Old Glory by Jonathan Raban Page A

They took hold of the boat and rocked it over on its gunwales. I had to find a diagonal course into the rollers, and kept on trying to tack against the grain of the wind. Black to red and red to black … but the buoys were mostly hidden by the high waves. Suddenly lifted on a crest, I’d see them, then get pitched down again into the slop. Riding a wave top for a moment, I looked for the two shores. They were both getting farther away. Had I been the Reverend Timothy Flint, I would have rushed for my copy of
The Navigator;
but that was packed deep in my suitcase far up in the bow, with rivulets of Mississippi water dribbling all over its scuffed leather.
Think slow
. One wave at a time.
    Turning the boat’s head at the end of each tack was my main problem. As I got closer and closer to the lines of rotten stumps, I had to wait for a wider-than-average trough, then spin around and head back up into the wave from which I’d just dropped down. Once, when I seesawed ineptly over a breaker, the propeller was lifted clear of the water and the engine made a vile sound, like the squeal of a stuck pig.
    “You don’t have to do
nothing
fast.”
    “Respect her, or she’ll do you in …”
    Wave followed on black wave in a monotonous, lilting rhythm. There were some words that went with it, somewhere … and suddenly they came back to me. A British manufacturer of tonic and mineral waters supplies a lot of English pubs with ashtrays to advertise his products. The words go in a continuous circle around the rim:
    In foreign climes there are at times
    Some moments quite appalling;
    But none too fraught to set at nought
    By a stiff drink mixed with Rawlings.
    Thank God for Mr. Rawlings. His jingle revolved obsessively in my head like a loop of recording tape. I set it to the waves:
    In foreign climes
(Drive at an angle up the shoulder of the wave)
    There are at times
(Perch on the top, look for the next red buoy)
    Some moments quite appalling
(Race for the trough, like a child riding down a slide);
    But none too fraught
(Steady; square up to the next wave)
    To set at nought
(Watch those stumps, before going down again)
    By a stiff drink mixed with Rawlings
(Swivel the boat around in the trough and head southeast for the blacks).
    I quite lost count of all the foreign climes and moments quite appalling; I also lost my fright. I didn’t notice that I was gaining the lee shore of a fringe of islands until I was there, and the water was quiet, and there was suddenly time on my hands under sunny skies at sixty-eight degrees.
    Bluffs closed in on the river again, and it dawdled through deep woody pools. On the holiday houseboats moored offshore, parties of women played euchre while their husbands took off in skiffs for the riverside bars, where they roistered dutifully through the long afternoon.
    “Trouble with folks around here,” said the man at Diamond Bluff, “is we don’t have no fun at all! No one has any fun here—ain’t that right, you guys? No one’s having fun! Look at these guys here—not one of them’s having fun!” He laughed, and dribbled Budweiser, his face smashed with liquor. “Say, do we look as if we’re having fun here?”
    “Not very much.” It was true. The shaky, aging funsters with their whoops and hollers looked as if they’d been condemned to having a good time. They were serving out their sentences as old cons do, with practiced resignation. The man, though, mistook my answer for companionable irony.
    “
Not much!
Hey, Clyde—give this fellow another goddamn drink. Can you believe it? You come out to Diamond Bluff any Saturday, and you’ll find it just exactly the same. Eggs-ackly. Do you have fun in England the same way we have fun here? Betcha don’t have no place there like Diamond Bluff! You just take a look at us guys: nobody …” His voice wobbled into a hiccup. “… has fun like we do.” He caught his foot in the brass rail at the bottom of the bar and fell against me,