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Minnesota, he said. Plus, we had some real beautiful cars and a lot of real super people.
    “They’re turning those engines at over seven thousand r.p.m.,” he shouted. “So, gentlemen! Let’s go racing!”
    Please, I thought, please don’t let’s go racing. The thought was instantly smashed from my head by the noise of what sounded like an intercontinental bronchial hemorrhage, as the stock cars took off from their starting positions and went roaring around the stadium. Christians and lions must at least have been a great deal quieter.
    I didn’t want to go racing. I didn’t want to stuff my face with meat, corn and cotton candy. I didn’t feel like rolling dimes for the NationalHeart Foundation. I wasn’t going to buy a snowblower. I didn’t care to ride the Big Wheel or goggle at the Black-Necked Spitting Cobra. I wanted out. I wanted to find my river.
    I had crossed and recrossed the Mississippi. There were eighteen bridges over it in as many miles, and it seemed that already I had been on most of them. Yet I was having almost as much trouble as De Soto or La Salle in actually reaching the riverbank. Once, the Mississippi had provided Minneapolis and St. Paul with the reason for their existence. Later, it had turned into an impediment to their joint commercial life, to be spanned at every possible point. Now it wasn’t even an impediment. The Twin Cities went about their business as if the river didn’t exist. No road that I could see led down to it. From a gloomy little bar on First Street, I could smell the Mississippi, but didn’t know how to reach it. Feeling foolish, I called the bartender over.
    “How exactly do I get down to the Mississippi?”
    “The river? She’s on the far side of the tracks.” The
wrong
side of the tracks. The river had been consigned to the part of town classically set aside for the American poor. It belonged to the same category as vandalized public housing projects, junked automobiles and dead cats. I was appalled. No one would have dared do such a thing to the river in my head.
    I left my beer untouched. Across the street, there was a potter’s field of ancient railroads. Most had died. Others were in that geriatric state where death is just a whisker away. It was a sorry strip, half a mile wide, of dingy grass, cracked ties and crumbling rails. The rolling stock looked as if it had rusted solid on its tracks. I couldn’t see any locomotives, only the names of the surviving railroad companies, painted in flaky lettering on the sides of the cars. BURLINGTON NORTHERN. CHICAGO AND NORTH WESTERN. MINNESOTA TRANSFER. THE SOO LINE. CHICAGO, MILWAUKEE, ST. PAUL AND PACIFIC . Crickets wheezed and scraped at my feet as I crossed from track to track. The soggy holiday air smelled of diesel oil, rotting wood and river.
    I clambered between two standing chains of freight cars, slid down a culvert of cinders, and there was the Mississippi. All that I could see at first was what it was not. It was not a great glassy sweep of water, big enough to make the civilization on its banks look small. It wasn’t the amazing blue of the cover of my old copy of
Huckleberry Finn
. Nor was it the terrible chocolate flood of Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope.
    It was just a river. From where I stood, the far bank was no more than a couple of hundred yards away. Its color was much the same asthat of my domestic Thames: a pale dun, like iced tea with a lot of mosquito larvae wriggling in the glass. I squatted moodily on a bleached rock, looking across at the dead smokestacks of a Victorian mill and listening to the rumble of a weir upstream. I lit a cigarette to frighten off the gnats buzzing in a thick cloud around my head, and flipped the empty pack into the river. The surface of the water was scrolled with slowly moving eddies. My cigarette pack drifted for a moment, slipped into the crease of an eddy, and was taken crabwise off across the stream. How long, I wondered, would it take to reach