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Show RTVER the open water, but being aboard Papoose made me feel isolated and invisible. For all its dirt and dampness, the old towboat was clearly the best I'd find in the way of shelter from the storm. She was a regular godsend. I chose to room in the old captain's cabin and I dug up the driest mattress I could find. As bad as the old riverboat looked (as bad as everything looked) I was glad to have found sanctuary. Night slipped in through the fog, gray turned to black, and I was asleep as soon as it got dark. There was an aluminum boat house floating on oil drums in the sheltered water next to Papoose and in the first light of morning I heard the fisherman who owned it take his skiff out on the river. I got up and could see that the river was going to stay fogbound all day. The temperature was dropping off. The fog stayed on the river for three days and I spent them on my fellow derelict, watching the thick haze swirl up the river. I read and got lost in daydreams up in the pilot's house. The disembodied movement of the fog sometimes made it seem like we were drifting. Since the sun had been my only clock, the eerie fog suspended time. The second evening when the fisherman came back in he brought me over a kerosene heater from the boathouse. It was the second time we'd seen each other. On our first encounter early in the morning I'd said hello and he'd stared at me and then gone on without another word. When he brought the heater over he asked, "You know how to work one of these things?" I said I did. "Good," he said. "Leave it in the boathouse when you go." He finished tying up his skiff and got in his black Ford truck and went home. The fog clung to the river like cotton to a boll. It varied in quality and color, going from an impenetrable dark soup to a cloud-like white, sometimes lifting in -174- |