Coast to Coast (11 page)

B
ecause I wanted to learn more about these boats, pounding by so head-in-air, I stood alone one hot summer southern evening at a landing-stage on the banks of the Mississippi. I had arranged a passage on the tow-boat
White
Gold)
and the landing-stage had been arranged as a rendezvous, where a motor-boat from the tow would pick me up. The stage was on a subsidiary channel of the Mississippi, and in the distance I could see the occasional light of a craft on the river proper. Behind me, on a bluff, the town of Vicksburg was all asleep, and usually there were only the noises of shunting trains and mosquitoes. Once a tug came close past me on the channel, its engines thudding; there were a few dim
lights on its bridge, and a couple of shadowy figures, and I could hear muffled and desultory voices. Presently, away over the bluffs, I saw the repeated flash of a searchlight, and heard the distant beat of diesels, and soon my motor-boat arrived out of the darkness, with a cloud of spray. Two jolly deckhands heaved my luggage aboard, there was a roar of motors, and we were away, scudding down to the river, with the man at the wheel shouting at me: “Cap'n says sorry we're late, we got held up at Natchez, he reckons we'll make it up between here and Greenville.”

The Mississippi at night is the very quintessence of blackness. The tangled jungle banks are all black, and so is the water, and only occasionally could we see looming past the motor-boat a floating trunk or a mass of jumbled branches. We kept our eyes on the flashing searchlight, though, and soon made out the long dark line of the barges. The
White
Gold
was bound for Chicago from Louisiana, with a cargo of oil, and she had an integrated tow of five barges. As she approached, we swung around in a great arc to run alongside her. The motor-boat's engines were cut off, a hoist lifted us out of the water, and a moment later we stood on one of the barges, still sweeping through the water, with the sound of slapping waves, and the lights of the towboat's pilothouse far astern. Such clandestine embarkations are often arranged, for crewmen who have to go ashore for emergencies, and join the tow again later on its voyage; or for the rare stranger who manages, despite the death of the passenger packets, to contrive a Mississippi passage.

There is (as I had suspected) a quality of supreme remoteness about life aboard a Mississippi towboat. Hour after hour, day after day, the silent banks slip by, with scarcely a sign of life on them, and you feel entirely separate from affairs behind the levees. Gradually the river encloses you, and when you pass a river town you examine it as you might a picture show, or a toy town, or something in a museum. There is something hypnotic about such an experience. From the glass windows of the pilot-house the yellow oozy water seems to stretch away endlessly. The sun is scorching and the sky cloudless, so that the decks of the barges shimmer, and the bare backs of the deckhands shine. Only rarely do you glimpse an old merchant town through a gap in the levee; a long hot main street, a few negroes lounging on the pavement, a mule and buggy kicking up the dust. Sometimes, down by the water, there is a crooked shanty boat, swarming with children, with a sun-tanned old philosopher idling his days away on its balcony. More often there is nothing at all but the merciless sun, the river, the dark and desolately wooded banks.

In the pilot-house, though, there is always an underlying sense of tension, for navigating a Mississippi boat is still one of the most exacting tasks in the world. The master and pilot of the
White
Gold
was Captain Robert Shelton. He was 27, and characteristic of the modern breed of Mississippi pilots. The modern towboat does not have a wheel, but instead a light touch on a polished metal bar steers the tow; and there Shelton would sit, one hand on this lever, his feet on a ledge in front of him, talking easily of anything from Tennessee Williams to French politics, sipping coffee brought at very frequent intervals by a willing deckhand, but always with a keen eye on the river and its banks. The Mississippi pilot still has to know more than any man has the right to know (as Mark Twain put it). Every foot of river and bank must be familiar to him, and he must recognize it in an instant. It is constantly altering, never looking the same twice, and he must notice any change instinctively, and summon at once the necessary reflexes. He must know the name of every light on the river bank, anywhere from New Orleans to Pittsburgh. He must know where to find slack water in the treacherous currents, where to sail in midstream and where to hug the banks (festooned with wild tree-trunks). He must foresee a thousand and one perilous tricks of the river. He is utterly responsible for the towboat and its valuable cargo, night and day, often half a continent and several weeks from home. The good pilot is handsomely paid, and he is never unemployed; if he leaves one company, within a day or two there will be others bidding for his services. The days of the old gaudy steamboat pilots are over, and Shelton (whose grandfather was one of them) sometimes regrets those times of silk hats, diamond pins, embroidered waistcoats and kid gloves; but the Mississippi pilot is a man of stature still.

It is queer to spend a morning in a towboat's pilot-house, for though you feel very much alone with the waters, to the pilot every moment brings some familiar landmark into view. Here we come up to Opossum Chute, where Joe Daniels ran his tow on a sandbar. There's the light on Sarah Island, above Poverty Point. See that channel there? That's Bunch's Cut-off, where the river used to run up to Pilcher's Point Landing. There's the 575-mile mark. Over that bluff's where a town called Napoleon used to be, a big town in Mark Twain's time, 30,000 people or more, but it died when the river changed and made this cutoff. (
More
coffee,
Joe!
) Sometimes a tow will pass in the opposite direction, and the pilot is almost sure to know it. There will be an exchange of blasts on the sirens, and a deckhand will wave lethargically. Sometimes there will be a call on the radio, from head office in New Orleans, perhaps, like a voice from another world: “Bob? Bob, you'd oblige me
by calling on Ted Harris, when you get to Chicago, and tell him we fixed what he wanted, like he asked. OK? How's everything?” Or a friendly engineer's boat may call up with some advice (you can probably see its upperworks, over the levee at the next bend, and the voice on the radio comes very loud and clear): “Keep way inshore past Salem Bar, Cap'n. We've been moving the buoys there. Real hot, ain't it?”

Sometimes the towboat captain gives a hand to a friend in trouble. Very early one morning, as we moved upstream, we overtook a big steamboat struggling with a heavy load. It was a difficult bend in the river, where the current ran especially strongly, and the towboat was making slow progress. Shelton recognized it at once, and knew its pilot, and very gingerly we approached to help. The
White
Gold's
barges were 800 feet long, the other towboat's more than 1,000; and these two huge strings of barges, each as long as an Atlantic liner, had to be joined in midstream, without pausing, in a place wracked by eddies and crosscurrents, so that the towboats could combine their energies. When I climbed up to the pilot-house (bleary-eyed and unshaven, for it was only just dawn) I found it charged with a routine excitement. The steersman, a sort of apprentice pilot, stood tensely in a corner. Shelton was cool and poised at his twin tillers. Far down on the barges two deckhands waited with hawsers. From the portholes of the other boat a few sleepy heads emerged, one of them in curlers (for many Mississippi boats carry women cooks, laundresses and stewardesses). Slowly, slowly, the tows approached each other, and the two pilots exchanged glances through their windows, and the porthole heads craned a little farther, and the deckhands gathered their ropes for the throw; until with a scarcely perceptible bump the barges touched, the hawsers were cast, and the two tows became one. Shelton handed the tillers to his steersman, and the rest of us sauntered across to the other tow for a gossip and a taste of someone else's coffee.

Sometimes during our voyage Shelton passed the tillers to me. It is a disconcerting experience to handle a Mississippi tow for the first time. The atmosphere of the pilot-house is at once placid and nerve-racking, for it has the silence of an operating theatre, only broken by the quiet click-click of the tillers, and a few murmured remarks from any off-duty deckhand who has chosen to come and sit on the high leather bench at the back. You are instructed to keep the head of the tow on such-and-such a sandbank, or such-and-such a tree; but soon, in the hot haze of the river, one bank merges with another, and the shape of the tree changes, and the horizon becomes blurred and featureless. When you touch your tillers gently, you find that the whole immense tow swings
suddenly and alarmingly, so that for a moment you are afraid the barges will be swept broadside on to the current, and carried away helplessly in the opposite direction. “Keep her well inshore,” says the pilot indulgently, and if you are timid about it he will tell you again, and again, and again, until the barges are barely escaping the roots of trees, and the gloomy overhanging foliage is brushing the upperworks of the towboat. The Mississippi pilot pursues his profession with great dash and
élan.
The emergencies are generally slow—a gradual swinging with the current, so that the leading barge hits the pillar of a bridge, or an inch-by-inch movement towards collision; but the dangers are very real. (Sometimes, indeed, the perils are less leisurely; in flood time a tow may have to be manoeuvred downstream, through all the intricate, shifting treacherous difficulties of the river, at 15 or 20 miles an hour.)

For the deckhands, life on a towboat seems invitingly tranquil. During the long days on the river there is really little to do, and they spend much of their time keeping the boat spick and span, painting its upper-works and polishing its brass. Often and again they saunter back to the galley for a cup of the coffee that is constantly on the boil. Or, leaning against the stern rail in the sunshine, they watch the frothy churning of the screw (they call it the “wheel”, so strong is the Mississippi tradition) and swap mildly vulgar anecdotes. They need have no worry about currents and shore-lights. Some of them have no idea where they are, measuring their progress only in terms of days out of port. There are unpredictable handicaps, of course—not long ago sixteen men were drowned when a towboat hit an Ohio bridge, and one of the
White
Gold's
barges has a buckled front because of an oil explosion; but in general the deckhand lives an easy life, enjoyably.

His quarters, if the towboat is modern, are excellent, with comfortable bunks and showerbaths, and his food is comparable with that in one of the less penurious London clubs. On the
White
Gold
‚
master, mate, chief engineer and all sat together at a high counter and were served by a Philippino cook with a dry sense of humour; and the choice of the dishes was enviable. Mississippi river food has always been good. Here is the dinner menu on board the steam packet
Monarch
‚ sailing between Cincinnati and New Orleans, on 31st March 1861: