Guebert: Life on the Mississippi

As widespread rains start to slowly refill lakes, reservoirs and rivers, Thanksgiving ideas flip again to the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth the place the Mississippi River, only a mile from our dairy barn, was a relentless, usually dominating presence.

Besides, that’s, within the late summer time months when all the things across the farm — cows, employed males, and even the river — moved in a gradual granny gear. This was particularly so on Saturday evenings the place practically 100 panting Holsteins and an airless milking parlor promised a sweaty session of steamy drudgery.

These languid Saturdays have been, nonetheless, the right time for 2 younger adventurers, my older brother David and me, to ask our overheated mom if we might “go camp on the river.”

It was a rhetorical query: Two fewer sulking youngsters for supper and one other lengthy evening in an unair-conditioned farmhouse? The reply got here rapidly, “Go!”

Like most Tom Sawyers, we traveled mild. Two cotton sleeping baggage, some frozen sizzling canines, potato chips, butter, a handful of sliced bread, a black skillet and a half-dozen eggs have been breakfast, supper and sleep. A rinsed chlorine jug from the dairy barn held a gallon of water and, in fact, we every carried a pocket knife and matches.

We by no means took a tent as a result of we didn’t have a tent.

Ten minutes later we have been crossing the heifer pasture to climb the levee that shouldered the western financial institution of the Kaskaskia River. Our “path” was the levee and its greatest hazard was a sleepy dry cow or two blocking the best way. When the Kaskaskia levee married the Mississippi River levee, David and I left it for a brief hike by way of a forest of silver maples, rattling cottonwoods and swaying willows.

Adventurous because it sounds — and it was for us — the straightforward geographic truth remained that had we backtracked to the levee we might have seen the dairy barn, dry cows and Mother’s clothesline within the distance.

Nonetheless, we have been in the midst of our personal private kingdom, a large sandbar on the assembly level of the brown, lazy Kaskaskia River and the huge, roiling Mississippi. Right here was sufficient driftwood for an all-night hearth and acres of sugary sand on which to make our starlit beds.

Very quickly in any respect we have been Marquette and Joliet, or Lewis and Clark, risking our sacred lives, used baling twine and quick melting butter by strolling by way of a forest of historic bushes, uncharted creeks and hordes of sizzling dog-hungry possums and racoons.

And we have been free, the form of free that farm boys solely felt when there have been no cows or alfalfa fields nearby. We have been buccaneers on a free-flowing river with the liberty to go anyplace.

Besides into the water. Our mom’s solely situation to get us out of her frazzled hair was no swimming in both the Kaskaskia, a lazy, outsized creek most summers, or the broad, secretive Mississippi. And we by no means did. Sincere.

However we explored the close by woods, ran barefoot by way of the sand, and sat for lengthy silent minutes watching the Mississippi stream across the subsequent bend. Supper was sizzling canines roasted on the tip of sharpened willow branches. Breakfast was eggs cracked, scrambled, and eaten from the skillet, and toast remodeled the nonetheless sizzling hearth. Butter soaked each.

Nights have been the perfect, although. We at all times made a roaring campfire to keep at bay all issues actual and imagined. Typically we have been woke up by towboats’ drumming diesel engines as they clawed their manner up the Large River’s robust present. Different instances their highly effective searchlights, searching for channel markers, lit our camp just like the midday solar.

The subsequent morning after extra harmful deep-woods explorations and fewer harmful sandbar sitting, we’d slowly make our manner residence. By some means we at all times arrived a couple of minutes after the remainder of the household had departed for church, one other sweat-dripping occasion we by no means regretted lacking.

Now, although, that will be a small value to pay for 2 previous males to fulfill again on Previous Man River for yet one more starlit, lazy evening amid the sand, willows and reminiscences.

Completely happy Thanksgiving.