scattering my half-eaten pizza to the floor.
I went chugging out past the knot of houseboats. The women, waiting for their sodden menfolk, were eking out the hours with ice cream, brownies, chocolate-chips and cards. Their cracked tenor voices rattled over the water:
“Pass.”
“Pass.”
“Left bower.”
“Right bower.”
“Euchred!”
Below Diamond Bluff, the river slid by an Indian reservation, posted against trespassers. Curious, I ran my boat into a quiet creek off the main channel. Herons lumbered off their fishing stations on creaky wings and the forest glades were speckled with butterflies, but the Indians were away and somewhere else. The burned-out chassis of a car caught high up in the branches of a tree was the only sign that people ever came near this place. I wondered if I was being watched. Turning my motor off, I drifted in the slack water, listening. All I could hear was the crickets, rattling in the brushwood like pocketfuls of chinked nickels, and the plop-plop of baby turtles falling off logs.
The air had gone dead. The boat hung torpidly on the trickle of current that fed Sturgeon Lake. My pipe crackled. I wasn’t sure if I was on forbidden territory. The chart said LANDS RESERVED FOR USE BY INDIANS , but made no mention of the water. Still, I felt like an out-of-season hunter. Posted and reserved, the Prairie Island Indians had become just one more endangered species, like the brown bear and the bald eagle. There was another wrecked car stuck in another tree; and where the creek opened into the lake, a row of plastic detergent bottles marked a fishnet or a line of baited hooks. So the Indians must have been about. I tried calling “Hello!” into the woods, but the only response came from a pair of snipe that fireworked out of a brake of fallen timber.
I started the motor again, and flushed a complete Audubon of pigeons and waterfowl. They went cackling and flapping overhead. Angry
American
birds. Bigger, gaudier and more numerous than their British relatives, they made me feel even more of a trespasser as they clattered back onto the water, grumbling like wives at the unmannerly way I had intruded upon their afternoon.
I continued downriver, the shadow of the boat running ahead of me as the Mississippi took a dogleg eastward, then dropped sharply south into Red Wing. The bluff on which the town was built was almost black now; it was hard to tell which was which between the pines and the church spires. I nosed around a floating village of boathouses moored to gin poles; they moaned and rumbled on the wake I made, their tin roofs catching the remains of the sun like heliographs.
An off-channel lagoon had a little colony of houseboats tucked inside it, and I went cruising around other people’s patios, looking for a space to tie up. All over the lagoon, the electric storm lanterns were being set out with the barbecue furniture, cocktail cabinets were opening, and the serious business of partying was getting under way. The houseboats were bright with lights and voices; their owners stood in identical leisure wear, caught in the same pose with a cocktail shaker in one handand a bottle of bourbon in the other, welcoming their guests to a world which, just for this moment, had the stylized brilliance of a TV commercial.
I was taken in hand and invited to come partying. My boat was made fast for me with fancy nautical knots (“You know the double sheet bend? I swear by it”), and I was shown onto the veranda of the biggest and newest houseboat in the row.
“This is Dick and Alma and Walter and Betty and Don and Bonnie and Ruby and Jay …”
“Think of the achievement!” Walter was saying. “Just think of the achievement!”
“Thirty-six hours he’s gone,” said Bonnie. “Thirty-six hours!”
“My God, I wish I had his self-control,” said Alma.
“Feels like
weeks,”
Walter said. He was a big man with sad-sack eyes. He looked as if running for martyrdom were the nicest
I went chugging out past the knot of houseboats. The women, waiting for their sodden menfolk, were eking out the hours with ice cream, brownies, chocolate-chips and cards. Their cracked tenor voices rattled over the water:
“Pass.”
“Pass.”
“Left bower.”
“Right bower.”
“Euchred!”
Below Diamond Bluff, the river slid by an Indian reservation, posted against trespassers. Curious, I ran my boat into a quiet creek off the main channel. Herons lumbered off their fishing stations on creaky wings and the forest glades were speckled with butterflies, but the Indians were away and somewhere else. The burned-out chassis of a car caught high up in the branches of a tree was the only sign that people ever came near this place. I wondered if I was being watched. Turning my motor off, I drifted in the slack water, listening. All I could hear was the crickets, rattling in the brushwood like pocketfuls of chinked nickels, and the plop-plop of baby turtles falling off logs.
The air had gone dead. The boat hung torpidly on the trickle of current that fed Sturgeon Lake. My pipe crackled. I wasn’t sure if I was on forbidden territory. The chart said LANDS RESERVED FOR USE BY INDIANS , but made no mention of the water. Still, I felt like an out-of-season hunter. Posted and reserved, the Prairie Island Indians had become just one more endangered species, like the brown bear and the bald eagle. There was another wrecked car stuck in another tree; and where the creek opened into the lake, a row of plastic detergent bottles marked a fishnet or a line of baited hooks. So the Indians must have been about. I tried calling “Hello!” into the woods, but the only response came from a pair of snipe that fireworked out of a brake of fallen timber.
I started the motor again, and flushed a complete Audubon of pigeons and waterfowl. They went cackling and flapping overhead. Angry
American
birds. Bigger, gaudier and more numerous than their British relatives, they made me feel even more of a trespasser as they clattered back onto the water, grumbling like wives at the unmannerly way I had intruded upon their afternoon.
I continued downriver, the shadow of the boat running ahead of me as the Mississippi took a dogleg eastward, then dropped sharply south into Red Wing. The bluff on which the town was built was almost black now; it was hard to tell which was which between the pines and the church spires. I nosed around a floating village of boathouses moored to gin poles; they moaned and rumbled on the wake I made, their tin roofs catching the remains of the sun like heliographs.
An off-channel lagoon had a little colony of houseboats tucked inside it, and I went cruising around other people’s patios, looking for a space to tie up. All over the lagoon, the electric storm lanterns were being set out with the barbecue furniture, cocktail cabinets were opening, and the serious business of partying was getting under way. The houseboats were bright with lights and voices; their owners stood in identical leisure wear, caught in the same pose with a cocktail shaker in one handand a bottle of bourbon in the other, welcoming their guests to a world which, just for this moment, had the stylized brilliance of a TV commercial.
I was taken in hand and invited to come partying. My boat was made fast for me with fancy nautical knots (“You know the double sheet bend? I swear by it”), and I was shown onto the veranda of the biggest and newest houseboat in the row.
“This is Dick and Alma and Walter and Betty and Don and Bonnie and Ruby and Jay …”
“Think of the achievement!” Walter was saying. “Just think of the achievement!”
“Thirty-six hours he’s gone,” said Bonnie. “Thirty-six hours!”
“My God, I wish I had his self-control,” said Alma.
“Feels like
weeks,”
Walter said. He was a big man with sad-sack eyes. He looked as if running for martyrdom were the nicest
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