Dear everyone,

I have wanted to come to Hannibal since I read Tom Sawyer to Lance in 1971, the summer we rented that first houseboat. He fell asleep every night before the end of the chapter, and I kept reading by myself. Twenty-eight years I've waited for this weekend, and Hannibal was worth it.

We saw everything. The little white house on Hill Street where Samuel Clemens lived as a boy, before he was Mark Twain, with the whitewashed board fence beside it. The house across the street where the real girl lived who became Becky Thatcher. The statue of Tom and Huck at the foot of Cardiff Hill, walking off together to go fishing, I suppose, or to get into trouble. We climbed the steps to the lighthouse at the top of Cardiff Hill, which was put up in 1935 for the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and we stood up there with the whole river laid out below us, Missouri on this side and Illinois on that one and the Recess down there at the dock the size of a bar of soap. On Saturday we went through the cave south of town, the one in the book, with a crowd of children who screamed at every turn.

But the best thing in Hannibal was a man on a bench. His name is Bob Mulvey, he is seventy-four, and he was a towboat pilot on this river for forty-one years. He started as a deckhand in 1943, at seventeen, when all the older men had gone to the war. Now he sits on a bench on the riverfront most mornings and tells anyone who'll listen which boats are well handled and which aren't. Marion sat with him four hours over two days. I sat for one, and heard about the flood of '93, when the river came up higher than anyone alive had ever seen it, and about a winter in the fifties when his tow froze into the ice below St. Louis for nine days and the cook ran out of everything but coffee and rice. He laughs at his own stories before he gets to the end, which is my favorite kind of storyteller.

He looked over the Recess very carefully on Saturday, and said she was a fine little boat. Then he looked at Marion and said, "Below St. Louis she's a different river. No dams. Faster. Bigger tows, thirty and forty barges. Wing dikes along the banks that'll tear your bottom out. You stay in the channel and you stay out of the way." Marion said, "Yes, sir," the way he used to tell his students to say it to him. In another life, I think, Marion would have been a towboat pilot, and a good one.

It's Labor Day, and I am typing this in the library with a sunburn. We leave Wednesday.

Love to all,
Anne

Wednesday: Lock 22, no wait. Thursday: Lock 24. (There is no Lock 23. It was never built.)

Thursday about three in the afternoon, a few miles below 24, the temperature gauge started to climb. I shut down, got us out of the channel, and put the anchor down. Checked the raw water strainer: clean. Pulled the cover off the water pump: the rubber impeller had lost most of its vanes. The pieces were somewhere in the cooling system.

No spare aboard. That's my fault and nobody else's. A man who told thirty-one years of students to check the impeller every season, and who heard one of them say so back to him at Lock 13, did not check his own. Anne has been kind enough not to mention this more than twice.

Let the engine cool, started it, ran at idle for ten minutes, shut it down, cooled it, ran again. Made the two miles to the marina here that way in an hour and a half. Called a dealer from the pay phone. Impeller kit coming Monday by UPS.

Meanwhile Anne has found a friend and a pie. She'll tell you.

Dear everyone,

Marion has told you about the impeller, so I'll tell you about Letha.

Letha Cardwell is sixty-two and runs the little café at the top of the ramp here, which is a counter with eight stools and four tables and a pie case, and has run it for thirty years. Her husband was an engineer on towboats until he passed in 1989. Every morning at six the same men come in, farmers and a game warden and two retired fellows who argue about the Cardinals, and she has their coffee poured before they reach their stools.

The flood of 1993 came up to the bottom of her pie case. She showed me the line on the wall, which she has never painted over. She says she and her husband's brother shoveled the mud out in August of that year, and she reopened on Labor Day with no gas in the pumps and a hand-lettered sign, and every one of those men came in for coffee that morning like nothing had ever happened, and that's when she knew she was staying.

When she found out we were stuck for the weekend she drove me twenty miles to a grocery store on Saturday in her own car and wouldn't let me pay for the gas. On Sunday she closed at two and made us grilled cheese sandwiches, and we talked at the counter until dark. She has never been north of Keokuk, and when I told her about the pelicans on Lake Pepin she put her hand over her heart.

And this morning, when Marion went up to the pay phone to call about his part for the third time, she handed him a whole peach pie in a box and said, "For your patience." He said he didn't have any patience. She said, "Then for your wife's."

The part comes this afternoon, if the UPS man finds us. I am almost sorry. Letha, if you ever read this, and I've written the address down for you on the back of the receipt, thank you. You are what I'll remember about Missouri.

Love,
Anne

Impeller came Monday at 4:10. Installed it in forty minutes. Replaced the thermostat while I was in there and flushed the system till the water ran clean. Engine has run cool since. Bought two spares at the next dealer. Will check them every season.

Tuesday: Lock 25. Today: no locks, and the biggest change in the river since we left. About mile 218 the Illinois River comes in from the east, and the Mississippi gets wider and browner and heavier. You can feel it in the wheel. There are limestone bluffs on the Illinois side for miles, straight up out of the water, white and gray, with houses perched on top of them.

Tied up at a big marina at Alton, above the Mel Price Locks. Anne's cousin and her husband are coming over from St. Charles this weekend. We'll stay a few days. Then Mel Price, 27, and St. Louis.

Dear everyone,

Tuesday was the day. We left Alton early and went down through the Mel Price Locks, and then turned off into the Chain of Rocks Canal, which is a long straight ditch, miles of it, dug so the boats can get around the rocky stretch of the river below. At the bottom of the canal is Lock 27. When we were at the bottom of it, waiting for the gates to open, the lock man leaned over the wall and called down, "That's your last one, folks. Open river from here to the Gulf." I didn't expect that to get to me, and it did.

Then the canal brought us back out into the river, past the grain elevators and the barge fleets and the bridges, and around a bend, and there it was. The Gateway Arch, standing right up out of the riverfront, silver, with the morning sun on the side of it. I had seen it in pictures all my life. It is not like the pictures. It is so tall and thin and smooth that it doesn't look built. It looks like somebody drew it on the sky with one stroke. I cried, as advertised. Marion slowed us down to almost nothing so we could look as long as we wanted, and then a tow came up behind us and we had to go.

On Wednesday my cousin Carmen and her husband Donald Dowell drove down from St. Charles and picked us up at the marina, and took us back up into the city to see it from the ground, and then from the top. You ride up inside the legs in a little egg-shaped car with five seats, and it rattles and tilts as it goes, which Donald said was normal and I chose to believe him. Four minutes. At the top there are little windows, and you lie on your stomach on the carpeted ledge and look out, six hundred and thirty feet up. On one side is the city. On the other is the river, with the barges on it like little rafts, and Illinois going on flat and green to the edge of the world.

Marion stood at the window on the river side the whole time, looking north, up the river toward home. I asked him what he was thinking. He said, "Six hundred miles." Then he said the Arch was a catenary, upside down, the shape a chain makes when you hang it from two ends, and that's why it stands up the way it does, and that they finished it in 1965, the year Lance was born, wait, no, Lance was born in '66. Close enough. He had his hand flat on the glass. I've been married to that man for thirty-six years, and every so often he still surprises me.

Thank you all for coming along. When I'm on the back deck in the evenings, I think about all of you reading these in your kitchens, and it's like having company.

All our love,
Anne

Red Wing to here: 631 miles, 24 locks, 97 engine hours, 431 gallons of gas, one impeller. Totals are on the front page.

From here down it's open river. No more dams, so no more pools. The current runs three to five miles an hour instead of one or two. The channel is marked with buoys, red on one side and green on the other, and there are rock wing dikes sticking out from the banks to keep the channel scoured, and they're under water most of the time, and you stay off them. Tows down here can run thirty and forty barges, since there are no locks to fit them into.

Plan: leave Monday, weather permitting. Cairo by Thursday or Friday. Then up the Ohio and the Tennessee to Kentucky Lake. Fuel's scarce on this stretch, so we're full and carrying extra.

Thanks to everybody who's written. Bob Mulvey's right. She's a fine little boat.