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When the rafts were still in Alton and for the first week in Saint Louis people were constantly approaching and asking how they could help. As much as I was a new guy onboard my camp counselor-like personality meant that I was instantly an ambassador. It was heart warming how much people who looked nothing like us were ready to offer all lengths of material aid they moment they set eyes on what we were doing.
In Alton a pair of older women drove me to a grocery store and told me to buy two hundred dollars worth of whatever our galley needed – mostly fresh vegetables as it easiest to only cook vegan meals so no one would ever be excluded. Somebody else had dropped off a heroic amount of fried chicken and some gallon jugs of Milo’s Sweet Tea. I have to confess that I succumbed to temptation and broke my pescatarian diet at the time to munch down a couple of pieces late one night when nobody else was within eyeshot.
I doubt I was the only one – while vegan was the most common onboard dietary preference the chicken was steadily disappearing somewhere. This wasn’t the case for some odd looking jars of preserved venison that another anonymous benefactor dropped off. While everybody was curious to look at it I never saw anyone open a jar to eat any.
I heard stories about stops upriver where the populace was less welcoming. In one town some crew members broke into a school to use the showers but got arrested because they let themselves fall asleep on premises. That created some bad blood. In another place the rafts were treated as bad harbingers:
“We know you River Gypsies brought the flood!”
Once we were docked at Cementland we were no longer visible from any road and most curious locals showed up by water. One morning a friendly fisherman showed up on a Jon boat and asked if there was any assistance he might be able to offer. We were good at provisions at that point but the charge was running out on the deep cycle batteries we used for lights and keeping everyone’s phone charged – unlike Alton there was nothing close enough to run an extension cord.
I asked if he could help charge a few of the batteries and then helped load them onto his boat and rode along to go plug them in where he lived. Once he got a little more comfortable with me he asked if anybody on the rafts smoked marijuana and I told them that of course many people did. He gave me a sandwich bag full of pre rolled joints of Mexican brick weed that henceforth lived in a dried out tortoise shell next to the sink where people brushed their teeth.
I can’t remember them ever running out but I do remember Caryl loudly complaining when she wanted a cigarette and the only thing around was endless free marijuana. At the time it felt like one of the moments, like simply living on whimsical storybook rafts, where it seemed especially poignant that the ordinary circumstances of our day to day lives would align with most peoples’ daydreams. Now I’ve worked on marijuana farms and stopped smoking the stuff due to panic attacks and it seems far more mundane for there always to be a surplus of the stuff everywhere.
I can’t remember how the big head carp came up but seeing as we were on a boat with a motor the conversation probably started with one of them leaping aboard. I looked back through the old chapters to see if I’d talked about the carp, or “flying fish”, but I didn’t see anything so I guess I should explain it here. Carp are filter feeders that literally eat other riparian organisms’ shit so some time before 1993 the owners of commercial catfish farms started importing them to help the breeding ponds clean.
Despite assurances that they would never escape into the surrounding environment the big flood of ‘93 resulted in many of the fish escaping into the Mississippi River. As an invasive species with no natural predators they have bred out of control since that point and come to dominate the river – displacing native species and at times growing large enough to weigh hundreds of pounds.
There are special underwater electric barriers to prevent the carp from ever reaching the Great Lakes but I haven’t lived in the MidWest for a while and couldn’t say if these eventually failed and the fish made it through. Anyway they have an adaptation that causes them to leap out of the water every time they hear a loud sound. Any time a motor was on they would leap onto the surface of the rafts – people wore helmets because getting clubbed over the head by an oblivious fish represents an ever present danger.
I remember seeing cool YouTube montages of boaters getting knocked overboard lIke this and a super satisfying shot of one beaning a dude in the crotch. I couldn’t find any good ones when I looked just now but if anybody has a good link by all means send it along and I’ll stick it in here.
Because the carp were bad for the river’s ecosystem we would make a point of beating them to death any time they found their way onto our decks. Me and Ellery used to shriek “Let’s go clubbing!” in exaggeratedly flamboyant voices before reaching for the closest wrench and going to town on them. In a pinch you could just grab the fish by it’s tail and swing it’s head directly against the plywood or I’ve even seen people quickly use their teeth to break the spines.
Because we were killing the fish anyway we figured we should try to make some culinary use of them. The most successful way was to boil them until the meat could fall off the bones to make a soup. This guy named Gabe usually cooked it – last I heard he was running a bar in some frontier town in Montana or something and had grown a big mustache.
The thing about Carp is they are impossible to fillet and their flesh is mucilaginous which basically means slimy like boogers. They’re pretty gross. The last time I bothered with one at all I only ate the three most muscular chunks under each of it’s fins as sashimi. This was only moments after Harrison helped me cut it’s head off with a giant rusty cleaver he called “Broot Strength” and I used it’s still twitching body as a plate while Harrison brought me soy sauce and wasabi in fancy little gilded dishes.
A visiting photographer friend named Brooke or Brookes took pictures but the links he’d sent me were in a Yahoo account I’ve long since lost access to.
Anyway when I was in the guy who gave us weed’s boat we hadn’t given up on trying to eat the things yet and he was incredulous that we’d even bother and asked me if I wanted to go catch some. It was pretty fun – he knew where the rocky berms that attracted the largest numbers were and I got to practice snatching them up in a net as they leapt through the air.
The fish from this expedition were either the last time we bothered with the soup or we put it off too long and had to throw them away. I forget exactly which.
After he brought back those batteries we realized that it would be easier to just charge them across the street in the offices of Cementland. They were pretty heavy and dragging them back and forth was an everyday chore. You could kind of balance one right between the handlebars of a bike, especially one of the choppers with “Ape Hangers”, but half the trip was over grass so it was almost easier not to.
The rafts had an orange and white cat named Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen – she had always stayed close before but the lure of Cementland caused her to move on to a landlocked lifestyle. People said they would sometimes see her wandering the park around sunset but I slept there for about two weeks and never did.
Right around the time we arrived some local independent filmmakers were shooting a sci-fi movie over there and hired us all as extras for the big crowd scene. They gave everybody Tyvek suits and had us haul rocks and act brainwashed in one of the former factory buildings while the film’s heroes snuck behind us. That’s probably how me and Lisers found the old Greyhound bus that John Patzius had modified – it was parked underneath the awning of the same hangar like structure.
It wasn’t so much that the rafts had a lack of privacy and good places to sleep as we were just excited to explore this newly accessible theme park. The bus had been redone with deep red carpets and vintage furniture that for some reason didn’t include a bed. It might have been too hot on there or dusty but almost immediately we moved on to the gigantic smokestack.
It was full of colonies of pigeons but we just brought a tarp along with us so we wouldn’t be lying on birdshot. The acoustics were something else – there’s a special echo kind of like a flanged out shotgun blast you get when shouting or clapping into really long tubes, I’ve noticed a similar sound with the buried cannons at the Marin Headlands.
We invited some other folks from the raft to bring along instruments and experiment with recording in there. It was nice to fall asleep staring at tiny circular portion of the night sky through a little hole about two hundred feet above us – Lisers thought the stars made it look like a drawing of a happy face. We were usually up and moving before the sun had climbed high enough to shine directly into it and heat the place up.
We stayed over there until Lisers went back to Germany. By that point the raft project was over for most people and the last big to-do on that side of the river was a generator show for Warhammer 48K and Skarekrau Radio on top of the pylon. With everybody dancing on a concrete pillar seventy feet above the water and swinging out over on it on this metal gate there would have been a lot of ways for people to get hurt. Thankfully somebody thought to spray paint a warning onto a piece of plywood:
“BE CAREFUL FOR REAL”
That seemed to do the trick. After the show me and the rest of The Garden of Bling crew started staying onboard our raft in East Saint Louis and only The Sweeps stuck around on the Cementland side. It was time to try to get our respective rafts moving again.
The Bling had a tiny little outboard motor that was only about 35 horsepower. Before they had modified it’s transom to include a steering system somebody had to stand on top of it while holding the edge of the wooden structure for stability and try to adjust the motor’s direction by using all of their body weight to shift it from side to side with their feet.
Corey Vinegar had been doing this when he fell into the water and disappeared under the propellor. Blood started floating up to the surface as he forced his head above the water and screamed for someone to give him a knife. Apparently his shorts had gotten tangled up in the mechanism and he needed to cut himself free before swimming to freedom. He had a big scar on his leg after that but got off relatively light considering how close it was to sensitive, vital areas and how sharp propellor blades are.
I guess I threw that in kind of casually. As far as I know it was the most severe accident and injury for both Mississippi River years of The Miss Rockaway Armada combined which is not bad at all all things considered. Any way Corey was with The Sweeps now and we were going to need a much bigger outboard motor.
Harrison found somebody selling a used 150 HP one somewhere nearby. We never actually got it functional but at least we spray painted it gold. I’ll get into that next chapter.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 