Americans United: Is it Nostalgia, or Were We Better Years Ago?
An essay by one of my favorite authors describing a trip he made on the steamboat paddle wheeler, the Delta Queen, took me back to a cruise we had taken on the same vessel almost exactly two decades ago. What started as a vacation was actually a demarcation, with the years prior generally peaceful and prosperous when considered in the long view of history. Tumult that ignited during that trip rose steadily, but gradually. A few years in, the turbulence appeared to pause and take a breath. Then, an upheaval, heaving, chaotic, confusing, clamorous, and divisive seemed to blow forth in one huge, long exhale. Today, that wind feels like a gale.
That Delta Queen cruise was in celebration of our 20th anniversary. On the surface, riding a paddlewheel steamboat down the Ohio River may seem seriously sedate. It’s difficult to explain how boarding such a ship takes passengers not merely on cruise where land is in sight on both sides of the boat. It’s more than leaving a physical port of departure. Paddlewheel riverboat cruises are somehow capable of warping the dimension of time, and the experience becomes far more than the location and ports of call, more than the on-board activities or shore excursions. Watch that paddlewheel turn more than a couple dozen rotations, and time collapses across centuries. Passengers may be less than a mile from either shoreline and within 100 miles or several thousand miles of “home”, but a sense of timeliness descends once the mooring lines are tossed aboard, the gangplank rises and the boat pushes into the river current.
Paddlewheel steamboats played a significant role in the western expansion of the young United States. Through the 1800’s, steamboat traffic increased steadily on America’s rivers, moving freight and people at greater speed and lower expense than other watercraft in use at the time.
Arriving later on the paddle-wheeler scene, The Delta Queen nonetheless has a unique and rich history of her own. She was built in the 1920’s and operated as a passenger vessel on the on the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta in Northern California for several years before serving the U.S. Navy during World War II. She returned to passenger service in 1948, this time on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. She was listed as a national landmark in 1989 and is the last remaining authentic overnight river steamboat.
Along with my husband’s fascination with American history, several factors made riverboat cruises easy vacations for us: unconventional work schedules, family demands, ease of access with Cincinnati’s port, and yes, fare discounts making the trips very affordable. We enjoyed several paddlewheel cruises before the Great Recession forced the vessels to port to weather the economic storm.
The vacation that was a demarcation is one woven into the fabric of American history. It was a cruise was from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati in September 2001. We departed Pittsburgh on Sunday, September 9, 2001. The “Captain’s Dinner” was early in the cruise, Monday September 10. Enough champagne flowed across our dinner table to make for a mellow, if not foggy start to the following morning, which had us moored at Marietta, OH. When the Cruise Director came on the ship’s intercom advising passengers that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers, I was sipping my first cup of coffee and muttered to my husband, “well, there’s a terrible air traffic control snafu.” Those words were barely uttered when the next announcement came that a second plane had struck the second tower. It’s been 20 years, and I still feel my heart sink recalling that announcement.
Passengers and crew wandered around Marietta stunned, and into early-opening bars with TVs broadcasting the real time terror of the morning.
Despite the horror, something amazing happened on that cruise. This, something that makes my heart sing, and I wish our nation could capture this again without associated terror, horror, and tragedy. Over the course of the next 36 hours, crew members and passengers collaborated to organize a prayer service on board. On the morning of September 13, the dining room of the Delta Queen became a non-denominational chapel. A passenger who was a minister, a “white man”, led the service along with the Captain. A crew member who served his hometown church as a choral director, a “black man”, had assembled a choir comprised of crew and passengers. For an hour, people of all colors, religions, political stripes, and socio-economic backgrounds, all came together to pray and sing for the United States of America.
In the years since 9/11, we’ve unified to varying degrees in response to natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the California Camp Fire, and to tragedies wrought by human hands like Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon Bombing.
But something that feels sinister seems to be pulling us apart now. It did not begin with a microscopic organism with ability circle the globe in a matter of weeks. We were already fraying, but COVID19 seems to be a catalyst that is magnifying differences that have existed for centuries. Rather than responding to each other with compassion and support that can heal our differences as well as navigate the devastation of the virus, we seem to have become even more fractured.
We are human beings and always far from perfect. But, two decades ago, I believe we were better people. We were more willing to unite; we were more compassionate and generous with each other.
How did we lose ourselves? And can we ever be “better” again? I do know I miss the United States that we once were.
What I would give to sing “God Bless America” again with that greatly diverse group of caring, compassionate, loving people who for several days in September 2001, became a community on board the Delta Queen.
