Travel
Steam Spirit
Riding the Delta Queen to New Orleans costs a lot more than a short-hop flight, but you get what you pay for—great food, beautiful views, and five days of glorious peace.
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Being aboard the DQ is like being a guest at a small Victorian resort, except that the view changes constantly. Coffee, tea, and snacks are usually available in the Forward Cabin Lounge, and there are various types of organized activities—kite flying, quilting, lectures, films, and tours of the galley and pilot house. An ornate grand staircase leads up to the bar on the Texas Deck, where the conversation is invariably about subjects close to the hearts of river people. Pat Sullivan remembered what was supposed to be the DQ’s last trip and how Betty Blake worked the port cities with a wheelbarrow load of save-the-DQ petitions. Pluma E. Orcutt, a retired insurance agent from Fort Wayne, Indiana, on her sixtieth river trip, carefully removed the protective cellophane wrapper from a dog-eared copy of a book she bought in 1972 about the DQ’s passage through the Panama Canal. The margins of the book overflow with autographs and handwritten notes from the captains and crews of bygone voyages. It’s her most cherished possession.
There are so many things to do aboard the DQ that it’s easy to forget that anything else is happening in the world. Each night after dinner a versatile group of musicians called Scott Black and the Riverboat Five entertain and play dance music in the Orleans Room until it’s time for the moonlight buffet (about ten-thirty). Meanwhile, other passengers listen to or sing along with Phyllis Dale, who plays piano in the Texas Bar until the last drunk has had an opportunity to do his or her rendition of “My Way.” Unobstructed passageways circle the three upper decks, offering freedom to stroll or space to relax in one of the rocking chairs that line the decks. About the only recreation not offered aboard the DQ is gambling, which the company long ago decided was not in keeping with its image.
Meals aboard the DQ are explorations into decadence and Herculean tests of willpower. Chef Jeff Hunter grew up in Philadelphia but cooks with a Creole flair and Cajun intensity. Tables in the dining room are assigned at random, so Phyllis and I experienced another jittery moment as we introduced ourselves to our partners at table 64, an elderly couple named John and Dolly DeYoung from Woodstown, New Jersey, who immediately told us they had been married 56 years and were on their sixty-fifth cruise. They turned out to be a pair of certified hoots: Privately, we referred to them as George and Gracie. John played straight man, with a twinkle of mischief in his eye, while Dolly regaled us with risqué poetry and jokes like the one about two spinsters who honor their brother’s memory by stretching his condoms over the piano—not owning an organ, you see.
Life along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway ranges from peaceful to bracing to downright mystical. My favorite place to watch it drift by was the bow of the Texas Deck, just below the pilot house. Eight or ten dolphins escorted us across Galveston Bay. Turning northeast, the waterway slices through the Bolivar Peninsula on its 350-mile journey to the Algiers Lock. Mileage markers along the bank signal the distance to the lock, which will lower us onto the Mississippi River just downriver from New Orleans. Someone reports seeing a flock of flamingos, which turn out to be roseate spoonbills. The waterway is straight and narrow, seldom wider than the required 125 feet except where we cross rivers or bays. Tons of cargo stream by in an amazing variety of shallow-draft boats and barges. On either side are salt marshes and gray banks of silt dredged out of the channel. Shortly after dark we pass under the West Port Arthur bridge, as a profusion of refinery lights twinkle in the darkness. Who could have imagined such a storybook night in the Golden Triangle?
By the second morning we’re deep into Louisiana. Swamps and marshes slide by. Rice fields blend into the gray horizon. A bald eagle watches from a snag in the channel. Trunks of dead cypresses protrude like bleached ghosts from the water’s edge, shrouds of moss draping their outstretched limbs. A great blue heron swoops low over our bow and spears a morsel from the water. White snow geese and Canada geese blanket a field. As we pass by small Cajun towns, people wave from their front porches and we wave back. Off the port bank is a graveyard of rusting boats and barges. And hard against it, a shipyard where two new casino boats are under construction.
The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway has become an enigma. It is constantly intersected by bayous, canals, cutoffs, drainage ditches, bays, and lakes. In some places it seems dangerously narrow, in others a mile wide. I see now what Mark Twain meant when he wrote that in his day a pilot was “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.” Applicants for a first-class pilot’s license are given blank sheets of paper and required to draw every buoy, light, underground cable, bayou, canal, inlet, bend, and landmark for a hundred-mile stretch. The pilot is the unchallenged master of the boat, as long as she is under way. No one else, not even the captain, is allowed to touch the controls. Approaching a barge or lock or drawbridge, the pilot pulls his steam whistle, every pull having its own meaning. One blast, see you on port. Two, see you on starboard. Five, danger. One long and one short, open the bridge. Though pilots communicate by marine radio now, whistles are part of the river’s tradition and romance, its native music, and pilots use them at every opportunity.
The nights are particularly hypnotic. The moon is full. A heavy fog hangs over the bayou. The pilot plays his spotlight off one bank, then the other, looking for landmarks, checking his position. An alligator slithers back into the swamp. Eventually, we make a hard left off the waterway and navigate a maze of waterways toward the Port of New Iberia, where we will tie up for the night. By the final night, we are on the Mississippi, a cold wind blowing in our faces, coasting past a levee where Cajuns have lighted one of their traditional bonfires welcoming Papa Noël. Our pilot acknowledges the bonfire with a long, mournful whistle.
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