| BY MARK COATNEY
This
is one of those "Hey Mom, you won't believe where I'm
at" moments. I'm standing in the pilothouse of the
John Donnelly, one of the largest towboats operating in
the Mississippi River. Which makes it one of the largest
ones in the world, and thus one of the coolest places to
be on the planet.
The numbers
associated with this thing are staggering: The boat is powered
by three enormous GM diesel engines that can shove the boat
and its full complement of barges upstream at around 8 knots
(in landlubber lingo, about 10 mph). Which doesn't sound
like much until you consider that a full complement can
be as many as 50 barges and that each barge measures 200
feet long and 50 feet wide, and that when they're all tied
together in a neat seven-by-seven array they make a tow
that is longer than the Sears Tower. "A tow that size,"
says Captain Rich Gilley, "is the largest moving thing
on the face of the earth." I feel like I'm eight years
old.
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| DIANA WALKER FOR TIME |
| The tow boat John Donnelly heads up the Mississippi. |
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We're
nestled along the west bank of the Mississippi River about
15 miles south of Cairo, Ill. Because this is conveniently
located near the intersection of the Ohio and Mississippi
rivers, this is a staging area for Ingram, one of the larger
barge companies. There are two kinds of boats in use here.
The somewhat misnamed towboats, such as the John Donnelly,
are the massive things that sit at the back to push an array
of barges. The tugs are smaller craft, the border collies
of the river, and their job is to steer a few barges at
a time into a group for the bigger boats to move up or down
river. A few moments ago, the crew of the John Donnelly
finished stringing one-and-a-half-inch-thick cables in a
network to stitch together a small tow of 12 barges.
The barges
haul pretty much everything that people use in bulk —
grain, coal, crushed aluminium. But the big money is in
tankers, which carry the more valuable — and more hazardous
— liquid cargoes. Companies will pay top dollar to
ship them, and the economics of river shipping are such
that barge owners will drop a full complement of loaded
dry-goods barges and travel downriver empty to pick up a
load of tankers.
Most
of the Mississippi River complex has been reengineered for
the benefit of these behemoths, a fact that not everyone
is pleased with. In fact, the river has been so straightened
and deepened, it would hardly be recognizable from the days
when Samuel Clemens (aka, of course, Mark Twain) was piloting
steamboats. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers runs a system
of locks and dams on the Ohio, Illinois and upper Mississippi
(we went through a few on the way down; the last is just
north of St. Louis) that allows them to keep water at a
level deep enough for the barges.
Despite
the fun of getting to move megaton loads up the big river,
all this messing about in boats doesn't always make for
an easy life. The tows run all over the Mississippi River
system, meaning that for the crew (usually nine workers)
the schedule is 28 days on, 28 off. That can be a tough
sell to prospective crew members, and like everyone else
in this supercharged economy, Ingram has a hard time attracting
qualified workers.
When
the boat is running, it runs 24-7. When they travel together,
Gilley and Captain Kenneth Miles split the piloting chores,
each driving the boat for two six-hour shifts every 24.
And while that schedule means that crew members can live
anywhere (when not on the boat, Gilley hangs his hat in
Albuquerque; one fleet captain lives in Mexico), the crazy
schedule can be hard on families.
"I'm
on my second marriage," says Miles. "My second
wife is fine with it, but the first couldn't handle it.
"The
problem wasn't the 28 days on," he jokes, "it
was the 28 days I was home she didn't like."
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