LET T E R FRO M M NNESOTA

MISSISSIPPI DRIFTRiver vagrants in the age ofWal ...Mart

By Matthew Power

Eseveral years, beginning when Iwas six or seven, I played a hobo forHalloween. It was easy enough to puttogether. Oversize boots, a moth-eaten tweed jacket, and my dad's bust-ed felt hunting hat, which smelled ofdeer lure; finish it up with a beardscuffed on with a charcoal briquette, ahandkerchief bindle tied to a hockeystick, an old empty bottle. I imagineda hobo's life would be a fine thing. Iwould sleep in haystacks and do ex-actly what I wanted all the time.

Since then, I've had occasional fan-tasies of dropping out, and have evenmade some brief furtive bids at seces-sion: a stint as a squatter in a crum-bling South Bronx building, a stolenride through Canada on' a freighttrain. A handful of times I got my-self arrested, the charges ranging fromtrespassing to disorderly conduct tominor drug possession. But I wasn't avery good criminal, or nomad, andinvariably I would return to the com-forting banalities of ordinary life. Inever disliked civilization intenselyenough to endure the hardships ofabandoning it, but periodically Iwould tire of routine, of feeling"cramped up and sivilized," as Huck

Matthew Power is a contributing editor ofHarper's Magazine. His last article for themagazine was a letter from a Philippinegarbage dump ("The Magic Mountain,"December 2006).

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2008

Finn put it, and I would light out foranother diversion in the Territory.

It was on one such outing, a hitch-hike up the West Coast in the sum-mer of 1999, that I met Matt Bullardin a palm-fringed city park in Arcata,California. A dumpster-diving, train-hopping, animal-rights-crusading an-archist and tramp, with little moneyand less of a home, Matt was almostexactly my age, and from that firsttime we talked I admired his racon-teurial zest and scammer's panache.He considered shoplifting a politicalact and dumpstering a civil right. Aswe sat on a park bench in the sun-shine, Matt reached into his back-pack and pulled out what he called a"magic dollar," an ordinary bill savefor its twelve-inch tail of cellophanepacking tape. He would dip it into avending machine, select the cheapestitem available, collect his purchaseand change, and pull his dollar backout by the tail. An unguarded ma-chine could be relieved of all its coinsand every last one of its snacks in thespace of an hour. It was avery im-pressive trick.

Matt was convinced that there wassomething deeply wrong with mostAmericans: they were bored and un-fulfilled, their freedom relinquishedfor the security of a steady paycheckand a ninety-minute commute, theirimagination anesthetized by TV ad-

diction and celebrity worship. He haddecided to organize his life against thisfate. He utterly refused to serve; helived exactly as he desired. Matt's wasthe kind of amoral genius that I had al-ways longed to possess. He not onlyhad quit society altogether but wasgaming it for all it was worth, like somedirtbag P. T. Barnum. I, meanwhile,would soon be returning to a temp jobin a Manhattan cubicle. Matt couldn'tunderstand why I needed to go back,and I couldn't really myself, but I wentback anyway, tugged by the gravity ofexpectations. In the ensuing years, I gotoccasional emails documenting Matt'sdrift, describing days on grain cars pass-ing through Minnesota blizzards,nightsin palm-thatched squats on Hawaiianislands: dispatches from a realm of to-tal freedom beyond the frontiers of or-dinary life.

Two summers ago, Matt sent an in-.vitation that I could not ignore. Hewas in Minneapolis, building a home-made raft, and had put out a call for acrew of "boat punks" to help him pilotthe vessel the entire length of the Mis-sissippi River, all the way to New Or-leans. They would dig through the trashfor sustenance. They would communewith the national mythos. They wouldbe twenty-first-century incarnations ofthe river rats, hoboes, and drifters of theMississippi's history, the sort who inMark Twain's time would have met

their ends tarred, feathered, and runout of town on a rail. Catfish rose in mymind; ripples expanded outward andscattered any doubts. I wrote backstraightaway and asked to join up.

I met Matt on a scorching July af-ternoon and followed him throughleafy, upper-middle-class residentialstreets toward Minneapolis's WestRiver Park. The industrious hum ofweed-whackers and leaf-blowersfilled the air, and helmeted childrentricycled along a path, their watchfulparents casting a suspicious eye atus. But through a small hole in the

er before 'me, narrow and amber-colored, flowing silently south, lined

on both banks with

M forested bluffs.

tt's raft was moored to thebank next to a: storm sewer outflow pipe.My first impression was of the Una-bomber's cabin set afloat. A brief de-scription of the vessel: ten feet in thebeam, twenty-four feet stem to stern,its decks had been laid down over three.rows of fifty-five-gallon drums, twenty-three in all. "I got .them from a dump-ster behind a chemical plant," Matt

smithing. On the roof was bolted a largesolar panel of larcenous provenance, aswell as a small sleeping quarters and aworn-out armchair from which the boatcould be steered. A wheel salvaged froma sunken houseboat was connected byan ingenious series of pulleys and wiresto the outboard motor on the back deck,a thirty-three-horsepower, two-strokeJohnson, which was showroom-newduring the Johnson Administration. Itwas one of the few purchased items onthe boat, bought by me as a gesture ofmy commitment to the mission. Severalworkbenches lined the cabin, and there

was a galley with a propanestove, a chest of drawers, anda rusty high school gym lock-er for storage. Matt hadbrought everything he hadscrounged that could possi-bly be of use: old fishing an-chors, tied-up lengths of rope,lawn furniture, a folding cardtable. Three bicycles. Sever-al five-gallon gas tanks. Astereo speaker system withsubwoofers made of paintcans, hooked up to a motor-cycle battery. A collection ofpractice heads from thedumpster of a beauty college.In keeping with the rustictheme, the boat's front had aporch swing made of ship-ping pallets and a pair of plas-tic pink flamingos, "liberatedfrom some lawn," screwed toits posts.

Matt's six-foot-two framehad bulked up since I'd lastseen him, and his hair hadgrown into a waist-lengthmullet of dreadlocks hang-ing behind a battered blackbaseball cap. He wore a goa-

tee, and his round face squeezed hiseyes to mischievous slits when hesmiled. He had added to his tattoo col-lection to form a sort of identity-politicsresume: NOT REALLY VEGAN ANYMOREadvertised an amended dietary philos-ophy on his wrist; a piece on the backof his hand showed crossed railroadspikes and the free-associative mottoWANDERLUST ADVENTURE TRAMP; onhis left bicep was a black-masked figurestanding behind a dog, above the phraseANIMAL LIBERATION.

Matt hadn't held a steady job since

foliage by the edge of the bike path,we instantly stepped out of themiddle-American idyll, scramblingdown a narrow path through the tan-gled undergrowth, through clearedpatches in the woods littered withmalt-liquor cans and fast-food wrap-pers, hobo camps with the musty wildsmell of an animal's den. I clutched atthe roots of saplings to keep fromtumbling down the slope. The soundsof civilization receded to white noise.We stumbled out of the trees onto asandy spit, and I suddenly saw the riv-

Illustrations by Stan Fellows

told me. "Some of them still had stuffsloshing around inside." The barrelshad been framed out with lumber, most-ly 2x4s swiped from construction sites,and a deck of marine plywood set ontop. On this platform Matt had built acabin, about ten by fourteen feet, leav-ing a small motor deck aft and a frontporch fore. The porch connected to thecabin through a pair of French doors,and a screen door exited the rear. Thecleats, railroad spikes welded to dia-mond plate, were "punk as fuck," saidMatt, admiring his amateur black-

LEITER FROM MINNESOTA 55

a brief stint at Kinko'sin the late Nineties.One time in court, hesaid, a judge had ad-monished him: "Youcan't be homeless therest of your life. Youhave to work." Helaughed as he recalledthis. "I fucking hatework," he said. "If Icould see some resultfrom it, besides money,maybe I'd do it. I wentinto the welfare officeto apply for foodstamps, and they took'one look at me andsaid; 'Clearly, you'reunemployable.'" Hesaw no shame in this,and he looked at foodstamps as a way of get-ting back the taxes hepaid when he was atKinko's. From the hun-dreds of hours he hadput into the boat, it wasevident that what hehated was not doing work per se butrather trading his time for money.Matt had been working on the boat forover a year and had spent almost noth-ing on it. What wasn't donated ordumpstered was procured by extrale-gal means. "Half this' boat is stolen,"he chuckled, with unmistakable pridein his handiwork and resourcefulness.

The nee-hobo lifestyle, such as itwas, often blurred the boundary be-tween ingenuity and criminality. Onthe legal side, there were the old stand-bys: "spanging" (bumming sparechange), "flying signs" (asking formoney with a cardboard sign), andthe governmental largesse of foodstamps. Matt was also a big proponentof pharmaceutical studies, which gaveout nice lump-sum payments as well asfree food. In one study, he said, hehad taken the largest dose of ibupro-fen ever administered to a humanbeing. In that instance, the result ofbeing a human lab rat was only diar-rhea, though he hadn't landed a newstudy in a while. "I had plans to buy ahouse with drug studies," he said wist-fully. The only semi-legitimate workMatt was willing to pursue was sea-sonal farm labor, particularly the sugar-

56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I MARCH 2008

beet harvest in North Dakota, whichhas become something of an annualpilgrimage for the punk traveler com-munity. From three weeks of drivingforklifts or sorting beets on a convey-or belt, enough money could be earnedto fund months of travel.

On the illegal side of gainful unern- 'ployment, there were many techniquesof varying complexity. The digital rev-olution in retailirig had led to gift-cardcloning (copying the magnetic stripon an unused gift card, returning it tothe store display, and then waiting un-til it is activated) and bar-code swap-ping (either printing up low-price barcodes on stickers or switching themfrom one item to another). Variouslower-tech shoplifting methods couldbe employed anywhere, from the prim-itive "wahoo" (wherein the shoplifterwalks into a convenience store, takes acase of beer, screams Wahoo! and runsout the door) to "left-handing" (payingfor an item with your right hand whilewalking through the checkout with an-other item in your left) and "kanga-rooing" (the more theatrical use of adummy arm and a pair of overalls witha large hidden pouch). One of the mostlucrative scams was called "taking a

flight" and involvedhaving an accomplicesteal one's luggage froman airport baggagecarousel, which, withenough persistent callsto customer service,could result in a $3,000payday from the airline.Matt and his friendssaw stealing as a formof revolt, a means ofsurviving while theychipped away at themonstrous walls of thecapitalist fortress.

For Matt, the rivertrip was to be a sort oflast great adventure be-fore he left the UnitedStates for good. Aslong as he stayed, hefelt the ultimate uri-freedom of jail lurkingaround every corner.For years he was heav-ily involved with thean irn a l-I ibera t io nmovement and logged

weeks of jail time in three differentstates for protests at animal-testing fa-cilities. He claims to be on a domestic-terrorist watch list. "When I get myJ.D. run by the cops, it comes up 'Sus-pected member of Animal LiberationFront. Do not arrest.": A recent home-coming for Matt in LAX resulted in afive-hour interview with HomelandSecurity. He related all these storieswith thinly veiled pride, the way a par-ent might describe a child's perfor-mance in a:Little League game.

Afrer the river journey, he was mov-ing to Berlin, a squatter's paradise hehad visited once and found far morelivable than anywhere in the UnitedStates. "I hate America," he said, with-out the menace of a McVeigh or a Zar-qawi but nevertheless with feeling. Iasked what he would do with the raftonce we reached New Orleans and heleft for Germany. "Only one thing todo," he said. "Torch it. I'm gonna

give this motherfucker arr' Viking burial.".0 inaugurate the voyage, Matthad planned a launch party a miledownstream, at a beach on the river'sedge. With a few more arrivals, our

little crew swelled to five: me and Matt,plus Cody Dornbusch, a compact,bearded twenty-four-year-old fromSouth Dakota; Chris Broderdorp, atwenty-one-year-old bicyclist and mas-ter dumpster-diver from Minneapolis,rail-thin with a half-shaved mop ofcurls and a high-pitched laugh; andKristina Brown, a fetching, levelheadedtwenty-five-year-old from Seattle, whoamong them had the most schoolingand seemed most to be playacting atthe pirate life. I was the only crewmember without a pierced septum: Thegeneral mood among my boatmateswas upbeat: the overflowing dumpstersof Middle America would be morethan enough to sustain our bodies, andadventure would nourish our spirits.Matt fired up the ancient engine, andin a haze of blue exhaust smoke wechugged slowly out into the current,which had the color and foaminess ofCoca-Cola, and headed downstream,hidden from the city by the limestonebluffs. The abandoned mills aroundthe Falls of Saint Anthony-the fallsthat had brought the city here-hadbeen converted into million-dollarcondominiums. The Minneapolis-St.Paul metroplex, tidy and forward-looking, seemed to have turned itsback on the river that birthed it.

The party, advertised among the lo-cal punk scene through word of mouthand printed flyers, commenced at sun-down. The raft was hung with Christ-mas lights, and a driftwood bonfireblazed on the sand. Kids drank 405 ofmalt liquor and climbed over and overagain onto the roof of the raft, jumping,diving, and cannon balling in variousstates of undress into the muddy brownriver water. The night was humid andsultry, tinged with menace, and a thickdarkness pressed down upon the river.Amid all the wild shouting and splash-ing, the dirt-smudged faces lit up byflames and colored Christmas lights, itseemed as though ,the raft had runaground on some cargo cult's island,the 'natives working themselves into afrenzy as they decided whether to wor-ship us or eat us or escort us to the edgeof the volcano at spearpoint. Someonestumbled into me in the dark, drip-ping, and grabbed me by the shirt,smelling of sweat and booze and theriver, his voice slurred. "Hey! You're thewriter. From New York." I reluctantly

confirmed this. "Well, your fuckin' sto-ry better be about solutions." (Hedragged out the word for emphasis.)"Otherwise it's bullshit. Solutions!"His grip tightened. He attempted tofix his gaze to mine and failed. Heshouted "Solutions!" once more forgood measure before shambling awayand jumping into the river again. '

In the morning, with the ashes ofthe bonfire still smoldering and a half-dozen half-dressed casualties of the bac-chanal sprawled on the beach, we pulledthe lines in and pushed the raft's barrelsoff the sand bar, drifting out and spin-ning like a compass needle until theboat nosed at long last into the flow ofthe river. With the Lyndon Johnson(the nickname I had given the forty-

-year-old engine) at half-throttle, theraft meandered with the current, thegreen wall of trees slipping by at walk-ing pace. The five-gallon gas tank wasdraining disturbingly fast. I sat on thefront-porch swing, rereading a dog-earednewspaper. Chris idly strummed a gui-tar as Cody and Kristina sat up top withMatt, who was steering from the cap-tain's chair. "You know, you're goingto be reading that fucking July I othNew York Times for the next month,"Cody told me, sticking his head over theedge. I put the paper down. A Hmongfamily fished from a railroad embank-ment, waving excitedly as we passed,perhaps remembering the long-tail boatsof their far-off Mekong. Eagles wheeledand dove into the river, which un-scrolled before us as we rounded eachbend. It was high summer, blue skiesand sunny, about as auspicious as onecould hopefor the start of a two-thousand-mile journey. We had hungup ragged pirate flags, and now theyfluttered behind us in the breeze, the

grinning skulls wearing a

O look of bemused delight.

ur first obstacle was Lock andDam #1. To maintain a navigablechannel on the upper Mississippi,which would otherwise be too low inthe summer for commercial traffic, theU.S. Army Corps of Engineers built asystem of twenty-ninelocks and damsbetween Minneapolis and St. Louis.These serve as a stairway for ships tosurvive the Mississippi's 420-foot dropduring its 673-mile journey to St.Louis; below that, the river (joined by

the Missouri and then the Ohio) issufficiently deep not to require locks,and there the Corps built levees in-stead. This engineering work has al-tered the natural flow of the Missis-sippi, allowing millions of acres offormer flood plains and wetlands to beconverted into intensively cultivatedindustrial farmland, which in turnsends fertilizer- and pollutant-richrunoff from thirty-one states coursingback into the channel and down-stream. Floods are held back by levees,and the resulting pressure, like that ofa thumb pressed over the nozzle of ahose, erodes 15,000 acres of wetlandsa year from the Delta, creating anoxygen-starved "dead zone" the size ofNew Jersey each summer in the Gulf ofMexico. The Mississippi is one of themost managed, and mismanaged, riv-er systems in the world.

The upper river may be restrained bydams, but it is not without its hazards,both natural and man-made. I flippedthrough our photocopied set of chartsof the upper river, on the cover ofwhich there was a hand-drawn pictureof a squarish boat, seen from above asit travels in a circle, about to plowover a stick figure flailing in the water.Underneath was written: CIRCLE OFDEA TH.l Each page of the charts cov-ered ten miles of river, and each enu-merated a frightening array of obsta-cles. "Wing dams," long jetties of rocksthat jut out into the river to directflow toward the channel, lurked justinches below the surface, waiting totear our barrels from under us. "Stump'fields," the remnants of clear-cut for-est lands that had been drowned bythe river, appeared as cross-hatchedforbidden zones that would strand us inan enormous watery graveyard. But ofthe many things we had been warnedabout, barges were by far the most dan-gerous. Seventy-five million tons ofwheat, soybeans, fertilizer, coal-the

1 Matt explained this rather gruesome nauti-cal term: when a speedboat operator stands upand catches the throttle, he can be tossed over-board, yanking the tiller to one side. The un-manned boat, at full throttle, will then tracea wide circleand return to the same spot whereits pilot was sent overboard, running him downand causing death by hideouspropellerwounds,Although the two-mile-an-hour cruising speedof our vessel made such a scenario unlikely, thecrew decided to christen our raft the 55 Cir-cle of Death.

LETTER FROM MINNESOTA 57

bulk produce of mining and industri-al agriculture-are shipped by bargealong the upper river every year. Astandard fifteen-barge tow, three hun-dred yards in length, can carry thefreight equivalent of 870 semi trucks.They are as large as a high-rise build-ing laid on its side, and about as easyto steer. A tow plying the river underfull steam can take as long as a mileand a half to slide to a stop,plowing over anything in itspath. The Lyndon Johnsonsputtering out in the naviga-tion channel while a tow boredown on us was not somethingI wished to contemplate.

As if reading my thoughts,just yards from the mouth ofthe lock chamber, the motorcoughed a few times and thenquit. We spun in place, andMatt flew down the ladderfrom the top deck to try to getthe engine started. "Shit, shit,shit!;' he yelled. "I forgot tomix the oil in with the gas!"The old two-stroke lubricateditself with an oil-gas mix, andwe had very nearly blown theengine by running straight gasthrough it. Matt popped opena bottle of oil and sloshed itinto the gas, measuring by eye.The rest of the crew scrambledfor our canoe paddles, hackingat the water futilely to try to guide theraft into the lock. Matt barked ordersthat no one heeded, and the general re-sponse of the crew (myself included) toour first emergency was unrestrainedpanic. Finally, after loud cursing andmany wheezing turns of the starter,the engine roared to life, leaving anoily rainbow on the water and a cloudof blue smoke in its wake.

"That's fucking great," said Matt."Dead fish and dead Iraqis."

The lock loomed ahead of us, andwe slid into its chamber, cutting theengine and bumping up against theconcrete retaining wall. A lock work-er walked along the wall to us andthrew down ropes to keep the raft inplace. I had hoped he'd be excited atour arrival, or at least amused, but hehad the world-weary countenance of aman who had seen all things that float,and our jerry-built vessel of scrap lum-ber and barrels was insufficient to im-

58 HARPER·S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2008

press him. I asked him what otherstrange things had passed through hislock. A guy came through rowing araft of lashed-together logs just lastyear, he said. I realized that we werejust the latest in a long line of fools,and not even the most hard-core.

Behind us, the door to the chamberswung silently shut, and like a rubberduck in a draining bathtub we began

the desolate set of a horror movie.Chris rode his bike off to search dump-sters, and the rest of us carried the gascans ashore to fill them up. Havingcovered barely ten miles in about thetime it would take to walk that dis-tance, we had already used up an enor-mous amount of gas. While the Lyn-don Johnson got slightly better mileagethan, say, an Abrams tank, it was

nowhere near as fuel-efficientas a Hummer. This appallingcarbon footprint aside, atthree dollars a gallon our mea-ger gas budget would be eatenup before we got out of theTwin Cities. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggest-ed that it would take some-where near $5,000 worth ofgas to make it the wholelength of the river. Matt,however, felt no guilt aboutthis use of fossil fuels. "I figuresince I never use gas the restof the year,. it all balances out.We'll make it. We're gonnabust our asses, get some worksomewhere, do some scams,look for a Wal-Mart."

Wal-Mart was frequentlyinvoked by Matt as a source ofalmost limitless materialbounty, a natural resource asrich as the midwestern prairiesits parking lots had buried.

Enormous and ubiquitous, the mega-stores offered almost everything weneeded to survive. Aside from outrighttheft (the most straightforward pro-curement strategy), there were thewonders ofWal-Mart dumpsters, over-flowing with inventory that was slight-ly damaged or barely past its expirationdate. There were also a wide variety of"return scams" as elaborate as anythingthe Duke and the Dauphin could havepulled over on the rubes. "Receipt div-ing" involved plucking a crumpled re-ceipt from an ashtray by the exit, en-tering the store, selecting the sameobject off the shelves, and promptlyreturning it, receipt in hand, for storecredit. Another ruse involved findinggoods in the trash (a bag of chips, per-haps), to which a PAID sticker had beenaffixed. This sticker was removed andplaced on a small, expensive object,which was then returned for store cred-it; and since many of the larger Wal-

sliding down along the algae-slick wallas millions of gallons of water drainedinto the next stage of the river. With-in a few minutes we had dropped thir-ty feet, and the top of the chamberglowed distantly as if we were at thebottom of a well. With the majesty ofgreat cathedral doors swinging open, acrack appeared between the gates ofthe lock, and the murky green watersof the chamber joined the still watersof the lower river, glinting in the sun-light. Matt whooped, to no one in

particular. New Orleans,rJ"'" here we come.

. .l.he first night, still in St. Paul, wepulled up to a hobo jungle, a firepit-pocked stand of trees below a rustingrailroad bridge where in the past bothMatt and Cody had waited to catchfreight trains. The jungle sits on landthat floods out yearly. Wrack and trashwere scattered about; it looked like

Marts in the Midwest had their owngas stations, a half-eaten bag of chipscould thereby be converted into a largesupply of free gasoline. Or so my crew-mates told me. We paid retail for ournew load of gas, hauling the heavy jer-ricans a mile through the woods towhere the raft was moored. I was be-ginning to realize that there was a con-siderable amount of heavy lifting in-volved in dropping out.Chris returned with a garbage bag

full of cold pepperoni pizza slices, a newstaple of our shipboard diet, removedfrom under the heat lamps of a conve-nience store and discarded only hoursbefore. We all dug in to the congealingbounty. Chris's dumpstering was a goodsupplement to our ship's stores, whichwere stacked against a wall in stolenmilk crates, a depressing harvest fromcommunity food banks: government-commodity-labeled cans of cheese soup,string beans, creamed corn; bags ofgeneric Froot Loops, some Kool-Aidpowder to fend off scurvy. The crew'sdietary ethos was what is commonlyreferred to as "freeganism," whereinfoodstuffs that are about to be thrownaway are rescued from the waste streamand thereby ethically cleansed. An es-timated $75 billion worth of food isthrown out yearly in America, and itdoesn't take a great leap of logic toconnect the desire to live sustainablywith the almost limitless supply of freefood that overflows the nation's dump-sters. Thus the opportunivore can for-age either overtly or covertly, by askingup front or diving out back."We're going to dumpster every-

thing we can," Matt told me. "Plusfood shelves, donations, and youshould apply for food stamps the firstchance you get downriver." I'll eat outof the trash as happily as the next guy,I told him, but I didn't feel right ap-plying for food stamps; this set Matt off .on a series of gibes about my "so-calledjournalistic ethics." Matt was happyenough to sustain himself on the de-tritus of a wo~ldhe saw as careening to-ward self-destruction, and equally hap-py to scam a government he despised."I'm glad everyone's so wasteful,"

he told me. "It supports

I my lifestyle."

n the middle of a watery expanseof grain elevators and moored barges

LETTER FROM MINNESOTA 59

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to the south of St. Paul, our engineemitted a tubercular hack and diedagain. There was a stiff headwind,and the ungainly raft acted as a sail,dragging us against the current andback upriver. We paddled and poledourselves to shore and tied up just be-fore the skies opened up with a thun-derstorm, and we huddled inside thecabin, soaked, as the robot voice onthe weather radio warned of dime-size hail carpet bombing the TwinCities. Matt stomped around theboat, dripping and furious, yelling atthe disorder in the galley and thegeneral uselessness of the crew. Mostorders were monosyllabic, the com-monest being "Move!" Rain hissedon the plywood roof of the cabin,thunder rattled the windows, light-ning tore the air. The flashes burnedphotonegatives of the landscape ontomy vision. The. river had removedits bucolic mask to show a darker,wilder aspect.The mood was grim. Cody stared off

into the distance every time he hearda train whistle in the nearby yard,freights being his preferred mode oftransport. We spent two nights tied upalong the rocky, wave-swept shoreline,the roof leaking in half a dozen places,with every pot in the galley set out tocatch the water. The cabin became in-creasingly claustrophobic, smelling ofsweat and mildew and cigarette smokeand rotting produce. I waded ashoreand walked through a shuttered suburbin the pouring rain to buy spark plugs.In the hardware store I overheard thetwo tellers discussing a care packageto be sent to their coworker, now aroof gunner in Iraq. Would the puddingseparate in the heat? Would applesaucebe better? Our drifting life felt meanand meaningless in comparison. Iwalked back down to the river in therain. We changed the fouled plugs andlimped on again under bleak gray skies.Matt had arrived at a magic solution

to the fuel dilemma, a way to absolveourselves of complicity in the Iraq warand reduce the Circle of Death's carbonfootprint. We were going to drift to NewOrleans, taking advantage of the grav-itational pull of a quarter-mile drop overthe 2,000 miles of river. I pointed out thefolly of this. There were twenty-eightdams still in front of us, slowing the riv-er down. A breath of headwind would

60 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2008

-------------------

hold the raft in place as if we haddropped anchor. He dismissedmy doubtswith a sneer. Matt was even harder onChris, upbraiding the young biker forhis lackadaisical work ethic and enor-mous appetite. As a dumpster-diver,Chris had proven to be overeager, andour galleywas perpetually full of overripefruit and moldering doughnuts. And hewas always eating, even during crises:hewould have been grazing the buffet onthe sinking Titanic. Matt barked ordersat him constantly and generally con-sidered him to be an oogle.?Twain, writing in Life on the Missis-

sippi of his days as a cub pilot, describesa certain Pilot Brown: a "horse-faced,ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling,fault-hunting, mote-magnifyingtyrant." In a section unsubtly headed"I Want to Kill Brown," Twain dealswith his hatred of his superior by lyingin his bunk and imagining dispatching. the tyrant "not in old, stale, com-monplace ways, but in new and pic-turesque ones,-ways that were some-times surprising for freshness of designand ghastliness of situation and envi-ronment." At night, swarmed by mos-quitoes on the beached raft, I enter-tained some of the same fantasies thatsustained a young Sam Clemens, feel-ing the fellowship of oppressionthrough all the years that had passeddown the river. There is a long recordof psychotic sea captains in literature,and Matt, by historic standards, wassomewhat less formidable than Bligh,or Queeg, or Ahab. He was a bit hardto take seriously, even when -helaunched into a tirade. But he was stillprofoundly unpleasant to live with andsail under on a ten-by-twenty-four,foot floating platform. I became in-creasingly of the opinion that Matt re-sembled a romantic anarcho-buccaneerless than a narcissistic sociopath. Per-haps he had traveled alone too often,depending on no one but himself, to bea leader of others. And this, I had cometo realize, was what a functioning

crew-even of anar-" T chists-demanded.

, ~ passed at long last beyond theTwin Cities, below the flaring stacks ofan oil refinery that looked like a

2 A poser; a street rat without street smarts;the lowest caste in the nominally non-hierarchical gutterpunk social hierarchy.

postapocalyptic fortress, a column oforange flame swaying in the night sky.Matt cut the engine and drifted when-ever the wind allowed, and our paceslowed to a crawl. We averaged a hand-ful of miles a day. A drop of water fromthe Mississippi's source at Lake Itascawill flow down along the river's lengthto the Gulf of Mexico in ninety days.In 2002, an overweight and lanolin-slathered Slovenian named MartinStrel swam the entire length in. justover two months. It would have takenus at least nine months at the rate wewere drifting. I made a game of watch-ing dog walkers on the shore outpaceus. Bloated catfish floated past belly-up, bound to reach New Orleans longbefore we would. Hundreds of spider-webs garlanded the raft; they drapedacross the curved necks of the lawnflamingos and between the spokes ofthe ship's wheel. I spent hours on thefront-porch swing, chain-smoking likea mental patient at the dayroom win-dow. I learned quickly not to bring upthe glacial pace of our progress towardthe Gulf."This is my boat, and my trip, and

nobody is going to tell me what to do,"Matt snapped. "If it takes two years, ittakes two years. I won't be rushed."The paradox of Matt's position had be-come clear to all but him: by buildinga raft to escape the strictures of society,he had made himself a property own-er, and subject to the same impulses ofpossessiveness and control as any sub-urban homeowner with a mortgage anda hedge trimmer. He was as much aslave to civilization as the locked anddammed river on which we drifted, andfar less likely to break loose.Meanwhile, a shipboard romance

had blossomed between Matt andKristina. None of us talked about it,though it was hard not to notice, asevery movement of their accouple-ments in the captain's quarters wastelegraphed through the entire raft inminute detail. Although Matt showedher more deference than 'he extendedto anyone else, he still condescended toher, barked orders at her, got jealousover phantoms. She told me she washaving fun and wanted to stay on theriver as long as she could stand to bewith him. I pointed out that it wasn'ta particularly healthy way to have arelationship, and she laughed. "It's kind

of ironic that he's so big on animal lib-eration and can't stand people," shesaid. "It's because animals can't con-tradict him."

As if to augur my own psychologicaldissolution, the raft itself was fallingapart. The heavy oak transom to whichthe ZOO-poundengine had been boltedwas pulling out from the raft's woodenframe. A little more torque from the en-gine and it would rip itself right off, sink-ing to the bottom of the channel like ananvil. Thrown up against the shore bywakes, we tied up to a tree outside thetown of Hastings, Minnesota, whereMatt told us we would need to stay forseveral days to fix the broken frame. Heordered me to find a Wal-Mart and re-turn with a little electric trolling motor,which could help steer the drifting raftor pull it out of the way of a tow. Iwalked up through Hastings, down themain street of curio shops and antiquesstores, past the end of the town side-walks, and out along the highway.

One can bemoan the death of theAmerican downtown at the hands ofexurban big-box stores, but to truly un-derstand the phenomenon, try reach-ing one without a car. It was a triple-digit day, the heat shimmering up fromthe softened blacktop, the breeze hot asa hair dryer. I tried to hitchhike, stick-ing my thumb out as I stumbled back-ward down the road. Cars flew by, theirdrivers craning to look or studiouslyavoiding eye contact. I wasn't a very ap-pealing passenger: I hadn't showeredor shaved in the week since we'd leftMinneapolis, and had worn the sameclothes throughout. I had a permanent"dirt tan," a thick layer of grime that noamount of swimming in the river couldfully remove. My black T-shirt hadbeen tom by brambles and faded bythe sun, and a camouflage trucker's hatcovered my matted hair as I trudgedfor miles along the grassy shoulder.Shame eroded; I didn't mind if I wasseen peering into dumpsters behindconvenience stores, looking for card-board to make a hitchhiking sign. Butstill no one stopped.

After walking for almost an hour, Ireached the edge of a wide sea of black-top, and walked across to the vast shedof a building that wavered on its edgelike a mirage. Enormous doors slidopen, and arctic air engulfed me,pulling me into the glorious air-

conditioned acreage of the largest Wal-Mart I had ever seen. I pushed a cartthrough the aisles, picking out atrolling motor and a deep-cycle ma-rine battery to run it. No one paid memuch mind, not the too-young cou-ples arguing in Housewares, not thecarbuncular stock boys tallying in-ventory on the vast shelves. As I rolledup to the counter, the checkout girl of-fered some scripted pleasantries, askedif I had a club card. She rang up thetrolling motor, a large oblong boxsticking out of the cart, but didn't no-tice the $70 battery lying under it.

All I had to do was keep smiling and.push the cart straight out the door,across the parking lot, back to the riv-er, and the battery would be mine. Whowould miss it-my seventy dollars, fromWal-Mart's billions? Matt would havewalked out proudly, or bluffed his wayout if confronted by security. He wouldcertainly have called me a coward forpassing up the chance. I told the girlabout the battery, and she rang it up,and I struggled back across the sea of as-phalt in the blazing sun.

When I returned to the raft, whichwas tied up amid bleached driftwoodand plastic flotsam on the shoreline, Ifound Matt waist-deep in the water,rebuilding the transom, and Cody,drunk on malt liquor, busying himselfby stuffing his gear into his backpack.I asked him where he was going.

"I don't really feel like going half amile an hour along the river withpeople I don't" really get along with.I'd rather go fast as hell on the train.Go work the beet harvest, make fourgrand, and go to India with my girl-friend." On the far side of the raft,Matt said nothing, only scowled andhammered on the boat. "Matt's a fas-cist," he whispered to me. "If I stay onthe boat, I won't be able to be hisfriend anymore." The raft, which forHuck and Jim supplied the only spacewhere they could be friends, hadwrought quite the opposite effect onour crew.

With no goodbyes, Cody threwhis skateboard and pack to the shoreand jumped after them, walking offin the direction of the railroad tres-tle that spanned the river down-stream. Half an hour later, a pair ofBurlington Northern engines pullinga mixed string of grainers and box-

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cars rattled over the bridge, boundfor Minneapolis, and I wondered,

with envy, whether Cody

D had clambered aboard.

ay after day I studied the chartsand traced our snail's progress. Eachmarked buoy passed like a minutehand making its Wayacross the face ofa schoolroom clock. The time, thedate, all the measures of normal lifewere stripped of meaning. But justwhen boredom threatened to over-whelm the senses, the river would of-fer up some bit of unimpeachablebeauty. Bald eagles circled overheadand landed in snags to watch us withwide yellow eyes. Deer startled fromthe shore, crashed into the understo-ry, white tails flashing. Opalescentsunsets silhouetted herons at dusk.The great birds paced their own glassyreflections before pulling up like brush-strokes to stand in the shallows of thefar shore.

Late one night we motored along astretch of the dark river and pulled upat Latsch Island, a houseboat commu-nity in Winona, Minnesota. Severalhundred young anarchists from aroundthe country had train-hopped andhitchhiked there to attend the annualevent known as the Crime thIne Con-vergence. Crime thIne is more a mind-set than an actual organization, but itsstated credo is essentially anticapitalistand antiauthoritarian, serving as acatchall for a host of other social andpolitical viewpoints, from post-left an-archism to situation ism to violent in-surrection against the state. A largegroup gathered on the darkened beachwhen we arrived, and cheered the raft,strung with Christmas lights, as webeached it at full throttle.

I wandered around the encampmentthe next day. Grimy and feral-looking,the Crimethlnc kids squatted in smallgroups around a clearing. The campsitewas overgrown with poison ivy, andmany legs were covered with weepingred blisters. It was the first time in weeksI hadn't felt self-conscious about be-ing filthy, but now I felt self-consciousabout not being punk enough, and Iworried I was being eyed with suspi-cion. Almost none of the kids wereolder than twenty-five, as if there werea sell-by date on radical social philos-ophy, a legal age limit after which one

62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2008

must surrender lofty ideals and shave offall dreadlocks. Crime thine's core func-tion is the creation of propaganda,mainly in the form of books and zines,and they held a swap of such anarcho-classics as Days of War, Nights of Love;Evasion; and Fighting for Our Lives. Oneof my favorite free pamphlets was"Wasted Indeed: Anarchy &Alcohol,"a searing indictment of the revolution-sapping properties of the demon drink,which offered potent slogans: "Sedi-tion not Sedation!" "No cocktail butthe molotov cocktail!" "Let us brewnothing but trouble!"

The Crimethlnc kids were in themiddle of several days of self-organizedworkshops, seminars, and discussionsranging from the mutualist bankingtheories of the nineteenth-century an-archist philosopher Pierre-JosephProudhon, to an introductory practi-cum on lock-picking, to a class on mak-ing one's own menstrual pads. Onewell-attended discussion was on con-sent ("Not the absence of no, but thepresence of yes!"), and it seemed tounderscore the Crimethlnc goal ofreevaluating the rules and customs ofsociety and creating new ones. Con-sent was central to the idea of func-tioning anarchism, which they believedto be the purest and most direct formof democracy. Everyone ate as a group,and a huge cauldron of dumpster-divedgruel bubbled over a campfire, tendedby a grubby-handed group of chefs dic-ing potatoes and onions on a piece ofcardboard on the ground. Huck mayhave been right that a "barrel of oddsand ends" where the "juice kind ofswaps around" makes. for better vict-uals, but it occurred to me that the rev-olution may well get dysentery.

Anarchism has not made much of amark on American politics since 1901,when Leon Czolgosz assassinated Pres-ident McKinley; but neither has it en-tirely vanished, and running throughthe American ideal of the rugged in-dividualist is a deep vein of sympathyfor the dream of unmediated liberty.What would happen, I had often won-dered, if their anarchist revolution evergot its chance? If everyone just up andquit, and did exactly as he or shepleased in an orgy of liberated desire?Who would keep the lights on? Whowould make the ciprofloxacin or, forthat matter, the calamine lotion? What

kind of world would the sun rise on af-ter that victory?

But the revolution hadn't happened,and it probably never would. The kidswere naive fantasists, but I could seetheir basic point: there was a hugeamount wrong with America and theworld, from impending environmentalcollapse to widespread sectarian war-fare to a real lack of social justice andequality. Crimethlnc's adherents hadcome together there because they want-ed to live their lives as some sort of so-lution. They saw "the revolution" notas a final product but as an ongoingprocess; they wanted not just to destroythe capitalist system but to create some-thing livable in its place. I didn't wantto smash the state, but I realized that inmy adulthood I had faced those samedispiriting questions: How should welive in a world so full of waste and de-struction and suffering? What were the"solutions" that the inebriated oracleinsisted I find, that first dark night onthe riverbank? I didn't know if I hadever been one of these kids or if I hadjust been playacting, wishing I werean idealist and acting as if it were so.There were solutions, I felt sure. Butthey were not to be found there,

adrift, disconnected

W from the world.

e floated ever southward,through rolling farmland and beneathchalky bluffs, past tiny towns clingingto the riverbank, the raft bobbing likea cork in the wakes of tow barges and jetskis. We were averaging about sevenmiles of drifting a day, and there werestill more than 1,600 miles of river be-tween us and the Gulf. Sometimes I'dlook up from a book after twenty min-utes to see we hadn't moved. Matt be-came more aggressive and bossy as thedays passed, exploding over tiny things:an open dish-soap cap, a pot of left-overs uncovered, an empty matchbooknot thrown out. A week after Cody left,Chris had unloaded his bicyclefromthe top deck and in a single afternoonpedaled back the mere fifty miles wehad come from Minneapolis; and withboth of them gone, the brunt of theabuse fell on me. We got into an argu-ment about money one night, as I hadfinanced pretty much every purchaseof un-dumpsterable or otherwise freelyprocurable necessity for the past sever-

r

al weeks. Matt had seventeen dollarsto his name and wanted money to tidehim over until he took a break fromthe river and went to the beet harvest.I told him I didn't want to be his banker,and that he was clearly resourcefulenough to figure things out just fine.

After that, Matt refused to talk tome at all. He and Kristina spent theirdays playing cards and dominoes, andI either took shifts at the steering wheelor sat on the porch, trying to read. Wedrifted in a heavy silence for two days,passing Victory, Wisc;onsin, and at lastmaking it out of Minnesota and intoIowa, the river unraveling before usinto a swampy waste of braided chan-nels and black backwaters, wideningout at times into half-submerged fieldsof rotting stumps.

We tied up for a night at a dockabove the Black Hawk Bridge, and thetires of tractor-trailers moaned on itssteel grating, ghostlike as they flew overthe river. I walked up the hill above theriver to use a pay phone at a smokybar, the regulars hunched over theirstools like heartbroken gargoyles.WhenI came outside I saw Matt and Kristinasurrounded by local police next to aconvenience-store dumpster, framedin a circle of streetlight. They had beenfishing out some food, and the manag-er had called the cops on them. Butafter checking their I.D.'s, the police letthem go. Matt walked back to the boat,and Kristina and I went for a drink atthe bar before returning to the samedumpster, filling a bag with cold cheese-burgers and pizza slices. The petty au-thoritarianism of the police had beenconfounded, but it didn't feel like muchof a victory. Staring out at the neatlamp lit lawns of Lansing, Iowa, I feltweary of being a stranger. J told Kristi-na I had to leave.

As much as I had wanted to see theraft down the entire river, as much asI had wanted the strength to quiteverything and live on river time, tosee Hannibal and Cairo and Memphisand New Madrid, I couldn't do it. Iwoke up at sunrise, packed my bag,and sat on the dock in the dawn glow.Matt and Kristina were asleep insidehis quarters. Mist rose off the river,which wound south past dark bankshung with wisps of fog. I heard Mattstir; he squinted and grimaced as hestepped out onto the porch and saw

me sitting on my pack on the dock.We seemed to understand each other.

Kristina undid the lines from thecleats, and Matt pushed away ftom thedock. With a wave they motored outinto the middle of the channel andthen cut the engine, catching the cur-rent and drifting along to wherever theriver would bear them. I sat watching forwhat seemed like hours before the Cir-cle of Death rounded a far bend and van-ished. I shouldered my pack, walked upto the bridge, and began hitchhikingeast toward home, borne along by kind-ly strangers. Waiting for a lift at sunset,I found myself on a stretch of blacktoprolling to the horizon through a land-scape of wheat fields and grain silos.Swarms of grasshoppers flitted aroundme, flashing golden in the fading light,leaping out of the fields at the high-way's edge. Alone in the middle of thecountry, far from home but headingthere, I felt more ftee than I had sinceleaving Minneapolis, since I'd first seteyes on the Mississippi. But the groundstill seemed to rock below my feet, as

though a ghost of the river

K rolled beneath me.

ristina sent me occasional up-dates, but soon she left the raft herselfand went off traveling on her own.Two months later I got an email fromMatt. With astonishing persistence, hehad made it all the way to St. Louis,through the entire lock-and-dam sys-tem, nearly seven hundred miles downto the wild reaches of the lower river,where the current, freed at last fromits restraints, flowed unhindered to theGulf. Drifting through St. Louis, theraft had been hemmed in between amoored barge and a pair of tugboats. Athird tug had pulled through, creatinga huge bow wash that sent water rush-ing sidelong into the cabin. Inundated,the Circle of Death had keeled over andsunk, almost immediately, to the bot-tom of the Mississippi. Matt, barefootin only shorts and a Tvshirt, had nar-rowly escaped drowning by swimmingto the barge and climbing out. All hisclothing, his journals, photographs,identification-everything but his lifehad been lost, and he found himself ina place he had often been: broke andhomeless, coming ashore in a strangecity. The river, of course, continuedon without him. -

LETTER FROM MINNESOTA 63

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