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Show RIVER in St. Louis," but if true, I saw no evidence of it. We did see the hulk of a Spanish caravel, a replica of Columbus' Santa Maria, that had followed some improbable course to wind up stranded high and dry on a wharf in the American heartland. By ten we were out of the industrial district, and in two more hours we had left the riverfront mansions behind. Before the van died Rick had bought a chicken for a buck fifty at a farmhouse. I think that all the scrambled egg mix we were eating moved him to visions of fresh eggs. We named the chicken Erica and waited for the eggs to show up. They never did. Erica did not like raft life particularly, if at all. She spent most of her time in a screened box because when she ran loose she defecated indiscriminately. She was a big, old, tough white Leghorn laying hen with a menopausal personality, but she certainly didn't deserve the knocks that fate had delivered in her dotage. Her only consolation must have been that Rick truly loved her. She fell into the river on the way to Nauvoo and Rick jumped in and rescued her. Not long after Erica came aboard we agreed that we'd eat her, but somehow we never got around to it. That damn chicken went three or four hundred miles down the river with us, but that morning at St. Louis she made a big mistake and shat all over Vince and Julia's bed. Early that afternoon a tremendous wind began to blow up the river, churning the water into whitecaps. Waves broke over the bow and spray washed to the top of the cabin. The barrels and timbers of the raft groaned under the strain, while the cabin acted as a sail, pushing us back up the river. We finally tied up to a rocky beach on the Missouri shore and waited a while for the wind to die down, but it continued unabated. Erica's fate was sealed. -80- |