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Life on the Mississippi
by Tena Starr
I had no sense of Missouri, but two things were clear pretty quickly: We were not in the South anymore, and Missourians are really, really proud of their state. Every person we talked to recommended something — towns, caves, restaurants, historic sites, modern sites. They said we were going to love their state. And, you know, we did.
We did the predictable and went to St. Louis where Steve rode to the top of the famous arch that overlooks the Mississippi River and the city. I stayed on the ground. Being 630 feet in the air isn’t my thing. A couple of screens in the museum under the arch show the view from the top. The museum is interactive — push a button and you can, for instance, watch and listen to American Indians talk about their history, about the 500 treaties the U.S. broke, about efforts to reclaim their culture.
Missouri apparently has relatively sane weather and a sound economy based on agriculture, cars and beer — three things the country always wants. The eastern part we saw is a handsome place with high bluffs, miles of farm fields and mid-sized farms with intact, red barns, unlike here, where the once handsome, now unused barns are falling down. Corn, soy and cattle are the main agricultural products.
Anheuser-Busch, the biggest beer brewing company in the world, is based in Missouri.
After visiting the Gateway Arch, we ended up that night in a town north of St. Louis that had only bad choices for lodging, which happens at some point on any road trip. Our first stop was the (something) Luxury Inn and Suites. It didn’t look luxurious from the outside, but we are not terribly fussy. Fussy enough, though, to walk right back out when we entered the lobby, which was the size of a bathroom, dirty, strewn with trash and had cracked Plexiglass at the clerk’s station.
We drove up the road and found just plain “Luxury Inn and Suites,” a place with some missing interior walls and a sign at the check-in desk that said we had 15 minutes to look at a room before we decided to rent it, firearms and other weapons were not allowed, and there’d be no refund for any reason.
We looked at a room, and it was clean, so close enough. There was a restaurant across the street, where we ordered senior meals that were good but massive. Predictably, our server pulled out her phone. She showed us pictures of caverns she thought we’d love to visit.
We had breakfast there the next morning. That server told us we’d come to the best restaurant in town. And, yup, she pulled out her phone and told us about a restaurant in Hannibal she was sure we’d love.
Hannibal, Missouri, is the home of Mark Twain, and Hannibal won’t let you forget that, even though the town isn’t as touristy as I’d feared. It’s an old and pretty riverfront town, not fancy, not rundown.
There is a small, annoying, blocked off street where there are signs saying something like this is the house Becky Thatcher’s house was modeled after. And this is the picket fence that Tom Sawyer might have painted.
I rolled my eyes. I’m supposed to gawp at a house and a fence that fictional people never could have lived in or painted? I might find a picket fence special because Tom Sawyer, if he’d actually existed, might have painted, but one that looked like it?
But that, really, was the worst of Hannibal. I guess everyone capitalizes on their hometown famous person, even if they get ridiculous with it.
There were kind of two points to this trip. One is my lifetime fascination with the Mississippi River, which I love for reasons that include its storied-ness, its indifferent power and its significance to commerce, war, history, culture and Western expansion. And because I plain love big rivers.
The Missouri River joins the Mississippi at St. Louis, forming the fourth biggest river system in the world, behind the Nile, the Amazon and the Yangtze. It’s 3,902 miles long. The Mississippi runs through, or borders, ten states. It’s home to alligators and giant catfish — one blue catfish weighed in at 131 pounds. It’s more than 11 miles wide at Bena, Minnesota, but only about 20 or 30 feet across at Lake Itasca, where it starts.
We were also interested, though, in the small towns and cities along the Mississippi, as we always are interested in the places that are not tourist destinations but ordinary places that have stories to tell about ordinary America.
Weeding through my too-many books a while ago, I ran across one written by a young man in the seventies. Disgusted by the Vietnam War, racism, violence, assassinations, he’d decided that the country was a hellhole to escape. He discussed the matter with a former over-the-road truck driver, asking him where to go. South America? Europe?
The trucker told the young man this: Before writing off your country, get to know it better. Maybe it’s not quite what you think. So, the young man, with his dog, set out to walk across America. What he found was an imperfect country, but one where people exhibited kindness, tolerance and generosity far more often than not, where many of his preconceptions and stereotypes fell through.
It’s a pretty bad book that ends with the guy finding God and a girl — not the solution for everyone — but it does manage to sometimes introduce Americans who, from a distance, believe they are rigidly divided, only to discover they share more than they thought in another spectacularly troubled time in this country.
In Hannibal, we took a short riverboat cruise on the Mississippi, and I’m happy about that because it cured me of wanting to take long and expensive riverboat cruises. We set out with the pilot explaining what we were seeing, which was good, but, you know, after a while, what you see is still the muddy river, islands and some trees on the banks, and then it gets to be, yup, seen the river now, and some trees again, here we are looking at the river still.
I was surprised to learn that the Mississippi River is not very deep until it gets pretty far south. Further north, dams are periodically put up to keep it at nine feet, the boat pilot said. Further south, levees keep it hemmed in and deeper, about 200 feet in New Orleans, where there is major shipping, compared to just 30 feet where the Missouri joins it at St. Louis.
On the cruise, we ran into a couple, a bit older than us, from Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We realized we’d been following each other around in Hannibal. We were staying at the same hotel and had had dinner at the same Turkish restaurant the night before.
They knew something about Vermont because they’d been on a six-week trip to Maine a while ago. This trip, they’d visited a quilt museum somewhere in Missouri and ended up in Hannibal, like, why not? The man grilled me about Vermont logging practices, both past and present.
They were traveling through pure curiosity — about everything from Midwestern quilt design to Northeastern woods.
We spent two nights in Hannibal, then drifted back and forth across the river from state to state, but made it a point to stop in Dyersville, Iowa. (Which we knew about only because — typical Missouri — someone had told Steve in St. Louis that we ought to visit the site.) Dyersville is where the movie Field of Dreams was filmed. If you’re not old enough to remember, Kevin Costner plays a sort of inept corn farmer who got a mental message that he needed to cut his corn and build a baseball field where the ghosts of baseball legends (and his dad) would come play. He hears: “If you build it, they will come.”
The house is there, although the owners don’t live there. The land appears to still be farmed. The ballfield is there, and everyone is welcome to just show up and play. The day we were there, families were doing just that.
We kind of had to hit it then to get to Minnesota in time for our flight, and to accomplish a significant part of our mission — to see the headwaters of the Mississippi. That took us to Bemidji, a city of about 15,000 and the legendary home of Paul Bunyan. Bemidji is up there, about 230 miles from Manitoba, Canada.
It was snowing in Bemidji, the wind was howling, the lake by our hotel was still iced up to the shore. A skinny Mississippi River ran through the city where there was a funky downtown with a big music and used CD and DVD store, a chocolate shop, a science museum, eclectic restaurants, some clothing stores and statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. It’s a likable place.
We stopped at the chocolate shop, where we bought handmade chocolates for family and where Steve asked for a mocha coffee. The fellow at the counter said, nope, he had no such thing as mocha or any other good coffee. “All I’ve got is trucker coffee,” he said. Steve replied, “I appreciate your candor, and will have a cup of your best trucker’s coffee.”
He said he was Canadian but was in Minnesota because of an “American Woman,” like the Guess Who song. He’d fallen for an American woman, who was apparently the one rolling her eyes behind the counter beside him. Steve claims the coffee was fine.
We set out our last day to find the Mississippi’s headwaters, which are officially at an outlet of Lake Itaska. I laughed out loud at a roadside sign saying “Mississippi River.” We’d traveled through places where the river was so wide we couldn’t make out what was on the other side. At that spot, it was a trickle through some swamp grass.
When we finally found Itaska, the river was more than a trickle, but no bigger than a brook. Someone had put a board across it, and Steve walked across the Mississippi River.
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