This essay is a response to Paul Metcalf's I-57 (LongRiver Books, 1988), a narrative hieroglyph constructed from written artifacts that culminates in a journey by car from the vicinity of Cairo, Illinois to Chicago. am sitting in the Blue Sea Lodge in San Diego, California, listening to the Pacific Ocean over my left shoulder and thinking of I-57, over my right. We landed in O'Hare Airport, Chicago, Illinois, about six hours ago, and flew over Interstate Highway 57. remember printing an excerpt from I-57 in a little magazine with a name stolen out of Melville's Pierre, i.e., SARCOPHAGUS. remember pieces of I-57 well. Paul and Nancy Metcalf spent a winter in San Diego, about a mile from where now sit. I'm in their old neighborhood, the beach. It is a strange feeling to sit this side of the continent thinking of Metcalf's book while watch TOUR OF DUTY the television. It seems more than slightly schizophrenic. East/West-West/East. ate dinner in NYPD's 2nd Precinct -- in San Diego. listened to Marvin Gaye sing What's Going on CBS. have the urge to open the door, step out to the beach, walk the water once asked Metcalf if he was trying to literalize the geography of Melville's The Confidence-Man in I-57. He said, no. Metcalf did go to Cairo, and in I-57 he quotes Dickens: the hateful Mississippi, circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course, a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hot bed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise; a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it, such is this dismal Cairo. Herman Melville had gone to Galena, Illinois in 1840, with one Eli James Murdoch Fly. It was an exploratory trip west, that included a visit with Herman's uncle Thomas Melville, in Galena. A Melville scholar, Tom Quirk, has written: the emphasis |in the novel~ would have been a voyage following the course of the Mississippi from the falls of St. Anthony toward the sea -- as Melville himself had probably followed it to the mouth of the Ohio in 1840 . Shortly after the publication of The Confidence-Man Melville gave up the life of gentleman-author-farmer, sold Arrowhead, and moved to New York City. On July 15, 1856, Lemuel Shaw Jr. sent news to his brother Samuel of the completion of their brother-in-law Herman's last commercial novel and writes: I know nothing about it; but have no great confidence in the success of his productions. Four or five years earlier Melville had discarded a chapter of this book entitled THE RIVER: As the word Abraham means the father of a great multitude of men so the word Mississippi means the father of a great multitude of waters. His tribes stream in from east and west exceeding fruitful the lands that enrich. In this granary of a continent this basin of the Mississippi will not the nations be greatly multiplied and blest. Above the Falls of St. Anthony for the most part he winds evenly in between banks or flags or tracts of pine over marble sands in waters so clear that the deepest fish espy the uninterrupted flight of the bird. Undisturbed as the lowly life in its bosom feeds the lowly life its shore, the coronetted elk & the deer while in the watery form of some couched rock in the channel, furred over with moss, the furred bear the marge seems to eye his amphibious brothers, wood & wave wed, man is remote. From I-57: But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven!) has no young children like him? An enormous ditch. (p. 37) from the slaveholding states there now poured a fresh stream of immigrants for whom the atmosphere of human slavery became as suffocatingly intolerable as any economic and political oppression in the old world. Many belonged to the uneducated, non-slaveholding poor white class …