The Raft Trip

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:06:53 GMT

By Dean Walley

The wind must have picked up as we slept because sparks from the campfire were flying in our direction. I got up to move my sleeping bag away from the fire, and that’s when I saw a bigger problem. The raft had come loose from its mooring and was floating serenely downriver.

“George! Bill!” I shouted. “The raft is getting away from us!”

“I’ll swim after it!” shouted Bill, diving into the river without giving George and me a chance to debate.

Bill was the fastest swimmer, and in a manner of minutes he was climbing onboard the raft. He started the little 18 horse motor on the first try and, thankfully, maneuvered the raft back to the sandbar where we made haste to get our wandering craft tied up more securely.

Losing the raft was the one possible calamity we’d never thought about.

We had talked about the threat of snakebite, of whirlpools, and even getting run over by a barge. But losing the raft? It never occurred to us.

We started out on our Mississippi adventure in the middle of August of 1958. But the real beginning was in midwinter of that year at Osbourne’s Café, a diner where we used to hang out and think about “what ifs.”

We had all three been raised in Hannibal, Missouri, the boyhood home of Mark Twain. It seemed as if we had grown up alongside Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. We explored the caves, climbed Lover’s Leap and Cardiff Hill and made our own trails through the woods.

And we had gone fishing and swimming and water-skiing in the Mississippi. But we had never gone farther south on it than Saverton, just nine miles downriver. We’d never gone all the way on that mile-wide, liquid highway that kept on rolling past us.

And so, one evening, after many cups of coffee, the idea came to us, all at once and all together.

“We could build a raft!”

“Go down the Mississippi!”

“Just like Hick and Jim,”

“But we’d go all the way, all the way to New Orleans!”

Our big idea was as unstoppable as the river itself, and in the springtime we began to make our winter dreams come true.

We knew nothing about building a raft. But we did know that it had to be more than just a bunch of logs tied together with rope. So we started in, taking it one step at a time, doing the thing that we didn’t know how to do. And little by little, things started taking shape.

The raft floated on six fifty-five gallon oil drums. The deck was of sturdy plywood, almost an inch thick. We built a small, screened-in pilot house and there was a “steering wheel” that turned the 18-horse motor that we had borrowed from my father.

Initially my parents were very cool to the idea of the raft trip. They didn’t want to see me go to a watery grave at the young age of 20. Or ever, for that matter.

But when interest in the raft trip began to spread around Hannibal, involving even the newspaper and the radio station, they became a little more enthusiastic.

So we continued to build our odd-looking craft, and more and more people stopped by to take a look. Local merchants started giving us deck shoes, canned goods, pop, beer, and even money!

Finally the white-hot August departure day arrived. The raft was moored at the riverfront, stocked with food, ice, gas, and lots of suntan oil and mosquito repellent.

It was hard to believe that we were actually going to do this thing, ride this river for 1200 miles, all the way from Hannibal to New Orleans.

But the town turned out to give us a big send-off. So there wasn’t much for us to do but go.

The mayor was there, along with the honorary Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher. There were many amateur photographers, our primitive paparazzi. And a great gathering of family and friends with parents looking proud and concerned at the same time, and the grandmothers looking a little puzzled and dewy-eyed.
We were about to get a taste of what, years later, Andy Warhol would refer to as everyone’s “15 minutes of fame.” But our 15 minutes was going to last for 18 days.

When we finally untied the raft, started the motor and began to move, the crowd made a lot of noise clapping, cheering, and honking horns. Then, in such a very few minutes, we were out of the confines of the marina and out in the middle of it all. We were on our way, come hell or high water! (Maybe not the best thing to say.)

Just nine miles south of Hannibal, we came to our first lock and dam. It was like a liquid elevator. We entered the lock on high water. The guys who operated the lock thought we were a funny looking trio riding an even funnier looking craft, and we had to put up with many jokes and snide comments about our slim chances of making it even to St. Louis.

We did look mighty puny in the great lock that could accommodate a barge 100 times our size.

After what seemed like a long time the water level began to fall, and at last the lock opened and we were on our way. The lock guys cheered! I think they really wished us well and probably thought it would be great to go along for the ride.

For a few miles there were lots of small boats cruising along beside us. But after awhile it was just us, in the middle of the mighty Mississippi, with steep bluffs on the Missouri side and lush green fields on the Illinois side.

I thought of a little prayer I had heard. “Help us, Lord. The sea is so wide and our boat is so small.” But I didn’t mention it.

We were all running on confidence, and I didn’t want to admit even a little bit of doubt.

I remember that first evening. We tied up on a sandbar close to the Illinois bank. That way the mosquitoes wouldn’t be so bad and we wouldn’t be troubled by rats, which were said to be two feet long and not at all shy.

We built a little driftwood fire and roasted hot dogs and then some marshmallows. And we talked about our day, feeling proud to have begun, sharing a relieved attitude of “so far, so good.”

In the twilight, we got into our sleeping bags, very tired, but it was a good tired.

I was thinking how the river was all around us, never tiring, never stopping, always traveling toward the sea. Then I looked up at the clear night sky. There was the Big Dipper. My father had pointed it out to me when I was very young. I remember thinking at the time, “The Big Dipper. What a funny thing to be made out of stars.”

And then I slept.

The next day the sky was absolutely blue, and the radio said the temperature was 98 degrees. We took turns at the wheel and when we got too hot, we jumped in the river and swam alongside the raft. We were so free! Like we’d never been free before. Sometimes we would go for an hour or so without seeing another human being.

The song I kept hearing on the radio became woven into the texture of the trip. It was number one that summer, so exotic and warm like our river days --Nina Simone singing, “I Loves You, Porgy.”

Our ride on the river was punctuated by trips into tiny towns we’d never heard of, to get groceries and gas and ice. The people looked at us like we were from Mars. I don’t think they got many visitors, especially ones who arrived on a raft, in bathing suits.

At Cairo, Illinois, the Ohio empties into the Mississippi, and we could really see it because the water of the Ohio was more clear and colored a sea green. For at least five miles, we could see that swath of green with the muddy brown of the Mississippi on both sides of it.

Before we left on our trip, a kind gentleman in Hannibal had given us a princely sum of money, saying, “By the time you boys get to Memphis, you’re going to be in need of a good bath in a fine hotel. And a steak dinner. And you can take the rest of the money and spend it on foolishness!”

Well, when we got to Memphis we did just as the gentleman had suggested. I can’t remember the name of the fine hotel, but I clearly remember the hot water and the smell of soap and the smooth white sheets that felt so cool to the touch.

We had that steak dinner in a restaurant that was so big-city fancy that we wondered if they’d even let us in. Well, they did. And a meal’s never tasted so good.

As for the foolishness, we kept it pretty tame. We went to the movies and saw “North by Northwest.” Halfway through it, we were all fast asleep. All that river and sun really takes it out of you.

Like all rivers, the Mississippi seldom runs in a straight line. It curves and wanders and meanders. There was one place where it changed its mind completely and started flowing back to the north.

That expression, “go with the flow,” hadn’t become popular but that’s exactly what we did, knowing that the Mississippi would take its time and go its own way, and all we had to do was just relax and enjoy all the surprises just around the next bend.

The days flowed by in their own way, too. We were passing towns like Greenville, Natchez, Baton Rouge. Names as southern as mind julips and Spanish moss.

Finally the big day came. We made our slow and quiet entrance into New Orleans. This last part is kind of hazy in my memory. There were some pictures taken and someone representing the mayor gave us the key to the city. Or did he? An actual key? I can’t rightly say. But I do remember that we did some celebrating in the French Quarter that night.

Everybody always asks, “What did you do with the raft?”

Well, we all had to get back to college. There was nothing to do but tear the raft apart and take it back home on a U-Haul trailer.

We talked about how we’d rebuild the raft and take another ride on the river. But you know how those things go.

The next summer my dada was building anew back porch. He incorporated some of the raft into that very porch.

It’s not such a bad way to wind up after such a long journey--just taking it easy on summer evenings and remembering that warm, slow ride on the wide, brown back of the greatest river of them all.

MissouriLife Articles

The Raft Trip