序言 ｜FOREWORD

野草WildGrass 译

 

千万不要下那条河。一个周末午后，当父亲与我离开后门打算开福特车兜风时，母亲突然喊道。这个下午，她会在家准备晚餐，烤制猪扒和香脆鸡，父亲与我则外出进行冒险。

 

这应该是1965年的春天，当时密西西比河浪涌圣保罗（美国明尼苏达州首府）堤坝，水位达到“历史高位”（今天报纸仍爱这样写）。洪水又一次席卷而来——但这一次，也是最后一次——那些世代定居在这块泛滥平原的意大利移民的小屋子，只能听天由命。

 

我们一家心照不宣，包括母亲也清楚地知道，父亲和我是要去堤坝。除了那条河，那天我们再没有第二个目的地。母亲心中对密西西比河泛滥成灾的恐惧与绝望，证实了亲眼见证灾难与废墟的价值。我们被驱使着前往这条河，打算参与这场被大火、洪水赋予庄严感的不正当盛事，而这些自然灾害将以足够接近——但也不要太过靠近——的距离，成为一种“风景”。我印象中的安全、乏味、普通的属于圣保罗堤坝的日常，现在一下被照亮了。它终于被重大的意义框住了，像一张伟大的照片被定格。它的意义不在于表面的满目苍夷，灾难让它庄严而高贵。堤坝不再是一道模糊的背景。它变得重要了，并且有看头——它因被洪水吞没而震撼人心。

 

那时，也许父亲要更加地伤感。毫无疑问，他明白这次的洪水是不同以往的。它的暴行极有可能招惹来联邦政府或者那些好心的城市规划师，他们会想出一系列安保措施和规章制度进行防护。这次洪水灾害已远远不是一次偶然的事件，我更愿意称之为时运。这条堤坝曾是父亲世界观里不可或缺的一部分，是父亲记忆里的故乡地形，而现在它不复存在，被抹除了。也许他在这个空虚、阴郁的周末选择开车来到这个潮湿的堤坝，是一次对自己过往历史的私人致敬——在不远处的小山上，曾有一个捷克移民聚落，他的家族是其中的一员，而沿岸则定居着意大利的移民。

 

像这样可以集聚不同国家移民的城市区域，正在逐渐消失。一些从小生活在温暖舒适、人口紧凑的老社区的孩子们，正在被带往城市边缘的地带，多年以后，我们终将会意识到这种行为本身就是城市杂乱无序的一种衍生。因为洪水的泛滥，当地的意大利移民以更加彻底的、如圣经里神谕般命定的方式，告别世代居住的聚集地，迁移的结果与洪水对这片地域的泛滥是相似的，尽管更加快速：荒无人烟。美国陆军工兵部队已经下命说明这些小房子必须被清除。居民必须离开。联邦和州政府不会提供资金进行重建。意大利居民被赶往郊区，这是对他们的惩罚——这些年来他们愚昧地固守在这条肆虐的河流沿岸。

 

想想这些钢琴！那天早晨，母亲看着报纸头条上被淹没的房屋和那些骤然变成威尼斯水城的街区里，各种交通小船在停车标旁边外露着未熄灭的引擎时，沮丧地喊道。母亲说，堤坝边上的女人们会一边挂衣衫，一边哼唱歌剧的旋律。那儿，每座房子都有一台钢琴！好像典雅的文化能拯救她们一样。透过这话，我仿佛看到了（这个景象将一直存留在我脑海中），一台台由简单线条组成的卡通大钢琴在暴涨的河水中上下浮动，胡桃木与云杉木制成的钢琴骨架微微弯曲，撑起的琴板就像沉重的帆布一样，而它们女主人站在即将被淹没的屋顶上，用柔和的颤声娓娓唱出一首首咏叹调。

 

那片街区已经是我们在密西西比河沿岸最后的社区了。在我剩余的少女时代及其以后，密西西比河的堤坝逐渐成为一个充满金属废弃物的院落，在这里，各种损坏的车与各种支离破碎的汽车部件不断累积，像巨大篝火的柴薪堆一样，只是它们从未被点燃。有时，无家可归的人趁着那几个温暖的月份，成群结队来到河岸，建立起临时的营地，然而最后他们也被迫离开。随着时间的推移，这条河流逐渐成为一块废弃物品与同样被社会抛弃的流浪汉的肮脏聚集地。

 

像密西西比河沿岸的很多社区一样，现在这座城市（圣保罗）已经宣布了它将对这条河“干点什么”的意图。挖掘机筑起更深的堤坝：一个开发者获得建造“住宅”的许可权，一个奢华的独立公寓式住宅区将出现在这个地方，在这片土地上，就在那个春天周末，我们到过的地方，那时父亲以进行商业事务的“调查”为由，说服一位坐在巡逻警车里的警察，成功带我跨过了密西西比河岸上的警戒线。父亲说出了“调查”这个词——温和的父亲——以极庄重的命令式口吻，让他听上去像是这里的负责人一样，然后那位警察挥手示意我们通过。

 

我们的福特车缓缓往里驶进，河水水位逐步上升到车轮盖。我本能的把脚从车厢底板上抬起，胳膊环绕扣住抬起的腿，就这样坐在软垫座位上。父亲沉默着，似乎没有意识到旁边的我正蜷曲着身体。他开得很慢，慢到让我产生一种缓缓往下沉入水中的错觉，而不是在前进。他趴在方向盘上，视线透过挡风玻璃，专注地凝视着外面的世界。河水发出慵懒柔和的声音，仿佛跟前行的车子在做一种私密的交谈。这些温柔的水浪听着十分扰人，唯一能让我安心的是父亲脸上专注、平静的神情。正如他对那位巡逻警察说的一样，他似乎真的在做某种调查。

 

我想，他在保存这里的影像，或者说他在记忆。在那个春天灰暗的星期日之后，新的、疮痍满目的景象出现在我们眼前，如同我们在滑动那个已是一片废墟、幽灵般的社区的过往影像，奇怪的是，不管它们多么令人伤感，也不会显不出它的美。

 

父亲愈发地徘徊在那些浸湿的街道中，我想是因为他想记忆起另外的、更无法磨灭的影像，那些画面已经从他的回忆和想象中潜逃，灼烧着他。在这片丢失的土地，他看到（尽管她不是真的存在过）一个穿着印花围裙的女人，伫立在围栏整齐的庭院里，一边哼着普契尼的意大利歌剧，一边把床单一线排开，不远处是安静流淌的密西西比河，它像任何沉睡着的野兽一样温驯和可怕。

 

密西西比河的启示不是直接的，它常带来一些看似不可能发生的图景。实际上，密西西比河像任何被忽视的地方一样，充满了奇异之处，并远比它那丰满的地图河线更加无形和无法捉摸。它是一座不断扩展的景观，积淀着陈旧的相片、动物的鳞甲、昆虫的鞘翅，以及被遗弃的物品、边缘的生物。它似乎在无形中吸引着遭受抛弃和排斥的人事物。而这些装饰着密西西比河，并成为它独有的风格。

 

密西西比河沿岸最小型的镇子，是一些远离主干道和高速公路的小村庄，它们骨子里透着一股破败性，并听之任之。苦涩的咖啡、谷物带啤酒（明尼苏达州特有的啤酒品牌）、汉堡包薯条、以及撒上面包屑、僵得像硬面包的鲶鱼。这里有一些时刻抽着烟的人，他们脸上的表情总是不急不躁，但这并不来自他们安静的天性，而是被这里的环境和氛围慢慢渲染出来。也许跟他们长期失业也有关系吧。这些超小型河镇并不以城镇自居，它们可以是一座酒吧，或是河岸边的一只小船坞，也可能是一间渔具店。你或许还能在其中找到两三家为你加热Tomstone披萨。

 

在美国的叙事观念中，故事线索倾向于从东往西游走。对一位美国作家来说，以主人公站在太平洋边缘处作为全书的结尾，是一种叙事性隐喻。不管这样的结尾是让主题升华，还是分崩离析，都无关紧要——边缘不仅仅作为故事的结局而存在。它更像是在表达，故事就是这样结束的。

 

在当今美国人的想象中，地处中部的密西西比河及其河域代表着一座立交桥。然而，不管是早期探险者与殖民者对美国的初涉，还是之后的探险（和巧取豪夺），都是从南往北（埃尔南多·德·索托Hernando de Soto与他意义非凡的探险之旅），甚至从北往南（从蒙特利尔和苏圣玛丽的贸易总部出发，法国皮货商们与他们的印第安人向导、捕兽猎人一路南下至密西西比河）。

 

密西西比河的“发现”费了大功夫。在此之前，欧洲人在脑海中想象它——渴望它——直到几代人后，他们才终于找到它。在早期探险者的测算（或狂热的希望）中，它的流向并非自北向南。1634年，简·尼科莱特（Jean Nicolet，法国皮货商）在成功抵达格林湾的温尼贝戈印第安人领地后，夸下海口，“如果在一条大河上有超过三天的航程之远”，那么他将“找到一片通往中国的大海”。无疑，这是一个梦，它被异国情调的精致装饰着，注满贪婪的希望。

 

即便是当时的土著印第安人也把密西西比河看成一个传说，并以“伟大之河”一名在部落间相传。这些部落土著从未见过它，但正是他们把密西西比河存在的传说告诉了当时北美殖民地南方的西班牙人和北方的法国人。

 

从此，密西西比河的传说，便未曾在第一批北美殖民的幻想中消失过。一次抵达这条河的旅行始终是他们的梦想之旅。

 

在地图上，密西西比河看起来像是一条贯穿美国国土的整齐线条，但事实上，这条河错综复杂。它由多条航道汇集而成，也是一个不同支脉互相争斗的宗族，其湖泊一样庞大的水域持续膨胀，众多支流的水量已能溢出至美国中心区域近三分之一的国土（如1993年的千年伏汛）。如果政府任其自然发展（即便如此——但印第安人也会建立堤坝并涉渡），密西西比河将让这个国家的中心地带变成一片辽阔的天然湿地。

 

在我们心中，沿河居住的自己就是一座座岛屿，漂泊在神秘、庞大的水下世界。而我们眼前这条大河，它的河域水线是这座水下世界渐渐抬升的边缘，后者收容着卑微的、经常是被遗弃的聚落。

 

这也是陆军工兵部队自1930年代开始挖泥作业和闸坝工程的真实原因。时至今日，他们自密西西比河上游，以阶梯式从明尼阿波利斯市至伊利诺伊州开罗市共计兴建了29座水闸，而开罗正是《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》书中，哈克和吉姆因未能顺利在密西西比河左转北上至俄亥俄州而展开后续一系列宏大南北叙事的转折点，因此才有了这个关于白人与黑人依靠一艘救生筏携手冒险并共创自由的故事。

 

1673年6月17日，经验丰富的探险家路易·若利埃（Louis Jolliet）和善于制作地图、精通几种印第安语的雅克·马凯特神父（Jacques Marquette），在五位法国皮草商和两位印第安导游的带领下，从位于圣伊尼亚斯县的简陋驻扎地出发，乘坐独木舟直下密西西比河的威斯康星河和福克斯河支流，最终抵达他们目的地，这里靠近现在的普雷里德欣城，威斯康星河也由此进入上密西西比河黑暗无际的水域。马凯特神父在日记中对此趟旅行的文字说明，后来成为了欧洲人对密西西比河最早的记录。

 

今天，涉及河流航道信息的江河图只有拖船领航员才会使用。这些江河图通常标记着码头和沼泽的名字。至于那些被忘记的通道、被遗弃的族群、无法定居或被抹除的地域，江河图上都没有，除了那些过去以五磅铅字印在上面的名字——“冬季码头”、“黑人中白昼标志”、“红宝石摆渡灯”、“巴德阿克斯岛”、“贝特西沼泽和米尔斯通码头”、“广州溜道”、“温菲尔德通道”、“可疑的克里克印第安人”和“无意义”。

 

这些美丽的名字，犹如一首首从潜意识中流出的文字挽歌，为那些无名岛屿、沙地河堤、棉白杨和柳树林、无人居所以及久远的地标作证。

 

至今，密西西比河仍保留了十七世纪的一些神秘瞬间，它们呈现出一种不可置疑的庄严以及这片大陆的宽广。其中，最广为人知的当属“伟大之河”这个称号，以及它的各国语言版本——Missisipi, Mich-a-see-bee, La Conception, Le Colbert, Rio del Espiritu Santo,

 

Mississippi，这是历史上那些试图在此留下足迹的外来探险者流传出来的。

 

也许父亲是知晓这些名字的。他喜欢眺望密西西比河，注视着来自加拿大成群结队的大雁起飞，沿着迁徙的路径一直飞翔。他喜欢看一团团掠过广阔河面的柔和彩光与雾气。

 

他也知道怎么在这些荣光下低头。他知道怎么观看。在那个涨潮的早晨，当我蜷曲着身体坐在他身边，担心我们也许会和那些幻想的钢琴以及真实的房子一同被卷走时，他用自己的眼睛记录眼前的世界，以此确保他记忆中那个消逝的世界不再消失。确保我们会再见到它。这也是一种让消逝的东西得以保存的方式。

 

拍摄和记忆那些被忽视的事物以及不受尊重的生命，让它们置于自身孤寂的抒情中——这总能战胜旅途带来的恐惧，并且往往不虚此行。

 

那个春日，有那么一刻（也许只有相片才能留住那飞逝的瞬间），当我们看到并记下眼前的密西西比河的景象时，那永恒并持续的一刻，就像马凯特神父在日记中记录的感受一样。那时他与同伴一起从威斯康星河河口划桨进入密西西比河。第一次见到这条伟大的河流，他写道，“这一刻的喜悦，我无法言说。”

 

Patricia Hampl

Just don't go down to the river. My mother speaking sharply as my father and I head out the back door for our Sunday ride in the Ford. She will stay home fixing dinner, roast pork, a brittle-skinned chicken, some meal demanding her afternoon. We go on adventures.

 

This would have been the spring of 1965 when the Mississippi surged over the St. Paul levee, achieving (as the papers still love to say) "historic levels." The flood ruined yet again but this time for the last time the little houses of the Italian families who for generations had settled on the floodplain, trusting to luck.

 

It was understood, no doubt by my mother too, that the levee was exactly where we would go, that the river was our only possible destination that day. Her hand wringing ratified the value of witnessing devastation and ruin. Damage drew us to the river, the illicit festival that solemnity provides by way of conflagrations, inundations, whatever depredations come near enough but not too near to become "sights." What I remember: our safe, mind-numbingly ordinary St. Paul world, was now illuminated. It was finally framed by significance. Not simply ruined, but dignified by disaster. The levee was no longer a blear background. It mattered. Was worth a look Thrilling because engulfed.

 

My father, probably, was more starkly elegiac. No doubt he understood that this deluge was different from previous floods. Its ferocity would call down federal mandates and earnest city planners with newly devised safeguards, rules and regs. More than an event, this flood would be seen as a condition. It would take an essential part of his worldview, his hometown geography, and erase it. Maybe he drove down to the sodden levee that vacant, gray Sunday in a private salute to his own domestic past an immigrant neighborhood as his own family were residents of a Czech neighborhood not far up the hill from the Italians along the river.

 

Such snug urban enclaves were eroding. The children of these tight, tender old neighborhoods were taking to the urban margins, to what we would come to know, years later, as sprawl. The Italians would depart in this more drastically biblical way, flooded out, but the effect was the same, if swifter: disappearance. The Corps of Engineers had already ruled that the little houses must be cleared away. The humans had to go. No federal or state money for rebuilding. The Italians were shooed to the new suburbs, punished finally for foolishly hugging the side of the unruly river all these years.

 

Think of the pianos! My mother had cried that morning, looking up from the dismaying front-page pictures of drowned houses, the suddenly Venetian streets where boats with outboard motors idled at stop signs. Women on the levee sang opera music as they hung out the wash, my mother said, every house down there had a piano! As if this cultural refinement should have saved them. From this remark I saw (and have retained in my mind's eye) cartoon grand pianos with warped veneers of walnut and spruce, their tops propped up like heavy sails as they bobbed down the swollen river, women warbling arias from the tops of doomed houses.

 

It was the last neighborhood along our part of the river. For years after that, the rest of my girlhood and beyond, the levee was given over to a scrap metal yard where smashed and flattened cars lay stacked like cords of firewood for a colossal bonfire that was never lit. From time to time bands of homeless people set up temporary camps along the riverbanks in the warm months and were eventually hounded out. The river became the disdained territory of throw-aways, used-up objects, discarded people.

 

Now the city, like so many communities along the Mississippi, has announced it intends to 'do something" with the river. Backhoes mound up a steeper levee: a developer has gained rights to build "housing units," luxury condos in the very place where, that spring Sunday, my father somehow convinced a cop in a patrol car that he had business past the police line and needed to "investigate." He used the word my mild father with grave command as if he were in charge here, and we were waved through.

 

We drove in, water rising to the Ford's hubcaps. Instinctively, I pulled my feet up from the floorboards, my arms around my raised legs on the gray-upholstered seat. My father didn't speak, didn't seem to notice me huddled next to him. He drove slowly, so slowly I had the sensation we might be sinking, going down, not forward. He leaned over the steering wheel, staring intently out the windshield. The water made soft slipping sounds against the car. These soft waves were worrisome, but I could only trust the absorbed, entirely calm look on my father's face. He did seem to be investigating, as he had told the patrolman.

 

He was framing his pictures, I think. Which is to say his memories. New, devastated pictures that appeared before us on that dark spring Sunday as we slid past images of ruin, which, strangely, were not unbeautiful, no matter how sad they were, sunk in the muck of that ghostly neighborhood.

 

Yet I think he patrolled those watery streets even more because he wanted to register other, more indelible pictures, images already burnt on his mind's eye from his own memories and imaginings, from this lost location where he saw (though she wasn't there) a woman in a flowered housedress, standing inside a neatly fenced yard, singing Puccini as she pinned a white sheet to the line, the Mississippi lying docilely nearby, tame and fearsome as any sleeping beast.

 

The river does not simply suggest, it provides improbable images. The Mississippi, more amorphous than its relatively plumb line on the map makes you think, is replete with oddity, like any ignored place left to its strangeness. It is an extended landscape of vignettes, shards, discarded objects, sidelined existences. It seems to have an affinity with abandonment and foreclosure. Discard and decay are its furnishings, its style.

 

The smallest towns along the river, hamlets well off any main road, virtually never on a freeway, betray a tendency towards tatter and resignation. Bitter coffee and Grain Belt, burgers and fries, catfish breaded stiff as hardtack. And in these places, the faces of people who smoke, who will always smoke, who are not unrushed because they are calm, but because they are becalmed. Maybe chronically unemployed. These are the smallest river towns, the ones that don't even see themselves as towns, just a bar, maybe a marina off the main channel, tackle shop. Maybe two bars, make that three, Tombstone pizzas they can nuke for you.

 

The American notion of narration tends to see our story-line moving from East to West. To end a book with the protagonist standing at the Pacific's edge is, for an American, to achieve narrative metaphor. Whether transcendence or collapse hardly matters the edge is not just the end. It's the ending.

 

The geographic middle, the Mississippi's realm, still exists in modern American imagination as flyover. Yet the earlier American experience of arrival, of seeking and finding (and taking) was South to North (DeSoto and his fatal journey) and, even more, North to South (the couriers de bois and their Indian guides and fellow trappers moving down the Mississippi from their trading headquarters in Montreal and the Sault).

 

The Mississippi took its time being "discovered." Europeans imagined it and desired it generations before they found it. It wasn't supposed to flow North- South in the calculations (or fevered hops) of these earliest explorers. In 1634, after reaching the Winnebago Indians in Green Bay, Jean Nicolet bragged that if he "had sailed three days' journey farther upon a great river" he would have "found the sea" which led to China. That was the dream, festooned with exotic delicacies, shot through with greedy hope.

 

Even the Indian people held the river's identity as legend, passing the reputation of "a Great River" to tribes who had never seen it but who in turn conveyed the rumor of its existence to the Spanish in the South and the French in the North.

 

The Mississippi has never fully relinquished this first residence in fantasy. A trip down the river is still a dream trip.

 

On a map the river may look like as a clean line bisecting the country, but the facts suggest a deeper metaphor. The Mississippi is really a massive conspiracy of waterways, a feuding clan of intermarried streams, massive lake-like expanses, and watercourses perfectly capable of spilling over almost a third of the American landmass at its heart (as it did in the millennial summer floods of 1993). Left to its own devices (if ever that was even the Indians attempted dams and rudimentary fordings), the river's message is that the center of the country is a vast wetland.

 

At our heart, we are islands adrift in a mysterious, largely submerged waterland. The river we see, the length of it, is the risen edge of this watery world, given to humble, often abandoned habitation.

 

This is the truth the Corps of Engineers has been countering with its dredging operations and the massive lock-and-dam constructions which, since the 1930s, have made the Upper Mississippi a staircase of 29 locks descending from the Minneapolis to Cairo, Illinois where Huck and Jim failed to turn left up the Ohio, thus providing our literature with its great North-South narrative, its morality tale of black and white clinging to a life-raft.

 

On June 17, 1673, in the company of five French couriers de bois and two Indian guides, the veteran voyageur Louis Jolliet, along with Father Jacques Marquette,

 

a missionary trained as a cartographer and fluent in several Indian languages, canoed down the Fox and the Wisconsin from their raw station at St. lgnace, and arrived finally at their goal near present day Prairie du Chien where the Wisconsin opened into the dark expanse of the Upper Mississippi. Marquette's diary notation is the earliest European record of an encounter with the river.

 

River charts, used today mostly by towboat pilots, are filled with the names of landings and sloughs without road access or populations, places erased or never settled, abandoned now except by the agate type used to inscribe their names on the charts Winters Landing, Coon Middle Daymark, Ruby Ferry Light, Bad Ax Island, Betsy Slough and Millstone Landing, Canton Chute, Winfield Access, Shady Creek, Point No Point.

 

Beautiful names, the automatic elegy of words that bear testimony to unmarked islands, sandy riverbanks, stands of cottonwood and willow, habitations and landmarks long gone, even from memory.

 

The Mississippi retains some uncanny seventeenth century moments, presenting itself with unquestioned majesty, the vastness of the continent in its flow. The massive body known elementally and most simply as The Great River with the stamp of all its attempted owners in its historic litany of languages Missisipi, Mich-a-see-bee, La Conception, Le Colbert, Rio del Espiritu Santo, Mississippi.

 

Maybe my father knew these names. He liked to look across the river, watch for Canada geese rising in formation over the great flyway. He appreciated a muddle of pastel light and mist across the wide water.

 

He knew how to bow his head to these glories. He knew how to look. He was taking things in that flood-time morning as I sat curled up beside him, dismayed that we might be swept away with the imaginary pianos and the very real houses. He was making sure his world, though lost, would not disappear. We would see it. That's how what's lost is allowed to endure.

 

To make pictures, to frame, out of ignored and dishonored objects and lives, the arresting beauty of the abandoned left to its lonely lyric devices this is always worth the terror, worth the trip. We had a moment that spring day--perhaps only pictures allow this fleeting state of grace when we saw and framed the river. A timeless moment, an instant like the one Marquette recorded in his journal, with such emotion, as he and his companions paddled from the mouth of the Wisconsin into the Mississippi. He beheld the great river for the first time, he wrote, "with a joy I cannot express."

 

Patricia Hampl