Backstory: Those whom the river beckons

Today, towboating is one of the better-paid careers a high school graduate can find. Towboaters work six months of the year for a starting salary of $23,000. After seven years and receiving a pilot's license, they can make close to $70,000. Each year more than 30,000 men and women work these nonunion riverboat jobs. Another 800,000 positions depend on this waterborne trade.

Like West Virginia coal miners or Texas oil drillers, most of those who work the rivers have boats in their blood. "With a lot of river people, it's passed down," says H. Nelson Spencer, editor of The Waterways Journal, the industry's premier trade publication. "Their dads or grandfathers would've been in the river business, and it's just something they've grown up with."

Tricks of the trade are passed down from generation to generation, too. Melvin "J.R." Harville, the Patricia Gail's chief engineer, makes it his mission to be a mentor to younger men.

A 35-year veteran of towboat life, Mr. Harville remembers the river men who took him on as a kid fresh out of high school, and turned a restless job into a career he could be proud of.

They became like family: Old Tuggy Howe, who "couldn't read nor write, but knew the river just as good," and Charlie True, who joked to young Harville: "I've always ate the fish out of the Kentucky River. But when I die, the fish are gonna eat me."

Now, when he's not in his tiny office overlooking the engine room, its walls lined with switches labeled "Blower shutdown" and "Local Ack Panel," Harville watches the new deckhands, pulling aside those who show initiative. Sometimes they're intimidated by the prospect of working in the engine room, a job known to require mechanical and mathematical aptitude. He keeps after them.

"I get 'em in here, show 'em something, and leave 'em to study on it a while," he says. "I ain't gonna turn 'em loose with anything that's gonna hurt 'em. But still on, it'll be enough so they know they've really done something."

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Down in the deck locker, Evans drains his mug. The good pay, the abundant time off - none of it matters, he says, when the cost to family life is so high. Back home in southwestern Illinois, he has a wife and a 2-year-old daughter. "I've gotten to see about seven, eight months with my daughter since she's been born," he says. "My wife's tired of it, and so am I."

"Well," says Ruddley, leaning back in his chair, "with kids it's different." His own children live in Indiana with their mother, and he rarely sees them. "That's what I'm-a do when I get off here," he says.

On the stereo, Marvin Gaye is singing about lost love. "I don't know," says Ruddley. "This job has a kind of excitement to me. I been just about all over. I'm kinda at that age where give me one something and let me do that thing and build on it."

Evans shakes his head. "I been doing this longer than I been married," he says. Whatever his daughter grows up to do is fine with him - so long as she doesn't become, or marry, a towboater. "I want something better for her," he says, rising to unstrap his orange life vest, flashlight, and radio. "I want her to go to college: doctor, lawyer, something where she's got a good stable life."

"Or marry a rich man, I don't care," he says, heading upstairs to bed.

• Part 3, Friday: Navigating the 'wiggles.'

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