Rambling Ruminations of Riverboat Rituals

Guest Post by nkit

(You couldn’t get this band any tighter with a cheater bar.)

There is something to be said for getting older. You have so many memories stored away in that library between your ears. Those memories sustain you. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten how the Dewey Decimal System works, so all those memories are floating around like runaway barges. It’s sometimes hard to lasso one when you want to.

A few nights ago I was browsing in the non-fiction aisles, and basically just reminiscing about the years I spent working on towboats on the Inland Waterway System – The Tennessee River, The Ohio River and The Upper and Lower Mississippi River. I was just a nineteen year old kid when I started. I left when I was about twenty-three. The river gets in your blood. You’ll never get away if you don’t make the move when you’re young enough. The money is really too good also.

The company I worked for offered to sponsor me through the National River Academy in Helena, Arkansas. It was a chance to get my pilot’s license. A NRA class is six to eight young men each year. The money is great, but they wanted a three year commitment, which was reasonable, but I was only twenty two, and working 60 days on and 30 days off was not my idea of life, especially because I thought of having children and coaching Little League and all that other American Pie and Chevy bullshit.

Chip Spiegel was one of my best friends out there. His brother Tom was the road manager for Pure Prairie League, a favorite band for both of us. It was a common bond, and he tried to talk me into a river life, but I had other dreams. Chip had an outrageously large paintbrush moustache that he claimed was the template for the moustache of the old cowboy pictured on every Pure Prairie League album cover. We went through a lot together.

Besides making up and breaking up tows, our number one job was to make locks. A tow was fifteen barges – three strands of five barges. A tow had three rake barges on the bow (barges with a sloped bow), three rakes on the stern and box barges in between. The boat (The M.V. Foremost, Captained by Mervin Olson) faced up to the center strand of barges. We pushed those five barges, but because of the way we laid the rigging (wires and ratchets that held the tow together), those five towed the other ten barges when they were pushed, hence the term towboat.

My favorite river by far was the Tennessee River. From Hales Bar, TN where we regularly picked up fifteen loads of coal, on down through the locks and dams at Nickajack, Guntersville, Wheeler, Wilson, Pickwick and Kentucky Lock and Dam (Thank you TVA) the Tennessee is so green and serene, yet mean. It is so beautiful, and so seemingly calm and slow. But, if you got a chance to tie off and take a refreshing swim, you could be a quarter mile down river in no time flat.

It has very powerful currents that are dangerous and scary for even a strong swimmer, which I fancied myself at the time. We would make our way down to Paducah, KY and meet the Ohio River, then on to Cairo and the muddy Lower Mississippi to deposit our fifteen loads just south of New Orleans. Cairo was, of course, where Huck Finn and the nigger Big Jim were headed so as to ultimately head up the Ohio to the free states for Big Jim’s freedom.

As the first mate, it was my job to talk the Captain into the lock chambers so as to not cause catastrophic damage. I would speak to him over a speaker 1000 feet away from the pilot house and tell him how many yards to the lock wall and the bullnose. We were pushing fifteen loads of coal, 23,000 tons on a particular Sunday with a huge crowd on hand. It was my job to choke down 23,000 tons with a two inch diameter line while the Captain was backing, and I was praying to God that the 2 inch line (now a half inch in diameter while choking the tow down and bringing it to a stop) would not dog down on the kevel (cleat), snap and whip around and cut my leg off in front of all those people.

It happens often out there, but not that day. It did, in fact dog down, but it held and the sarcolactic acid in my arms burned the living crap out of me, but we got her stopped without hitting the lock gates. Needless to say, it can be a very physical and very dangerous job. Not only does the river get in your blood, but it’s also been known to take a quart or so from time to time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8n7CEEB1ps

Anyway, back to the Tennessee locks and dams. A common tow on the Tennessee River is, as I said, five barges long, three barges wide. That’s 1000 feet of barges with 195 feet of boat. The lock chambers on the Tennessee River are only 600 feet long, which means that you have to push into the chamber and break the tow in half, so to speak. You push nine barges in, break the front nine from the last six barges and boat, back the boat and six barges out so that the gates may close, and lock down with no boat. Wilson Lock and Dam was my favorite.

Located at Muscle Shoals, Alabama it was not only the biggest drop on the river, but also a big tourist spot. The drop to lock down was 94 feet and something to behold when the water was pumped out of the chamber and the lower gates opened and you were pulled out without a boat behind you. It’s a long way up when you get to the bottom and realize where the boat and last six barges are. As the First Mate it was my job to man the port side bow and a catch a line on a peg in the descending lock wall outside the lower gates.

A mechanical mule, or kevel, on a rail up above pulls you out until the current gets you. We had insurance, a man with a line with a monkey’s fist above on the wall, but if I can’t catch a peg or hook up my line to the monkey’s fist, we’re going down the river to sleep with the catfish. So, I make a cowboy toss, lasso a peg, tie us off, and wait for the chamber to refill and for the boat and last 6 barges to lock down.

They finally lock down and we tie it all back together, and away we go to the next Lock and Dam to do it all over again. The time it takes to make a lock is determined by the drop/rise – the amount of water to be pumped out and into the chamber, and the amount of traffic. It truly is a sight to see when handled with precision. The lockmasters love a lock that is well and efficiently made. It makes their lives easier.

I was telling some riverboat stories to my wife the other night, and despite the passing of forty some years, I was able to lasso a few of those old memories. I didn’t even need to access the card catalog. It makes me wonder what might have been had I stuck around for a few more transfusions. Bloody crazy. But my river blood stories are stories for another day, or not.

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