Free The River Queen by Mary Morris Page A

I’m feeling rather Zenlike the next morning as I rise. I am not sure when I was last coffee-free. Perhaps in eighth grade. I am used to waking to the smell of dark beans brewing, the promise of an infusion to start the day.
    But as I rise the next morning there is none to be had. Certainly not on board. We still can’t boil water and I’m sure the people who run The Depot are recovering from the night before. I pad onto the deck where Jerry is staring at the newspaper from two days before. “Good morning, Mary,” he says.
    I give him a nod, then grab a water bottle from our cooler, which is now filled with floating shards of ice like an Arctic spring. In the head I pop my prescribed medications. I pee into my jar and brush my teeth with bottled water. Then, leaving Jerry muttering about yesterday’s news and Tom nestled topside on his air mattress, cooing sweet talk to Samantha Jean, I’m off.
    It is a pleasant morning after the storm as I cut across the park, and for the moment I have no regrets. Albeit drugged, I made it through the night. I wasn’t raped or killed. The boys perpetrated no crimes against me as far as I could tell. To my complete surprise I slept rather well and enjoyed the gentle rocking of the river, which I found preferable to an electric storm.
    There is a crispness in the air. A hint of fall. It’s the kind of midwestern morning I remember. A gentle breeze blows as I wander past a grove of trees on St. Feriole Island. From the plaques that line this island I learn that this was once an important gathering place for French-Canadian fur traders and Native trappers. It was inhabited until 1965 when floodwaters crested at 25.38 feet and inundated the island with more than five feet of water. One hundred families were moved inland under the federal relocation program. Now the Mississippi continues to flood periodically (in 2001 the island experienced a double crest flood with a height of 23.75 feet), and St. Feriole Island has become a park.
    I pause in the grove where I take in deep breaths. It seems that a tornado does wonders for the quality of the air. I walk on, stopping to explore a large yellow brick building, abandoned and gutted, which was an elegant old hotel for decades. In its next incarnation it became a slaughterhouse owned by Armour until it was closed in 1965. I gaze into its gutted lobby, trying to imagine animals, bludgeoned to death in this vast, hollow space. I move on. Just beyond the grove and across the tracks sits the Villa Louis—“the house on the mound.” The Villa Louis is an elegant old home that has in recent years been refurbished and returned to its former splendor. I was hoping to visit, but it’s just past eight and a sign informs me that the villa doesn’t open until ten, at which time Jerry wants to sail. I’ve brought my journal and my watercolors with me and I am content to plant myself on a stone block in front of the villa and scribble and paint for an hour or so.
    I have kept these journals for years—as I wandered the dusty streets and marketplaces of Central America, as I traveled across Siberia. I wrote in them when I lived in Paris and when I was under house arrest in Havana. On the inside cover I always write “Reward,” but I have never lost one, though once in Spain a young man raced off a train to give a journal back to me and I kissed his hand. And on the Vltava in Prague a boat vendor accepted one as collateral so my daughter and I could rent a pedalboat.
    Mainly these are working journals, but inside of them I also keep a diary and paint. I cut and paste boarding passes, snapshots, local flora. What happens around me, what is said. The bizarre, the inane, the weather, the everyday. I write it all down here. I jot in the margins and paint the pages in the colors of my moods.
    My first journal was a gift from my father. He gave it to me on September 12, 1967, before I sailed to France.