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Show RTVER beach the island was so thickly covered with cottonwoods as to appear impassible. In the evening I landed on the Kentucky shore just above a ferry dock at a place called Columbus. There was nothing on the riverfront but the dock and mounds of sand and gravel piled below a sharply rising bluff. The mounds spilled down into the hungry river and behind them were the chutes, conveyers, crushers, and cranes of the gravel company. The ferryboat caught my attention. Ferryboats are the funkiest outfits on the Mississippi River. Some of them run on steam engines built before the First World War. This one was no exception, though it was even funkier than most. It puffed and wheezed into the Columbus landing, looking like an crippled duck too old to fly. The ferry was run by a corpulent alkie in the first throes of old age and his skinny assistant, who appeared even older and more alcoholic, toothless and rail-thin. They looked like a boozy backwoods Laurel and Hardy. I asked the Captain how much it would cost to ride across the river and he growled out an exorbitant price, so I went looking for a place to camp. The sand and gravel outfit had made that difficult. The ferry came back and I struck up a conversation with the first mate. He told me that there was a battlefield park at the top of the bluff. He showed me where a path to the park started just in back of the old school bus that he called home. I asked him if there was anyplace nearby where I could buy some beer. He said it was a dry county, but if I'd meet him later on the porch of the mansion house up in the park, he'd call on a bootlegger and bring up some beer. The path wound up the bluff through woods littered with all sorts of Americana, empty cans and bottles, lost paper plates, and wind-blown -151- |