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Show RIVER sent us hurtling downstream and we used the outboard to thread through the railroad and highway bridges and cross the river. We headed for the marina, but (r the owner wanted to charge us 20(t offoot to tie up, so we tied up to the old cobblestone waterfront, which still had its steamboat mooring rings in place. The next morning we picked up the Army Corps of Engineers maps of the river from Cairo to the Gulf of Mexico. We spent the rest of the morning wandering the big city streets. Near a big hotel we stopped to listen to a blind black accordion player when suddenly the Winnepeg Police Pipe and Bugle Corps marched out of a nearby department store, bagpipes blaring and kilts flying in the breeze. They were apparently part of a salute to Canada, but I doubt the poor accordion player ever figured out what had happened. That afternoon we went to see "Easy Rider," the hit movie of the summer of '69. We thought it was the greatest film ever made, though it did give us pause to think about our destination: the South. Not long after we got back to the raft, a TV news crew showed up and interviewed us. The newscaster was a very somber man in a gray suit who seemed totally devoid of a sense of humor. He shot questions at us rapid-fire and we babbled back incoherent answers about how this was a really BIG river. That evening we found a television in the shabby lobby of the Baltimore Hotel and watched the news with a morose older gent who looked like a down-on-his-luck salesman. He seemed aggravated at the company. When we came on the news he looked from the set to us and then back at the set and then back at us. He never did say anything. We cast off early into a clear blue morning, riding the wild current down past the warehouses and factories of St. Louis. I'd looked for the Southern Comfort distillery, since its label read that it was "Distilled on the Banks of the Mississippi -79- |