|
COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
PEKIN --
The "Pekin wiggles" are halfway up the Illinois River, between the Mississippi River and Chicago. On the radio, other tows tell us how they are doing in the Pekin wiggles. During the forward watch, on this tow, the captain mentioned them when they were still three hours upstream. They would not be his to negotiate. Two in the afternoon and the pilot, Mel Adams, of the back watch, the after watch, is addressing them at the moment. He has made a sharp turn to the left followed by a bend to the right, and is now going into an even sharper turn to the left that will line him up with the Pekin railroad bridge, of the Union Pacific. There is not much horizontal clearance under the Pekin bridge.
Mel is tall and lanky, fed in the middle but lithe in the legs. He has a sincere mustache, a trig goatee, and a slow, clear, frank, and friendly Ozark voice. He lives in southern Missouri, on Table Rock Lake, which has seven hundred miles of shoreline. The eight other people in the crew of this vessel all call him "Male." They are from Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, southern Missouri, and southernmost Illinois. They work twenty-eight days per stint. When they report for work, they show up in Paducah and are driven in a van from Kentucky up into Illinois or anywhere else this towboat happens to be. Its name is Billy Joe Boling.
Over all, the Illinois is a fairly straight river, only ten per cent longer than its beeline, the fact notwithstanding that the bends at Pekin corkscrew like fishing line that has come untied. Mel understands monofilament. He is wearing shorts, sandals, a cap with the word "fishing" sewed into it, and a T-shirt covered with fish. Each morning, before he goes off watch at five-thirty, he cell-phones his wife, Aurora, and gently awakens her. When he is at home, he routinely gets up at four-thirty, goes fishing, is off the lake by nine, and by nine-thirty has cleaned his fish and put them in the freezer. He says his personal best is a twenty-eight-pound flathead catfish. In his Bayliner Trophy 1703 with center console, he penetrates the bays and skims the shoals of that seven-hundred-mile shoreline, his touch grooved with experience.
A lot of good that will do him here. This vessel is no Bayliner with center console, and the Illinois River is not a big lake in the Ozarks. The mate Carl Dalton has gone up ahead with his walkie-talkie to serve as a pair of eyes for Mel in the pilothouse, near the stern. Carl is a tall guy who played Kentucky high-school basketball, but when he was halfway up the tow, near the break coupling, he was already a tiny figure, and now, all the way up at the head, he is an ant. This vessel is a good deal longer than the Titanic. It is thirteen feet longer than Cunard's Queen Mary 2, the longest ocean liner ever built. It is forty-four feet longer than any existing aircraft carrier. It is a hundred and five feet wide. And with Carl calling off numbers--"twelve wide on the port . . . two hundred below . . . twelve wide, a hundred and fifty below . . . eight wide on the port, a hundred and twenty-five below . . . seven wide on the port . . . six wide on the port"--Mel is driving it into the crossing currents of the hundred-and-fifty-foot gap between one pier and the other of the bridge's channel span. It helps that the railroad tracks have been raised. In their normal position, they are three feet lower than the Billy Joe Boling.
The Illinois River is in most places a little more accommodating. With exceptions here and there, the demarcated channel is three hundred feet wide. But you are not going to do a doughnut with this vessel. You are not going to do a Williamson turn. Both maneuvers describe closed three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circuits. This vessel is nearly four times longer than the channel is wide. The entire river in most places is about a thousand feet from bank to bank. Our bow wave quickly spreads to both shores. We could not turn about if we had all of the river to do it in. If we were ninety degrees to the direction of the channel, we would block the river solid and spill over both sides into the trees.
Among American rivers, only the Mississippi and the Ohio float more ton-miles of freight than the Illinois, a fact that does not seem to have done much to raise its national profile. People say, "The Illinois River? What's that? Never heard of it. Where does it go?" Actually, there are three Illinois Rivers in America, each, evidently, as well known as the others. One is in southwestern Oregon. One rises in western Arkansas, describes a vast curve through eastern Oklahoma, and goes back into Arkansas as a tributary of the Arkansas River. The autochthonous Illinois River begins not far from Chicago, at the confluence of the Des Plaines and the Kankakee. From river town to river town, it draws a bar sinister across the state of Illinois--Marseilles, Ottawa, Starved Rock, Hennepin, Lacon, Rome, Peoria, Pekin, Havana, Bath, Browning, Beardstown, Meredosia, Florence, Hardin--descending two hundred and seventy-three river miles to Grafton, Illinois, on the Mississippi River forty miles up from St. Louis.
In the thousand feet in front of Mel are fifteen barges wired together in three five-barge strings. Variously, the barges contain pig iron, structural iron, steel coils, furnace coke, and fertilizer. Each barge is two hundred feet long. Those with the pig iron seem empty, because the minimum river channel is nine feet deep and the iron is so heavy it can use no more than ten per cent of the volume of a barge. The barges are lashed in seventy-six places in various configurations with hundreds of feet of steel cable an inch thick--scissor wires, jockey wires, fore-and-afts, double-ups, three-part backing breasts, three-part towing breasts. The Billy Joe Boling, at the stern, is no less tightly wired to the barges than the barges are to one another, so that the vessel is an essentially rigid unit with the plan view of a rat-tail file. In the upside-down and inside-out terminology of this trade, the Billy Joe Boling is a towboat. Its bow is blunt and as wide as its beam. It looks like a ship cut in half. Snug up against the rear barge in the center string, it is also wired tight to the rear barges in the port and starboard strings. It pushes the entire enterprise, reaching forward a fifth of a mile, its wake of white water thundering astern.
Carl Dalton, on the head of the tow, now says, "Six wide on the port, fifty below."
Mel, in the pilothouse, is grinning. He has come up to this railroad bridge many times before and evidently it amuses him. "This place is so narrow you have to put guys out on the head to tell you where you are," he says, and laughs.
Where is he? Fifty feet from the bridge, and his head corner on the port side is lined up so that it should miss the nearest pier by six feet. He is steering the Queen Mary up an undersized river and he is luxuriating in six feet of clearance. Meanwhile--back here a fifth of a mile--the dry riverbank is ten feet behind the stern rail. The stern is so close to the bank you could almost jump off without getting your feet wet. Mel is not standing at a wheel. On this vessel, a wheel is a propeller. There is no wheel in the pilothouse. He is handling instead a pair of horizontal sticks--beautiful brass fittings with pearl handles, one for the steering rudder, one for the flanking rudder. He also has two throttles, one for each engine. Each throttle has a forward and a reverse position. If he goes forward on one and back on the other, he can walk the whole tow sideways.
Years ago, our captain--who is off duty and in his room sleeping--was a deckhand on a tow that hit this bridge and scattered all fifteen barges.
"Five wide," Carl says. Carl is five feet from the pier and has drawn even with it.
"That's perfect," Mel tells him. "That's all. I got 'er."
"Getting set" is vernacular for being moved sideways by current. When Mel is steering through less complicated reaches of the river, he will choose an object under a mile in front of him (an island, say) and another object (say, a church steeple) directly behind the first one and much farther away. If the steeple moves to the left with respect to the island, the tow is being set to the left. If the steeple moves off to the right of the island, the tow is being set to the right. He doesn't need any church steeples here. There is nothing subtle about the current under this bridge. We are about a third of the way through now and the current has begun to shove the head from the west side of the channel toward the east, skidding the whole big vessel from one pier toward the other. We started sixty inches off the west pier and--after moving forward eleven hundred and forty-five feet--we end up sixty inches off the east pier as the stern slides by it.
Mel aims the tow into a mile and a half of dead-straight river. Skyscraping grain elevators line the eastern bank. Beyond them, and behind a high levee, are the invisible streets of Pekin. "When we was going through the bridge, we had to favor the leg on the left side 'cause the current will push us over to the pier on the right side, so we had to favor the pier on the left side real close," he says. "You could feel the current catching the head, pushing it over towards the right. So we pushed it through about another two hundred feet, then let it run on straight rudder for a while. By the time we got through the bridge, we only had about five feet of clearance on the starboard side. That's how you take it through that bridge, especially when we got some current running, like we do now."
After lighting a cigarette, he adds, "There are seven different ways to run a river--high water, low water, upriver with the current on your head, downriver, daytime, nighttime, and running it by radar. Once you learn those seven ways, you can run any river. We made the Pekin wiggles in one try."
open sleeve --
In this sort of journey, there is no real departure or precise destination. Its structure is something like a sleeve open at...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
