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Show RFVER far over the great river. Occasionally these arachnidian aviators would land on the raft, a bad fate because Rosie squashed them when she found them. The meandering river grew deeper and older and cast its spell over us completely, bewitching us with the feel of the wind in our hair and the sun on our skin and the rustle of the constant flowing water all around. Our fear of the South melted slowly but completely. Long hair was no big deal-we were, after all, the right color. I had one brush with fear one evening in a jungle-covered part of the state of Mississippi. A skiff came pounding up the river, her aluminum belly beating against the water. Two duck hunters were lounging in the skiff and when they sighted our raft they slowed down and circled around us twice, coming in closer as they circled. At last they brought the skiff up to the side of the raft and stared up at me with vacant-eyed wonder. They were both drunk and they had shotguns in their laps. "Howdy," I said. They stared at me wordlessly for a while. Then one of them said, "You want a drink?" "Sure," I said, and they tossed me a bottle of Jim Beam. Just above Memphis we encountered our first truly big towboats. All the stories we'd heard about the behemoths of the Federal Barge Line, America and her sister ship, United States, made us to wonder if the raft would survive an encounter with either. We'd met fishermen who described the two boats as four-stacked, black-and-yellow creatures that more than fifty barges, irresistibly and unstoppably. "What should we do when we see one of them?" I had asked. -93- |