Day two. 51 miles from Red Wing.

Went through our first lock today, Lock 4. Here is how it works, for those who want to know. About a mile above the lock you call the lock on the marine radio, channel 14, and tell them who you are and which way you're going. Or you can pull a cord at the end of the long wall. Then you wait. Commercial traffic goes first, always. When it's your turn they give you a light. Red, wait. Amber, get ready. Green, come in.

Inside the chamber, the lock man drops two ropes down to you from the top of the wall, one for the bow and one for the stern. You don't tie them off. You hold them and let them slide through your hands as the water goes down, so the boat drops with it. Lock 4 took us down about seven feet in ten minutes. Then the big gates at the bottom end open and you see the river again, lower, and you go.

Anne had the bow line. I had the stern line, the throttle and my heart in my mouth. Went fine. The lock man said "Have a good trip" like it was a Tuesday, which it was.

Engine: ran 2,800 rpm all day, temperature steady, no leaks I could find. 6.5 miles an hour over the bottom. Burned about 4.5 gallons an hour. Tied up for the night at a little marina above Lock 5. Tomorrow 5 and 5A.

Dear everyone,

Marion has told you about the lock, so I'll tell you about everything else, which is more.

Our first night out we only made it nineteen miles, to a marina on Lake Pepin. Lake Pepin is not really a lake, it's the river, but it's so wide there (two miles and more) that you could be forgiven. It was made, they tell me, by the Chippewa River coming in from the Wisconsin side and dropping so much sand that it backed up the Mississippi behind it, a long time ago. It's also where water skiing was invented, in 1922, by a young man from the Minnesota side, which Marion found more interesting than the geology. And Laura Ingalls Wilder was born near the Wisconsin shore, in the Big Woods, in 1867, which I found more interesting than either of them. I read those books to Tonya three times through.

The wind came up after supper, out of the south, straight up the lake, and the Recess began to buck in her slip like a horse that wants out of the barn. I was sure we were going to snap a line. At about ten o'clock the woman who runs the marina, Nancy Ackley, came down the dock in a yellow slicker with a flashlight and doubled all our lines without being asked, and checked our fenders, and told us we'd be fine. She has run that marina by herself for nineteen years, since her husband passed, and she says the lake does this about once a week in August and the boats always come through it better than the people. Then she stayed and had a cup of decaf with us in the cabin while the wind blew, and told us about the year the ice went out in March and took half her dock with it. I liked her very much. I hope we see her on the way back up, if we ever come back up.

In the morning the lake was flat as a plate, and there were pelicans. I want to tell you about the pelicans. I did not know there were pelicans on the Mississippi. I thought pelicans were something in Florida. These are American white pelicans, and there were hundreds of them on Lake Pepin, floating in a long white line off the point like a fleet of little sailboats, enormous birds, white with black on the wingtips that only shows when they fly. When they all took off together it sounded like applause. Marion stopped the engine and we just drifted and watched them for half an hour, and he didn't say one word about the fuel, which is how you know he was moved.

And eagles. Bald eagles, everywhere, in the dead trees along the bank, sitting there like they own the river, which I suppose they do. We counted eleven before noon on Tuesday. When I was a girl you could go your whole life on this river and not see one. Now they're common as crows. I don't think I'll ever get used to it. I hope I don't.

Today it is raining, hard and steady, so we are staying put in Winona. Marion is changing something on the engine that doesn't need changing. I've done two loads at a laundromat and come to the library. The librarian, a young man with a ponytail, set me up at the computer and showed me how to send this, and when I told him what we're doing he said "That's the best thing I've heard all week," and I think he meant it.

All our love. Keep your letters coming.
Anne

Locks so far: 4, 5, 5A, 6, 7. Five for five.

Met our first tow below Lock 6 on Friday. For the people back home who've only seen them from the bridge: a towboat on the upper river usually pushes fifteen barges, lashed together three wide and five long. That's about 105 feet wide and, with the towboat, over 1,100 feet long. Each barge carries about 1,500 tons, which is the same as 15 railroad cars, or 58 semi trucks. So one tow is a train more than two miles long, and it's going right past your kitchen window.

The locks up here are 600 feet long. The tow won't fit. So it goes through in two pieces. The towboat pushes the first nine barges in, they lock down, a winch on the lock wall pulls them out and the deckhands tie them off, the chamber comes back up, the towboat and the last six go through, and then they put the whole thing back together below. An hour and a half if things go well. You wait for all of it, on the side, in your little boat, unless the lock man is kind and squeezes you in with them.

Passing a tow on the river: the pilot calls you on the radio and says "See you on the one" or "See you on the two." The one means pass port to port. The two means starboard to starboard. You answer and do it. A tow can't stop in less than a mile, and the pilot can't see anything for a quarter mile in front of his barges. Stay out of the way. That's the whole rule.

Anne waved at the deckhands. They waved back. She is going to do that for 600 more miles.

Dear everyone,

Well, now you'll all get the story about the bait shop, which I've already told Tonya and Lance and both of Marion's sisters, so I may as well type it once and be done.

We came in here this afternoon, and while I was getting ice Marion went into the bait shop at the fuel dock to buy a fishing license and a dozen nightcrawlers. The man behind the counter, about forty-five, sunburned, looked at him for a long time and then said, "Mr. McFarland? Senior High?" His name is John Hindman, class of '72, and he was in Marion's woodshop sophomore year. He has run this bait shop for fifteen years. And he said, standing right there in front of the minnow tanks, that he still has the birdhouse he made in Marion's class. It's in his backyard. Wrens nest in it every spring. He said, "You made me redo the roof three times," and Marion said, "Did it leak the fourth time?" and John said, "Not in twenty-nine years."

He would not take a nickel for the crawlers. Then he came out on the dock and looked over the Recess, every inch, the way men do, and gave Marion the name of a man in Burlington who's good with sterndrives, and said he'd tell his wife about us at supper.

And then Marion sat on the back deck all afternoon with those free nightcrawlers and caught exactly nothing, and I put a piece of hot dog on a hook and caught three bluegills in twenty minutes. I threw them back. I am telling you this because it's true, and because he will not.

The night before, on Sunday, we anchored in a backwater for the first time, off the main channel behind an island, with no marina, no lights, nobody. Marion read the chart for an hour first and checked the depth twice. It was the quietest place I've ever been in my life. A beaver swam past the boat at dusk, towing a branch, and slapped his tail at us when he saw us, which made me jump a foot. After dark the stars came out the way they used to when I was a girl on the farm, before there were so many yard lights in the world. We sat on the roof deck in our jackets until eleven. Marion said, "Thirty-one years," and I said, "Twenty-eight," and we didn't need to say anything else.

We also met our first fellow travelers in La Crosse, Jim and Anna Beals, a retired couple from the Twin Cities on a 36-foot trawler, going all the way to Florida for the winter, down to the Tennessee River and then the Tenn-Tom Waterway to Mobile. They've done it before, so they are full of advice, most of which is about where to get pie. We'll leap-frog them all the way down, I expect.

Love to all,
Anne

Locks 8, 9 and 10. Locks 8 and 9 had no wait. Lock 10 had a 40-minute wait behind a towboat with a single barge of scrap iron, which nobody could explain.

Iowa has been off the starboard side since Sunday. Looks the same as Minnesota from here. Don't tell anybody in Minnesota I said that.

We're nosed onto a sandbar for the night with two anchors out, one off the stern and one on shore. The water here is clear enough to see the bottom in three feet. Tomorrow, Lock 11 and Dubuque. We'll stay home a while: oil change, Anne's checkup, grandsons. Then on south.

For the record: John Hindman's birdhouse roof was a good roof the first time. I made him redo it because he could do better, and he did.