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The wonder of travel on a river is this: a river is joined to everything else. That is a fact I realized once again recently when several friends and I piloted a 48-foot houseboat down the Mississippi, a river whose watershed is connected to more than 40 percent of the continental United States and a similarly large proportion of its identity.

We began in the little river town of Wabasha, Minnesota. After we loaded our gear and several bushels and coolers of food, Russell Morgan, the owner of Great River Houseboats, showed us how to start the boat, charge the batteries, run the stove, refrigerator and hot water heater; and reviewed the rather confusing insurance, damage, and emergency service policies.

Next we took a half-hour shakedown cruise, out of the marina, into the main channel, and into a small cove on the Wisconsin side of the river. He demonstrated how to operate controls (similar to those of a console-operated runabout) and anchor the boat for the night.

Then we headed down the biggest and best-connected river of them all - Mark Twain's river, America's river, the river of unwritten Indian legend. Beyond the next bend is always another town, another city, a gulf, an ocean. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." On a river as large and varied as the Mississippi, you need never arrive at all.

I was with The Comfortable Traveler. An editorial writer for a local metropolitan paper, he was the architect of the cruise and the menu, which required several coolers and countless bags and boxes of food. Here also were Traveler's friends, Snoring Man and The Pilot, who in an infinitely varied career operated towboats and barges on the Mississippi. We anticipated that his experience would prove valuable and interesting in interpreting the sights around us and navigating the many locks and dams on this stretch.

A gauntlet of buoys and shore markers reminded us that this is a working river, a nexus of nature, recreation, residence and commerce. That fact is most obvious at a town such as Alma, squeezed between the river and the steep bluffs. Founded by white settlers arriving by steamboat, these river towns are among the oldest communities in the region. Owing partly to the era in which they were built and partly to the steep topography, they huddle near the river, a knot of activity. Clapboard homes and brick buildings cling to bluffs and fight for space along narrow strips of land between highway and railroad tracks, the tracks and the Mississippi.

As we approached Alma, we saw that boat traffic was backed at the lock and dam, one of 29 mammoth structures from the Twin Cities to St. Louis built early in the century to create pools to aid navigation. The Pilot picked up the radio mike to call the lockmaster. A towboat with several barges was passing through the lock, the lockmaster said.

In minutes the tow and barges emerged from the lock and churned upstream, pushing mountains of water with their prow. The semaphore at the lock entrance flashed green. We and a half-dozen other craft slipped down into the lock chamber. "Locking through," as passage around the dams is called, is perhaps the trickiest aspect to navigating the modern river. Certainly it is the most intimidating to the beginner. To The Pilot, of course, it was routine, and a 48-foot houseboat much easier to navigate than a tow boat and barges. Inside the lock chamber, we held ropes tossed to us by attendants along the wall and waited for the lockmaster to pull the plug. The water began to drop slowly but steadily. The downstream semaphore turned green, and we emerged below the dam. The runabouts sped away, as we plodded in their wake.

We motored down the river at an easy 5 to 6 miles and hour, scanning the riverbanks for a suitable anchorage. We soon spotted a site on a high sand bank. We eased the bow onto the sand and deployed the steel "sand anchors" to keep us perpendicular to shore for the night.

We had been towing a 14-foot johnboat along the houseboat, and just before dark, The Pilot and I scooted upstream, the flat-bottomed boat skipping over river like a stone. We spotted a wingdam, one of thousand long rock dikes built during the last century to focus the current to the center of the river. Splashes and spreading rings along the rocks suggested some kind of feeding frenzy. We anchored and began casting. Within minutes we caught several smallmouth bass, a white bass and a northern pike - and lost countless strikes. That night we gorged on fettuccine The Comfortable Traveler prepared in the houseboat's kitchen. With Snoring Man sequestered in his own cabin, we slept to the gentle lap of the river against the houseboat and the sound of the occasional freight train across the river.

Next morning, after a leisurely breakfast, we lifted anchor. Soon we passed Minneiska, population 127, its brick church and modest houses tucked artfully into the base of the Minnesota bluffs. Cars and trucks whizzed by on U.S. 61. Driving along the river I had never noticed the beauty of this small town, but from the water, prepared by the slow pace, I could appreciate how harmoniously it blended with the hills, how invitingly it addressed the river.

The river turned, and we looked down a long procession of bluffs. Each hill appeared like a curtain, grayer and grayer, fading into distance. They resembled, observed Traveler, the successive arches of a Gothic cathedral. The scene was not so different from what Father Louis Hennepin saw in 1680, when he observed that the Mississippi "runs between the two chains of mountains … that wind with the river."

We passed through another set of locks, and motored by a long bank where houseboats, runabouts, and even canoes and sea kayaks had pulled up on the sand. By midafternoon we neared Fountain City. A line of limestone bluffs rose several hundred feet behind town. We approached these river towns with a sense of excitement out of proportion to the size of the towns themselves. They represented an opportunity, a meeting of river and land, of boats and railroads and automobiles, of residents and travelers. "As long as you're moving there's hope," observed The Comfortable Traveler. "I've never had a bad time traveling. I've had trips where everything goes wrong, but I've never had a bad time traveling."

We drove the houseboat onto a sandy bank about a mile above and across river from town. The Comfortable Traveler and I ran the johnboat into town, tying off at the public dock. A faded sign greeted us: Welcome to Fountain City. We soon encountered the Monarch Tavern. Made of brick, it stood three stories. A sign advertised "102 years of beer, food and beauty." A plaque on the highway marked the site of a battle between Indian tribes in 1839. Farther up the hill, St. Mary's Catholic Church, built 1899, anchored the upstream end of the downtown; St. Michael's Evangelical Lutheran Church sat a couple of blocks away at the downstream end. Then we came to a sign: Rock in the House, three blocks on the right.

The house sat at the upstream end of town, at the foot of the towering bluff. John and Frances Burt were working in the yard. On the side of the house was a box for admission: $1.

At 10:38 on an April morning in 1995, John Burt explained, the owner of the house, a Mrs. Anderson, had just taken pictures of her newly remodeled bedroom and was standing in her kitchen when she heard the sound of thunder. What she didn't realize until a few seconds later was that a boulder weighing about 200 tons had torn from the cliff above, bounded down the hill and split into several smaller projectiles. The largest sailed toward the new bedroom and landed with an earth-shaking crash. The fellow who worked for the Corps of Engineers across the street ran over and tried the doors, but all were jammed. Finally he forced open the kitchen door, and Mrs. Anderson stepped out unharmed.

Since then the boulder has occupied virtually the whole back bedroom, sitting atop the flattened waterbed. A month after the collision, Mrs. Anderson and her husband sold the house. "They didn't want nothing to do with it," John said. "They got out of here. It scared them out."

"Does it make you nervous to live here?" The Comfortable Traveler asked.

"Well, we don't live here. We live up here a couple miles," John said, pointing.

The Burts bought the house partly because they understood the house would be torn down and partly for the potential tourist trade. Since then, newspapers and magazines all over the world have written stories about the house. In 1995 more than 19,000 people came to see the house. "We get foreigners here practically every week - Russia, Japan, all over," John said. Another rock, 200 tons by John's estimate, still hangs on the cliff, with a crevice behind it that is large enough to crawl through.

The Comfortable Traveler and I joined the others at the boat. We had been traveling only two days, but the days - so lacking in structure, so empty of normal accomplishments - achieved the fluidity of the river. The houseboat, by blending the convenience of a cabin with the mobility of a boat, further confused my sense of time and place.

That evening The Comfortable Traveler grilled shrimp, chicken and porketta. After dinner we hauled lawn chairs to the boat's roof and smoked cigars into the night. I rolled out my sleeping bad and pad. The mosquitoes never found me. I finally awoke about 5 a.m., covered with dew. Upstream, stars twinkled above the black Mississippi. Downstream, dawn began to spread across the horizon. The lights of town shown in the still river like the reflection of a pendant, and I thought Fountain City one of the most beautiful communities I had seen.

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