Morning on the Mississippi

May 1, 2003

Dear Pat,

I was awakened Saturday morning by a phone call from DC. She was at her parents' house. In half an hour, she and her mother were supposed to begin leading tours at a restored 1883 Victorian called the Glenn House. The American Queen, a riverboat that had just docked, was unloading people looking for history.

DC was calling because she couldn't find her car keys. This is not an unusual occurrence. We go on a key hunt once or twice a week. We search for eyeglasses more often. That's why she has five pairs. "I'm very busy," she says when something goes missing. Where she put something is far down on her list of priorities of things to remember.

My father and DC's father play in the Dixieland band that greets riverboats when they arrive. DC thought her father might have picked up her keys by mistake on his way to the riverfront. Since I was only a few blocks away, my mission was to retrieve them.

The morning was chilly, the sky blue. The river usually looks brown, but that morning, with the sun still low in the east, it sparkled. The band was playing something you might hear at Jackson Square in New Orleans. My father strummed his banjo. My father-in-law and his trombone were sitting out for a few measures.

It was impossible for him to have DC's keys, he told me.

Walking to my car to carry this news to DC, I stopped to look at Cape Girardeau. If I were a tourist who had just arrived here after a night on the Mississippi River I would think I had landed in a wonderful place.

The downtown is built near the bottom of the bluff that slopes all the way down to the river. At the top of the bluff sits the Common Pleas Courthouse, built before the Civil War.

Below its green terraces lies a four-block-wide and two-block-deep commercial district checkered with historic buildings. Most date to the beginning of the 20th century or before. Many have survived spring floods that washed through the downtown almost annually until a floodwall went up in the 1960s.

Someday we'll put up a mural depicting people paddling boats down Main Street.

The downtown buildings offer many charms: a microbrewery, a bakery, restaurants, bars, jewelers, clothing stores, antique shops, gift shops, an ice cream parlor, hair salons, lawyers and a store that sells plants. It has one thing you can't sell: character.

We love and hate the wall. It protects this cherished part of the city, but it also separates us from the river. We try to dress up the wall with murals, but it's still a concrete barrier between us and this primal force, the Mississippi River, that has drawn people to it as long as people have lived here.

Go through one of the floodgates almost any time of day and you'll find people still there, just looking at the river.

Driving through Wheeling, W. Va., recently, I was struck by how artfully the Ohio River and the hilly land meet there. People instinctively knew, as they did here, that such a place would make a good home.

When I arrived at DC's parents' house she told me her father had just phoned to say he did have her keys after all. Some days the river calls and calls and calls.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.