Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure by Rinker Buck

Author:Rinker Buck [Buck, Rinker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501106392
Publisher: SimonSchuster
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

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After several days at Rocky Point, cloistered in my study carrel on the Patience, I felt refreshed. My evenings were especially memorable. A group of union workers and their wives, from the Century Aluminum plant across the river, lived on their boathouses at the marina during the summer, and now they were my river community, my Harlan Hubbard clan. They dropped by for drinks every night, brought me casseroles, and raced the electric bike down State Road 66.

But mostly, I was lazy and recuperative, recovering from a month of stress on the river. At Sunset Park in Tell City I found a picnic table along the riverfront where I could relax on cool nights with my books. The river I was reading about, and its sensations of river life, was right there. The mildly brackish smell of the still water at the banks, and the far-off squeals of children playing behind me in the park, completed my sense of being at rest beside the historic waterway that had carried America southwest.

In R. E. Banta’s The Ohio, which was published in 1949 as a part of the popular Rivers of America series, I came across a reference that amused me. Growing up, I had always loved the 19th-century murder ballad “The Banks of the Ohio,” a classic country-western song so durable that virtually everyone in country and folk—Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie—had recorded versions over the years.

But now I learned from Banta’s book that a different song titled “Banks of Ohio” was the centerpiece of a popular frontier musical that was performed in the inland river towns as early as 1812. Frontier musicals and individual ballads like “Cumberland Gap,” “Fare You Well, Polly,” and “No Irish Need Apply” were a kind of national media at the time, an itinerant, shared narrative performed by wandering troupes at natural amphitheaters along the banks, or from the “theater flats” tied up to the docks, and they were often the only entertainment that Kaintuck settlers saw all year. “Banks of Ohio,” Banta wrote, evoked the “wanderlust of youth” that inspired a generation to float southwest.

As I read the lyrics of “Banks of Ohio,” the sun falling behind me warmed my neck and time moved back and forth in glimmery waves. I indulged the fantasy of being an alligator-horse in the time of my great-great-great-grandparents.

Come all young men who have a mind for to range

Into the western country your station for to change

For seeking some new pleasures we’ll altogether go

And we’ll settle on the banks of the pleasant Ohio.

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