The Forgotten River - an excerpt

The Forgotten River is a rare piece of nonfiction prose about his native Arkansas by Charles Portis. 

“There were two vessels, the Ouachita and the City of Camden, and they ran on about a two-week cycle—New Orleans-Camden-New Orleans, with stops along the way. The round-trip fare, including a bed and all meals, was $50. Traditional steamboat decorum was imposed, with the men required to wear coats in the dining room. At night, after supper was cleared, the waiters doubled as musicians for a dance. 

It was Dee Brown of Little Rock, the author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, who told me about this, and how as a teen-aged boy in the late 1920s he took the Ouachita from New Orleans to Camden. He had a summer job at a filling station between Stephens and Camden, and had often watched the steamer tie up and unload. “‘I’ve got to ride that boat,’ I kept telling myself.” He saved up a bit more than $50 for the adventure—“an enormous sum in those days”—but then thought better of this extravagance. He would keep half of it back. “So I made a reservation for the other end and hitch-hiked down to New Orleans. Hitch-hiking was easy and safe then, and faster than the boat.”

His timing was good, which kept expenses down. He paid a dollar for a night’s lodging at a boarding house near the French Quarter. The trip back was a delight, as Mr. Brown remembers, a leisurely voyage of five or six days. He got full value for his $25. The big splashing wheel pushed the steamer up the Mississippi, the Red, the Black, and at last into the Ouachita at Jonesville, with the two walls of the forest closing in a bit more day by day.

There were fine breakfasts of ham and eggs, when ham was real ham, with grits and hot biscuits. At lunch one day he found a split avocado on his plate, or “alligator pear,” as it was called on the menu. “I had never seen one before. I wouldn’t eat it.” Young Mr. Brown was traveling light and so had to borrow a coat from a waiter at each meal before he could be seated. He had a tiny sleeping cabin to himself with a bunk bed and a single hook on the wall for his wardrobe.

He enjoyed the nightly dances, though he had to sit them out as a wallflower because he didn’t know how to dance. Townsfolk along the way came on board just for the dance, and among them were young Delta sports sneaking drinks of corn whiskey and ginger jake. These were Prohibition days. A young girl from New Orleans, traveling with her family, offered to teach Dee Brown how to dance. “I wanted to dance with her, too, sure, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.” This family, he recalls, who had never seen any high ground, marveled over the puny hillocks of the upper river. He remembers an Arkansas woman vowing never again to eat sugar, after seeing the deckhands, dripping with sweat, taking naps on the deck-loaded sacks of sugar.”

The Forgotten River by Charles Portis. Collected in Escape Velocity. This story appeared in the September 1991 issue of the Arkansas Times. 

(Biblioklept)