The River Queen

We like to read about ourselves here in Iowa, maybe in search of a collective sense of who we are. This was the West, after all, before West went west --- and now we’re Midwest, not that that makes much sense. We’re in the middle of a continent, not the West as presently defined. Eastwest’s more like it, but that’s not likely to catch on.

It’s fairly well agreed, however, that the West begins to begin at the Mississippi River, Iowa’s east coast; and when Mary Morris promised a trip down the river from La Crosse, Wisc., to River Mile 0 at Cairo, Ill., aboard a vintage houseboat called Friend Ship (brand name River Queen) I bought into it.

“River Queen” is part travelogue, and a good one, but it’s a book that weaves multiple strands skillfully to become quite a bit more.

Morris’s father, Sol H. Morris, had died at 102 a few months before the trip began. Some of the early years of his life, spent mostly in Chicago, were lived in Hannibal on the Mississippi in a house next door to the boyhood home of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain).

So the trip was partly a geographic exploration of an aspect of his life, but beyond that an attempt come to terms with a complex father-daughter relationship.

Sol Morris was a beloved father, but also an abusive one --- not physically, but because of an ungoverned and poisonous temper driven with words like spears into those closest to him. Reconciliation becomes one of the strongest threads in “River Queen.”

Morris traveled downriver with two men from La Crosse, Jerry Nelson, dour owner/captain of Friend Ship, and Tom Hafner, his more outgoing first officer --- a man more “married” in a non-threatening sort of way to his little dog Samantha Jean than he was to his girlfriend (Tom signed on for the trip in part to give Samantha Jean a little vacation and himself more quality time to spend with her).

Watching the relationship between these four --- woman, two men and small dog --- blossom into friendship aboard the Friend Ship is the loveliest aspect of “River Queen,” another thread skillfully woven in.

Then there’s the river itself --- made navigable by the Army Corps of Engineers with marked channels and an elaborate systems of locks and dams --- but still the most powerful, cantankerous, romantic and violent character that Morris writes about. Her descriptions of the Mississippi often are lyrical and occasionally terrifying.

Morris gives Iowa generally good press as Friend Ship passes downriver at 8 mph --- Guttenberg, Dubuque, Bellevue, Clinton, Davenport, Muscatine, Keokuk --- although Davenport fares best because of Morris’s affection for jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke.

Iowans sometimes amuse themselves by watching non-Iowans like Morris (born in Chicago, she has traveled and written about the world and now lives in Brooklyn) stumble around --- and there’s some of that, too, in “River Queen.” Consider lunch in in Bellevue:

“When I walk into the Richmond Café, the music video to ‘Mississippi Girl’ is playing. I see two gay guys sitting having lunch. This wouldn’t surprise me, of course, in New York, but it does in Bellevue, Iowa. In fact it looks as if the whole restaurant is filled with guys right out of Brokeback Mountain eating burgers and fries. At least I think they are gay. Then I realize that the two men I first spotted are both wearing the same sleeveless T’s with the name of the cement company they work for across the front.

“All the men in the restaurant are in uniforms bearing names like ‘True Value,’ ‘Tacky Jack’s Sure Wax’ and ‘Professional Rescue Innovators.’ All the women are wearing rhinestone crosses and taking their mothers to lunch. Everyone in the Richmond Café is either in a company uniform or wearing a rhinestone cross or both. And now I’m pretty sure no one is gay.”

And this:

"As I head back to the boat down a side street, a freight train passes me so slowly that I can reach out and touch it. The engineer waves. I wave back. I find this river custom so quaint, yet so odd at the same time. I try to imagine waving at bus drivers, at subway conductors, at strangers on the street. But here we just wave and wave.”

How quaint that Morris would think this quaint.

Sorry to report that Nauvoo, Mormon Disney World on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, creeped Morris out. But she and Jerry approached it on foot from the river after mooring at a grain elevator --- so you can see why. The Saints have accomplished wonderful things while restoring their former home, but they have not succeeded in rehitching a town that fled to the bluffs after they left in the 1840s to the river that birthed it. The effect is odd, even creepy, when you’re not used to it.

Morris’s discovery in Hannibal of an old photo showing the now-demolished house her father had once lived it moved her greatly, but Hannibal itself did not --- frozen and frosted Mark Twain molded into a sticky mouse trap for aging tourists. And not a sign in this former slave state of Twain’s black Jim, Morris notes.

Finally, after a brief trip into ghostly Cairo after a turn up the Ohio, then beyond Paducah a turn down the Tennessee to Kentucky Lake, the trip ends at Friend Ship’s new permanent mooring.

I started reading on a Sunday afternoon and after several breaks finished “River Queen” late Monday afternoon --- and wanted more. It’s that kind of book.

Mary Morris’s “River Queen,” published 2007 by Henry Holt & Co., is available in hardback for approximately $24.

Morris, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, also is the author of “Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone,” “Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail” and several other books.