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the Gulf of Mexico? Two thousand miles at … what—four, five miles an hour? A month? Six weeks? At any rate, it would arrive long before I did. I watched its red flip-top lid slowly circling in the tepid water until it was carried out of sight.
    I realized that I’d seen this bit of river before, in a dozen or so bad nineteenth-century engravings, most of them by untalented but adventurous Germans who had traveled up and down the Mississippi with sketchbooks. The rock on which I sat was exactly where they must have set up their equipment to draw the Falls of St. Anthony. Then the river spilled over a succession of steep limestone steps. It was famously picturesque. The Germans represented the waterfalls by taking a pen and a ruler and making a hatchwork of parallel vertical lines. It must have been a very orderly way of passing an afternoon. They then colored them in with a fierce mat white. The general impression was that at this point the Mississippi was a cascade of toothpaste; one could almost see the army of hired hands squeezing the giant tubes behind the falls. The kindest thing that one could say about the engravings was that they were a vivid illustration of the sheer bewilderment of the European imagination when it tried to confront the raw wilderness of the American West.
    For even in 1800, this place had been utterly wild—far wilder than the Alps, or the Upper Rhine, or the English Lake District, or any of the other places to which romantic pilgrims went in search of wilderness. Fort Snelling, just downstream, was the last outpost of white America against the Sioux. In 1805, Colonel Zebulon Montgomery Pike led an expedition to the headwaters of the Mississippi and camped beside the Falls of St. Anthony. A Sioux warrior stole the Colonel’s American flag while Pike was out hunting for geese, swans, ducks and deer. In his notebook, he was very hard on the local savages and wrote that he had shot “a remarkably large racoon” on the riverbank.
    Then the falls had been harnessed to turn millwheels. The remains of the mills still lined the far shore, their brickwork fallen in, their paddles long gone. They’d ground corn and sawed up forestfuls oftimber. The falls had blocked any further navigation of the river to steamboats, and Minneapolis had been the natural place to join the railroad system to the waterway.
    In 1861, Anthony Trollope came to Minneapolis by train, but couldn’t make up his mind about whether the place, whose name he found delightfully ridiculous, ought properly to be called a village or a town. Mark Twain came here in 1880 and found a city that had swollen to the size of St. Paul, its “Siamese twin.” The two cities were the Ronny and Donny of the Northwest, joined at the breastbone and the abdomen, facing each other for every second of their lives, interesting to visit, alive, real and living. By then, sixteen different railroads met up in the desolate sidings at my back, and they were knocking the heart out of the commercial life of the river. In 1904, the Baedeker Guide to the United States, rather at a loss to find nice remarks to make about Minneapolis, was at least able to describe it as “the flour-milling capital of the world.”
    And the river … poor, schooled, shriveled river. All this piling up of one technology on top of another—railroad on steamboat, interstate highway on railroad, hydroelectric dam on watermill—had reduced the Mississippi from a wonder of nature to this sluggish canal on the wrong side of the tracks. Bridged, dammed, locked, piered, she was safe now. Minneapolis had no need to bother with her. It had turned its back on the water, and only odd foreigners like me with dreams in their heads came here to brood over what had happened to her.
    Out in the stream, the grubby current humped against the giant steel mooring bitts to which no barges were tethered. I thought I saw a dead fish, but it turned out to be a condom. I remembered the old spelling