Down the River

by Loren K. Davidson (Ph.D., Duke University, 1959)

Inspired by Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, three young scholars decide to raft down the Mississippi River in the summer of 1957 and see for themselves what a 20 th century version of Huck’s trip would be like. Pondering over beers in a local bar the mandate to “publish or perish,” they were struck by inspiration:

“It was during some talk of the voyages of Ulysses and St. Paul, during the sipping of brown, muddy liquid, that the glistening, brown worm crawled forth, fixed itself upon our minds, and in the air of day cracked and let the double‑winged dragonfly free. One of us had lamented that the New World lacked any voyages comparable to these in speaking of the journey of our native souls, when one or perhaps it was two of us suddenly recognized in Huckleberry Finn's voyage the parallel we thought we did not have. Here was no doughty warrior, no learned evangelist, but an untutored boy, much like ourselves. And so the odyssey began, the missionary journey to convert the waterprints of Huckleberry Finn into academic gold”.

The dragon fly is Loren Davidson’s emblem in Down The River, a memoir that takes us down through relevant American history and literature, as well as down America’s great waterway.

In sharp focus, is the story of three rafters have many adventures and misadventures–whacking together a raft from a sodden old dock, and then pushing off onto a calm surface only to be suddenly embraced by a strong current taking them completely off course, and in subsequent days, being swept along through searing heat, drenching rain, wild hurricane winds, and swarms of mosquitoes. It’s about getting hung up on wing dams, about colliding, or nearly-colliding, with channel buoys or swiftly-propelled barges, about often rowing like crazy madmen to avoid some horrible unanticipated obstacle and when luck held, being saved in the nick of time by a johnboat or a lone car on a back road which just happened to be in the right place at the right time to spare them certain disaster. It’s about making arduous treks in the night searching for food, getting lost in darkness, stumbling through cornfields, or perhaps kneedeep in gumbo in ditch bottoms alongside the river, while carrying cameras, sacks of groceries, water jugs, and other purchases, and unable to find where the raft was moored, and about encountering a host of pleasant and helpful as well as unhelpful riverfolk. Also, it’s about the male menus that the three rafters devise. And sometimes, it is about the “sociable” moccasin, “the inquisitive black snake, and the agile rattler,” which wanted a lift. And it is about wondrous landscapes and sunsets, and peaceful encounters with the past, made possible only by this river At the beginning of the trip, in a wonderful allusion to Huck Finn, he writes,

“While picking up sticks for a fire, I crossed the head of the island. It was almost dark now and I looked across to Hannibal, where lights shone cheerily. I suppose my mood, like that of the gregarious Huck, should have been a little wistful, but instead, the sense of adventure, of reliving in a small way the marvelous joys of Huck's real fiction, made the contrast between my feeling and his, great. The air about me contained a host of witnesses. The real island and real Hannibal were suddenly and without effort the idyllic, fictional Eden of boyhood, and across a shining river lay St. Petersburg. Something had begun, the end of which we could not see.”

Accompanied on their raft, The Mysterious Stranger, by the lore of an assortment of travelers who preceded them in past centuries–explorers, Indians, pioneers, and military generals, artists, and novelists–the three professors are never deserted by the spirit, wisdom, and humor of Huckleberry Finn and his creator, Mark Twain. Loren K. Davidson possesses the uncanny knack of alluding to and quoting the right traveler at the right bend in the river, and weaves a gorgeous tapestry of multiple threads–the personal with the scholarly. With its breadth of knowledge and profound human insights, the book is a unique and significant contribution to the genre of Mississippi River travel literature.

At the end, the three young men give their beautiful friendship the acid test before wending their solitary ways back to Ohio University. They fail the test.