Mark Twain never cared much for the blue Ohio.
He was a true, mud-blooded Mississippi riverman, saying that Ohio River water was just too clear to be healthy, while muddy Mississippi River water was so nutritious that a man drinking it ”could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to.”
Well, Twain knew rivers and wrote truly. But the Ohio deserved better. Even without a rich cargo of mud, it`s nourishing enough-a jade-colored feast for the eyes with as much history as you care to digest.
For years I`ve been too beguiled by the Missouri and upper Mississippi rivers to spend time on the Ohio. But not long ago I was on it for four days and five nights, cruising the upper Ohio from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh on an old-time paddle wheeler named the Delta Queen. She`s a great white wedding cake of a boat, 65 years old, done up in mahogany, teak, stained glass, crystal chandeliers and gleaming brass.
All this was a cultural jolt for someone like me, accustomed to a battered johnboat named Cirrhosis of the River, to sleeping on sandbars and running trotlines for catfish. And there I was on the Delta Queen, in a paneled stateroom with a brass plate on the door: ”November, 1986. Her Royal Highness, Princess Margaret.” No gritty bedroll on this trip; I`d sleep in a bed once graced by a princess. On a hunch, I checked under the mattress. Sure enough, no pea.
The Delta Queen was a hostess in the grand manner, dedicated to getting her live cargo up the Ohio River as safely, well-fed and entertained as possible. There were three meals and two buffets each day and ragtime and dance band each night.
All that should have been enough. But by the second day the river began asserting itself. My old rambling itch was coming on, and I couldn`t scratch it. The bigger the boat, the farther I`m kept from the essence of the river. And the Queen was a lovely old grandmother, keeping me in, devising games and stratagems to amuse me-but never letting me play in the grubby, wonderful river world outside.
Whatever the Queen withholds in hands-on river experience, she tries to make up for in color and comfort. And in her old-fashioned, genteel way, the Delta Queen does give her passengers the time and continuity to begin feeling the river`s endless flow of strength and peace.
She is nearly alone in that; only she and her sister boat, the newer Mississippi Queen, have passenger cabins and provide extended travel on the Mississippi, Ohio and Cumberland Rivers. You might do much the same thing on your own, with more freedom of choice and movement, in anything from a lavish houseboat to a common johnboat. Barring that, the two Queens are the only options for overnight travel.
Still, the boat is only part of the cruise. The other part is the river itself. The Ohio`s valley is narrow by most Missouri and Mississippi River standards, flanked by heavily forested headlands that often rise hundreds of feet. Then the bankside trees give way to small towns facing the river, with narrow storefronts scarcely changed in 100 years or more.-towns like Pomeroy, Ohio, ”8 miles long and one street wide” between the riverbank and a steep bluff.
A musical passage
As we passed, our steam calliope was thundering ”Little Sir Echo,” and the bluff sent it back to us, note for note. There, as at every town and landing, people stopped whatever they were doing to watch, wave and mark the Delta Queen`s passing.
Denied the freedom to ramble on my own, I fantasized as we went along. And the Upper Ohio has plenty of fuel for that.
This was one of the great ways west-the first leg of a river system of that led 3,500 miles from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. I left my cabin late at night and went out on deck, half-asleep and half-hoping to see the stack lanterns of phantom steamboats.
If any river has such ghosts, it`s the Ohio, for in its day it was boatbuilder to young America. Lewis and Clark`s keelboat was built near Pittsburgh. So was the most famous of the old Missouri River steamers, the Far West, a low-hulled, spoon-billed stern-wheeler that would one day carry wounded troopers of Maj. Marcus Reno`s command, which was part of Lt. Col. George Custer`s ill-fated expedition to the Little Big Horn.
There was fuel for fantasies ashore as well.
We had steamed through the night to Maysville, Ky., getting there well before daylight and looking like a woodcut out of ”Tom Sawyer”: a boat designated as a National Historic Landmark moored at a town that`s on the National Register of Historic Sites.
I wandered through the town and along its riverside in places once trod by the moccasins of authentic folk heroes. Two hundred years earlier, Maysville (called ”Limestone” then) was home to early Kentucky`s most famous frontiersmen: Simon Kenton, Daniel Boone and Lewis Wetzel, the man Shawnees knew as ”Death Wind.”
Memories enough for any river town dreaming in the sun. But for me it marked the place where my personal hero joined the army. Young John Colter had come over the mountains from Virginia, arriving at Maysville in October 1803. Capt. Meriwether Lewis was there with the keelboat, taking on supplies and looking for a few good men. Colter enlisted in the Corps of Discovery and headed west into legend to become the archetypal mountain man, the first white man to see the Tetons, Jackson Hole and the Yellowstone country.
We left Maysville in early afternoon, heading out into the channel, where we were joined by a convoy of Sunday boaters.
Campers on shore
Across the river, where a little stream came into the Ohio, a family was camped on a sandy beach under the trees. A small boy was splashing in the creek; another was fishing in the main river, while a man, woman and a little girl were busy around camp.
And so it went as the Delta Queen made steady passage up the valley of the Upper Ohio, ”patting her feet nicely,” as they say. We beat steadily eastward that afternoon and night and all the next day, past the city of Portsmouth, Ohio, and such Ohio towns as Garden City, Franklin Furnace and Hanging Rock.
There were the hamlets of Greenup and Raceland in Kentucky. Just beyond the mouth of the Big Sandy, border river between Kentucky and West Virginia, we began turning into the northeast. We would make more than 200 miles before tying up at Blennerhassett Island on the West Virginia side.
The place takes its name from a rich, rebellious Irishman who came to the island in the early 1800s and built a magnificent home that would be consumed by fire; his fortune would be consumed in an ill-starred partnership with Aaron Burr. A replica of the mansion has been built on the old foundations, and the island is a regular stop for the Queen.
We visited the island in the morning, then made a 16-mile run to Marietta, which claims to be the oldest town in Ohio. If it isn`t, it`s close: The town dates to a rainy April day in 1788 when a group of New Englanders arrived on flatboats and came ashore to build.
The Queen was moored there all afternoon, giving passengers a chance to visit the town`s steamboat museum.
Capt. Frederick Way Jr. came aboard in midafternoon, a small, frail man in his 90th year but with a mind as keen as when he brought the Delta Queen from San Francisco to the Ohio River.
It had been 1946, and the Queen still wore the battleship gray of her naval service from World War II. With Capt. Way at her helm, she went out into the Pacific under tow, down the California coast and into the storm-wracked Gulf of Tehantepec, sometimes 300 miles from land, through the Panama Canal, north into the Gulf of Mexico and finally up the Mississippi to the Ohio River and Pittsburgh, where the gray paint was scraped away and her true beauty began to emerge.
The old captain and the Delta Queen have a bond shared by no one else;
both are out of another time, and he still pays his respects almost every time the big boat is moored at Marietta.
We cast off in early evening, resuming our long course into the northeast. Our passage up the Ohio wasn`t shattering any speed records. We rarely made more than 7 m.p.h.
During this stately passage there were fun and games: kite-flying off the stern, bingo, trivia contests, calliope-playing by passengers, that sort of thing. But more and more, it seemed, passengers would gather on the forward decks, no one talking much, just looking and watching as the riverside towns and wooded shorelines slid past.
`The old folks` home`
I did my share of that, but early on, I discovered the engine room. No place on board has a warmer welcome, shinier brass or better coffee than aft in what rivermen call ”the old folks` home.” Nowhere else are you nearer the heart of the boat and the pulse of the engines driving their 10-ton pitman arms and the oaken paddle wheel.
The dreamy routine was broken whenever the Queen locked through one of the huge channel dams. Nearly everyone would be on deck when we entered a lock bay between sheer cliffs of concrete. Fifty feet above us, people looked down from the top of the lock wall as the big boat slowly rose to meet them. Then we were above them, the lock bay filled, and the upstream gates swung open and we resumed our steady passage into the open river.
Our last shore leave was at Wellsburg, W.Va., a small river town not far downstream from Steubenville. Except for the Queen, no commercial river traffic stops there now. But at our grassy mooring place were relics of a busier time: the overgrown, half-hidden stone underpinnings of a wharf where 19th Century steamboats loaded and unloaded their cargoes.
Most of what the Delta Queen Steamboat Co. calls the ”wilderness Ohio”
was behind us. Past Wellsburg, Steubenville and all the way into Pittsburgh there are still some forested uplands. But the riversides are increasingly dominated by power plants, dead and living steel mills, heavy industry.
Sometime late in our fifth night we came into Pittsburgh, past the Golden Triangle where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers join to form the Ohio. Daybreak found the Queen docked at a concrete landing beneath an elevated highway at the peak of the morning rush hour, with taxis and airport limos waiting at the foot of the gangplank.
By then, most of the Delta Queen`s passengers surely had gotten what they had signed on for: a taste of pampered riverboat travel with excellent food, impeccable service and facilities and evening programs worth remembering.
The combined effect of all that, on the moving stage of a mighty river, must be addictive. Of the 168 passengers on our cruise, 80 were repeats. They were fond of the boat, of the cruise, but there was something more. Was it nostalgia for heartland scenes and traditions? Or perhaps they were seeking something that the great inland rivers have in rich supply.
For a river`s fine delight is its freedom; it is born traveling, wanting always to move on down the line and see what`s around the next bend, sometimes pausing to explore eddies or loaf in quiet backwaters, but too free and fiddle-footed to stay in one place.
Give a river enough time, and some of its freeness will rub off. And because freedom is always a highly perishable commodity, frequent returns to the river are necessary for taking on a new supply.
Maybe that`s why many people go there. Maybe that`s why they keep coming back.
Where to join the Queen
The 88-cabin Delta Queen operates Feb. 14 to Dec. 14, offering 2- to 12-night cruises on the Mississippi, Ohio, Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. Departures are from New Orleans, Cincinnati, St. Louis, St. Paul, Louisville, Memphis, Nashville, Pittsburgh and Chattanooga. Cruises average $161 to $565 a night per person, double occupancy. Included in the fare are steamboat accommodations, all meals and nightly entertainment. Shore tours are extra.
The Delta Queen`s sister boat, the larger Mississippi Queen, with 204 cabins, operates Jan. 26 to Dec. 29 on the Mississippi, Ohio and the Cumberland Rivers and offers 2- to 11-night cruises that depart from New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, St. Paul, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Louisville. Prices are the same.
For more information, contact a travel agent or the Delta Queen Steamboat Co., Dept. PY92, Robin Street Wharf, New Orleans, La. 70130-1890;
800-543-1949.
