After our bright sunny day in St Louis, a wave of gray skies and rain overtook us. Although Alton Marina is a state of the art marina within close reach of a great little 19th century river town, the weather put a damper on our spirits. The Mississippi River was rising - and promised to bring more and more debris downriver from the flooded river banks in the north. All the forum entries for boaters in the area told of large amounts of debris, logs and tree trunks in the water - and we could for ourselves see right out on the river - lots of stuff we didn't care to run our engines up against. There is a lot of commercial traffic on the Mississippi - huge tugs pushing 15 or more barges - and you have to stay out of their way at the same time as you play dodge-a-log in the river.

In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you see that this was always the natural state of affairs for the Mississippi - flooding was terrible and wiped out crops, fields and towns, but for Huck, it brought canoes, rafts, booty from houses and wrecked riverboats - a veritable cornucopia of serendipitous finds. The river is incredibly muddy and turbid - this is not the clear water of the great lakes. To our delight however, we found the water not to be polluted as we feared it might be - just merely muddy and full of natural debris - nary a plastic bottle or trash bag to be seen.

The river was projected to rise all week and once it crested there would be much less debris washing down the river. A good deal of the commercial traffic had died down over these days as the river was closed to traffic to the north (most of the locks were inundated and not operating) - so all the wheat, corn, coal, sand, gravel and natural gas had to wait until the river levels went down. Alton was projected to crest at 6 feet above flood level - and we thought we could leave right after that. One day we took the bikes down to the Mel Price Lock right below Alton - and were happy to find the National Great Rivers Museum there also gave a tour of the locks - so we could see the immense structure we were about to pass through. These locks are designed for traffic of vessels far larger than any we had seen to date - even those in the St Lawrence Seaway and the Illinois River.

It must have been a magical sight for those European explorers to see the massive rivers all converging in a relatively narrow geographical area - the Illinois emptying into the Mississippi (#1 by volume) followed by the Missouri River (#1 by length) and then the Ohio (#2 by volume) - the largest rivers in North America all converging within two hundred miles of each other. By strange coincidence, Alton is not only the center of some of the largest rivers on the planet but is also home to the largest human ever recorded - Robert Wadlow (1918-1940) at 8 ft, 11.1 in - and there is a statue to him in the town. This area seems to like things big!