I am reading Richard Bissell's novel High Water. The book's setting is a towboat that is shoving coal barges up the Mississippi River in the late 1940s. Some of Bissell's descriptions brought back my youthful memories of the river. Here is his description of the river smell.
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I went out and looked at the river and it was cold and gray and the fog had lifted for a while but settled down into a cold drizzle, so the islands over across the way looked hazy and pale. The decks were wet and had a dull shine to them and the river smell was strong. Unless you have ever smelled the Mississippi River you don't know what that means and no use to attempt an explanation, but she smells like islands and willows and railroad ties and mud and she smells like Minnesota and Illinois and Wisconsin and Iowa and parts of Missouri, all mixed up together. Then she smells like under a bridge, or sitting in a duck blind, and like old overalls and marine engines, and like a retriever when he is crouched shivering in the boat on the way home. She also smells like wet oilskins, coal smoke, dead catfish and buffalo and gar pike, like rotten logs and hepaticas on the hillsides, and like the whiskey breath of an old deck hand who can't quite remember where he come from.
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I can't wait to visit Davenport, Iowa this summer and fill my lungs with river air. (I mean the invigorating air at the Iowa riverbank, of course -- not the stinky Illinois-side air.)
