Crowding over the chart table in the starboard hull, the three of them looked at the official state road map of Louisiana and compared it to Grant’s hand-drawn sketch. His route made sense and seemed to be the most direct way to reach the state line while avoiding as many major highways and urban areas as possible. The level of detail on the road map showed only highways, because of its small scale, though there was enough overlap in the coverage area across the state line to include the corner of Mississippi where Grant’s sketch indicated the cabin was located, but none of the county roads or unpaved roads leading to it were shown. They would have to rely solely on his drawings to find their way the last few miles, once the route left the highway.
“There’s the Bogue Chitto,” Larry said, tracing it with his finger. “Look at that, it’s a tributary of the Pearl. See here, it empties into the river there, just downstream from this Highway 21 here.”
“So?”
“So that means we might be able to get a lot closer with the boat. I’ve heard that some of the shrimpers and other boat owners in the area sometimes use the lower reaches of the Pearl for a hurricane hole, so at least part of it is navigable. I don’t know how far up it we could get, but it looks like a big river to me. Let me get my chartbook and see what it shows for the entrance.”
“Yeah, but we could only go up it so far, right? Wouldn’t that take too long and wouldn’t it be better to try to follow the same route Casey and her friends took on the road?”
“How you goin’ down de road, Doc? You gonna walk 90 mile wid all dem hungry people? How you gonna take enough to eat an’ den keep it safe from a thief? What you gonna do den, mon, if you find dat place? You gonna want de girls to walk back all de way dem come, when t’ings more dangerous now?”
“Scully’s right. I think it would be crazy to try and hike it from here, and besides, that would take days, one way.” Larry pointed on the map, “Look, even if we sailed to the north shore and started here, you’d have to get through all this urban sprawl for miles and miles—Mandeville, Covington, and then more small towns to the north. And besides that, what would we do with the boat? We couldn’t all go and leave it behind, and I think it’s a real bad idea to split up for a long time like that, especially since we have no way of knowing how bad things are inland. If you go wandering off on the road, either alone or with Scully, I won’t have any idea when to expect you back and no way of knowing if something happened to you or if you just got delayed. And likewise, you’d have no way of knowing if I would even still be here with the boat when you get back. Someone could kill me and take it if I just sat here anchored in the lake that long. You heard what Craig said was happening in his marina, and I don’t have to remind you about Puerto Rico. Would you want to bring the kids through all that danger to get back to the north shore, only to find out that you didn’t have a ride when you got here? I don’t think it’s feasible at all to do it that way.”
“Well, what are you proposing then? It’s not like we can sail all the way to cabin, can we?”
“No, but with our extremely shallow draft, our working outboard motor, and our untouched fuel supply, not to mention the ability to easily lower the mast to go under bridges, power lines, and other obstacles, we may be able to get a hell of a lot closer to it than we are here.” Larry pulled out his chartbook for the northern Gulf coast and flipped through it to the appropriate page. “Here it is. Look, the main mouth of the river is here, this easternmost entrance. This chart doesn’t show it, but you can see on the road map how the river splits into two major branches, the West Pearl and the East Pearl, way upstream but below the place where the Bogue Chitto empties into it. The nautical chart doesn’t cover that part of the river, but you can see that there is a marked channel on the East Pearl, and it shows enough water even for much bigger boats than ours all the way north of Interstate 10. So we know we can get that far. It’s impossible to tell from the road map, of course, but I’m betting we could motor on upstream for quite some distance beyond the marked channel, maybe to here even, where Interstate 59 crosses the river. That’s almost halfway to the mouth of the Bogue Chitto. The closer we can get to that cabin with the boat, the easier it will be to get to them and get them all out of there. Once we’re that far upstream, you can see that there’s nothing but a few small towns and hardly any development along the river. The map shows that most of it is a national wildlife refuge.”
“What good would it do to go all the way up there and only get halfway to the Bogue Chitto? That still leaves a long way to go, and then it looks like even farther on the Bogue Chitto itself to get to the state line.”
“Well, in the worst case, from that point, it would probably be feasible for you and Scully to strike out on one of these smaller roads that roughly parallel the course of the river and go overland the rest of the way. That’s far from ideal, but much better than leaving from here. We could tuck the boat into one of these smaller bayous or oxbow lakes and I could stay with it and hope no comes along that far out in the swamp who would realize the potential of a boat like this. I think it would be much safer there anyway, as anyone we encounter up there on the river is likely going to be more self-reliant and probably not desperate like all these folks here in the cities. But as I said, that’s the worst case. Here’s what I’m hoping: on all these Southern rivers, aluminum johnboats are everywhere. All the locals in the area use them for fishing, and you see them tied up or pulled up on the bank everywhere there’s a camp or cabin. I’m sure that given this situation, most people who have one are not going to want to let go of it, but we might find someone who will. Whether we’re able to borrow one, barter for it, or buy it outright, if we could get hold of a 14- or 16-foot johnboat, it would be a simple matter to mount our 25-horse outboard on it, and then you and Scully could probably reach Grant’s cabin in a day. We’ve got enough fuel on board to do that, and you’ll use less coming back downriver. Anyway, that’s the best plan I’ve got, and I think it’s our best shot. What do you say?”
“How long do you think it will take to get to the river mouth, and then motor up it to that point?” Artie wanted to know.
“You can see on the chart that it’s roughly 50 miles east of here to the mouth of the Pearl. We passed it yesterday on the way here to Lake Pontchartrain. We could be there tomorrow morning easily if we sail back to the eastern end of the lake tonight, and at least get to the other side of the Twin Span Bridge. We can get a few hours of sleep, then get up and go. We should be within the mouth of the Pearl before noon. We can then assess the situation better and make sure the outboard is ready for the trip upriver.”
“We could run into delays and obstacles on the upstream part, of course, but I figure, if the Pearl is typical of the rivers that empty into the Gulf, the current won’t be very strong. The outboard ought to push us at least three knots—maybe five if the current’s real sluggish. And if it proves to be slower, maybe we’ll get lucky and find a johnboat before we have to go that far. I mainly just want to take the big boat upriver far enough up to get it out of sight of anyone who might see it as a grand opportunity to sail the hell out of Dodge, and that mostly means getting inland of the coast.”
“So it looks like all day tomorrow to get the
Casey Nicole
situated, and then if 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
Casey Nicole
along nicely at seven knots, owing to the slim, knifelike profiles of the twin hulls that presented little resistance to the water.
“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.”