we’re lucky and find a boat, the day after that Scully and I might make it to the cabin. I guess that’s not bad at all.”
“No, and even if we lose an extra day, you’ll still get there faster than you could walk from here. Even if you could walk 20 miles a day, which you probably couldn’t given the conditions, it would take you four and a half days to get there from here, and at least as long to get back.”
Once Larry had made his case Artie needed no further persuasion. Scully was certainly happy about the plan, as he had no desire to be walking any distance from the boat in ‘Babylon’ and just wanted to get the girls and their friend and get back to sea as soon as possible. With this settled, they hauled in the anchor and sailed back under the Causeway the way they’d come, and later in the night cleared the Twin Span Bridge and its awful smell of death. Once they’d gone a few miles farther east, they anchored to get some sleep and wait for daylight to navigate the Rigolets out of Lake Pontchartrain into the sound. But in the morning, when they were ready to leave, the wind had died down to a flat calm, and Larry said they might as well go ahead and use the motor; because of the land masses surrounding them it might be afternoon before the wind filled in again.
The 35-year-old Evinrude hadn’t inspired much confidence in Artie when he first saw it in Culebra. But since that day, it had been out of sight and out of mind, hanging below decks under the cockpit with the cover fixed over the well. With the favorable winds that had carried them everywhere they had wanted to go for more than a thousand miles, the motor simply had not been needed.
“It’s as good as new,” Larry assured him when he expressed his doubts. “Scully rebuilt the carburetor last time we used it to move somebody’s boat when a tropical storm was coming into Culebra. It ran like a top. One thing about these old two-stroke Evinrudes: they’re dead-nuts simple to work on and there’s little to go wrong.”
Scully proved him right when the engine cranked and ran on just the third pull of the starter rope. Once they put it in gear and got up to speed, the small outboard was able to push the
“It’s not as fast as sailing, but it’ll get us there,” Larry said.
They motored on through the morning, droning along over the opaque, brown waters between Lake Pontchartrain and the clearer waters of the Mississippi Sound, and by late morning reached the marked channel that designated the entrance to the navigable part of the Pearl. Turning north into the river, before they even got to the first bend they encountered their first potential obstacle: a low bridge that spanned the channel. It was far too low to clear in any sailing vessel with a mast, but it was a railroad swing bridge, so it was kept in the open position most of the time when a train was not expected. Luckily it had been open when it was abandoned sometime after the pulse hit, because they found it out of their way now. For a few bends beyond the railroad, the river wound through an expansive marshland of tall grasses, snaking along through the transition zone between salt and fresh water. The Evinrude outboard was proving its reliability and had consumed only a few gallons of gas from their supply. Larry did some calculations based on how much it had taken to get this far from Lake Pontchartrain and was certain they had enough fuel to make the trip upriver and back, considering both the distances they planned to go on the catamaran, and by small boat the rest of the way.
“We probably won’t have much left after the trip, and I doubt we’ll ever be able to get any more, but if it enables us to get those kids and get back to the Gulf, it will have served its purpose,” he said. “After that, we’ll be real sailors like in the old days when no boats had an ‘iron staysail’ to fall back on when the wind died.”
“Hey Copt’n, what we gonna do ’bout dis otha drawbridge up ahead?” Scully asked. “Dat one’s de highway and she closed, mon.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. It wouldn’t have been open that day unless there happened to be a barge or something coming through, so it got locked down in the closed position. We’re going to have to lower the mast. Let’s drop the hook right here in the middle of the channel and get it done. We might as well stow the sails below. We won’t be stepping it again until we come back out under this bridge.”
The way Larry had the rig set up, with synthetic Dyneema shrouds and stays tensioned by simple dead-eyes, rather than turnbuckles, and the mast stepped in a tabernacle with a pivot, lowering the entire affair was a relatively quick and simple task. To bring it down in control, he connected a four-part tackle to the forestay, with the tail led back to the central cockpit winch. The total time lost in the operation was less than a half hour, and soon they were motoring north again, passing under the steel suspension bridge that the chart identified as Highway 90. As on all the other bridges they’d seen, abandoned cars were scattered along its length, but they saw no sign of life, nor the evidence of death that had been so clear from the presence of vultures on the long bridges leading out of New Orleans.
Immediately to the north of this bridge, they passed the small town of Pearlington on the right bank. It appeared that many of the residents here had chosen to remain in their homes, and they saw a few people as they motored by, all of them stopping to stare at the unusual catamaran going upriver. At a dock in front of a waterfront house, a middle-aged man was loading crawfish traps into a slightly larger version of the kind of johnboat Larry was on the lookout for. At his signal, Scully cut the throttle back to idle so that he could make him an offer to either buy or rent it. The man in the skiff just laughed out loud.
“Are you kidding? How you think I’m going to feed my family without a boat? A boat’s the only way anybody can make it around here now. I wouldn’t trade it for nothin’, not even that fancy yacht of yours there.”
Larry said he understood, and for the brief moments they were drifting within speaking distance, he plied the man for local knowledge of the river conditions upstream.
“You might make it as far as I-59, I don’t know. I’ve never run the river that far myself. If your draft is only two feet, like you say it is, you can probably find a channel. The only problem is that thing is so damned wide you may not find a place to get through with both of them hulls. Good luck trying to find a small boat, though. I can’t imagine anybody letting one go right about now, but there’s a fool born every minute, so you never know.”
Artie was beginning to second-guess his brother’s plan as they motored on upriver after hearing this bit of advice. What the man had said made perfect sense. In a world where the grocery stores were cleaned out and the delivery trucks were not running, anyone living on a riverbank with a functional boat would have a distinct advantage over those less fortunate souls who had no way to access the abundant food sources the river offered. And if they couldn’t find someone willing to part with the right kind of boat that could negotiate the smaller waters of the Bogue Chitto, they would end up walking once they reached the limits of where the
After leaving what was left of civilization behind at Pearlington, they motored upriver the rest of the afternoon, winding through the endless bottomland forests lining the banks on both sides, while carefully watching the muddy brown current for signs of sandbars, hidden logs, and other dangers. These hazards made it necessary to go slowly, and when the sun dropped below the trees, they had not covered as many miles as Larry had hoped. They were well to the north of the Interstate 10 bridge over the swamp, but still several miles downstream of the next bridge at Interstate 59, at least by Larry’s calculation. The I-59 crossing was the last bridge spanning the river basin between them and the mouth of the Bogue Chitto, and Artie could feel a growing sense of anticipation at being that much closer to Casey, but he was also overwhelmed with frustration about not having an appropriate boat and having to stop for the night. Larry insisted it was too risky to navigate the river in the dark, though, and steered them off the river into a wide slough that led into a large dead lake bounded by tall cypress trees. As they were maneuvering about to find the best place to drop the anchor, Scully spotted something washed up in the debris of logs, plastic bottles, and other trash that had been deposited by the last flood among the cypress knees at the lake’s edge. Upon closer inspection through Larry’s binoculars, they could see that it was a boat—or at least part of one—turned on its side and halfway submerged in the shallows. As soon as the anchor was down, Artie and Scully off-loaded the kayak and paddled over to check it out. It was indeed a battered and abandoned aluminum boat, jammed in between two cypress knees, its stern end sunk and its port gunwale bent and twisted. Upon closer inspection, Artie saw that there was large hole punctured through the thin aluminum hull, which was why it sank and probably why no one bothered to salvage it. It looked to be at least a couple of decades old, and Artie knew that such boats were cheap to buy even when new. It likely had washed downriver from some camp upstream, and probably was already neglected and abandoned before then.
Scully said Larry could fix the hole, though, and if they could get it out, he thought it was big enough to carry the outboard. But try as they might, because of the way it was jammed between the cypress knees and weighted down with water inside, the two of them couldn’t budge it. They paddled back to the catamaran; Larry passed them
