One way to understand the story of the United States is as a story of transportation. These waterways we’ve been traveling for the past 4 months were once America’s commercial highways. Canoes, rafts and barges delivered agricultural and industrial goods down (and later, with steamboats, up) the Great Rivers, through the Great Lakes, and across the Erie Canal. Located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, St. Louis (where we’re near now) was once one of the nation’s most critical trading centers.
There’s still an immense amount of commercial traffic on the inland rivers, now via diesel towboats pushing enormous barge flotillas. Like locks on the Erie Canal or camels in the Sahara Desert, these tows at first awed and intimidated us but have now become yet another obstacle to negotiate. Nevertheless, I was still impressed to learn that in September alone, the Mel Price Lock, which is a couple miles ahead of where we are now on the Mississippi, locked through 5,759,025.3 tons of cargo, including more than 2.5 tons of food and farm products and more than a million tons of chemicals. (We have these very precise figures because Felix and I rode our bikes along the levee – along the levee!! – to a museum the Army Corps of Engineers operates at the lock.)
We also saw enormous, quarter-mile-long commercial “Lakers” in the Great Lakes, but there’s almost no commercial traffic remaining in the Erie Canal, and that’s because over time commerce shifted first to the railways and later to the interstate highways. Having been awoken countless times over the past few months by train whistles, we can attest that railway lines were often built to parallel the waterways, which makes sense since that’s where cities and industrial hubs were already located.
BUT, the Mississippi River is really wide and flows really fast, and until 1874 there was no railroad bridge across it. Trade shifted north to Chicago. You know St. Louis has a big arch, right? You may even know it’s called the Gateway Arch, and that it’s meant to celebrate the city’s role as the Gateway to the West. What I, at least, did not realize until this week is that the Arch was proposed during the Great Depression as part of a jobs creation and riverfront renewal program, and eventually built during the early 1960s, when St. Louis, like other U.S. cities, was struggling with the consequences of segregation, de-industrialization and suburbanization. In this context, it’s more like a wistful elegy to gateway status of the past.
The Arch is immense and austerely beautiful from the outside, and there’s a free museum in the base that does an excellent job telling the story of colonial expansion and “manifest destiny” (Dave W., thumbs up for the National Park Service).
To get up to the top, you have to cram yourself and 4 other people into a capsule about the size and shape of a heavy-duty front-loaded washing machine. This “tram” has a small window in the front, thankfully, which relieves some claustrophobia and also provides a fascinating look at the Arch innards as you rise up. (As well as a few skeletons and ghouls, if it’s late October when you go :)). When you arrive, you get to shove through the crowds to peer through a few tiny windows, then ride back down.
Of course the railways themselves were later obsolesced by the interstate highway system, which explains something about Alton Illinois, where we’re currently docked. Alton has a port, obviously, and there’s a main street near the harbor (Broadway) with charming brick buildings, several reportedly haunted, and only about half housing functional businesses. You have to cross a pretty major road to get there from the marina, but the real interstates join up about 3 miles away, where there’s a second more active hub area of plazas and big box stores. There’s no real reason to go there, unless there’s something you need to buy.
The first time we left the marina, we asked the cab driver what to do in Alton. He said – not kidding – that there are some pretty decent hotels, no bugs anymore. Apparently there was an issue with the Super 8 a while back but that’s been resolved. He then told us about the bars he used to go to, that have since closed because too many kids started doing meth there. And he told us about the club where B.B. King used to play, before he died. There are still a ton of shady-looking bars in town, which he explained is related to people passing through on the various interstates.
So what happens when drone deliveries in turn replace trucking? Do the big box stores board up because we’re all ordering on demand from Amazon? Do people still go to shady bars, or do we create convivial speakeasy type supper clubs, or drink alone at home? Does the Joyce Kilmer Service Area become a national historic site?