Old Glory by Jonathan Raban

Author:Jonathan Raban [Raban, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-79162-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

The weatherman had been right: there was no wind at all. He hadn’t mentioned precipitation, though, and for once the American word for rain seemed an exact description of what was happening. This rain didn’t just fall; it precipitated. It descended, gravitated, condensed, deposited and settled. Fine and close, it turned the air to wet smoke. It made the branches of the trees sag under its dull weight. It came in droplets so small that they left no mark on the water. In minutes, I was as thoroughly saturated as if I had been swimming in my clothes. Everything had gone to the color of gray ash: river, trees, sand, fields. There was no sky—or if there was, I was driving soddenly through it. A hundred yards away, the leading barge of a tow showed as a blunt smear, apparently suspended overhead in midair. I ran out of the channel and decided to keep to the wrong side of the red buoys for as long as the rain lasted. When the tow’s wake arrived, it came in a series of big, lethargic slurps from the clouds, as if the river had tipped up on its end and were pointing into space. It wouldn’t have made much difference if the wake had capsized me: the relative density of the water must have been almost identical to the relative density of the air. The candy-striped canopy over the boat was no help; the wetness precipitated just as wetly underneath it as above it. I tried to light a pipe to cheer myself up, but the tobacco was squidgy, like steaming manure. Christ that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again. The motor growled at my back, stirring the dead river. Then the sky lifted.

It sat now on the treetops instead of on the water, making a wide, low-ceilinged corridor of the river. Shaking myself like a dog, I passed New Boston. The dripping cement works there didn’t look inviting. Nor did Keithsburg. The Mississippi fanned out through a dank, wide-open reach of flatland, marsh and forest. I killed the motor, changed gas tanks, and let the boat raft slowly down on the current, turning broadside as it went. In the stillness I could hear scuffles in the brushwood on the bank and the sibilant trickle of water over the sand.

On the Illinois side there was a dead tree which seemed to function as a skid-row hotel for a gang of large, ne’er-do-well birds. As I came close, they lumbered off from their posts, assembled above the treetops in a ragged battle formation, and came out over the river to see whether this floating yellow thing was meat. When I started my motor, I thought the birds would scatter in fright, but they kept on coming, in lower and lower circles, until they were perhaps twenty or thirty feet over my head. Their wings creaked. They made bronchial kark-kark noises in their throats. They looked scarred, moth-eaten and hungry, and reminded me unpleasantly of the Buffalo chapter of Hell’s Angels.

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