Prologue

Port of New Orleans, 2018 

When the ship emerges from the mist it is clear we are in danger. It was not there just moments ago, when we readied our oars and decided to cross the river. Now, like an apparition, it looms. The vague outline of its monstrous form comes into focus as though the thing is materializing out of the fog, constructing itself from the very air. 

My nine year old son is seated in the stern, his eyes wide with awe. He is too young to fully comprehend the crisis that is unfolding. My daughter, nearly eleven, crouches in the narrow taper of the bow and fixes her gaze on the immensity of the oncoming tanker. She understands the predicament. I know this, because I can hear her crying discreet, muffled tears. Their mother, my wife of nearly twenty years, is focused solely on the task of rowing. She and I are furiously pumping the oars, trying to pass through the channel ahead of the ship. 

The boat we are traveling in is not quite eighteen feet long. The hull is painted dark green and sits only inches out of the water. To the industrial operations along the Mississippi River south of New Orleans we are a nuisance. Looking down from the refinery docks, scowling men in hardhats gesture for us to move on as though they are swatting away a pesky mosquito. To the tanker, though, this steel monolith churning upriver, we are invisible, inconsequential as a drifting leaf. And we are directly in its path. 

What the hell are we doing here, I think, my mind frightened and racing. It is a holiday weekend. We could be anywhere else—the beach, the ballpark, the mountains. But we are here, in the low light, courting death on this river. And I know why. Because I have been here before, and I left something unfinished. 

_____

Long ago, when Mandy and I were newlyweds, we built a wooden rowboat and launched it into the Mississippi. Intent on voyaging from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, we spent three months living on the river. By day we rowed its broad, muddy water, the world newly rendered around every bend. At night we slept beneath a canopy of stars on its sandy, wild islands. It was a time before mortgages and children, before the diagnosis and the debt, when our grandparents were living and the century was young, back when everything was possible. 

We found our share of perils along the way: bears and feral dogs and one lustful, drunken fisherman brandishing a loaded pistol. But we also made friends of strangers, people who selflessly welcomed us into their lives and homes. They offered us more than their charity and kindness; they gave us the keys to their front door. For a season, we unplugged from the system. We escaped the dull tyranny of routine and traversed the heart of America. 

Then, for reasons I have wrestled with since, we walked away before it was done. Mandy and I pulled the boat from the river ninety-three miles from the end. 

For me, middle age came with a despairing sense of alarm at the shortness of time. I felt unaccomplished, incomplete, lost—feelings that would manifest into phobias and panic attacks. This return to the Mississippi River is a second chance. This is a bid to set things right, to confront old regrets and make good on a promise to myself, to reconcile the young man I was with who I have become, and to hopefully, finally reach the sea. 

It was my idea to bring the children. I wanted them to see firsthand the geography their mother and father once saw. I wanted them to know adventure, not from story books or television but through a lived experience. Now, with a tanker bearing down on us, such sentimentalism feels naïve.  

_____

My heart is hammering from both exertion and fear when I notice the ship has lost its perfect symmetry. No more are we looking squarely at its prow. We are past the midpoint. The side of the behemoth is beginning to swing slowly into view, growing longer by degrees. Like air escaping a pressure valve, there is an audible sigh of relief when I realize we are no longer on a collision course.  

But Mandy’s attention is on something different. I turn to catch her staring at a strange boat speeding downriver toward us. It is far smaller than the tankers and the towboats threading the channel. In seconds the boat is almost upon us, throwing spray as the pilot throttles back and slows to a near idle.

“Dad,” my son asks, “why is there a machine gun on the front?”

“I…I don’t know, buddy,” I answer, confused at the sight. Before us is an angular vessel, gray aluminum blending with the gray skies. On the foredeck is an assault rifle mounted to a tripod. The craft looks menacing.

A man in uniform appears and raises his hand, hailing us to stop. Once they are alongside the man leans over the rail, eyeing our boat from end to end. He looks surprised or bemused as though he cannot quite believe what he is witnessing. With a quick nod of his head he greets me and says, “Afternoon, captain. Where you headed?” 

“Downriver,” I answer, stating the obvious. It is then that I notice what is spelled out in block letters on the side of the hull: U.S. COAST GUARD.

“Well, I hate to spoil your fun,” the guardsman tells me, “but we’re gonna have to take you and your boat out of the river. There’s just too much traffic, and the visibility is too low. You all cannot be out here.”

For a brief instant my breath fails me. The words feel like a sucker punch. A static ringing floods my ears. Language becomes ambient noise as I try to register what is happening. Hands are extended across the gap. Our children are taken aboard—one bewildered, the other one sobbing. Mandy follows.   

Alone in the rowboat, all I can think is that I did not wait sixteen years to come back here only to have it end like this, unceremoniously plucked from the water barely two miles from where we put in. A soldier reaches out. He is motioning for me to take his hand. 

It can’t be over, I tell myself, it just can’t be. Not now. There is still so far to go. And I cannot leave this river unfinished again.