Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Day 22: it's always sunny in Vicksburg

We awoke at the Vicksburg harbor boat ramps, sweltering and ready to consign the town to the growing stack of river chart pages we've finished. But as if the previous night's trials had allowed us to work off unknown sins, we found Vicksburg heaping its bounties at our feet. While Clement wandered the town on his eternal quest for postage stamps to mail postcards and sampled an "award winning green tea frappé," and while I (Piers) crouched in the shadow of the sea wall in a tank top to make a work phone call, Bennett and Nick met a friendly man who recommended the town's riverboat museum and a restaurant called Klondyke Trading Post, both down the road. 

The Trading Post's facade had us a little worried. It looks like an abandoned gas station. Never ones to judge a book by its cover, we boldly strode through the door, where we found a nice little restaurant/deli with a great lunch/brunch deal. We went to work on heaping plates of chicken, cabbage, black eyed peas, and macaroni and cheese. Stuporous from food, we sat around completing the local newspaper's crossword, sipping fresh-brewed coffee, and discovering a Kid Rock song called "All Summer Long." This song samples the entire piano line of Warren Zevon's immortal "Werewolves of London," and its lyrics principally address how much fun it is to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd's dingus anthem "Sweet Home Alabama" all summer long. Whether Kid Rock's tune is a masterful use of postmodern pastiche or a woefully empty piece of schlock is not for us to say. (Nick thinks it's the former.)

The museum was closed but we did stop into a market full of kooky goods. 



We had our eyes on a volleyball printed with an imitation bloodprint à la "Castaway," but at $20 we could not justify the expense. Bennett picked up a tropical shirt in preparation for tropical storm Bill, whom we might encounter a few days hence. While we checked out, we learned that one of the employees' sons, Lane, was a big guy in the Lower Mississippi paddlers' scene. She said it was too bad we hadn't got in touch with Lane because he has many connections further downriver and would have loved to meet us. She offered to pass our information along, so we left a phone number and a link to this blog.
 
We returned to our boat to clean it up and ready our gas cans for what promised to be a scorcher of a gas run. We met a nice guy named Greg who hooked us up with some starter fluid. He's thirty but looks like he's our age, and sells grass seed for a living. 

"Finally I can legally sell grass," he said.

We also met two brothers named Kentavius and Cameron (13 and 6 years old, respectively) who were hanging out at a nearby park waiting for their mom to get off work. Having availed themselves of the fountain, they had moved on to the waterfront, where they discovered us. As we went about our business they began asking questions evincing a mixture of fear and awe of the vessel. We told them we had to make a gas run, but suggested that if they wanted a ride when we returned, we could take them on a quick loop. They nervously accepted. 

No sooner had the Cat-Sassers (Terry Cans in hand, Kentavius and Cameron in tow) ascended the ramp onto Levee Street than a man holding a sandwich asked if we needed a ride to a gas station. We gratefully accepted, loaded the cans into the truckbed, and climbed in. Kentavius and Cameron came along for the ride. I rode up front and learned that our benefactor is a physicist who works for the Army Corps of Engineers, the organization that makes the charts we use. I thanked him for this and asked about his work. He said he takes riverbed samples up and down the Lower Mississippi in order to determine whether and how to direct the flow of sediment.

"Oh," I said, "so you're responsible for all the dikes and wing-dams we've been desperately steering around."

"Yep," he said. 

We kept it civil, filled our cans, and returned to our boat to find Lane, who had cancelled a bike excursion to come meet us. He is champ of the day, with that nice physicist earning a cool second. Lane gave us some tips on the rest of the trip, some places to find travel resources, and, most fortuitous of all, an intro to two online communities where we could perhaps find a buyer for our dear Cat-Sass. 

Yes, reader, it's true: we're hoping to sell our beloved boat by the end of this trip. We've been gambling on offsetting the trip's costs thusly. We'd been posting on Craigslist in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, finding a few interested parties and so, so many PayPal scammers, who swarmed us like the Edgewater Marina's mosquitos. 


With Lane's social media bump and his blessing, we took Kentavius and Cameron for a spin on the water. Cameron took some photos using Clement's camera, and Kentavius drove the boat a short ways before bowing out. 


"I drove my dad's car once," he said. "When I tell my mom I drove a boat she's going to be like, What?"

"Should we let your brother drive?" Clement asked. 

"No," Kentavius said. 

On no condition did Cameron wish to drive, anyway. We learned that the boys' mom would be back to retrieve them in fifteen minutes, so we hurried them back to the dock in order to avoid any kidnapping-related comedies of errors. 


We bid Vicksburg adieu and headed to Natchez (pron. NATT-cheese, apparently). The trip was smooth, which prompted a discussion about whether it was better to suffer and have something to write about, or instead to have an uneventful day and a short blog entry. We decided that for all the stress of the moment, we look back with some fondness on all our Cat-Sasstrophes short of mortal peril (arrival in St. Louis, flooding engine in path of barge, etc). 

We arrived in Natchez after dark and tied up to some swamped trees beside a casino boat, feeling lucky. 

A parting note: Gelly bros' beloved cousin Iris has requested photos of daily life aboard the Cat-Sass.

Here's Clement making coffee:


Here are Bennett and Nick keeping it real: 


Here are our gas/mileage notes, and our navigation charts, which I've briefly stopped reading in order to write this post: 


3 comments:

  1. You raise an interesting point: "The trip was smooth, which prompted a discussion about whether it was better to suffer and have something to write about, or instead to have an uneventful day and a short blog entry."

    In fact, it is the role of travel writers to go to exotic locations and suffer terribly. That makes for much more interesting reading than "the sun was shining and the cocktails were cool".

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  2. it's important to note that the chorus of all summer long also contains the guitar lick from sweet home alabama, suggesting that the song's use of sampling is a deliberate attempt to highlight the two predecessors' melodic similarities. but rather than evincing compositional laziness or a postmodern critique thereof, the nostalgic tone of the song's narrator ("it was 1989, my thoughts were short my hair was long") suggest that the mashup quality of the song's melody may be a sincere attempt to represent the distortive effects of time and emotion on memory and/or the role of shared popular culture in personal experience.

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  3. I'm lovin' the blog guys. Climbing under the fence, getting lost, eating gas station food while hunting for gas.........isn't it great! Love the writing style as well, very descriptive......keep on truckin'...oops boatin'
    RD

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