Downtown and its river

Most of you already know what I think about Cape Girardeau's riverfront. And you can blame it all on Mark Twain.

When I was growing up on a farm on Killough Valley over yonder in the Ozark hills, books were my escape. We had no TV. Our battery radio could only pick up one Poplar Bluff station. So I read books. Lots of them.

Shady Nook School had a library of sorts. It was a cabinet at the back of the one-room school. Inside the cabinet were several shelves of books, including a nearly complete set of an encyclopedia.

When I was a young student, I thought the word "encyclopedia" was so magical and so full of potential. I was surprised it could be contained in just six syllables. Pick any of the batch -- the E volume, for example -- and the next thing you knew you were in Egypt.

Sitting at my school desk near the pot-bellied stove in the schoolhouse, I calculated that the drive to Egypt would be equivalent to 100 trips to St. Louis. And I knew that wasn't going to happen. So I never dreamed that one day I might go see the Nile and the pyramids. For the likes of a Missouri farm boy in the 1950s, the only road to Egypt was on a printed page.

Mark Twain offered a more likely possibility: travel to, if not on, the Mississippi River. After all, Cape Girardeau was a destination that could be reached in under one day. And even Hannibal might be a a realistic destination. After all, hadn't we driven to see Bagnell Dam one day and still got home in time to milk the cow?

So when I read the books Mark Twain wrote about the Mississippi River, I took them to heart. On the other hand, when I read descriptions of Egypt and ancient Greece and the Antarctic and Africa, I never felt compelled to remember details about getting there.

But most Ozark farm boys had built at least one raft in their young lives, so floating down the Mississippi was something to consider halfway seriously.

Raft-building in the Ozarks has its limitations, in case you're wondering. The pond up the hill behind the barn was barely wide enough to accommodate a raft. But you'd be surprised what you can make with scrap lumber and tree limbs. Hint to all young raft builders: Don't use white oak in your raft. It sinks.

The river over the hill offered another opportunity for rafters, but there were so many snags and gravel bars that it never seemed worth the effort to try.

Snags and gravel bars and shifting underwater sand were the stuff of Twain's stories. If all he had to write about was an uneventful trip from Hannibal to Memphis, there wouldn't have been much punch to his yarns. Steamboats running aground or ramming into a submerged sycamore tree -- now there was something worth a writer's, and a reader's, attention.

When I moved to Cape Girardeau more than a dozen years ago, I was immediately drawn to the riverfront. I still am.

A great deal has changed for the better in those few years. The improvements to Riverfront Park have made the area so much more inviting. Even the floodwall is less of a brute now that the historical murals are there. And the Wall of Fame promises to draw even more attention.

I hope more of you will come downtown from time to time to shop and eat and sightsee and be entertained. Downtown -- and its riverfront -- have a bright future.

It doesn't hurt, of course, that downtown's second annual official golf tournament is only eight months off. Mark Twain would play, if he could.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.