Free Old Glory by Jonathan Raban Page A

with the same indifferent gaze that I’d noticed in the cow at the state fair. My head rattled with a conundrum: if my going away didn’t happen on TV, it wouldn’t be real; if it did happen on TV, it couldn’t be real.
    There was one problem with a sound boom; two hairs in the camera gate; one time when my motor wouldn’t start; and a hitch involving a small boy and a basset hound. After the sixth rerun, I got back to find the crowd dissolving and the TV crews packing their equipment back into their vans. I turned around. No one remarked my last departure. I slipped into the main channel and let the boat take root in the river.
    At last I had the Mississippi to myself, and it seemed that Minneapolis had conspired to make a gift of it to me for the afternoon. Nothingwas moving. Barges and towboats were moored at the wharves, but no one was about on them. Cranes and derricks were frozen on the sky, caught at odd angles, as if their operators had been suddenly called away. The air was inert, and the surface of the river was as finely patterned as a fingerprint. Every twist and eddy of the current showed up as a black-pencil curlicue on the water. One day, I’d learn to interpret every squiggle—at least, I’d try to. For now, it was enough to be moving just for moving’s sake, like Baudelaire’s lost balloon.
    A factory went by; an empty dock; a lone man with a paintbrush on the deck of a tug, who looked up for a moment from his work and waved; then summer-dusty trees, massed and entangled on a shore of powdery sand. Rising fish left circles on the water here, and the current squeezed them into narrow ovals, before they faded into the scratched wax polish of the top of the river. It was lovely to be afloat at last, part of the drift of things. All I needed was a pet fox from a Bingham painting to throw his black reflection on the water.
    Beyond the riverbank, the city blocks wobbled and tapered in the afternoon haze. They looked so insubstantial that a cooling wind might have wiped them away altogether. Pity the typists, doormen, cleaners, clerks, executive vice-presidents locked in those trembling columns of gas! I had the natural superiority of the truant; out of it all, on my own limb, at a happy angle to the rest of society. The motor chirruped smoothly behind me, the boat kept up an unwavering line between the buoys, and in this still water I could see the floating logs fifty yards ahead and swing casually around them.
    The upper lock at the Falls of St. Anthony was already open for me when I rounded Nicollet Island. Up on the platform, Herb, the lockmaster and the King were leaning over the railing. I crashed into the chamber wall, overshot the ropes that had been lowered for me to hang on to, reversed furiously, crashed again, and just managed to grab one of the lines before the steel gates at the back of the lock closed with a hiss and a clunk.
    “Okay,” said Herb. “You’ll learn.”
    “Wish I was going with you,” said the lockmaster.
    The lock had seemed huge when I’d stood above it four days ago. Inside the chamber, it felt twice as big. I clung to my pair of ropes. The water began to bubble and boil as the lock emptied. The boat edged down the slimy wall, and the faces above my head grew smaller and vaguer. As I dropped to thirty, then forty, then fifty feet down, it was like entering a new element in which the air was dank and cellarlike; I was far out of earshot of the people I had left back up there in the city daylight, their voices lost in the gurgling and sluicing of Mississippiwater. The boat tugged and swung on the ropes, and even in a sweater I was shivering. Looking up at the pale pink blotches of Herb, the King and the lockmaster, I felt that this descent was a kind of symbolic induction, a rite of passage into my new state as a river traveler.
    I couldn’t hear what they were calling. The front gates of the lock opened on a blinding rectangle of day, and I was out, past the railroad