I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them.” Lacking any “boat-like gear,” they looked as if they were built “to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountaintop.” In American Notes, he writes that they were “foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats. Louis and back again, had the vocabulary knocked out of him when he first saw one.
Charles Dickens, who in 1842 rode three different steamboats down the Ohio and up to St. One of which was the steamboat-indigenous, glorious and preposterous. In Dubuque, Robert Carroll is the guide to an old dredge boat called the William M. But it is a unique way to sample this country’s present and past its rich, its formerly rich and everyone else its Indian mounds and Army forts its wildlife from tundra swans to alligators and its ceaseless engines of commerce. Touted as a “scenic byway,” it is often not scenic and occasionally a thruway. In Illinois alone, it comprises 29 different roads and highways. The Great River Road is a map line drawn in many inks, consisting of federal, state, county and town roads, and even, it sometimes seems, private drives. My guiding star would be the signs with the pilot-wheel logo that beckons all who are willing to suspend time and turn off the GPS. He would have loved it.Īll that the model lacked was the highway running the Mississippi’s length-the Great River Road, my home for the next several days. What would Samuel Clemens have made of the Riverwalk? He was a grown child who readily took a God’s-eye view of life on earth. A mockingbird kept me company as I sauntered on the buff-colored concrete mosaic and watched kids tumble over the elevation intervals layered on the model’s riverbank, rising from the channel like a stairway of stacked pancakes.
The Riverwalk affords an outdoor stroll that covers 1,000 miles on a scale of one step to the mile.
I had come to the Rendezvous from the Riverwalk on Mud Island near downtown Memphis-a gurgling scale model of the lower half of the Mississippi from its confluence with the Ohio all the way to the Gulf. You work up a hunger walking half the length of the Mississippi-even along a virtual version of the river. Not until he became a full-time journalist, far from the river, in the alkali dust of the Nevada Territory, did he settle on “Mark Twain.” But “A Son of Adam,” along with “Josh” and “Rambler” and his other experiments, belonged to an amateur, a man who occasionally wrote while otherwise employed as a printer, steamboat pilot and miner. The restaurant’s slogan-“Not since Adam has a rib been this famous”-had reminded me of Mark Twain’s fondness for comic allusions to Adam, to the extent that he based an early pen name on him. I ran through the names in my head as I devoured dry-rub barbecue and piled up napkins at Memphis’ bustling Rendezvous.
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