In the Night

Just before midnight last night, as the boat slowed and the steady background engine noise shifted, I wrapped myself in a bathrobe and went to the empty top deck.  The sky was full of stars, arcing down to the horizon in every direction.  Dozens of gulls – laughing gulls or their relatives, small white bodies with black heads – chuckled and muttered, flicking around the boat, in and out of the light.  The river here was wide, stretching at least three times the width we had seen upstream near Bratislava, and the current slack behind the dam ahead.   Bright lights illuminated the tremendous engineering we approached:  the dam and locks, with a long armored dike stretching out upstream, ready to embrace us.  Above the lock, an electric billboard spelled out something, in Hungarian I suppose. 

The boat slowed, the engines shifting again, and then came to a stop.  Next, to my surprise, a complete sideways shift, and the boat moved slowly to settle against the concrete embankment.  Ropes were thrown and secured, the engines died, and we sat, waiting for the lock ahead to fill and open.  Still, but not silent night.  On the far side of the dike, the ground dropped away into a wetland or shallow pond, dark and filled with a cacophony of night noises:  frogs peeping, birds whistling and squealing, crickets or beetles droning.  An occasional bat flickered by, the air around the light towers full of insects.  So strange, fantastic almost, to see the huge human infrastructure – the dam, the power lines, the locks, the light towers, straight flat cement embankments – and to hear in the darkness this chaotic nocturnal wildlife.

Another boat approached, and settled in on the dike behind us.  Soon, the water level in the lock reached the height of the river on our side, the lock gate dropped, and the captain drove our boat in to the enormous lock.  He came out onto the deck and steered the boat in from a sort of portable steering control panel right on the side of the boat, watching carefully as he moved us in to the lock, a meter or two from the side.  We stopped, the bow of the boat right up close to the end of the lock, and tied off on the mooring pylons set in the side of the lock that float up and down with the water level.  There must be vocabulary for all this that I do not know.  The boat behind moved in and tied up behind us.

I went back to our cabin, cold and bug-bitten.  As I lay in my bed, after what seemed like a long time, the lock gate closed, the water level dropped, and sometime later, half-asleep, I realized we were underway, passing the last lights and heading out onto the dark Danube, maybe 30 feet lower and rushing again towards Budapest.