Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Day 14: Scylla and Charybdis


We awoke at dawn on the concrete patio of Cedar Hill Resort and packed our things as quickly as possible so that Cedar Hill would be none the wiser about our campout. 

Sleeping on the concrete had been a fugue of semi-conscious soreness and short strange dreams (a lecture from my ex-landlord on the lives of his kids; helping someone leash several dogs together) so I (Piers) was glad to be moving around. We bundled all our sodden sleep apparel onto Cat-Sass and prepared to motor to the next marina, and thence to St Louis. But alas, our motor was as dead as the unseen fish rotting beneath Cedar Hill's dock. We tried a jumpstart: nothing. We tried calling Sea Tow and various marinae, only to find that no one was towing even on a Monday morning. We made coffee. The sun came out. We laid our wet stuff on the dock and watched it dry. We called some some shops and finally got a man named Pat on the line. He was downriver, only five nautical miles away, but because he didn't have a boat on hand, he told us, it would be a drive of several hours. He offered to talk us through a few quick fixes, and soon enough Clement was using a pair of scissors and a screwdriver to jump the starter. 

"Are the scissors supposed to melt?" Clement asked. 

"No," Pat said. 

The motor made a few noises, but nothing happened. Pat said he was currently working on a few boats, so if he could fix one in time, he'd boat up to us later that afternoon. We thanked him and resumed our waiting game. I went to wash dishes. But only two spoons in, I was stunned to learn that Bennett had got the motor running. We got shipshape in a hurry and headed downriver to Pat, who would hopefully make our ignition less of a cause for prayer. 

We were feeling good until we looked at our gas tank: fluttering above empty. We did the math and determined that if we ran the motor at near idle, we'd have a shot, so we began puttering along, soon supplementing our meager five knots with an extra .4 knots of paddle manpower. We put DJ Danger Mouse's "The Grey Album" ("The Black Album" + "The White Album") on our weatherproof speakers and hoped for a Hanukkah miracle. 

Aching and dripping with sweat, we coasted into the marina, where Pat tightened some nuts and gave us a few tools for future troubles. He refused any compensation whatsoever. Pat was the Terry of Day 14. 

Feeling much more optimistic, we headed south. We were about five hours north of Saint Louis and hoped to arrive by nightfall. 

I'll note here that the river around St. Louis is notoriously one of the dodgiest parts of the Mississippi. About fifteen miles north of St. Louis proper, the Missouri River meets the Mississippi, which sometimes (though not yesterday, thankfully) makes for intense turbulence. In "Life on the Mississippi," Mark Twain writes about his fear of this confluence as a young steamboat pilot. After the Missouri comes the Chain of Rocks, which sounds like one of Odysseus' trials but is in fact a waterfall around which all mariners must travel by clearly marked canal. We traveled and exited said canal, locking through our final lock, and then the madness began.  

As readers of this blog--particularly yesterday's post--will know, it's been raining a lot, which means the water is high, which in turn means that the river has taken on no small volume of debris. All of it seemed to be floating in the few miles above St. Louis. On top of this, the river narrows even as barge traffic increases, which made for a nightmare of wakes and wake echoes crisscrossing around Cat-Sass even as the St. Louis Party Parabola arced into view.


Last and worst of our trials was the zag upstream to dock at Material Supply Company, our intended port. I was in the captain's chair, and had to thread the needle between a bridge leg and a stand of parked barges, against the current and through a veritable forest of current-borne logs. Navigation became a grim game of Would You Rather. If we avoided every log, the current would have driven us into a parked barge, so we had to accept some log pummeling, but if a log had taken out our propellor, we'd have been dashed backward into the barges anyhow, so it was a long few minutes as we struggled into port.

Two men sitting in chairs on the dock, one old and one young, told us our boat was in good hands. They were employees of a contractor repairing a nearby bridge for the city, working the 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift, so they'd be keeping a close eye on our boat. 

"We have to watch the bridge," said Mark, the younger man, "and if anyone falls off, we retrieve the body." He shook his head. "I still can't believe I landed this job. I get paid to sit here all night and do nothing. People ask me, are you bored? I say, I rather be bored than busting my ass. I used to pour concrete."

We met up with our high school friend Abrar, a recent graduate of Saint Louis University, who took us to a Lebanese restaurant, where we met up with our friend Rob, a St. Louis native. We regaled our land friends with tales of the water. When the receipt came, we were interested to discover that where our receipts ought to have said our table number, they read, "hipster like bros." Amused and intrigued, we asked our waitress if she had noticed that three of us were brothers. She said that she hadn't noticed but now saw the resemblance. 

"I meant bros like friends, hanging out," she said. 

We are hipster like bros, after all, so we had to agree. 

We then traveled down to the industrial waterfront with them to give a tour of our boat. 

We found Mark and his coworker cooking brats on a charcoal grill. They had nothing to report. Our friends seemed suitably impressed by our boat. 

Suddenly a line of cars and motorcycles roared by across the water. They sped along the road and disappeared. Mark wandered over. "Old man's asleep," he said. He told us that this length of road was known as a congregation spot for street racers. Mark used to race cars along here, regularly taking home $500 pots, until he flipped his car. The line of cars reappeared and began parking along the side of the road, next to Abrar's car. "They're about to race," Mark said. We watched the assembled racers exit their cars and line the track, and fall silent. A low roar began in the distance. Then a screaming came across the waterfront: a motorcycle, with a car hot in pursuit. 

Mark professed his dislike for such "crotch-rocket" motorcycle competitors. "I'm not going to lie," he said, "I want to see that guy eat it." 

We crossed the dock's gangway and observed the next race from up close. The assembled racers were courteous, and made sure to tell us when we could and could not safely cross the track.

We drove back to Abrar's apartment complex, giddy with exhaustion and the promises of laundry machines and indoor beds. These were the first of many amazing kindnesses bestowed on us by dear Abrar. 

1 comment:

  1. Happy to hear you are well and eagerly awaiting the next instalment. Wish I could be there to join in the Hipster Bro lifestyle down the river.

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