Call Me a Cab

12

What with Baby Blodgett, and before that the delay of circling Indianapolis, it was five o’clock before we’d finished crossing Illinois, with St. Louis dead ahead. I had my choices of Interstate bypasses, but at five P.M. it wouldn’t really matter what route I took through the city. All arteries, to coin a phrase, would be clogged.

At first, as we neared the city, most of the traffic build-up was outbound, but soon the traffic in both directions got thicker and thicker, until we were barely crawling along amid all the rump-sprung green Impalas and nervous orange Toyotas and the inevitable black pick-up truck with the old refrigerator standing up in back. And the campers, let’s not forget all those campers waveringly driven in the wrong gear by the sour old guys in baseball caps with their sour old wives beside them. Slower and slower we went, until even Katharine, who’d been back to brooding herself ever since we’d left the hospital, noticed that something had changed. Coming forward to the jump seat she said, “What’s the problem?”

“Rush hour.”

“Where are we?”

“St. Louis is off that way,” I said, waving a hand to the left.

“Then that bridge must be the Mississippi.”

“By golly, you’re right.” I’d been too involved in the road and the traffic to think about the real world along the way. The Mississippi River; think of that. I’d never crossed it before, not at ground level, and you don’t get the same effect in an airplane at thirty-two thousand feet.

Given the traffic situation, we had plenty of time to study the Big Miss as we inched across the bridge, and I must say it was something of a letdown. The Mississippi River had become a major legend in the American mind, like Paul Bunyan or George Washington’s cherry tree, with the difference that the river actually exists and can be seen. And it isn’t that much to look at, at least not as far north as St. Louis. It’s sluggish, and flanked by the usual flotsam of warehouses and barges and decaying river industry, and it isn’t even very wide, not in comparison with some other rivers I could mention. It’s simply a river, and it can’t bear the weight of myth that we’ve all given it.

I commented on this to Katharine, who assured me other sections of the river did live up to the image, and mentioned a riverside park she’d “done” near Memphis. “You don’t believe what the states wanted, though,” she said. “Both of them.”

“Both of them? Two states?”

“It was in conjunction with a bridge,” she explained, “and to begin with, they wanted both banks to look the same. Look bookends. They also wanted Astroturf and concrete trees.”

“What do you mean, concrete trees?”

“I mean concrete trees. There are any number of concrete trees in America.”

“The seeds must be something to look at. Where are these concrete trees?”

“Well, for instance, the palms in Palm Beach, Florida.”

“They’re concrete? The palm trees in Palm Beach aren’t real? You’re putting me on.”

“No, I’m not,” she promised. “Particularly along the main east-west boulevard — Avenue of the Palms, I think it’s called.”

“You are putting me on,” I said, twisting around to look at her briefly au naturel rather than in the rearview mirror, because that kind of deadpan con-job hadn’t seemed to be her style. “You’re telling me the palm trees on the Avenue of the Palms in Palm Beach are concrete, and you expect me to believe it.”

“The real trees were knocked down or damaged in hurricanes,” she told me. “The city fathers decided it would take too long to grow new trees, and besides another hurricane could knock down the new ones just as well, so they put up concrete palm trees instead. With plastic fronds.”

“How do they look?”

“Real, unless you get right up close.”

I looked around at the world with suddenly paranoid eyes. “You mean a lot of this stuff could be concrete?”

She laughed. “No, this is all too sloppy, it has to be real. And so’s the park, by the way, we won our point there. No symmetry, no Astroturf, no concrete trees.”

“What was their idea, anyway? Hurricanes?”

“Flood control. They wanted us to work with the Army Engineers, create a buffer so we’d have a strong flood abatement position right there at the bend in the river.”

“What did they want to use for water?”

“We didn’t ask. We just made a certain amount of fuss, and finally our opinion held sway.”

“Good for you,” I said, because although she kept using the pronoun ‘we’ I suspected from the ring of remembered battle in her voice that she’d been the primary figure on the good-guy side of the struggle.

“It was worth it,” she said. “And the result is as mythic as you could hope for. With the Spanish moss on the real trees, and the broad slow river emphasizing the sweep of the bend, and the very flat banks extending well back with strong open spaces, it looks like something out of time. Prehistoric. That was the feeling we were trying for all along, the aura of pre-history, even of pre-man. An unhurried timelessness.”

“Sounds very good.”

“It was our feeling, too, what you said about the Mississippi having a mythic quality for Americans, and we wanted to represent that quality if we could. It seemed to us the Mississippi stands in the American mind for some sense of what the land used to be, long ago, before we came here and started making our mistakes.”

“Like those,” I said, pointing out some crumbling unpainted clapboard warehouses along the Illinois bank.

“There’s so much left to be undone,” she said. “But that could be beautiful along there, with a lot of time and patience.”

“And money.”

“The sad thing is,” she said, “God did it right the first time, and didn’t charge a cent.”