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Show RIVER It was a strange interlude. Like life, hitchhiking is one third joy and two thirds sorrow. I remember one sunny afternoon carrying my guitar through Nashville toward the highway. The owner of a gas station called me over. "I'll give you fifty cents if you play me a song," he said. I pulled out the guitar and plugged away at all seven verses of "When You Learn to Ramble, You Learn to Lose." When I was done, the gas station owner gave me fifty cents. "I just wanted to see what kind of guitar you had," he said. Another tornado had blown up the river while I was gone, so I hadn't missed much in the way of good weather. I was glad to get back to Memphis and the river. I cleaned out the boat and reorganized my gear. Wherever I was going, I could tell that I was getting close. I walked around Memphis again that night. It was a weekday and the streets were deserted and lonely. The empty glass and steel buildings stood unyielding and cold. In the whole forest of stone I hardly saw another soul. I got up early in the morning and rowed out into the river. I drifted under the old highway bridge and the railroad trestle and down around the bend. Memphis, the last big city for four hundred miles, slowly disappeared and I drifted into the wilds of the state of Mississippi. The weather was dirty during the days it took me to get to Helena, gray and windy, but the south wind was warm and no rain fell. That was all right by me. It felt good to have survived to see this season. Several times I had been sure that it was my fate to freeze, but now the signs of spring were everywhere. The river's banks and levees were covered with thick green trees and in the wind I could almost taste the salt and warmth of the Gulf of Mexico. The backwoods of -191- |
