Roughing It Dale Williams Barrigar
From the ages of twelve until sixteen, I was raised on the banks of the Mississippi River.
I first got truly intoxicated via alcohol on the banks of the river. (Alcohol would later become a major passion, until I had to give it up.)
I first tasted cigarettes on the banks of the river. (Same.)
I first tasted the sacred ganja (weed), too, on the banks of the Mississippi River. (Also a major passion, not given up so far as of this writing, except in the smoking form; medical edibles are stronger and more long-lasting anyway…)
I first held the hand of a girl on the banks of the river.
I knew a boy who was raped, robbed, and murdered by two other boys, who I also knew, brothers, who people called “white trash,” his body dumped into the river.
I was first shot at on the banks of the river (the one and only time so far, although a few people have threatened to do so since then, both those with guns and those without) which is a long and involved story all unto itself.
We lived a couple of miles inland. My friends and I would go down to the river whenever we could, which was frequently. Exactly like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (which I didn’t know at the time), my friends and I would sneak out of our parents’ houses at night, sometimes out of the window exactly like Huck, to go roaming around our small-town world under cover of dark, in the night, the fabulous night, when the ghosts, the angels, the wild animals, and the beautiful mermaids swimming in the foamy river waves come out, or you wonder if you’ve seen them at least.
We sometimes passed the Lincoln-Douglas Debate statue on our way down to the miles-wide river. One time, some friends of mine climbed all over the statue, which I didn’t do, not because I wasn’t a climber, I was a climber, of trees, cliffs, bridges, public buildings, water towers, fences, and sometimes up and down the outside walls of my parents’ house when getting in and out of the window at night without them knowing.
I didn’t climb on the Lincoln statue because I respected Honest Abe, and what he stood for, too much. I’d first learned about him back in Michigan from Mrs. and Mr. Murphy, our next-door neighbors, who had three framed photos alongside one another on their mantle above the fireplace in the early 1970s: Lincoln, John. F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
When we moved to Illinois, I was instantly aware that we were entering the Land of Lincoln because of them. His leftover presence or memory bathed the whole land for me in a sort of immortal or legendary aura, or glow. He was the reason I would join the Blue Devil high school wrestling team here in Illinois, because I knew Old Honest Abe himself had been a wrestler, an individual who took on the bad guys even then.
One of my earliest memories is of crossing the river, in a car, on a bridge. We still lived in Michigan then and were on a family trip to the West. Dad was driving, and mom was pointing out the window, explaining why the river was so legendary.
The deep country in that part of Illinois surrounding America’s largest river is a mythological land that is yet unknown to many. Hilly, extremely rural, filled with cliffs, ridges, forests, prairies, cornfields, eagles, deer, wild cats, wild dogs, and hogs, a place where you can easily get lost for hours on the back roads and not see another single human soul, a land of tiny, sleepy villages at crossroads with one person sitting in a chair, mysterious isolated farm houses and barns back by themselves in the hollows, and small family cemeteries on hilltops like something out of “Wuthering Heights,” an area where the people almost seem to speak with a deep southern accent, a remote, vast region bordering the unconquerable river that few tourists or outsiders ever venture to or stop at, but where you can sometimes see travelers like hobos wandering up and down the lanes or waiting with their bottles and bags to jump a train, this part of Illinois still has an aura about it that conjures up an American past straight out of a Mark Twain story, large-haired, large-eye-browed, large-mustachioed, cigar-chomping, corncob-pipe-holding, whiskey-swilling, covered-in-newspaper-ink, laughing uproariously, raging Mark Twain.
While we visited Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s home town, many times, like everyone else in the area, I never read Mark Twain’s stories, essays or novels when we lived along the river. In a fit of homesickness not long after we moved to Chicago when I was sixteen, I picked up “Huckleberry Finn” on a lonely summer afternoon and was suddenly transported back to the river country, where my best friend had been black, just like Huck and Jim. Their escape down the river forever after would stand for the longing for, and movement toward, freedom in my mind.
William Dean Howells called Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Twain, “the Lincoln of our literature.” Lincoln, Twain and THE LAND equaled THE RIVER in my mind, the strong brown god, as T.S. Eliot from Saint Louis, Missouri, called it, and the river itself equaled freedom, the cardinal virtue in the U.S. of A.’s finest idealist notions of itself. ILLINOIS, the middle of the country and the middle of nowhere, is America itself, boiled down.
As another great and legendary, iconic Middle American, Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, has it about his youth in Minnesota: “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.”
“FREEDOM!” as Mel Gibson’s version of William Wallace, eternal Scottish rebel, a hero to both Twain and Lincoln, hollers out with his last echoing breath at the end of “Braveheart,” a great and overblown film, defying both the king and the mob, and even something else, like death itself.
Americans are good at escaping, or they used to be, just like me and my friends used to escape the comfort of our homes to go roaming where the edge of the world could be found. As Huck says at the end of his book, which he wrote himself, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest…” Now we inhabit the territory of The Mind, and lighting out means keeping your brain (and spirit) as free as possible from the disease of modern life, even (or especially) when they’re coming to get you.
Twain himself had become a kind of early conscientious objector, when he defected from the Confederate army after his very first taste of real violence, which he documents in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed,” and “Roughing It.”
“I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating,” he says about his decision to bow out of the army, avoid the carnage he now knew was coming for sure, and soon, and flee to the West.
“In this country, on Saturday, everyone was struck dumb, and saw at first only deep below deep, as he meditated on the ghastly blow,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination.
The paradoxical actions and reactions regarding freedom of Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, one running for his life, then writing about it, as an example to all of us about how you can escape the system if you try; the other refusing guard and accepting the death he knew was coming for him like it had come for so many (and which comes to all of us late or soon), and which had been shown to him in a dream…are both embodied in trips they took down The River. Lincoln saw slaves on the auction block after a raft trip down The River to New Orleans, and told a friend, “If I ever get a chance to hit slavery, I’ll hit it hard.” Fifty years later, Twain went back into the past and wrote a story about a small “white trash” white boy and a good-hearted, good-looking, and wise, black man becoming the best of friends, all by themselves, at the bottom of society, on a raft trip down The River.
“The brown god / is almost forgotten / by the dwellers in cities,” as T.S. Eliot knew; but “the river is within us…”
literally stories 
Wonderful ♥️
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Thanks so much for reading, so glad you enjoyed this! Dale
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Dale
Truly a remarkable piece. The way the River itself is the connecting thread between yourself and the past, with Twain and Lincoln. Beautifully done without a gram of flab.
It’s sad that you can go coast to coast and see nothing, with such wonders stii in existence.
Great work!
Leila
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Leila
Thanks for inspiring, understanding, and publishing this essay.
I forgot to mention in the essay that I almost drowned in the River – twice.
Also knew a man who made his living pulling gigantic catfish out of their holes with his gloved hands (and selling the fish). He drove a motorcycle, carried a flask and a pistol, chewed tobacco, and lived in a tiny shack on stilts along the banks of the River. He was half black, some white, and part Native American. His name was Gordo.
A curious nature fact is that bull sharks can easily survive in fresh water and they sometimes swim upriver from the Gulf of Mexico as far as Illinois – and have attacked people in the River.
We used to have late-night bonfires along the banks of the River with the plentiful driftwood that was everywhere.
“WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS” by Led Zeppelin was one of our favorite songs!!
Thanks again, L.A.!
Dale
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Excellent Dale
I imagine the river could easily lead you to a book of essays!
Leila
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Leila
As Shakespeare said, “Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, by paved fountain, or by rushy brook, or on the beached margent of the sea, to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind.”
Thanks for encouraging the writing of a book of essays by yours truly!
Coleridge called all of his poems and essays “To Wordsworth” (he gave them other titles later, for variety’s sake).
Dale
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A fascinating glimpse of the life and times of old and newer writers and inhabitants of your country. An entertaining read. Thank you. dd
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Thank you, Diane!
I hang my head in shame for the things my country is doing now, and it’s vastly sad that the “Evil Ones” (as Led Zeppelin called these eternal creatures) get all the press and the good ones, both past and present, are ignored and forgotten, from coast to coast, in the good ol’ USA. It’s also true that fine readers from the UK always understand American writing far better than Americans do (at least until long after the Americans who wrote it are dead).
As far as good news, I can say that the current governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, who also happens to be a billionaire, is a GOOD man who’s doing everything he can to stop the Nazis from taking over the USA. Hope is the thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson said…
Thanks again, Diane!
Sincerely,
Dale
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Dale, you write about a part of America few foreign visitors (like me) ever see. And in so doing, you show to foreign readers (like me) how much writers like Twain owe to the place they were born and raised in. A fine essay on the sense of place. Thanks, Mick
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Thank you, Mick!
Coming from a great writer of place such as yourself, this is a great compliment!
I have two other essays on locations in the “fly over” country of the USA that will hopefully be brought to fruition by the “other me” who does all the writing (I’m too lazy to get much done on my own). One is on the Great Lakes; another on the High Plains of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Also one essay on Anchorage, Alaska, where I spent a week drinking in the bars where the sailors and the Native American Ladies of the Evening hang out (being platonic friends with all of the above and nothing more).
Dale
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Hi Dale
Great-great piece!
It brought up a lot of feelings. Almost had me crying on this one. Thinking about Lincoln and the poem by Emerson. The river and life passing by like the “Brown God,” of TS Elliot. So cool that you brought T.S. Elliot back from Britain to the Mississippi. I’ve had the impression TS Elliot was a stuffy banker, but this changes my perception of him. Gives him back his Americana. We could use more of that, just now.
When writing gets inside your soul that is quite an accomplishment.
The coming of age on the river banks, alcohol and ganja. Evil too, like how the beauty of life runs parallel to this shadow of darkness.
What I love about this kind of writing is–it takes you to a place–and you want to go there some day. I’m from Indiana, but these places you describe, seem like a world away. And it’s not that far! This is what I so enjoy about Chekhov he creates a world that can still be accessed, It’s recorded so well, it’s alive. That’s how this is. This is a living story.
Mark Twain is so great! Interesting how you lived a life of Huckleberry Finn and Jim, without even knowing it, then getting to read your own story on the river! On a side note there’s a story by M.T. called “Cannibals in a Car.” It’s a good one.
And Abe Lincoln–His trip down the river–seeing the slaves. A turning point in history as God may have sent him there. (Is there any doubt). I like the mention of wrestling, being a school wrestler myself. I’m not sure people know how strong Lincoln was. He wasn’t just as wise and solemn as his statue(s). He was a real person with legendary physical strength. The doctors said he looked worn out in the face from the terrible burden he carried, but his body was very strong at his death. He would have taken Booth apart in a fair fight. I liked how a neighbor taught you a respect for Lincoln. While others, like apes, climbed on his statue. That is a fine juxtaposition of decency shown in writing not told. It’s Chekhov’s, “Moon glinting off shards of glass.”
There is a lot of adventure in this retelling of life. There is always a melancholy that hits the heart in a coming of age story, if it’s done well. And so I say, “Well done!”
I’m glad I started my morning by reading this! Great way to start the day!
Christopher
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Ananias
Thanks very much for highlighting the emotion/al aspect of this essay. Some of those friends I used to hang out with are no longer with us, and my mother is also gone, not to mention my youth (well, at least physically, at 58), so the sadness of this piece, beneath it all, rings loud and clear for me as well. And, we in the USA have so many heroes we could be focusing on, not only Twain and Lincoln, while instead the vast majority of the population is utterly fascinated with, and fooled by, those who Led Zeppelin called The Evil Ones: the eternal Enemy, the Slanderer, some folks just call him The Devil.
Your close and intimate knowledge of Lincoln is reassuring, and inspiring. I believe you – Someone sent him here. I will check out “Cannibals in a Car” by Twain – I don’t know that one.
One thing I left out of the essay (I don’t know why) is about a friend of mine who committed suicide with a shotgun, alone in a deer camp, on the banks of the river about fifteen years ago. He was a wealthy small-town lawyer. He and I had always been fans of both Hemingway, and Hunter S. Thompson (who died in 2005). I hadn’t seen him in person in decades, but we had kept in touch via email. You always wonder why they didn’t contact you first – maybe you could have talked them out of it. It has always haunted me that he went back to the banks of the River. And used the same method as EH and HST.
Good thing this life isn’t really the end of anything (I don’t believe people are punished for their desperation), and I know you know that too! Thanks again for reading and responding with such understanding, creativity and knowledge. I had a feeling (and I mean this) that you had been a wrestler too.
Dale
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Dale
That’s rough about your friend. I’m sorry that happened. People are unknowable in a way like how elephants go off to die. Human beings are usually in a social discourse and when they’re not and they do some irreversible thing it’s quite baffling. A very large gap opens up. My uncle suffered depression and committed suicide. He was a well liked gentle soul. Depression is one of our family curses or just a general curse of the human race. Life can get a person down. “Born to be down,” by Local H or maybe that was just a line in it? After all as soldiers wrote on their helmets in Vietnam, “Born to die.” Life is tinctured with grave dust.
I did wrestle a bit in school. I think wrestling (The school type not WWF is like swimming, I’m sure if someone wanted to wrestle me down all those moves would kick in like instinct. The legs would kick out if they came low., or if they are standing up get them in a double leg take down. You know what I mean… You can take the boy off the mat but you can’t take the mat out of the boy (even if he’s an old man) once he learns leverage.
I always liked “The Macho Man” Randy Savage and wondered if mickey Rourke hadn’t based his character on him in “The Wrestler.” That is an absolute masterpiece!
Iv’e got a story coming out on Friday to a website near you.
Christopher
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What it is to be captivated from first line to last. All those ‘firsts’ on the banks of the River. In fact a river of an essay in that it sweeps you along, the detail incredibly evocative & the every day made mysterious – from the “land of tiny sleeping villages”, hilltop cemeteries, forests, wild dogs, eagles to those ‘Huck Finn nights’ roaming around with friends. Strikes me as that rare thing: at once lyrical & conversational, & here beautifully done; so much so admiration could tip into envy. Fascinating too on Twain himself; never heard him better conjured than he is here, “large-haired, large-eye-browed . . . whiskey-swilling, covered in newspaper-ink, laughing uproariously, raging . . . ” But then the whole piece is kind of mythically-charged, the “middle of the country and the middle of nowhere” that is Illinois no less than the River. A wonderful read, Dale.
Geraint
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Geraint
Thank you! As always, your eloquence, wisdom, and great abilities as a reader are a true blessing!
To say a few more words about the “great idea” which “Shakespeare: Made Man” gave me:
Brief sections (like nonfiction-like microfictions) on the following figures will be strung together: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and Michel de Montaigne will be strung together (in a suspenseful way) all leading up to their conflation/culmination in the appearance of the Boy Criminal and First Modern Poet (after Baudelaire), Arthur Rimbaud, on the streets of Chicago (that part will be fiction), so in that sense, other pieces of yours can also be said to have helped inspire this work in progress, which is very much in a fragmented state at this point.
I don’t know if this one will ever be finished in the right way, yet, and it will take a few months, minimum, is my guess, for this to be accomplished. I’ve found (through decades of trial and error) that once an idea occurs, it’s best to hang out with it for a while, then very much put it on the back burner for a while, too…so it can simmer and develop on its own, etc etc.
I have a habit of taking books by or about the artists I’m working on and throwing them down wherever I plan on sleeping before I drift off…hoping (in a William Butler Yeats-inspired way, perhaps) that something good from The Masters will seep into my feeble brains during Dreamland Time (and of course, one also has to read the books while awake as well, for this to work)…
Thanks again, Geraint!
Dale
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Truly a “great idea” Dale- & with an all-star cast of ‘greats.’ And obviously I appreciate it might be some while before I or anyone gets to read it.
And talking of nonfiction-like microfictions, I look forward to reading anything you might have to say on the work of Jim Morrison.
Very best,
Geraint
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Hi Geraint!
Thanks again for your further encouragement on a Jim Morrison piece of writing.
I made a leap forward on this recently when it occurred to me that this essay should focus on a single Doors song as a way of exploring Morrison’s work.
I have it narrowed down to two options at this point: either “Roadhouse Blues,” or “Riders on the Storm.” The essay won’t be only about the one song, just a way of focusing it to say more about Morrison’s work in a wider way.
Thanks again!
Dale
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Hi Dale,
A beautifully written, poignant and intertwining story.
The tone that you got throughout enhanced. It flowed like the river itself.
‘Abraham, Martin And John’ is one of my all time favourites – A simple song that tells the story about horrific and complex issues and three good men who fought them.
As always your knowledge and passion matches your skill as a writer.
Excellent my fine friend!!
Hugh
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Hugh
Thanks, as always, for being such a great Editor, Short Story Writer, and Commentator, and for creating, and dedicating yourself to, a space like LS where so much excellent creative writing can appear that might not otherwise have found a home right now! Your accomplishments on this level are second to none, beyond compare, and desperately needed in these times where The Algorithms, Obsessive Consumerism, and Advertising have so completely captured such vast, massive swaths of the Human Population, even to the point where millions of folks believe Robots can create Human Art, which they can’t, because they can’t feel pain, and that’s the Number One Requirement in creating human Beauty (and by Beauty, I also mean Ugliness, when it’s truly creative).
I know the song you’re talking about, but haven’t heard it in very many, many years. But I remember talking about this song with my mother when I was very little, as she explained it to me. No joke. Gonna check it out again today for sure!
Dale
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Having lived in Illinois most of my life, I especially appreciate this piece. Southern Illinois, with its hills and hollers and Garden of the Gods, is much different than most of the state. The references to Lincoln and Twain are woven in expertly. A very enjoyable read.
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Dear David
Thank you!
Having lived in Illinois for most of my life as well, I can say that this place has truly grown on me! Funny that yourself, Christopher J. Ananias, and me are all from “around here” (CJA not too far in Indiana).
In the last 30 years, I watched a lot of my friends move away to Florida, Arizona and Texas. Now that those places are so hot in the summertime you can’t even go outside without frying your own a–, a lot of them are moving back again. And WE have 20% of the world’s fresh water and an unbelievable amount of the very best, deepest soil on earth, plus Muddy Waters, whose art, life, and self created The Rolling Stones, Rolling Stone Magazine, and “Like a Rolling Stone” (the world’s greatest rock song) by Dylan.
The only place I would trade this place for is the Seattle area.
Dale
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Lovely work. Great weaving of ideas and themes.
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Thanks for reading and for this poetic response!! Dale
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Makes me remember my much less dramatic relationship with the Willamette and Columbia Rivers in the Specific Northwest. Old canneries long gone, the Bonneville Dam, the small Indian settlement with shacks and Cadillacs (unintended rhyme) which was later flooded, the surgeon and salmon we caught (if you want to know a weird animal look them up – can grow huge, ancient bottom feeders, can live over a hundred years and weigh up to 1800 pounds). A huge example is kept next to Bonneville Dam.
We too had a drowing in local waters. One of twins I always dislike.
Wife just read “James” and this makes me want to go back to Twain. As mentioned before, his comment about sex in heaven was not released until after his death.
Thanks Dale
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Hi Doug
Thanks for reading and sharing memories & observations of river life in the great Northwest.
Twain is so overarching as an American writer that he can sometimes briefly feel calcified or like a museum piece, until we pick up his work again and are reminded how living & alive his language always is, even when he’s at his very worst (and he wrote so much that he’s often at his worst, which he himself pointed out on more than one occasion). Leila calls him “the American Shakespeare” (another writer who was so overflowing that he was not always at his best, in truth).
Twain’s endless supply of wise sayings in the guise of pure humor is surely second to none.
Thanks again! Much appreciated.
Dale
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Lincoln’s dad treated him like a slave, that’s why he was so empathetic to the exploited. Lincoln was bound by law to live with his dad until he was 21, on that birthday, he left and never returned. He despised his father so much he refused to go to his funeral. I like this line: a land of tiny, sleepy villages at crossroads with one person sitting in a chair. Wow, interesting memories in the first part of the essay. I can see how Huck Finn would be the go-to book for a kid or teenager growing up along that river.
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Hi Harrison
Thanks for reading and commenting, as always!
Carl Sandburg called Lincoln “a long tall shadow and riddle of a man.”
I believe you’re absolutely right, Lincoln had major problems with dear old dad, so much so that he had trouble being in the same room with him, or even in the same county or state with him.
It’s also interesting to note that he had a lot of problems with his dear old wife. They say she was a manic-depressive with borderline personality disorder who did quite a lot to increase Old Honest Abe’s own tendency toward depression.
Carl Sandburg tells this little story about Lincoln and his law partner, Herndon.
Herndon was extremely helpful and friendly to the good-looking, and the wealthy, women in the town, and was also known to touch them a lot while paying lots of attention to them – on their shoulders and so forth.
Lincoln was equally friendly to ALL women – no matter what they looked like, or how much money they did or didn’t have. And he never touched any of them, but always tipped his hat to all. (And Donald Trump has the gall to compare himself to this man, and be believed by millions of people.)
Sometimes I exaggerate (in the manner of Mark Twain, without meaning to) in my writing (and life), but none of the memories in the first part of my “Roughing It” essay were exaggerated at all, not even a little bit. Thanks for calling attention to these.
Dale
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This is a wonderful piece of America as such and a reminder of the some of many great writers, who I think still deserve the title of bard, such as Twain, Whitman, Dylan, and I’d add Kerouac to that myself.
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Hi Paul
THANKS for reading and commenting!
AND, I totally agree with you 1,000%, Jack Kerouac earned himself a place at the Bard table with the others you mentioned.
Here’s a little poem by him I like which I think proves his worth (among other things):
“And the little mouse / that I killed will devour / me into its golden belly. / That little mouse was God.”
Thanks again!
Dale
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