I KNEW FROM THE START that the extensive dam and lock network on the Ohio River would be one of the most interesting challenges of the trip. Reenactors like Scott and weekend fishermen that I met along the Ohio loved to repeat tales of peril at the locks, from being forced against the cement walls while sharing the chamber with a coal barge, to the sudden race of water in the exit pools once the gates have been opened. On busy summer weekends in settled areas where recreational boating is popular, the line of boats waiting outside the entrance gates to “lock through” can stretch for a hundred yards and delay river traffic for hours. I would soon learn, however, that safely negotiating the locks is really not that difficult, and the exaggerated tales of danger mostly serve to inflate the egos of motorboaters. It’s all part of the culture of fear surrounding the rivers. The stories also obscure the significance of the locks. Descending the “aquatic staircase” of the Ohio is to discover what rivers really are today.
The first principle that it was vital for me to understand was that, on the Ohio and Mississippi, I was only remotely encountering a natural river environment. From the earliest days of commercial steamboat traffic on the western rivers, the 1820s, when a legendary boat captain and inventor named Henry M. Shreve began clearing the floating islands of forest debris along the Mississippi with a new design he called the “snag boat,” America’s major waterways have been so ceaselessly dammed, trenched, and channelized with levees and jetties that they exist today as man-made lakes. On the Ohio, particularly, the extensive dam and lock system has tamed the river, almost completely eliminating the “wild and free” natural flow of the 19th century. The controlled bodies of water between the dams are called “project pools,” or “managed pools,” with flow and water depths determined by the amount of water the managers of the dams upriver decide to release during any twenty-four-hour period, depending on rains. This flow management has slowed the currents of the river, making it safer for commercial traffic, especially when large barge strings are passing each other near the bends. These slower river conditions were another reason that I had to install a motor, to help maintain headway and steerage during my “float” to New Orleans. The “improvements” to the river made since the 19th century have also greatly increased the volume of commercial river traffic. I also needed a motor to safely steer the Patience around the barge strings.
Negotiating the lock system of the Ohio became another experience that dramatically changed my conception of American history. Nineteenth-century American history returns to us in modern teaching as a series of bitter congressional feuds—the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854—over the spread of slavery. But Congress was also feverishly busy after 1820 debating the issue of federal expenditures for the “navigation improvements” on the rivers, principally the Ohio and the Mississippi and their major tributaries. The problems faced by a young country growing increasingly dependent on river cargo were vast, but easy to comprehend, and they determined one of the largest political battles of the 19th century.
The Mississippi River’s “total catchment area”—the landmass that feeds a river with distant rain and flowing streams—covers almost 40 percent of the continental United States. The river must accept the rainwater not retained by the soil over a 1.2-million-square-mile area that stretches north as far as New York State and Minnesota, and includes the flow from 250 tributaries. The massive melt of the Rocky Mountain snowpack, arriving above St. Louis via the Missouri and the Platte rivers, is a torrent every spring. In major flood years the enormous burden of water carried south by gravity has to go somewhere, and once the flow reaches the sandy soil and bayous in Mississippi and Louisiana it endlessly fissures into new channels and migrating wetlands that obliterate everything in their way. The riverbanks are not so much banks as they are nature’s moveable containment device, wiggling and jumping around under water pressure, like a garden hose on the lawn that has just been turned on from a spigot.
Without intervention, flood overflow from the Mississippi would push New Orleans and its neighboring Louisiana parishes into the Gulf of Mexico, and carry off hundreds of thousands of acres of prized cotton, sugarcane, and rice lands. During the flatboat era, this giant kettle of water was perpetually poised to tip over onto the very places that 19th-century Americans wanted to be—the booming river towns and croplands of the mid-continent. As John McPhee, in his book The Control of Nature, put it: “A nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature.”
The natural debris of cottonwood root balls and cedar and locust trees carried down from the northern forests was another grave hazard, this one to boat navigation. Almost every flatboat journal from before the Civil War recounts the story of a barge being sunk by heavy snags damaging the hull, and many boats experienced collisions with floating trees and “deadwood islands” more than once a week. In April 1847, Theodore Armitage, sailing the flatboat Whig from Indiana to New Orleans, recorded that two of the skiffs he was towing were seriously damaged by driftwood near Greenville, Mississippi. Three days later, below Natchez, the Whig ran against a snag, which stove in the side of the boat, requiring a daylong layover to make repairs. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain identified river snags as perhaps the worst hazard to navigation. “The whole vast space of the stream was black with drifting dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away.… Now and then [when] we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat as if she had hit a continent.” The threat was particularly severe at night, Twain wrote, when the black tree snags merged into the darkness and couldn’t be seen. One U.S. Senate report in 1846 listed 21,681 “rigid snags” that had been removed from the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Arkansas rivers in the early 1840s. There were an additional 36,840 mostly submerged snags of “roots, logs and stumps.” The same survey identified 75,000 trees along the banks that were leaning toward the water and “liable to fall into the rivers.”
The rivers were, paradoxically, both early America’s highway of cash and the natural enemy of commerce. In slack years, the banks along the turns acted as giant speed brakes, slowing the onrush of water to manageable velocity, and providing a relatively stable, navigable passageway encouraging flatboat and later steamboat traffic. But in years of flooding—so intrinsic to rivers that it has to be considered nature’s plan—those same sandy banks endlessly braided to allow the currents to carve new shortcuts or oxbow bends, gouging a huge clear-cut of trees in the wake of each rupture. Every decade, sometimes every few years, the deluge flooding south relocated the sandbars, completely changing deposits of silt that acted as both river hazards and navigation fixes. In other places giant straightaways plowed through thousands of acres in just a few days, dramatically relocating the path of the river and isolating the old bends into giant, curved “oxbow lakes.” (Lake Chicot and Horseshoe Lake in Arkansas, popular recreational and fishing lakes, both formed after being cut off from the Mississippi.) Towns that stood in the way of the river’s hydraulic wrath—Scuffletown, Kentucky; Rodney, Mississippi; and Cairo, Illinois—were either washed away or economically destroyed.
The banks were acting as banks were meant to. One year they held and gently steered the flow, pushing a sufficient quantity of water into the boat channel in the middle of the river. The next year, when the water crested their tops, the banks parted and redirected the excess water into nature’s relief system, the nearby swamps. This dynamic hydrology often made sense, given nature’s tendency to endlessly replicate itself and spread biological diversity. Erosion is nature’s method for redirecting excess water and redistributing fresh, fertile soil. Trees are supposed to lean over the banks and then fall, collecting as floating islands, one reason that stream restoration projects often include leaving “shade barriers” of growing and fallen trees in place. Any number of important river species—catfish, ducks, turtles, water moccasins—rely on leaning or floating trees for cooler water in the summer. Muskrats, mink, river ferrets, beavers, and even raccoons often colonize large river snags, particularly those beached on islands or sandbars, which are ideal habitats for hunting and breeding. They feast on the duckweed, crayfish, and frogs swarming around the snags, forming a food chain that passes up to the predators, vital to every natural system. Bobcats and coyotes love to feed on the snags stuck against sandy banks, foraging for the smaller mammals inside. Nature works by moving soil, flora, and animals around a lot. It just doesn’t always work for the convenience of man.
In addition to the early snag-removal efforts of Captain Henry Shreve, the first barrier to be attacked was the Great Falls of the Ohio, between Louisville, Kentucky, and Clarksville, Indiana. The one-mile stretch of white water, falling over a lovely staircase of fossil beds, was dreaded by flatboat captains because it required a time-consuming portage around the falls by horse and wagon, or hiring a local pilot to steer a flat through the narrow rapids. Plans to build a diversion canal around the falls dated back as far as 1781, but a serious effort, by a private stock company, didn’t begin until 1824. The Louisville and Portland Canal finally opened in the 1830s and the response was immediate—through traffic to Natchez and New Orleans increased dramatically, to more than seven hundred boats a year.
But a constitutional problem, federalism, initially stood in the way of more ambitious efforts to clear the rivers for navigation. A succession of presidents in the early republic—from Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to James Polk in 1849—objected to the use of federal funds for what they considered river projects that benefited only individual states. A series of Rivers and Harbors Act bills in the 1830s and 1840s faced the continuous threat of presidential vetoes. President Andrew Jackson, though a former river trader and boatyard owner himself, and one who had made a considerable fortune along the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, condemned public expenditures on river improvements as “corrupting influences.” (Jackson, of course, didn’t object to bills funding public works on the Cumberland, which flowed directly past his plantations outside Nashville.) Mostly, the Rivers and Harbors Act legislation that survived presidential vetoes were modest measures that funded river surveys, local snag removal, or projects that enhanced military preparedness or the “transportation of public mail.”
This changed dramatically after the Civil War, when northern control of the Mississippi had proved decisive for the Union, and the vast sums spent on military campaigns had softened public opposition to federal spending. Coal mining had jumped over the Alleghenies from Virginia and Pennsylvania as early as 1800, and Ohio alone was producing over a million tons of anthracite by the 1850s, generating a major new source of wealth and accelerating industrial growth downriver. Few Americans remember today that the American model of economic growth was once predominantly based on “sustainable” energy, from the grain windmills of New England to the factory waterwheels of the industrial revolution. But coal changed everything, converting America to a fossil fuel glutton. By the 1830s, coal was beginning to replace hydropower and wood as a source of energy all the way down to the Mississippi plantation country. Coal became the dominant fuel for heating American homes, and oil distilled from soft bituminous coal, marketed under the name kerosene, was widely used as lamp fuel. Coal barges were already a common sight on the 4,400 miles of inland canals in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Midwest, and by the 1850s stern-wheeler steamboats pushing three and four heavily loaded coal barges at once—essentially, they were just wooden flatboats on steroids—were plying the Mississippi and its inland tributaries. In antebellum America, the big flywheel driving the economy was cotton, and “Cotton was King.” But the same might have been said for coal. By 1880, America was extracting 80 million tons of coal a year, and most of it reached distant markets along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
Delivering coal and agricultural products along the western rivers was now a national priority, and, with so much money involved, national politicians were willing to fudge their loyalty to federalism. The first big act passed by Congress was an 1884 bill that supported the building of a dam on the Ohio near Davis Island, five miles below Pittsburgh, to flood waters backward and make the major industrial center emerging in western Pennsylvania more navigable. The floodgates were now open, and by the turn of the 20th century Congress was happily endorsing a succession of Rivers and Harbors Act bills empowering massive channel improvements made by the Army Corps of Engineers. On the Ohio alone, a series of forty-six dams and locks were built in the early 1920s, and improvements to lock designs in the 1960s eventually reduced the system on the Ohio to twenty larger and more efficient dams and locks. The renovation of the Olmsted Locks and Dam on the Ohio, seventy miles above the confluence with the Mississippi, finished the improvements in 2020. Today, the Army Corps, with thirty-seven thousand employees and a $5 billion budget, presides over an inland empire of hydroelectric plants, more than 250 river locks, Superfund mitigation sites, and a fleet of dredging boats that keep the river channels clear by relocating 250 million cubic yards of silt a year.
The earliest locks built on the Ohio and along the inland canals were based on European designs that dated back to the 17th century. The first wooden structures were barely more than a hundred feet long, all that was needed for cargo or passenger craft at the time, but today they have been expanded to concrete behemoths with chambers 1,200 feet long, with smaller, neighboring “auxiliary” chambers of 600 feet, to accommodate private craft or just a barge or two.
The principle of building a moveable “water stair” over falls, shallow water, or stretches where sudden changes in river elevation prevented navigation was relatively simple. A large waterproof box, or lock chamber, is built along the banks, and it is fed by either a diversion wall or dam across the river. The chamber is opened and closed by steel or wooden gates facing both the upstream and downstream sides. Once the upstream gates are opened and the downstream gates closed, the chamber naturally fills to the water level behind it, allowing a boat or commercial tow inside. When the towering upstream gates are shut, and the downstream gates opened, the chamber empties to the height of the “downstream pool.” The water races out with a loud gurgle, like a giant bathtub emptying through its drain. The boat can now enter the exit pool and move onto the river under its own power. The process is reversed for boats climbing upriver to higher elevations.
There are a multitude of refinements. Today, cement gantries cross overhead, allowing tractor and forklift travel between the main chamber and the auxiliary chamber, or over to the dam structure nearby. A century ago, captains communicated with the lockmaster in his bridge on the lock via an established code of boat whistles. That has now been replaced by radio, and red, yellow, and green lights signaling the boats to hold or enter the locks. Sophisticated instruments measure water velocity and the amount of flow released into the river each time the gates are opened, allowing the Army Corps to precisely forecast water levels dozens of miles downriver. Floating bollards that rise or fall at the same level as the boat have eliminated the need for long lines to be thrown up to the lock crew on the walls above. The control rooms of the lockmasters are tall cantilever structures elevated over the locks with high tinted windows facing 270 degrees, resembling the control towers at major airports. They command spacious views of the sail line and the barge traffic up and down the river.
The Ohio River locks are lovely structures and the experience of locking through the dams down through the Appalachian ridges is as thrilling as riding Amtrak’s California Zephyr through the Rockies. But the lock and dam system has fundamentally changed the rivers, transferring control from nature to man. The “project pool” between two dams can extend from twenty to nearly fifty miles, with water levels carefully monitored to benefit barge traffic. When heavy rains far north in the watershed threaten the Ohio with turbulent conditions and fast water, the dams restrain the flow, maintaining the best conditions possible for pushing barges upstream. When rains are slack, more water can be released to raise the channel depths for the tugs. The twenty locks on the Ohio have tamed river flows to just two to three miles per hour, and tug captains no longer have to fear a sudden, unanticipated wall of high water approaching because it rained hard yesterday in Indianapolis, three hundred miles away, or running aground at Gallipolis or Marietta because the Midwest was suffering a drought. Most of the year, the river is a softened, predictable space.
Economically, the Ohio River dam system is far from ideal. America’s chronic reluctance to reinvest in its cement-and-girder infrastructure has debilitated a waterway that carries almost $25 billion in cargo every year. Tugs pushing a standard string of fifteen to twenty barges are delayed at each lock and dam because standard barge lengths of 150 feet to 195 feet mean that only five or six of them can be pushed into a lock at once. Tug crews can spend a whole day “splitting” their loads while the push boats laboriously ferry back and forth through the chambers and then tie up their partial loads at mooring cells along the river, and then go back through the locks for their remaining barges. If more than one barge string reaches a dam at once, crews can wait ten hours or more for the traffic ahead of them to clear.
This is complicated by antiquated valves that break, panels ripping off dams, and leaky seals that require expensive, cumbersome emergency repairs. The “wickets” on many dams, which are raised or lowered to change water levels, were built in the 1920s and 1930s out of oak, and hydraulic pumps dating to the same period are so old that replacement parts have to be fabricated one at a time. One stretch between Paducah, Kentucky, and Cairo, Illinois, is so prone to delays that river captains call it “el bottleneck” and dread the forty-eight-hour delays locking through each dam during the busy harvest season in the fall. But their own industry is to blame, at least in part. For more than a century, aggressive lobbying by the barge industry has kept taxes and fees that help pay for the upkeep of the lock and dam system pitifully low, which is good for company profits and also lowers transportation costs, but bad for the aging locks. The Army Corps estimates that at least $8 billion in work is needed on the locks and dams, but receives only a fraction of that every year from the relatively modest levies of the Inland Waterways Fuel Tax.
This was the cosmos of water where I would spend the next two months, a one-thousand-mile watercourse of nature subdued, daily parades of twenty-two-ton barge tows, and the hydrophobia of the people I met along the banks. For me the life lessons would be many. And, from my perch high above the water, the sensation of romance was renewed each time I turned the Patience around a new river bend.
As I approached my first lock, the Braddock Dam at Mile 12 of the lower Monongahela, the Patience felt miniaturized, a tiny detail painted into a looming industrial tableau. The rounded arches of twin railroad bridges framed the river behind us and the towers of U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works rose beside us, matte black against the green Allegheny hills and the cottony-white sky. I was cheered by the happy work of my crew. Danny was bustling about with a tool belt dangling low on his cargo shorts, making more improvements to the electrical system and building stabilizing legs for the fans so they wouldn’t tip over every time we hit a tug wake. Brady came up and explained that, ever since he served in the Marine Corps, he had considered himself a “space specialist.” He wanted to do more reorganizing of our kitchen and sleeping gear. Jay was dissatisfied with the state of my pots and pans, most of which had been purchased pre-loved and crusted with burnt grime at Goodwill, and he was shining them up with steel wool and Brasso metal polish. When he saw us pass the angled diversion wall outside the Braddock locks, he called up to tell me that he was ready to man the ropes for hooking onto the floating bollards inside the chamber.
That night I would write in my notebook: “Crew performs well without me giving too many instructions. Just be a gentle manager—enable them, don’t tell them.”
I maintained a holding position outside the lock gates by running the prop at low power in reverse. I remembered that Army Corps regulations required that all crew members wear life vests in the chamber and was pleased when I looked down and saw that everyone had put one on. Initially, the situation at the Braddock lock was confusing. When I talked to the lockmaster on the radio he told me that the “chamber was clear” for me to enter, but the yellow caution light at the end of the revetment wall was still on. A local tug pushing barges was exiting the locks, roiling up the water, and a yahoo driving a small waterskiing boat was careening around the port side of the barges, racing for the exit pool.
Barry was still sitting beside me, coaching me through my first lock.
“You’re good to go,” he said.
But I didn’t like the way that little ski boat was skittering around and guessed that the tug captain didn’t want any more traffic entering his space while he was easing his barges out of the lock.
“Okay, but let me do this first one my way,” I said. “Let’s let the little boat and the tug pass first.”
I radioed back to the lockmaster that the Patience would hold until the pool in front of the gates was clear.
“Your call. Come ahead when you want.”
The motorboat raced by and, as the tug slowly passed, the captain waved an “A-OK” from his bridge. I let the backwash from his propeller push me toward the open lock gates and steered using a minimum of power. Slow, slow, and I couldn’t get into much trouble. As we approached the gates I aimed for the starboard wall inside and noticed three sets of yellow vertical lines painted on the cement sides of the lock, spaced at either end and the middle of the chamber.
“The yellow stripes mark your floating bollards,” Barry said. “You want to aim for the middle set.”
“I’m taking this very slow,” I said to Barry. “We’re going to just kiss that bollard line.”
I felt like a kid learning to ride a bike with training wheels—we were that slow. But, screw it, I thought. There weren’t any boats behind us and there was no reason to show off during my first time through a lock.
At the middle yellow lines, I eased the Patience into reverse too late, missing the bollards, but recovered by gently skidding my wooden sides against the cement walls of the lock, scraping the Patience to a bumpy but acceptable stop at the final set of lines. Jay held the bow against the bollard with his line, letting out rope as the water level in the chamber was lowered, and I held the rest of the boat against the wall with reverse power and a little steering to port.
While we were waiting to descend in the lock, a couple of men in blue jeans, grimy T-shirts, and yellow safety helmets, obviously members of the Army Corps lockmaster crew, rested their arms over the metal railings above and looked down at our boat. Jay was standing just below them, hideously clashing in his red bandanna do-rag, lavender pirate shirt, and orange life vest.
“Hey, what are you guys?” one of the Army Corps men yelled. “A pirate boat?”
Inside the locks along the Ohio River. The sound of our boat sides scraping against cement and water racing out of the gates thunderously echoed against the high walls.
I was about to answer, but Danny cut me off in his shrill soprano voice.
“Flatboat Patience! We’re taking this baby to New Orleans!”
“Whoa,” one of them said. “That takes a set of balls.”
“We’ve got ’em!” Danny shouted back. “We’ll be drinking gin and tonics on Bourbon Street by October.”
I cringed. The Patience spokesperson, apparently, would be my frantic-antic first mate, Danny Corjulo. Later, I quietly suggested to Danny that perhaps it would be more appropriate for the captain to speak for the boat.
“You?” Danny said. “The Irish stiff? Forget about it. Just watch me. I’ll be great at flacking for the boat.”
A loud buzzer sounded inside the chamber as the lockmaster began to let the water out. As we descended against the towering walls, it was spooky inside, especially the noise. Every conversation on the boat, every scrape of the hull against the cement walls, echoed loudly within the cement enclosure, the sounds endlessly caroming against the water and each other and then back, a cacophony mixing in the lock with the whoosh of water emptying below and the splash of leaks from the gates. On the bow, Jay was telling Danny a raunchy story and the magnified volume of his words—“IT WOULD HAVE FRICKIN’ PISSED OFF AN ANGEL, I TELL YA’ ”—bounced all around and lifted heavenward, like a loudspeaker announcement at a football game carried away by the wind. The deafening sound and the claustrophobia of being surrounded by walls growing taller and taller induced panic. I had to consciously fight the temptation of worrying about what would happen if a wall collapsed and trapped us underwater.
A gauge stenciled onto the wall beside us indicated that we were now approaching 723 feet in elevation above sea level, approximately the water level outside the gates in front of us. When we reached the bottom, the gates began to open and another loud buzzer sounded. The water outside in the exit pool was placid, gently flowing past the retaining walls in the narrow channel that led back to the Mon.
The biggest surprise was the considerable amount of debris that had been trapped inside the lock with us. Truck tires, the root balls of trees, skittering circles of Frisbees and plastic bottles, and a water ski popped up through the filthy film of water like a beach ball held under the surf and then released. The debris pile gently collected against the hull of the Patience as we motored out of the lock. We were traveling in a floating junkyard. America’s record of creating waste that lasts forever is an impressive national achievement. In New England, you can still find acres of slag heaps beside deserted iron furnaces that date back two hundred years, and the tracks “maintained” by our slovenly railroad companies are just a giant, aboveground graveyard of rusting I-beams and creosote ties. From Cape Cod to New Mexico the underground aquifers below former military bases are now so fouled with hydraulic oil and B-52 fuel that water no longer flows in them. The corporate looters and air force generals who have presided over this continental defiling insist that cleaning up this mess is the business of anyone but them, and would rather abandon their fouled nests than clean them up.
The Ohio and Mississippi River valleys are simply this principle executed at large over thousands of miles of water, practiced both corporately and by the common citizenry. During low-water conditions on the rivers, especially at places where industrial sites have been shuttered or the commercial channels have been rerouted, car and truck chassis dumps the size of giant used-car lots poke up above the water level in the oleaginous coves. The moribund mooring cells of tugboat companies and petroleum refineries are stacked three or four wide with steel barges, poked with holes from the acidic erosion of bird guano, which turtles use to climb up to the remaining flat spaces of gunwales to sun themselves. Forests of tree saplings grow in the abandoned barges. The water under the bridges in Cincinnati and Baton Rouge has been carpet-bombed with stainless steel shopping carts. The Army Corps of Engineers, fastidious to the point of despotism about private citizens running electrical wires or waterlines down to their river docks, does nothing about this massive and democratically practiced discarding in the rivers. It would be unpatriotic for the responsible federal agency to curb America’s genius for spewing off waste.
I couldn’t believe the volume and variety of waste now surrounding me as we exited the Braddock locks. We raced a metal garage door, the blue vinyl roof of a backyard gazebo, and what appeared to be a collection of aboveground pool liners down the exit pool. Our transit through this floating town dump dispirited me, but I didn’t need to worry about our safety because the heavy, raked bow of the Patience easily parted the rubbish to either side. I could hear an occasional underwater grinding when our prop nicked a two-by-four board or a bait can.
I motored up to cruising speed and picked up our next waypoint, the under-trusses of the Rankin Memorial Bridge. Aside from the revolting spectacle of the floating solid waste, locking through was fun and spooky, and now I had returned to the welcome Melody of America—clanging steel yards, train whistles, and the rumble of traffic on the bridges—along Mile 10 of the river.
“That’s it?” I said to Barry. “That wasn’t complicated.”
“That’s it. People like to make it sound difficult, but it isn’t.”
After another mile, we reached the outskirts of Pittsburgh, and the river became festive, a weekend beer party. This would become a recurring visual and atmospheric clash of the trip. Whole afternoons spent cruising through the forested splendor of Appalachian nature preserves, state parks, or the sprawling Shawnee National Forest would suddenly be interrupted as we approached popular boating areas like Cincinnati or the lake-like stretch formed by the river bends near Aurora, Indiana. The Ohio was a float through two competing American spaces. The deep quiet and scenic contentment of endless conservation forests, with nothing in sight beyond the occasional osprey diving for fish, or a big Ingram tug pushing coal barges, would suddenly be ended by the wail of motorboat engines, island drinking melees, and the smoke of barbecue fires climbing above the trees. The Ohio River is a vast conservation space periodically interrupted by party venues.
Scott Mandrell had warned me that morning that getting through Pittsburgh would be nerve-racking, with pleasure boats cutting us off and big tugs with long barge strings exiting off the Allegheny and then making wide, sweeping turns as they pushed upriver on the Mon or maneuvered for the sail line toward the Ohio. But I was learning that he was just habitually frenetic, a self-important bundle of hyperbole and fuss. Exaggerating the difficulties of navigating the rivers fed his ego but made no common sense. The traffic along this urban stretch of the Mon was busy, but not hazardous.
Handsome, shirtless boys with skinny hips and sunglasses, beside their girlfriends in hot-pink bikinis, raced by in their Malibu and Nautique ski boats, throwing off rooster tails of water and lunging wide as they pulled water-skiers and wakeboards. As we approached Point State Park in Pittsburgh, where the Ohio begins, we could see that the seats of PNC Park were full for a Pirates game, and on Sundays the crowd outside the ballpark includes large groups of people, sunbathing and picnicking on the immense green space between the river confluence and the stadium. Laughter seemed to be the predominant feature of the weekend Mon. People waved from the shore and the waterskiing boats skittered over to see the Patience, their hulls plunging low and then gently rocking up and down in their back wake.
The big, multideck tourist boats of the Gateway Clipper line were out, too, crowded with partying passengers. Waiters on board were serving meals and lots of beer. The triple-decker Three Rivers Queen and the Gateway Princess circled us a few times and everyone on board seemed to be photographing the Patience with their iPhones. As the cruise boats swung around us, I angled the bow a couple of times to present the best photo op of Jay. They all wanted an image of Jay in his do-rag, dagger belt, and pirate’s tunic.
It was fun out there, not the tense conflict with traffic that Scott had warned me about. This was another early indication that the “guide” I had chosen to help me down the river was ill-suited to my needs and, already, I was chastising myself for my bad judgment.
We dropped Barry Boucher off at a small boat landing underneath the Fort Pitt Bridge. He told me that he would walk across the bridge and then ride the Smithfield Street bus home to Elizabeth. I didn’t want to say goodbye to this decent, gregarious man, my first mentor on the rivers.
“I wish you were along for the whole trip,” I told him. “You really helped us.”
“Nah, I’m a local boy, don’t know much beyond the Mon,” Barry said in his thick Pittsburgh slaw. “You’ll be fine, Capt’n. All you gotta do is use your head.”
As I picked up the sail line on the Ohio River and then passed to the north of Brunot Island, I felt alone up on the roof console. There was still a lot of motorboat traffic and I could see two big barge tows in the distance, moving upriver near the McKees Rocks Bridge. If I had to do some maneuvering down there, I would need to know my position precisely, and I didn’t want to both navigate and steer alone.
I called for Brady to come up, suspecting that his penchant for detail would make him a strong navigator. He had told me that he’d had a lot of boating experience. I also liked that he was a retired marine. Military veterans are generally exacting when it comes to following orders, even when they disagree with them, and he was the perfect partner at the helm during a period when I would probably be making a lot of mistakes. All of this proved correct. Brady was an obsessive and quick observer of every mile marker and bridge crossing, and he was good at taking compass readings off high-tension wires and island points, fastidious about keeping track of our position on the river. He was constantly peering ahead through binoculars and then he would place his index finger at each waypoint on my Ohio River chart as I followed along on the iNav screen, and together we discussed the oncoming barges and what we thought the tug captains would do. Fortunately, it was an easy stretch—the sail line moved due northwest as a long straightaway, with plenty of room for traffic.
The lesson of my morning river instruction with Barry was that I should go slow or just coast to a standstill if I couldn’t figure out the traffic ahead, and to trust the safest, commonsense conclusion. I was surprised at how quickly I got the hang of river navigation. While researching river cargo, I’d read that empty barges draw three feet of water, at least a foot deeper than my draft, so there was obviously enough water for me off the mooring fleets along the banks. Traveling about forty or fifty yards away from the parked barges along the banks would keep the Patience well away from the big commercial through boats out on the sail line, but close enough to the banks so I could always drift toward shore at the first sign of trouble. There was a big fleeting area up ahead on the right bank at the Norfolk Southern rail yards. We hugged the barge fleet down past Neville Island, and the two barge tows coming upriver, one slightly behind the other, passed uneventfully.
At Mile 5 on the Ohio, we were approaching the Emsworth Locks and Dams at Avalon, Pennsylvania, the rebuilt and renamed dam facility built at the original Davis Island site in 1885. I could tell that Brady was going to make a great helmsman, and I wanted him to get some early experience so that our roles as navigator and boat jockey were interchangeable. That way we could spell each other on longer days, or I could go below and rest or take notes while Brady ran the boat.
“Brady, let’s have you take the wheel and get us through the lock,” I said. “I’ll work the radio, you drive.”
“Done,” Brady said as we traded seats.
I could see that the Emsworth Locks were busy. One of the chambers was closed for repairs and there were two fifteen-barge tows carrying gravel and coal upriver, ponderously moving around on both sides of the dam. The tugs were splitting up their loads to get through the locks, and then crossing the river to tie up their barges at a mooring fleet near some mildly rough water called Little Horsetail Riffle.
When I radioed ahead to the lock, the Army Corps crewman advised that we faced a long wait. The tugs splitting up their loads wouldn’t be done for several hours. He requested that I either tie up or anchor clear of the tug traffic, at the mouth of a small creek called Spruce Run, a half mile upriver on the right bank.
Brady motored over to Spruce Run and we tied onto an old creosote piling near the banks, letting the Patience drift stern-first in the downstream flow. We wouldn’t get through the locks until almost dark, but it was an enjoyable wait. Brady and I sat on the roof deck discussing politics and details of our lives, and I was delighted to find out that he was a competitor in “mounted shooter” events, an equestrian sport during which “cowboy mounted” riders gallop through a corral, plugging away at targets with revolvers or rifles. I had never heard of mounted shooting, but it got my horse itch going. Under the low afternoon sun, Brady explained how the events were organized and we quibbled over the merits and faults of the breeds preferred in the sport—quarter horses and quarter crosses, Arabian crosses, buckskins, and paints.
One contradiction about Brady fascinated me. A dogmatic, obstreperous conservative, he rarely missed an opportunity to gratuitously rant about Blacks, liberals, and immigrants, but personal experience seemed to have rid him of the rote homophobia of right-wingers. A brother of his in San Francisco was gay and had contracted AIDS, and Brady frequently traveled to California to spend long periods helping to care for his brother. Brady also believed that John F. Kennedy had been a great president, “the last Democrat who cared about the workingman.” Maybe southern conservatism wasn’t as monolithic as I thought.
Waiting on the roof deck of the Patience for the Emsworth Locks to clear was a relaxing way to end the day. Light breezes blew downriver and the towers of the U.S. Steel plants rose against an elegant sunset. The river sang the American melody of trains clacking by on the banks and tugs whining in the channel, churning up wakes.
We ended up that night at the kind of place that would charm us all the way down the rivers to New Orleans, a scruffy little shitwreck blue-collar marina in Glenfield, Pennsylvania. The patchy lawns and modest weekend shacks of steelworkers and cops were wedged onto a narrow strip of land running east and west between the Ohio River banks and the Norfolk Southern tracks. Everybody chased around on golf carts littered with empty beer cans. A fun-loving, hospitable crowd met us at the wooden docks and told us that we were welcome to spend the night. There were barbecue pits near the boat and a gracious elderly couple parked one of their golf carts at the dock so that we could use it to drive up the marina lane to the cinder-block lavatory and take showers.
Danny instantly transitioned to his regular evening routine, chasing off on the electric bike to shop for food. As soon as we docked, he heaved the bike over the gunwales and disappeared down the dock for the local Giant Eagle supermarket.
“I won’t be long!” Danny called over his shoulder as he raced off on the electric bike.
This was a lie. “Waiting for Danny” to return from shopping tours and beginning to cook became a regular evening vigil on the trip. It was useless to complain about it.
“Rinker, it takes a long time in the supermarkets down here to find the prosciutto and spices I need,” Danny said to me a few nights later. “You’re such a loser. You don’t even know that the Europeans sit down to dinner at midnight.”
Later, Danny donned his chef’s apron and chopped up a chicken for stew with his Special Forces axe. I made a fire in the barbecue pit in the grove of maples beside the dock, and the pot of chicken seemed to simmer forever over the coals. We were all tipsy with our gin and tonics as we watched the steam lifting from the stewpot.
The subject of politics and the general social conditions now prevailing in America came up. A few weeks earlier, an Islamic gunman had opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people. Brady and Jay had conservative opinions, but reasonably argued ones, mostly leaning on the standard talking point that passing new gun laws wouldn’t prevent shootings like Orlando.
This was one of the nights when I both loathed and loved Danny. A beautiful day on the river had filled me with Whitmanesque passion for my country. Danny could have equivocated about what Brady said, faking some kind of consensus. Get along, I thought. Build a country. Love a country. Danny, don’t say anything. But no. That’s not Danny. He is a Connecticut Yankee who condemns the dogmatism of southern conservatives while preaching the party line of the North.
“Brady, you don’t have to worry about Congress passing new gun laws,” Danny said. “Everybody killed in that nightclub was gay. Conservatives don’t mind if you shoot gays.”
I stepped over to the portable table on the dock and poured myself another gin and tonic.
Finally, Danny served us his stew, which he ladled over a bed of rice. It was probably the most exquisite chicken I have ever tasted.
A flock of geese, invisible above us, squawked by. The rap music and squeals of the teenagers at the marina youth center floated through the trees against the high turbine whine of a tug out on the river.
“Danny,” Brady said, looking up from his stew. “You are a worthless northern liberal. But your ass can cook.”