Backstory: Those whom the river beckons

At midnight, the deckhands going off watch and those just coming on meet in the deck locker to trade safety vests and barbs. In the corner, a boom box is playing Pink Floyd. It is Mike Evans's birthday, his 27th.

"Old man," jokes Cecil Ruddley, Mr. Evans's replacement on the towboat Patricia Gail's midnight watch.

Young as he is, Evans has already worked a decade on Mississippi riverboats. "I wish I hadn't lasted a year," he says, slumping in a metal chair.

Veteran river men will tell you: Towboat life is not for everyone. While the work pays better than most jobs a high school graduate can find, it is physically draining and its month-on, month-off calendar is hard on family life.

Despite the trials, life on the open river and the camaraderie of the men and women who work it have an appeal to which tens of thousands succumb each year. There's a saying: Once you wear out a pair of work boots on the river, you're here to stay.

At 17, Evans took a towboat job to prove to his future father-in-law he could support his new fiancée. After a decade of working away from home six months of the year, he vows this will be his last trip.

Mr. Ruddley, meanwhile, is new to tow life. After nine months, it has captured his imagination like none of the many military and civilian jobs he has held since high school. Now, he says, he plans to follow in the wake of generations of river men: work his way up from deckhand to watchman to mate; study for his steersman's license, so he can drive a boat supervised by an experienced pilot; and eventually complete the rigorous test for his pilot's license and be "turned loose" on the river.

"I used to think like that," says Evans, hunched over a cup of coffee. "Not any more."

Ruddley switches in a Marvin Gaye CD. He has heard this before. "Man," he says, "you gonna be out here 30, 40 years talking about 'This my last trip.' "

"You trying to curse me, man?" says Evans. "Then again," he concedes, "I quit twice before. Always come back. This is all I know."

***

In the century and a half since Samuel Clemens worked her length as a steamboat pilot, the Mississippi River has done nothing but change. She has been channeled, locked, and dammed; seen shattering earthquakes and awesome floods; and even indulged the whim to jump her banks, landing disappointed Mississippi towns, overnight, in Louisiana.

River work, though, has changed little in a hundred years. Though global-positioning systems, radar scanners, and electronic depth-finders now fill the pilothouses, signaling in high-pixel resolution the passing of Dismal Point or Vice President's Island #46, out on the tow the labor is much the same as it ever was.

There, men (and occasionally women) work hard six-hour shifts ratcheting barges together with steel wire as thick as a baby's wrist. The tools are substantial, a fact belied by their pet names: "jewelry" for the heavy link chains, "hula hoops" for wires that circle the massive barge cleats. The smallest, three-foot steel rods used to brace the straining wires, are called "toothpicks."

As in Mark Twain's day, too, much of the Patricia Gail's crew started working the boats out of high school; some even before. Capt. Robert Byrd took his first boat job at 13 - choosing the course followed by his uncle, a river pilot, over that of his father, who sold moonshine.

Page: 1 | 2