OCR Text |
Show RTVER wheel, centered on the black line of the hull, rose up to the base of the Texas deck. The submerged rumble of her engines was drowned out by the sound of falling water. If I hadn't felt so miserable I'd probably have been moved to song. I watched her till she rounded a bend and was out of sight, vanished like a dream, a steamboat hallucination. By evening the cloud of fog was thick and wet. I still felt terrible and I badly wanted to find some kind of shelter. An oppressiveness in the air made me sure there were days of bad weather ahead. I knew there was a ferry at a place called Cottonwood Point just above the Arkansas line and I thought I might find some kind of shelter at the landing. When I rounded the bend, hugging the Missouri shore, I found Papoose. She was a derelict riverboat tied up to a flooded stand of cottonwoods, so ancient and weatherworn that it was hard to guess how old she was, though I'd seen damn few active towboats that looked like Papoose. She must have been more than fifty years old, but it was clear she wasn't going to get much older. Her peeling paint showed that she had once been a trim green and white, but now her exposed metal work was oxide red. Long and narrow, sixty or so feet long and not twenty feet wide, she had one long single-storied cabin topped by a pilot house. The cabin was broken up into many small sleeping cabins filled with built-in bunks, a galley, and a cavernous hole where the ruins of her engines lay. Nearly all her glass was broken and the cabins had been gutted by rats and teenagers. In the settling fog Papoose looked most ghostly. I landed next to her and tied my boat to a cleat. Through the fog I could hear the ferry several hundred yards down river chugging back and forth across the Mississippi, the sound carrying clearly over -173- |