon, enormously fat as it transcended the horizon; its reflection a glittering pathway across the water. We sprawled on the foredeck, completely awed by the transformation of day into night. After Vince and Julia retired, Rosie and I sat on the stern, dangling our feet into the cold water, watching the moon-illuminated river. As it mounted the sky, the moon turned white and its reflection formed a column of light on the water. The landscape seemed to be made of beaten silver. "This is magic, isn't it?" said Rosie. The next morning I woke up early and watched the sun rise. The full moon was now hanging just above the western horizon. During the night a layer of pure white fog had shrouded the river. It was so thick it looked like a snow field, solid enough to walk across. The first light was pink and orange, transforming the white fog into a glowing cloud as the sky went from black to gray to purple to blue. The eastern horizon was the line of black pines and water oaks that crowded the Illinois bank, screening the fire of the rising sun. Birdsong and the soft rush of the river as it swept beneath the raft were the only sounds. I cast off into the mist and again began navigating the Mississippi. It took a while to develop a working relationship with the river. The Coast Guard maintains a channel three hundred yard wide marked by red and black buoys and a system of navigation lights and mileage markers beginning at mile zero at the Head of Passes in Louisiana and ending at about mile 968 at Cairo, where the upper river begins again at mile zero. The Army Corps of Engineers published two sets of maps that show nearly every chicken coop and woodpile between Minnesota and the Gulf of Mexico, so with the maps and the markers you pretty -66- |
