This extraordinary book chronicles the two-thousand-mile journey down the Mississippi River that Raban made in 1979, piloting a sixteen-foot, mustard-colored aluminum motorboat, powered by a fifteen horsepower Johnson outboard motor. For a big, dangerous river like the Mississippi, the boat seems small and frail. The typical reaction of river people when they see it is “Shit, you came all the ways down in this?” Time and again during the trip, Raban is warned to be careful. A lockmaster in Minneapolis tells him, “You going to ride the Mississippi, you better respect her or she’ll do you in.” The dangers are many: sloughs, chutes, towboats, stumps, waves, eddies, boils, wing dams, hidden bank supports, pipes, cables, wrecks, wind, rain, and fog. Here, for example, is Raban’s description of Boulanger Slough:
The bluffs widened, and the Mississippi spread itself into a great islanded pool, two miles from shore to shore. It was Boulanger Slough. Two nights before, sitting in the restaurant in Minneapolis, I had crossed it on the charts as casually as if I’d been planning a country stroll. Boulanger Slough in life, though, looked horribly different from Boulanger Slough on paper.
So this was what a stump field was: a barbered forest. For as far as one could see, the rotten tree trunks stood up, some just below, some a few inches above the water. It had been, perhaps, a hundred years since they’d been cut down, and they looked as if they were already halfway to being coal. The river slurped around their blackened roots and boles. The channel here swung out and east through this waste of water, bog and timber. The wind was bowling long gusts from the right-hand shore, where it began as a riffle on the edge of the stump field, then built up a rolling swell as it came north across the mile or so of peaty water.
By the time it reached me, it had accumulated a frightening height and weight: lines of chocolate combers ran straight up and down the channel. They took hold of the boat and rocked it over on its gunwales. I had to find a diagonal course into the rollers, and kept on trying to tack against the grain of the wind. Black to red and red to black ... but the buoys were mostly hidden by the high waves. Suddenly lifted on a crest, I’d see them, then get pitched down again into the slop. Riding a wave top for a moment, I looked for the two shores. They were both getting farther away.
That “The river slurped around their blackened roots and boles” is excellent. One of the great pleasures of this book is reading its many wonderful river descriptions. Here’s another:
On this windless morning, the water of Big Slough looked as viscous as thick machine oil. It was blackened by the decomposing forest that lay under it. Miles of it were so shallow that the stump fields on either side of the channel were exposed right down to their spreading roots. Wedded to their own immobile reflections, the stumps, in their hundreds of thousands, made arabesque patterns of flattened hexagons. Away across the slough there was the rigid outline of a man in a punt, fishing for his image, and the image casting back. Not a sound, not a ripple fractured the great, empty symmetry of the place. With the motor killed, I was part of it: doubled in water, I was as lifeless a component of the scheme as a carboniferous stump.
And one more:
There were sharp rips and creases in the current now, as if the Mississippi were trying to tear itself apart; but the most scary change was the succession of great waxy boils. I could see them coming from a long way off. Most of the river was lightly puckered by the wind, but there were patches of what looked like dead-calm water: circular in shape, a hundred yards or so across. I took them for quiet millponds, good places to light a pipe or unscrew the cap of a thermos flask. Delighted to find that the Mississippi now afforded such convenient picnic spots, I drove straight for one. I hit its edge, the boat slewed sideways and I was caught on the rim of a spinning centrifuge. I had mistaken it for calm water because its motion was so violent that no wind could disturb it. I could see the cap of the boil far away in the middle, a clear eighteen inches higher than the rest of the river. From this raised point, the water was spilling around and down the convex face, disappearing deep into the crack in which my boat was caught. Running the engine at full speed, I yanked myself out easily enough, but I had felt the river trying to suck me under, boat and all, and I was tense with fright.
Raban’s journey starts in Minneapolis, September 3, 1979, and ends three-and-a-half months later in the river delta near Morgan City, Louisiana. Along the way, he visits more than forty river towns, including Red Wing, Wabasha, Winona, La Crosse, Lansing, Prairie du Chien, Guttenberg, North Buena Vista, Dubuque, Galena, Bellevue, Savanna, Moline, Davenport, Andalusia, Muscatine, Oquawka, Burlington, Dallas City, Nauvoo, Hannibal, St. Louis, Sainte Genevieve, Chester, Grand Tower, Cape Girardeau, Hickman, New Madrid, Caruthersville, Osceola, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, New Orleans, Lockport, and Houma. He roams these places, drinking in bars and pool halls, eating in restaurants and cafes, staying in hotels and motels, crashing community picnics and pig roasts, attending church services (even though he’s not a believer), touring local businesses (meat packing plant, cotton warehouse, grain terminal). He occasionally goes on a date (Ms. Alpine, in Dubuque; Judith, in Muscatine). In Savanna, he participates in a nighttime raccoon hunt. In St. Louis, he has a brief relationship with a woman named Sally. In Memphis, where there’s a mayoral election happening, he follows the campaign of Reverend Judge Otis Higgs. He rides two towboats – the Frank Stegbauer, from Memphis to Vicksburg, and the Jimmie L., from Natchez to New Orleans. In a Houma bar, he nearly gets knifed.
Everywhere he goes, he talks with people – people in bars, restaurants, and hotels; business people; river people; towboat people. None of it is planned. To me, that’s the allure of his approach. As he says early on, the whole idea of the journey is "to follow the current of things.” He writes,
The book and the journey would be all of a piece. The plot would be written by the current of the river itself. It would carry me into long deep pools of solitude, and into brushes with society on the shore. Where the river meandered, so would the book, and when the current speeded up into a narrow chute, the book would follow it. Everything would be left to chance. There’d be no advance reservations, no letters of introduction. I would try to be as much like a piece of human driftwood as I could manage. Cast off, let the Mississippi take hold, and trust to whatever adventures or longueurs the river might throw my way. It was a journey that would be random and haphazard; but it would also have the insistent purpose of the river current as it drove southward and seaward to the Gulf of the Mexico.
I find this approach irresistible. Raban carries it out magnificently. Old Glory is one of his masterpieces.
Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various specific aspects of Old Glory, e.g., its structure, action, and point of view. But first I want to introduce the third book of my trio – Tim Butcher’s superb Blood River. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
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