The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘The world consisted of nothing but me and that great, comforting gulf of water’
Michael Kerr (aka the Deskbound Traveller) provides literary inspiration to see you you through lockdown
It was the mid-Eighties, and I was under the blankets with flu in my attic room in my parents’ house on the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland. At the same time, I was nearly 4,000 miles away, sitting in a 16ft aluminium skiff with an outboard motor, alongside Jonathan Raban.
As a boy, in thrall to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Raban had turned the brook at the bottom of his road in Norfolk into “the lonely, enchanted monotony” of the Mississippi. Now, in Old Glory, he was out on the real river, heading from Minneapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, taking the pulse of America.
As he had lived inside Twain’s book, so I did inside his, “until the world consisted of nothing but me and that great comforting gulf of water where catfish rootled and wild fruit hung from the trees on the towhead-islands”.
Below, in an extract from Old Glory, Raban makes a stop in Buffalo, Iowa.
Another Angel told the story of how he’d found a rattlesnake in a creek. He chawed and twisted his syllables as if they were pieces of gum in his mouth. “…ayund thayun Ah bayusted the goddayum sonofabayitch’s hayead off with a rock.”
“S---,” said someone, in a tone of entirely innocent admiration.
I went to the men’s room. When I came back I saw that my hat, which I’d left on the bar by my beer glass, was gone. I had become fond of that hat. It had lost its boy-scout air. Bleached, creased, pockmarked by the rain, it was nicely registering my own steady accretion of experience. The angels watched me as I sat down. I studied the space on the bar where my hat ought to be. I should have played this game more circumspectly, but the river had made me jumpy and I just demanded, angrily, that whoever had stolen my hat should give it me back.
“Guy’s lorst his hayut,” said the rattlesnake-killer, rolling his eyes back in badly-hammed astonishment.
“Well,” said my immediate neighbour, “Ah still got mine,” and he raised the fingers of both hands to touch his brim. “That’s what Buffalo’s famous for. Hat-napping.” Whoops and whistles.
Rattlesnake said: “Are you trayin’ to tell us something, fella? You ain’t, by any chayunce, trayin’ to say as one of us-guys has committed some kinda mister-diemeaner?”
I didn’t like the thought of my own head being busted off with a
David Livingstone, in the introduction to
(1857) rock. The bartender was conspicuously attending to matters elsewhere. There was going to be no help from him. I said that I was sorry to have lost my hat. It was my only one and I’d grown to like it. If anyone saw it anywhere, I’d be grateful for its return.
I left the bar and stood outside, hoping that it would be chucked at me through the open window. It wasn’t. I felt sour and resentful as I left Buffalo, Iowa (pop. 1,513). The United States is internationally notorious for its thuggishness, but in 10 years of visits and temporary residences I had never once had anything stolen from me or been met with even the most indirect threat of violence. It seemed infuriating and absurd that the record should be broken here of all places, and broken over something as trifling as a battered $12 hat.
I cut straight across the river to Andalucia. Angry with Iowa, I felt the climate in Illinois was healthier. Besides, shielded from the wind behind a long chain of islands, the still water of Andalucia Slough offered a manageable alternative route for another nine or 10 miles downstream. I filled my spare gas tanks at Jack Tillia’s Harbour and told Mr Tillia about my troubles in Buffalo. “You been over there?” he said. “Lucky all you lost was your hat.”
A big speedboat was circling in the slough. It came close in to the harbour.
“Hey!” shouted a man on board. “We’ve been looking out for you.
Ain’t you coming to my daddy’s pig roast? He’s expecting you.”
I had forgotten Harvey Schwartz’s invitation in Frick’s Bar, two days before. Mr Frick had said that Harvey was a hard man to refuse, but it had never occurred to me that he’d send out a search party. It was good to be rescued. My cases were bundled on to the speedboat. I joined the two men and a woman in the stern, and we went crashing through the slough and into the main river. I had never seen the Mississippi treated so casually. We skipped from wave to wave at 25 knots, with the bow of the boat pointing into the sky. We played in the wake of a tow, treating it like a ski-jump. As I felt my stomach being left some yards behind, I hoped the
river knew that I wasn’t doing the driving. It was going to have plenty of future opportunities for taking its revenge.
The latest edition of with five other books by Jonathan Raban, is published by Eland (travelbooks. co.uk). In addition to hard copies by post, most titles can be downloaded.
For more musings from the Deskbound Traveller, see deskbound traveller.com