LETTERS FROM HOME: DANCING ON THE BANKS OF THE MISSISSIPPI

July 12, 2001

Dear Leslie,

The big riverboats have been stopping by more frequently now that summer is beginning to find its full expression in afternoons fat with heat and moisture. The Mississippi Queen docked Tuesday, its calliope announcing its arrival on a trip north up the Mississippi. The American Queen gets in tomorrow, maybe bound for New Orleans.

In New Orleans at this time of year, people only go outdoors in the late afternoon to go to work or to a cool restaurant. The streets smell overripe and are. Tourists don't care.

Here the tourists, some speaking foreign languages, walk around downtown in something of a daze, looking for stores and historic sites and something to photograph. Some from more temperate or cold climates must wonder how the local residents endure the summer sauna. Others, considering the dear price of a ticket to ride one of these boats, must romanticize the sweat trickling down their backs. It's just the way Mark Twain said, they'll say.

The river is high now, so the boats tower over the floodwall. The sight is impressive but not the way it was in Mark Twain's day. Then towns like Cape Girardeau were outposts and the river was the only practical means of shipping corn to market and bringing fabric and entertainers and news of the world in. The barge companies still do a good business, and the river in stretches is as wild and authentically magnificent as it ever was. But tourists looking for a quaint little river town stuck in the 19th century will have to look elsewhere.

Sixty miles upriver, the town of Ste. Genevieve is stuck in the 18th century and part of the 17th, but they like it that way. Ste. Genevieve is a wonderland of the closest things the Midwest has to antiquities.

Cape Girardeau's paddlewheel has always been spun by commerce and probably always will be. Nearby Jackson grabbed the county seat but Cape Girardeau had the river and hills made for a college.

An out-of-towner told me she likes Cape Girardeau because it's a town with a university. She works 60 miles away in Carbondale, Ill., a university with a town.

Like all downtowns, Cape Girardeau's suffered when first a shopping center and then a mall went up in the western parts of the city. But our downtown has qualities not to be found anywhere else in town: a gourmet food store, good restaurants that aren't links in a chain, a wine store, a coffeehouse with folk music, art galleries, a micro-brewery in the works.

When the riverboats arrive, they remind us that Lewis and Clark stopped here on their way to find the West, that flatboats and keelboats carried our goods downstream to New Orleans before Twain's steamboats appeared, that three different packet boats bore Cape Girardeau's name early in the 20th century, and that barges and boats on the river still make us stare today.

DC knows whether the Mississippi Queen or the Delta Queen is arriving by the sound of the whistle. When one or the other or the American Queen puts in, my father and father-in-law are there playing Dixieland music to welcome the guests to Cape Girardeau. When the tourists begin exploring Cape Girardeau, DC's mother is at the city's restored Victorian mansion to show them how we lived over 100 years ago.

A lot of people still dance to that whistle.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.