Day 10: Pearls and murder

After a sleep troubled only by a midnight hello from a passing train, we awoke hungry for the sights, sounds, and tastes of Muscatine, Iowa, "Pearl of the Mississippi." Upon arriving in town we'd smelled the delicious, musky odor of malt on the breeze, and after some research we determined that Muscatine boasted a small brewery: Contrary Brewing Co. The night before, we'd shot a quick email to Mark Mitchell, owner, asking if we could have a morning tour, and we woke to an affirmative reply. Thrilled, we rushed through breakfast and made ready to visit Mark. 

One incident worth noting: while Nick and I (Piers) coffeed the coffee, Bennett and Clement searched for a bathroom, which they found thanks to the nice folks at the Mississippi Brew bar. When they returned, I retraced their steps, also interested in availing myself of the facilities. When I arrived at the bar, the place was empty, but I saw a sign for the bathroom, so I helped myself. As I was washing my hands, a man holding a mop stuck his head around the doorframe and gave me a suspicious look. 

"You must have met my brothers," I said, my tone cheery. 

He shook his head.

I launched into a detailed explanation of myself and my aims, and in no time the man was telling me about two young men who'd crashed in his apartment while canoeing from the headwaters of the Mississippi to the Gulf. Apparently these guys hadn't told their mothers of the plan until they hit the water, principally because one mom had a paralyzing fear of water. "When she found out," the man said, "she had a real freakout."

Caffeinated and embageled, the four of us walked the three blocks to Contrary Brewing, a nanobrewery that represents former Muscatine postman Mark Mitchell's attempt to turn his twenty-two year homebrewing hobby into a living. 

He gave us a tour of his gleaming equipment and let us sip a sup of his beer. Particularly delicious, we all agreed, was his Fools Gold, a mellow IPA that is his most popular beverage. 

Mark's brewery boasts 12 original beers on tap, with more to come. Contrary Brewing opened a few months ago. Though the startup brewer's life is nerve-wracking, Mark is optimistic, and justifiably so: his beers are delicious, his logo is attractive, and his bar/restaurant is a very pleasant place to while away some time. We bought two growlers of the Fools Gold and one Boston Round of his Contrary IPA, and felt very pleased with ourselves. He wish the very best for Mark, and respectfully suggest that if you, fair reader, should find yourself in Muscatine, you should consider dropping by Mark's place. 

We made our way toward Muscatine's Button Museum, which Mark had recommended highly, but we stopped in our tracks when we noticed the sign for Candle Shed Effect, an antiques store. 

We had a long conversation with the owner about her gleefully morbid aesthetic. 

"Last year I decided to make this place more me," she told us. "There are so many antiques stores out there doing the same thing, so I'm trying to set myself apart." She says that some people find her skulls disturbing, but that these skull-haters just don't get it. "Everybody's got one," she said. "You do, I do. You live once and you die once, so you might as well be yourself."

At the Muscatine Button Museum we solved a mystery even as we discovered greater, deeper questions about this great river. 

For Muscatine, "Pearl of the Mississippi" is no empty superlative. From the late 1800s to the 1940s, Muscatine was the pearl button capital of the world, producing billions of buttons yearly from the pearlescent shells of the freshwater mussels that used to line the riverbeds. Overfishing (overmusseling?) and damming decimated the mussel population by the Second World War, when zippers and petroleum also began muscling in (an expression that began with the deadly competition between rival Muscatine clammers, who were known to mount cannons on their boats) on the pearl button market, so Muscatine switched to a plastic button town, but even today mussel shells with telltale Swiss cheese puncturings wash ashore. 

Terry Eagle, assistant director and a gentlemen well worthy of the first name he bears (see days 8 and 9), gave us a tour, and had many fascinating things to say about Muscatine's pearls, and one Pearl in particular. 

Pearl McGill was a young woman who hoped to pay for her education by working in a Muscatine button factory. When she arrived, she learned she was to be an industrial spy, hunting out unionists and socialists and reporting them to management. These were days of strike-breakers, Pinkertons shipped in from Chicago to rough up anyone who attempted collective bargaining. Pearl quickly discovered that she was on the wrong side of this conflict, and became a double agent and then a labor activist, speaking all over the Midwest about workers' rights. Eventually Helen Keller heard her speak and paid for much of her education. So Pearl finally did become a teacher, but she burned to return to activism, and soon announced that she would take up the lecture circuit again. That night she was shot dead in her front yard. The records will tell you that her husband pulled the trigger--he washed ashore downstream in women's clothes later that week--but according to Terry, everyone in Muscatine knows that some button factory or other had Pearl killed. We just don't know which one. 

"When you hold a pearl button to your cheek you can feel the cold of the river," Terry said, and he was right: unlike dull plastic, pearl buttons chill the skin. Terry likes to quote one visitor who said that you can feel the life in a pearl button. 

After an enlightening Muscatine morning, we bid the fair city adieu and headed downriver. We stopped in New Boston (smaller than regular Boston), where a nice, shirtless, and mustached man named Rick gave me an ATV ride to a gas station. 

While I was out, Clement finally hooked a catfish. He at first thought his line was caught on a log, but was delighted to find a quite large flathead catfish on the end of his line. 

He asked two boys at the end of the dock what he should do, and they told him to reel it in and lay it on the dock. The larger boy took the reins and ripped the hook out of its mouth with pliers. 

"They'll make noises sometimes," said the smaller boy. 

After Clement revealed that this was the first fish he'd ever caught, Daniel, the larger boy, agreed to kill and clean it for us--although, as we soon learned, not in that order. Daniel walked Clement, Bennett, and Nick to a public cleaning station, and began to peel off the skin of the live fish. 

"Do fish feel pain?" Clement asked. 

"Oh, yeah," Daniel replied nonchalantly. 

We learned that Daniel was 13 and had cleaned his first fish at age "4 or 5." Daniel proceeded to remove all of the fish's skin below its head, slice it down the belly, and rip out its guts, all while it still wriggled. Clement, Bennett, and Nick tried to block out their empathy instincts. Finally Daniel wrung its neck and the deed was done. 

Nick fried it up à la Catfish Martino, and we had a delicious afternoon snack of catfish that had been alive 15 minutes ago. 

We headed downriver, supplementing our fish snack with some Chef Boyardee à la Bennett (Cat-Sass head chef for the day) and cruising comfortably until we reached the next lock. We'd planned to go as far as Fort Madison, but by the time the barge ahead of us barged off, night was falling, so we headed to the nearby Edgewater Beach Marina, marked on our map but not in our marina guide. 

As we pulled into Edgewater's little cove behind Turtle Island, the night began assuming all the qualities of a horror movie. The marina had clearly been abandoned for a while, with shaky, creaky docks through which at one place a small tree grew. We explored the area and found an office and restaurant full of junk. On one table sat a framed drawing of two houses perched in a vine structure, with the caption, "chance made us neighbors, but choice made us friends," which phrase we all agreed was susceptible to creepy inversion in the right context--say, whispered into your ear by a murderous swamp person. 

"My biggest fear is someone removing Nick's face and wearing it as a mask," Bennett said as he prepared our dinner of pasta with chili (it was essentially a day of Chef Boyardee Two Ways). Perhaps he still had that catfish on his mind. 

Clement and I attempted to attach the mosquito net structure he and Bennett designed, but within a few minutes we were severely overrun. We were in mosquito hell. They swarmed our headlamps in unswattable clouds, presumably overjoyed to find human flesh for the first time since the marina closed aeons ago. 

We made a quick decision to gtfo and head for Burlington, a few miles downriver. Beneath a huge orange moon, with Clement crouching on the bow holding a nine-volt battery to our nav lights, Nick navigating, Bennett shining a spotlight, and me steering, we literalized the phrase "four ships passing in the night" as we deftly steered around three barges. There was some shouting, some swerving, some admonishment from Nick that shouting doesn't help anything, and some incredible night sights, not least of which were the looming lights of Burlington's bridges beckoning us in. Freed of mosquitos and feeling exhausted but lucky, we ate our dinner, polished off the penultimate chocolate bar from the cache given to us by Cordelia Gelly (mother of the Gelly bros), and hit the hay.