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Riverboatin' : Getting to the Heart of America's Heartland
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10057 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
2,619 Words |
| Author
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William F. Willoughby
William F. Willoughby covered the religio-political scenes in
Washington and around the world for a quarter of a century,
serving as Washington bureau chief of Religious News Service,
religion news editor and columnist for The Washington Times.
He is currently publisher of Religion Today. |
The first mate may not take to the beer keg these days to get the steamboat back afloat, but should either the Mississippi Queen or the Delta Queen ever get hung up, count on it--there's more than enough of the suds to make its journey a happy one, high water, low water, upstream or downstream. Even if it stays put.
What an amazing experience I had aboard the Mississippi Queen for a week-long cruise up and down the Mississippi from New Orleans! Vicksburg, well below Memphis, was the turnaround point.
To me, one who pores endlessly over maps and devours geography articles like others devour mystery stories or science fiction, it was a whole new orientation to America. It is undoubtedly the most American vacation I ever could take.
And what I think I liked even more was that in one all-too-short week, it became a reorientation to life itself, a life that is so violently assaulted by the workaday world's hurry-up-and-get-it-done demands.
Imagine whisking down to New Orleans by jet, not too much slower than the speed of sound, and only a few hours later, "speeding" up the mighty Mississippi River toward Vicksburg during high water at the amazing speed of less than five miles an hour.
It was dusk by the time the big floating hotel, the grandest steamboat ever to ply the great rivers of the inland waterways of America, headed a few miles southward so she could start her course northward. Skylines fascinate me, and as we approached the skyline of New Orleans, one of the most dramatically changed cityscapes among American cities, it already had become dark. The city had taken on a glamorous look that beckoned people to come and play.
This indeed is an unusual way to see a world-class city, a city with a unique classiness and sassiness all its own, mingled with its unmitigated bawdiness. A city which is at the same time the control valve of the mighty Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri River artery, claiming the waters of streams that drain two-thirds of the entire nation. A city of class, of fun, of downright seriousness.
It was during the twenty-hour run that took us past Baton Rouge, the lackluster Louisiana capital, and New Orleans that I realized in mind and experience what no number of geography books could convey about the Mississippi, or for that
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