From the mouth of Titus Hollow where we had put in I poled the freight canoe for a mile across the backwaters of the Batchtown flats, along channels twisting through beds of smart­weed. We picked our way down the marsh trails in the open sun and morning wind, looking for passage to the River and finally breaking out into the main channel just in time to catch the wheel wash of a northbound towboat.

"My word," said the Englishman. "Oh, my bloody word."

His attention was fixed ahead, on the River, although the stuff behind us was notable enough. Back there the loess-capped headlands of Calhoun County marked the west coast of Illinois-a backlit mosaic of rock, lofty goat prairies, and oak forests reflected in the waters under the bluffs. I could see no buildings or highlines, nor any sign of people: only those headlands with their stone fronts still in shadow, frowning out over the sunlit marsh.

Before us, the great River sliding seaward. I pushed into the current and let it take us, drifting down toward the gray cape of rock that the old Frenchmen had called "Cap au Gris." I waited for Willy Newlands to say something else but he stared at the great brown Mississippi in silence, really being on it for the first time and probably getting that visceral turn that coming suddenly out into the River always seems to trigger.

"Well, here it is in all its turbid glory," I opened. "How about it?"

"A bit bigger than I'd thought," he answered, still not taking his eyes from the River.

"Bigger than most, smaller than some. You've known the Thames and the Rhine; this can't be all that much more."

Willy unfastened himself from the scenery and looked at me thoughtfully. "But it is, you know. It's the Mississippi." He paused, turning back to the River again. "And I'm here."

Before that, I had been studying German under Herr Professor Schmidt. It was scientific German, which is the very worst kind, with its compound word-horrors that only German scientists could devise, or would ever want to.

Herr Schmidt was the archetypal teacher of this awful wissenschaftlich Schriftdeutsch. He was seldom in the classroom as we straggled in, but would enter precisely on the hour—a short, compact man of middle years, walking briskly and somewhat pigeon­toed and as perfectly perpendicular as it's possible for a man to be without hanging. Invariably clad in a dark suit with sincere necktie and crisp white shirt, he drilled us in technical word roots and pluperfect subjunctives with no more literary emphasis than the log-log decitrig slide rules we used in those ancient days.

One day, however, our translations happened to include a scrap of Thomas Mann. To our surprise, this moved Herr Schmidt to a brief comment on literature—and the revelation that when he had arrived in this country his first act, even before reporting to his new teaching job, was to make a pilgrimage to Hannibal, Missouri, to pay homage to Tom Sawyer and the fabled Mississippi. Within that starched Teutonic bosom beat the heart of a born river rat.

Later, I was a flunky for a German film crew on location in western Illinois. It was a cosmopolitan bunch. The star of our little series was a Norwegian skiing champion known in some circles as "The Golden Stud." The script girl was a stunning Scot out of South Africa, of all places. The head cameraman was Dido Weigert of Munich, ably assisted by his countryman Atzie Hamel.

Dido was an unflappable pro who'd already shared an Emmy for a documentary on the Kremlin. No nonsense with Dido. He wasn't even ruffled that blazing August afternoon when the superbly endowed script girl begged our kind indulgence to strip to her waist. Gentlemen all, we permitted her to work the rest of the day in the comfort of a black lace half-bra.

Anyway, about the only thing that flapped Dido was the nearby Mississippi and our river yarns. Like Willy Newlands and Herr Professor Schmidt, the first American writing he'd ever read was Mark Twain and he'd never really gotten over it. Toward the end of our filming we had a little trouble keeping him on the track and off the River, and he departed vowing to return and make the definitive Mississippi River film for European television. Sooner or later, he'll be back.

And then came Father Patrick Purcell from the Glen of Atherlow in County Tipperary. He was a seasoned outdoorsman. It was said that he'd been something of a salmon poacher back in his friskier days—and when he spoke of his home rivers it was in an affectionate but somewhat guarded manner, with lowered voice. Or maybe it only seemed so. But he did have the feel for rugged places and wild water that ex-poachers never lose, and with his first long look at the mile-wide Mississippi and its alluvial forests he said lovingly: "Ah, 'tis the River itself . . . " He said it as only an Irishman can, which is about as good as it can get.

I have found it interesting and a bit puzzling, looking at the Mississippi in the company of Scots, Englishmen, Irishmen, Canadians, Aussies, Mexicans, Germans, French, and Lebanese. It strikes them in different ways, of course, although I have a hunch that that visceral turn is usually there. For some, there may even be a flash of special insight.

It has been said that to understand Americans one must understand baseball. The trouble is, the nuances of baseball are utterly beyond the grasp of most foreigners. It might be simpler for them to understand something of the Mississippi River, which would certainly constitute a more perceptive encounter with the confused and confusing heart of America than would a visit to Yankee Stadium or Disneyland.

As with any other part of real America, of course, they'll have to look for the Mississippi. Strange, how such a deep and wide and almighty long river can be so hard to find—even for Americans. Especially for Americans. Foreigners may find it more easily than we can, and even after its old storybook spell is broken for them, as it surely will be, they may still have the conviction that this is the quintessential American river, our heartland's fullest gathering of waters, folkways, and manners. Ask any foreigner to name just one American river and see what he says.

If that visitor spends enough time on and around the Mississippi he could end up understanding Americans better than most of us know ourselves. Prey of greed and spoils politics, like us, flowing out of a hopeful past into an aimless and uncertain future, like us, the Great River embodies all our follies, fancies, and glories. Like us—rich, powerful, colorful, polluted, wasted, beloved, feared, serene, brutal, ugly, and beautiful. It is not the American Ganges; the soul of America is not to be found there. It is only reflected there. And like America as a whole, it is a joyous place once you shrug off its sour detractors and find it for yourself.

You will hear it called "The Great Sewer," the intestinal tract of America's midsection, fit only for commercial traffic and waste disposal.

There is something to that, but the larger truth is that great stretches of the Mississippi are lovely corridors of wildness that still honor original landscapes in what otherwise is a bland monotony of com, soybeans, and cotton. It is a pity that we have profaned and strictured parts of the River, spoiling so much of it for ourselves, but from the River's point of view that is all transitory. Even the great channel dams are only petty, fleeting little restraints. A few miles from where I am writing this, the crumbling Lock and Dam 26 is being replaced by a vast new edifice costing hundreds of millions and which, in the next half-tick of the Mississippi's ancient clock, will, in tum, crumble. No dam can survive such a river's displeasure indefinitely, and it is not the River's pleasure to be blocked and bound. In spite of our contempt for the integrity of great rivers, the Mississippi will shrug off our abuse and move on.