The River Queen by Mary Morris Page A

at zero and aim for the red, but I can’t seem able to do the two things at once.
    â€œYou see that?” Jerry says, pointing at the blue gray surface of the river. I see nothing. “Over there where the water ripples. Those lines tell you there’s something there.…” I sigh because to me the water ripples everywhere. “That’s a wing dam. You wanta watch out for that.”
    I am watching for something I cannot see and I do not even know what it is. I have no idea how to read the surface in order to know what lies beneath. This is what Captain Horace Bixby once tried to teach a young and apparently not very swift cub pilot named Samuel Clemens. “You only learn the shape of the river,” Bixby in Life on the Mississippi warns a disbelieving Clemens, who will soon take his pseudonym from the river and become Mark Twain, “and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that’s in your head, never mind the one that’s before your eyes.”
    I don’t have any river in my head yet. I hardly have it in front of my eyes. I cannot tell a wing dam, whatever that is, from the normal flow. A deadhead could leap up and grab our rudder and I wouldn’t know. I’m a person who tends to see mirages anyway. But here mirages are everywhere. The surface seems to ripple in the same way no matter what, unless the wind has raised it out of its bed. But for the next half hour I manage to stay between the red and green buoys, avoid a few logs drifting by, and not rip the bottom out of our hull.
    The river is not the same as when Twain was a cub. Now there are the locks and dams. The Army Corps of Engineers manages and dredges the main channel and the corps has provided fairly accurate navigational maps. But this does not mean we can’t run aground or ruin our keel on what we do not see. We can still get caught on a snag or battered in the shoals.
    Take the main channel. If I look at the maps and follow the buoys and daymarkers, I should pretty much be able to stay within the channel. Apparently I cannot. There are times when the river turns into a maze of competing rivulets, when what looks as if it should be the main channel is really a poorly dredged chute. I’ve come to such a spot where there appear to be several ways to go. “Look for your buoys,” Jerry says.
    To my right the river is vast, but the buoys appear to the left down a narrower chute. “But this is where it’s wide.”
    Jerry shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. That’s the main channel. That’s where it’s dredged.” He points to an instrument. “This is your depth finder. We’ve got a draft of 3.5 feet. I’d like twice that beneath us.”
    As we approach Lock and Dam 9, Jerry takes over and Tom gives me a high five. “You did great,” he says, nearly breaking my hand. “Except you covered about five river miles in ten.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by that?”
    And he makes a zigzagging motion with his hand.
    *   *   *
    As we enter Lock and Dam 9, it’s pouring again. A dark cloud has snuck above us, the remnants of our earlier storm, but the green light is a go and we breeze in. We are the only craft and have the lock to ourselves. It seems as if the lockmaster, who putters up to us on a little yellow golfcart in matching yellow rain gear, has little to do. There’s no traffic here.
    I’m in my flip-flops and my New York City Marathon rain slicker, which was left at our house by a visitor years ago. Despite the rain, I remain excited as I hold the lines in my blue plastic gloves. As our boat descends and the water rushes out of the lock, I cling to my rope and push us off the wall.
    My assignment this time is to prevent the bent-over satellite dish from smashing into the cement lock wall as we descend the ten-foot drop in the lock. But the rain is cascading and the deck