Big River Ride Journal (Part 7)
http://www.pedelecs.co.uk/articles/20/1/Big-River-Ride-Journal-Part-7/Page1.html
Russell Scott
By Russell Scott
Published on 10/12/2006
I am halfway down the river now with almost 1,100 miles on the clock. Only another thousand or more to go, on a bike that has become my very best friend - and believe you me, I am extremely fussy about who or what I keep company with.
I crossed into Missouri last week, glad to leave the appalling roads (with their sand-and-gravel shoulders) of southeast Iowa behind me. The first stop of any significance was the port of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Samuel Langhorn Clemens, aka Mark Twain. It is a modest building, not 200 metres from water's edge, and from where it is easy to absorb the powerful influence that the river had on the lad while he was growing up. Back in the mid 1850s, steamboats came and went all day, stacking up alongside each other on the riverside. They went north and they went south, prompting young Clemens to explore whatever lay beyond his own visible stretch of the Mississippi. History recalls that he eventually became a steamboat pilot, before turning his hand to the writing game.
There are dozens of stories about how this guy got his pseudonym. The one that rings true to me, pertains to a newsletter that was regularly distributed among the steamboat fraternity, written by someone who called himself 'Mark Twain'. When that particular 'Twain' retired, Samuel Clemens took over the newsletter, adopting his predecessors's pseudonym in the process. However, the Mark Twain that you and I know was most certainly not averse to starting a few naughty rumours which would rapidly spread up and down the river (i.e., one guy was a thief, or another a card sharp; the wife of a rival captain was having it off with a neighbour while her husband was downriver....stuff like that). But at least it got the man writing, and unless you're completely ignorant of history, the rest you already know.
All the same, I get the feeling that the citizens of modern-day Hannibal are slightly weary of their erstwhile celebrity ("he was nuthin' but an alcoholic" grumbled one. "The whole myth is overrated" growled another). Probably true, but almost 100 years after his death, he still draws in the admiring crowds in their hundreds of thousands every year.
Today's Hannibal, which is sadly minus the coming and going of the riverboats, is now more of a town than a port, the Mississippi River rolling by unconcerned. But its warm and friendly inhabitants (unlike young Sam Clemens) are not especially curious about what lies beyond the next bend in the river. It seems to have developed a slight parochial quality.
t was time to saddle up and head south. I passed a strange looking building set back from the road, perhaps the size of a public lavatory in a car park. It turned out to be a disused jail, reserved for the eastern European immigrants who turned up in Missouri seeking work at the cement factories during the early 1900s. On paydays, the three-cell jail apparently got filled up with drunks and troublemakers. Having had a peek inside, I would guess it to have been a deterrent like no other - tiny, dank, almost Satanically-dark inside, and very heavily barred. Time spent inside that place would have passed very slowly indeed.
And so on to the river town of Louisiana, and from there to the Greater St. Louis suburb of St Charles a further 65 miles away - which is about as far as I care to ride in a single day. Getting into downtown St Louis the following day was somewhat worrying. Bikes are not allowed on the interstate freeways, and the only way for a cyclist to make downtown is along a 30 mile stretch of road called Page Avenue - a run-down thoroughfare aptly-nicknamed the 'shooting gallery'. Put another way, I did not stop to take my camera out of the pannier bag - because it was unlikely to have lasted in my own hands for more than a few seconds. That said, St Louis itself is a smart and pleasant place as cities go, a pleasant ambience, and with plenty of tasteful urban regeneration going on.
barrels
From the 'big smoke' of the Midwest, my halfway point, on down here to Sainte Genevieve - a quiet French colonial town that is America's oldest settlement west of the Mississippi. This is no Plastic City. It has a decidedly French colonial aspect to it, having been settled by our European neighbours in 1735. From what I can make out during so brief a visit, it has two special claims to fame.
The first, WINE (God, I I love that stuff). Automatically I think of California when American wine comes to mind, but I'm wrong to do so. Missouri was the second state in the Union to begin wine growing long, long, before California. It now grows enough red & white grapes to produce 750,000 U.S. gallons per annum, worth something like $35 million to the state's economy. Yet before pre-prohibition days, this part of Missouri produced, bottled, and sold over three million gallons of wine each year.
The thirst in this country can, on occasions, be really quite sophisticated.
The second, NICKNAMES. Americans, in my view, are wholly uncomplicated. If you tell someone that you're known as Jack the Rat, then that's good enough for them, no questions asked. Nowhere is this syndrome more personified than here in Ste Genevieve. Nicknames become real - and therefore fiction becomes truth.
II do not know the real names of the following people, and neither does anyone else. They are merely the names by which they are, or were, known - names that are in the telephone directory, on mailboxes, and most certainly on epitaphs. Here is a weeny sample of the the former and present residents of this little Mississippi town.
Froggie K; Squirrel Irlbeck; Catfish Ruttler; Wonder Warthog Kurtz; Few Clothes La Rose; Two-Gun Goverau (the sheriff), Mr Knicklesplitter (a miser). And three brothers who were Christened Raymond, Marion, and Leo, only to become Izzie, Dizzie, and Nuts. My own personal favourite - and how he got this name is anyone's guess - is Toad Greasehopper
Toad Greasehopper, for God's sake?
Ah well, this is not simply America. This is the Mississippi, where things are different. There is an X-Factor existing along this river that I haven't quite got to grips with yet. But I shall.
Keep up to date with Quentin's travels by reading his blog here on Pedelecs, by visiting his site below or listening to the once-weekly broadcast on Radio 5 Live Up All Night programme.
| | I am halfway down the river now with almost 1,100 miles on the clock. Only another thousand or more to go, on a bike that has become my very best friend - and believe you me, I am extremely fussy about who or what I keep company with. |
Part 07: Sainte Genevieve, Missouri. 12 October, 2006
I am halfway down the river now with almost 1,100 miles on the clock. Only another thousand or more to go, on a bike that has become my very best friend - and believe you me, I am extremely fussy about who or what I keep company with.
I crossed into Missouri last week, glad to leave the appalling roads (with their sand-and-gravel shoulders) of southeast Iowa behind me. The first stop of any significance was the port of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Samuel Langhorn Clemens, aka Mark Twain. It is a modest building, not 200 metres from water's edge, and from where it is easy to absorb the powerful influence that the river had on the lad while he was growing up. Back in the mid 1850s, steamboats came and went all day, stacking up alongside each other on the riverside. They went north and they went south, prompting young Clemens to explore whatever lay beyond his own visible stretch of the Mississippi. History recalls that he eventually became a steamboat pilot, before turning his hand to the writing game.
There are dozens of stories about how this guy got his pseudonym. The one that rings true to me, pertains to a newsletter that was regularly distributed among the steamboat fraternity, written by someone who called himself 'Mark Twain'. When that particular 'Twain' retired, Samuel Clemens took over the newsletter, adopting his predecessors's pseudonym in the process. However, the Mark Twain that you and I know was most certainly not averse to starting a few naughty rumours which would rapidly spread up and down the river (i.e., one guy was a thief, or another a card sharp; the wife of a rival captain was having it off with a neighbour while her husband was downriver....stuff like that). But at least it got the man writing, and unless you're completely ignorant of history, the rest you already know.
All the same, I get the feeling that the citizens of modern-day Hannibal are slightly weary of their erstwhile celebrity ("he was nuthin' but an alcoholic" grumbled one. "The whole myth is overrated" growled another). Probably true, but almost 100 years after his death, he still draws in the admiring crowds in their hundreds of thousands every year.
Today's Hannibal, which is sadly minus the coming and going of the riverboats, is now more of a town than a port, the Mississippi River rolling by unconcerned. But its warm and friendly inhabitants (unlike young Sam Clemens) are not especially curious about what lies beyond the next bend in the river. It seems to have developed a slight parochial quality.
t was time to saddle up and head south. I passed a strange looking building set back from the road, perhaps the size of a public lavatory in a car park. It turned out to be a disused jail, reserved for the eastern European immigrants who turned up in Missouri seeking work at the cement factories during the early 1900s. On paydays, the three-cell jail apparently got filled up with drunks and troublemakers. Having had a peek inside, I would guess it to have been a deterrent like no other - tiny, dank, almost Satanically-dark inside, and very heavily barred. Time spent inside that place would have passed very slowly indeed.
And so on to the river town of Louisiana, and from there to the Greater St. Louis suburb of St Charles a further 65 miles away - which is about as far as I care to ride in a single day. Getting into downtown St Louis the following day was somewhat worrying. Bikes are not allowed on the interstate freeways, and the only way for a cyclist to make downtown is along a 30 mile stretch of road called Page Avenue - a run-down thoroughfare aptly-nicknamed the 'shooting gallery'. Put another way, I did not stop to take my camera out of the pannier bag - because it was unlikely to have lasted in my own hands for more than a few seconds. That said, St Louis itself is a smart and pleasant place as cities go, a pleasant ambience, and with plenty of tasteful urban regeneration going on.
barrels
From the 'big smoke' of the Midwest, my halfway point, on down here to Sainte Genevieve - a quiet French colonial town that is America's oldest settlement west of the Mississippi. This is no Plastic City. It has a decidedly French colonial aspect to it, having been settled by our European neighbours in 1735. From what I can make out during so brief a visit, it has two special claims to fame.
The first, WINE (God, I I love that stuff). Automatically I think of California when American wine comes to mind, but I'm wrong to do so. Missouri was the second state in the Union to begin wine growing long, long, before California. It now grows enough red & white grapes to produce 750,000 U.S. gallons per annum, worth something like $35 million to the state's economy. Yet before pre-prohibition days, this part of Missouri produced, bottled, and sold over three million gallons of wine each year.
The thirst in this country can, on occasions, be really quite sophisticated.
The second, NICKNAMES. Americans, in my view, are wholly uncomplicated. If you tell someone that you're known as Jack the Rat, then that's good enough for them, no questions asked. Nowhere is this syndrome more personified than here in Ste Genevieve. Nicknames become real - and therefore fiction becomes truth.
II do not know the real names of the following people, and neither does anyone else. They are merely the names by which they are, or were, known - names that are in the telephone directory, on mailboxes, and most certainly on epitaphs. Here is a weeny sample of the the former and present residents of this little Mississippi town.
Froggie K; Squirrel Irlbeck; Catfish Ruttler; Wonder Warthog Kurtz; Few Clothes La Rose; Two-Gun Goverau (the sheriff), Mr Knicklesplitter (a miser). And three brothers who were Christened Raymond, Marion, and Leo, only to become Izzie, Dizzie, and Nuts. My own personal favourite - and how he got this name is anyone's guess - is Toad Greasehopper
Toad Greasehopper, for God's sake?
Ah well, this is not simply America. This is the Mississippi, where things are different. There is an X-Factor existing along this river that I haven't quite got to grips with yet. But I shall.
Keep up to date with Quentin's travels by reading his blog here on Pedelecs, by visiting his site below or listening to the once-weekly broadcast on Radio 5 Live Up All Night programme.
bigriverride.com
BigRiverRide is sponsored by Ecover