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Show RIVER lanterns. Although we were usually exhausted when tumbled into bed, we made love almost every night. We anchored one evening at the mouth of a bayou next to a small white trimaran. The couple on board, Roger and Martha, had built the boat in Ohio and were now on their way to Florida. We spent the evening swapping tales of the river. I must have appeared jealous of the beautifully crafted trimaran because Roger assured me that I'd taken a better approach. "Look at it this way. You run your raft onto a sandbar or snag, all you've got to do is push it off and roll on down the river. You'd have to really stretch your imagination to sink her. If I sink this baby," he said as he lovingly tapped the wood of his boat, "I'm out $20,000 and two years of my life." We left the state of Mississippi and both shores became Louisiana. The river had been narrowing all day, picking up speed as it slimmed down, and from looking at the map I could tell it would be a tight place to pass any traffic. Since we'd survived a meeting with her sister ship, I wasn't too worried about encountering America, but then again I wasn't about to assume anything. We were heading to the bend above Lake Providence when we sighted the great black-and-yellow towboat. Her bow alone was six barges wide and I headed for the protection of a drowned sandbar, but the current was so fast we swept down the river before we could round the sandbar. I hugged the port side of the channel as closely as I could. America rolled past, smoke pouring out of each of her four stacks, her wakes as tall as the cabin on our raft. We swept around the bend just as we passed the towboat into miles of water that appeared to have been blasted by a hurricane. The raft buckled and pitched through the -98- |