Free Old Glory by Jonathan Raban Page B

sidings, into another chamber, another drop, more clammy half-darkness, and another wide-open afternoon.
    In that sudden alarm which sets in an hour or so after one has started any journey, I ran through the inventory of what I’d packed. My Hostmaster soda siphon with its box of bulbs for putting bubbles into tap water … chapstick … aerogrammes … the ineffective electrical gadget that was supposed to put instant creases in my trousers … surely I had left my hotel room quite bare. Then I remembered. On the lower shelf of the bedside table, a fatal place to put anything, I had left my copy of
Huckleberry Finn
, open face down at the bit where Huck plays the mean trick on Jim with the sloughed rattlesnake skin. Damn, damn, damn. Slowing on the current, I thought that perhaps my loss wasn’t such a bad augury after all. This was a voyage I was going to have to make alone.

3

Old Glory
    B y the time
I reached Lock 1, six miles farther on downriver, I was feeling cautiously insouciant about locks in general. I rode up to the ladder built into the lock wall, tweaked the bell rope hanging behind it, and was told by a voice coming out of a loudspeaker to stand off while an upstream tow came through.
    I beached the boat under the Ford Parkway Bridge and lit a pipe, listening to the grumble of city traffic over my head and to the fanatic whistlings and scrapings of the crickets on the shore. The rising tow-boat showed over the top of the lock: its smokestack, radar scanner and top deck, then four more decks, one after another in wedding-cake tiers. These modern towboats had inherited a great deal of the glory of the steam-powered stern-wheelers they had superseded fifty years ago. Each deck sported a frieze of white ornamental railing work, slender Corinthian pillars and a fancy portico. Like the old steamboats, they were the floating equivalent of the Southern planter’s mansion, brimming with neoclassical swank. Their pilot houses, jutting forward from the rest of the boat in a wide-windowed balcony, had a royal arrogance about them. Even now, a Mississippi River pilot was a definite somebody, and the top-heavy pyramid of the towboat’s superstructure reflected all the luster that still attached to his title.
    When the lock gates opened, the tow pushed out its fleet of nine barges, sucking the river away from the shore as it came, and sending out a long stern wave which lifted my boat and rammed it deep into the bank. I got my motor started and headed for the open lock chamber. The water there was still threshing from the action of the tow’s twinscrews, and when I went in I lurched and slid as if I were trying to drive too fast on ice.
    I had been warned. Tows had engines of enormous horsepower—anything from three thousand for little ones to eight and nine thousand for the big, lower-river boats. In the open river, they could make wakes and eddies that went on churning for a mile after they had passed. In a lock chamber, they could swill the two-or-three-million-odd gallons of water about like a milkshake.
    I wasn’t even supposed to be here. In my newly won assurance I hadn’t troubled to notice the red light at the entrance, and as my boat slopped and skidded in the lock I got cursed for a blind sonofabitch shit who should’ve waited for the fuckin’ green,
you asshole
. Were they going to drown me in cold blood in order to teach me a lesson? The lockman allowed me my rope only after he’d run through such a lexicon of expletives that the torrent of excrement being tipped on me from the lock wall was roughly equal to the volume of turbulent water on which I was just managing to keep afloat. I was torn between fright, fury and bleating apology. As I sank into the emptying chamber, I heard my own whinnying voice collapse into a stutter of f’s.
F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f
, I went, my own attempt at obscenity turning as seemly as a line of asterisks in a Victorian novel.
    The lockman called down: “You come