James' Journal

POSTINGS FROM JAMES

Oh that’s nothing

Just the gas lantern

Smashing into the ceiling

Main Street looks different from the river

The riverfront looks different from the river

Towns and cities too

The river looks different from the river

The hum of the motor back in the well

Long line mindless barges with their determined tugs

Churning the water deeply

Ripping up the grasses

That bind our little motor down

Whirlpools and schools of whirlpools

Linger and spin the trailing tail

Of slow motion barges

Industrial dinosaurs

Flat boats john boats keel boats steamers

Floating casinos not moving at all

Ghostly in the morning mist

Speed boats house boats launches pontoons

Jet skis yachts cabin cruisers

Riding each others wake

On the Upper Mississippi

Little towns strung along the shoreline

Maybe a broke down gas pier

Maybe a funky little harbor

The houses face the river

As a sign of respect

For this big wet vein

Whose watershed extends over 28 states

Barges heaped with coal coming up

Barges binned with grain going down

Artery, vein

Some kind of energy exchange

Waving

It’s a weekday work day morning

Mostly just the serious river runners

Out here now

And they mostly follow the custom

International custom

Of acknowledging those you pass

In other vessels.

A little wave

A nod or doff of hat

Maybe just fingers to the brim

A sweep of arm or one finger wave

International acknowledgment

On the high seas

On Old Man River

On the gravel roads of the Dakotas

People who would argue

Maybe even fight

If they got any closer in time or space

Don’t agree on nothin’

But this international acknowledgment

The custom of a wave

Old Water

The oldest fresh water

Is in Old Man River

The water starts out young

And far away

In mist and dew

In tiny itinerant streams

Coursing and joining

Forces with other waters

And eventually maturing

Into the Mighty Mississippi

Life blood of the land

Houses on the hillsides

Houses on the top

Houses on the river

That never stops

Red light green light

Passing port to port

Ships in the twilight

Staying on course

At first we were worried

We weren’t prepared

We’d left something out

We’d get out there and gone

Beyond reach of what we’d need

Couldn’t put a finger on it

We took a risk

Shoved off

Fates to the wind

And later

When the boat gained a rhythm

We opened the bag chairs

And there they were ---

Cup holders

DANGER

ALL VOIDS ARE

CONFINED SPACES

Sign posted on a barge wall

Sean was busy at his laptop. After his third quick move to avoid splash when we crossed a wake he said “Shite, it’s hard to get any work done”. To which I responded “That’s why I’m here”. Bobby added a deep chuckling grin and a thumbs up.

Lock 20 has a little yard with a waterwheel. They let us free float. Lockman came by up top on his little yellow electric Cushman cart as we were going down. Jolly looking fellow to whom we yelled out “Hey, you know how far it is to New Orleans?” He yelled back “Too far. You aint even half way there yet.” “How do you know that? You don’t know where we came from”. “Yeah, but I know where you’re at.”

PULL CORD

IN RECESS

FOR LOCKAGE

Sign for small craft at lock entrance

Overheard in Quincy

Well built community dock and harbor. Twenty bucks for a slip under cover. In the next slip a retired couple on a houseboat. They smile and greet us before we even tie off. Like they’ve been waiting for us. Apparently had heard of us. Bobby had walked up to the slip quietly before we got the boat there and overheard them talking about some guys on a pontoon from La Crosse. Guess our reputation is making better time than we are.

They commence through smiley faces to deluge us with the minutiae of their lives. Each line well worn. Oft repeated. Little vignettes of their past to tag onto any topic at all. Designed to be engaging and conversational. Hand-crafted over time. Refined and rehearsed for effect. Reminding me of the perfect shallow ideals of the ‘50’s. They kind of glom on to us. We don’t glom back; just bob and weave politely through a little banter as we gather up our cooking gear and carry it to the end of the pier to prepare a sunset dinner as Tenzin kayaks off for beer.

A little later I walk back to the slip quietly barefoot to get something. As I near their houseboat I overhear them talking inside their houseboat, arguing back and forth. Bickering. Same kind of practiced routine about it as the bantered chatter. But angry and argumentative.

Makes me think of the old Mohican Peacemaker I know, Aunt Dot, from Stockbridge. When she’s called in to do some peacemaking in a family dispute, she gets the people together and says “What is it about fighting that you like?”

Back at the end of the pier Tenzin returns with the beer and I say “Tenzin, if I ever get like that, don’t take me out and shoot me cuz I don’t want you to get in trouble…but feel free to let me die.”

Early evening light

A wave of bats

Near a half mile long at times

Undulating cohesively

Over the river

Rolling as a fast wave

Thick and connected thousands

Suddenly they split in the middle

And half of this wave veers off to the left

Making its’ own swoop off the river

Low over the east shore trees

The other half of this quick elastic wave

Dives down out of sight behind an island

And poof

It’s over

Unless you could read

The history of the air

You’d never know what happened

We push in the late day light

To get some more miles

Stay on our way to make it

It gets a little rough out there

We’ve passed some harbors

Pushing a little more

A bit of a squall building

Racing the darkness

Trying to keep the elemental

Pieces together

Which we do

Making camp

Making food

Covering the logistical waters

And when it’s done

I watch my three mates

Scrambling for high ground

Looking for signal

Taking their heads to other places

The officious twit

With his hands on his hips

Said ‘we think it was a tornado’

The golden friendly young lady

Pumping our gas

Said she heard it was a microblast

The timid cashier

Wasn’t quite sure

Said her boss was talkin’ wind shear

Whatever it was

It mangled the metal

That once roofed boats in the harbor

And left sections of dock upturned

They say the whole thing

Just lasted five seconds

Evansville Days

A town that knows how to throw a party. Relax the rules. Let your collective hair down. Take all the authoritarians who’ve ever used the phrase “it’s for your own safety” and send them on vacation. Run the whole place on common sense, the Golden Rule and whatever fun folks come up with. And when those tight asses come back from vacation be sure to tell them tales.

Nice little two grocery store town, Evansville. Right on the Kaskaskia River. Evansville throws its’ party on Main Street and the River. You can tie up your boat and camp for free.

Turbidity

All or part of 28 states (some say more) drain or flow into this river. Water from all sources; whether falling from the sky or coming up through the ground. It all joins into this river. As a result, especially on the Lower Mississippi, there is a power and scale to it that is hard to fathom. It is relentless, unforgiving and as busy as it can possibly be.

There are whirlpools down here (some folks seem to call them eddies) that sometimes dot the surface as far as the eye can see. Vortexes. So much swirling subsurface power that the surface stays flat. Ominously, deceptively flat. Even the winds, upstream, downstream or cross winds, can’t disturb the surface. When the waves are breaking, the whirlpools look inviting and friendly. They are not.

There are what you might call families of swirling whirlpools; bunches of little vortexes within a grander one. The flat circle might be 50 feet across, some say they’ve seen them well over twice that size. A big one is concave in the center. If it has little ones within it, they might be concave too. And not more than a foot away might be another of equal size and complexity.

Speaking of complexity, right in the middle of a sea of these vortices might be an equal number of boils. Those being places where the water seems to be erupting upwards from somewhere. You can even hear the big ones over the sound of the motor. (They say the big whirlpools hiss, but I haven’t heard it over the sound of the boat.) It’s a kind of bubbling or boiling sound.

The whirlpools and boils will push this boat somewhat unpredictably with their interaction. The way most of their power is subsurface. The way the whole dance is moving downstream very seriously while it’s doing whatever all else.

Jonathan Rabban in his book ‘Old Glory’ calls the effect on a small boat “slippery”. Can’t disagree with that adjective.

So you can have the current making an overall ripple; the wind making waves in a different direction; smooth amoebically circular flat surfaced whirlpools that pull down over a foot in their centers; and boils that bubble up many erratic inches, even at these low water levels.

This River requires one’s attention…and respect.

You Can’t Make This Shit Up

Yesterday a fish jumped onto our boat

We were several seconds stunned

As no doubt was the fish

Then we hooted and laughed

At the two pound flying carp

Because it was the stuff

Of impossible tales

Generations of fish stories

Flopping around on the deck

Like we’ve never seen before

Nor likely hence

A few hours later

Turning East to

Run up the Kaskaskia

All of a sudden

Whoosh here comes another one

Right through the open door

On the front of the pontoon.

We whooped and hollered

Someone mentioned dying and

Going to heaven

The improbability more

Than we could really assess

And then this afternoon

Just after the Ohio joined in

While the waters were roiling

As the two mighty rivers sorted out

Their new and irrevocable marriage

No more than a couple miles downstream

Some bigger fish started jumping

Alongside the boat

They’d jump a few feet in the air

Then hit the water only to jump again

Sometimes 3 or 4 times like a stone

Skipping on water

And we were jazzed by it all

Pointing and yelling out

So as a joke

I got up with a grin

Went and opened the bow door

And before I could get back to my chair

This 25 pound flying carp

Landed on the front deck and came

Flipping and thrashing through the door

All the way back to Tenzin at the wheel

Trailing blood and scales

And I remember thinking

Wait a minute that was supposed to be a joke

I tell you

You can’t make this shit up.

Then toward evening

Pulling into Hickman Harbor, Kentucky

Motoring slow toward town

6 more fish jumped onto the boat

For a total of 9.

It would’ve been 10 but one bounced

Off Bobby’s chest

And landed back in the water.

You can’t make this shit up.

I’d add that the next morning another fish came 6 feet out of the water and over our side rails, just missing Sean’s open laptop and thumped down in our stern…but I don’t want to stretch my credulity beyond what the uninitiated can believe.

Cairo

Where y’all from?

We put in up in Wisconsin.

Where y’all headed?

Just to Memphis. We heard tell they got some damn good barbeque down there and we’re fixin’ to get us some.

We got good barbeque right here in Cairo too, but Memphis, that’s the best alright.

Barge Wake On The Lower Mississippi

“You take about 36 empty barges and a big tug going upstream on the Lower and you got yourself a phenomenon.”

This is the stuff into which

Bobby did a bow stall.

The initial waves are big slow rollers

Then you meet the churn

Spinning off the four foot rolling holes

Following the stern

About then run into waves returning

From shore

Having ricocheted off both banks

They cross through each other

And in so doing make waves out of wake

That break straight up

On the surface

While underneath the cross currents

Meld momentum and move on

With giant slow motion.

When the biggest wave breaks over our bow

The tug and barges are a mile away.

Steady As She Goes

We passed the Roberta Tabor

Pushing fifteen loaded barges

Our first day out of La Crosse

And again, and yet again

Ten days later

Thirty miles shy of Memphis

Tenzin found some time to think

Sean in a hammock blogged away

Bobby called it a rare vacation

There was cold beer each and every day

Folks are going to great lengths these days to keep the Mississippi from its’ old tricks of shifting course. They want to keep it right where it is now. Mark Twain said used to be a fellow could go to sleep in one state a slave, and wake up in another a free man.

So these days they have wing dams and rip rap, locks and levees, dams and the mighty expensive Corps of Engineers. Stilts for the stubborn and sea walls for the rest.

People have a circumscribed sense of adventure. They don’t want to move to another state even if they don’t have to leave home to do it. Guess they don’t want the hassle of pro rating their year’s taxes between two states, or have to start all over again fighting with another school board. But life is short, and it might be worth it just for the fun of watching the apoplexy it would cause local politicians.

Anyway, we’re sure doing whatever we can think of to keep that scary old river right where it is. When people misunderstand something, and are afraid of it they don’t treat it well. Real power deserves real respect. So folks wall the river out of their lives, like an enemy. Well they don’t have to look at it, but they still gotta smell it.

OBSERVATIONS

Each day a few lone butterflies flitted past out in the middle of the river. Some right through the boat. Black, red, yellow, blue ones.

It would be a good idea to have a radio set along to communicate with tugs, locks and other larger boats.

Those new cots with mosquito netting tented over them would be ideal for sleeping on the boat or shore.

If I were to do this again it would be in a faster boat.

You could run the Upper with a minimum of supplies --- gas, food and shelter. Good maps can get you most everything when needed. The Lower is more problematic. Almost nothing is readily available by water.

Maps: What this Mighty River running needs is a good Lonely Planet type guide of maps and tips and relevant information. Neither the Corps of Engineers charts nor Quimby’s guide tell you what you need to know about the river and what is where on its’ shores.

Great Blue Herons are the dominant large bird all the way down. Sometimes several per mile standing still in the shallows.

The best way to go down the river is in a hammock.

Not much wildlife seen on the shores other than birds. The occasional deer, and the odd thing Tenzin and I saw that looked like a giant gray squirrel with digging legs (bushy tail and all).

You can go for hours (at our speeds anyway) on the Lower without seeing another private craft --- just tugs with barges. You can go days without seeing a proper dock --- just primitive boat ramps here and there. The valuable and singular exception being Hoppie’s Landing. An oasis on the water.

Before going read Jonathan Rabban’s “Old Glory” paying special attention to tips on small craft navigation. And Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” for texture and depth—and a sense of change.

THE GOOD SHIP SUNBIRD

A lesser vessel would not have fared so well.