Its powerful diesel engines throbbing softly, radiating a constant, gentle shudder through its 160-foot length, the towboat Martha R. Ingram pushes its cargo slowly down the Mississippi River, following the Army Corps of Engineers’ channel through a bewildering jumble of chutes, sloughs, verdant islands and backwater lakes.
Following a lane marked by red and green buoys, the boat and its 12 barges move south at a stately pace. Even with the Mississippi’s current pushing against its stern, the Martha R. Ingram drones along at just 7 miles per hour as it passes Big Soupbone Island, bends left to slip by the boaters, sunbathers and picnickers at Santa Fe Beach, and turns right again to glide beneath the old highway bridge at Savanna, Ill.
One mile slowly melts into another. From his command post four stories above the river’s glassy surface, the Martha’s pilot, Ralph Stinebrook, fiddles constantly with the rudder levers to maneuver the boat and barges along the sinuous channel. The Martha rumbles through long stretches of virtual wilderness, past the church steeples and water towers of riverbank villages, past heavy industry’s belching smokestacks, past garish gambling boats, past handsome houses built high on the bluffs and fishermen’s shacks perched on stilts at the river’s edge.
Often the crew is within hailing distance of campers and fishermen and people taking afternoon strolls along river levees. But the people, pleasures and amenities “on the bank” are as remote from the Martha R. Ingram and its crew as if the towboat were pushing its cargo across an ocean.
In many ways, the Martha and the hundreds of other towboats that ply America’s inland waters are little worlds unto themselves.
Brown-water sailors board a towboat at the start of a trip and don’t step off until their duty is finished, 28 days hence. They work six hours, are off six hours, work another six hours, are off another six hours, and on and on for nearly a month, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays included.
Despite what they are called, towboats push barges. They don’t tow them behind. The dictionary says towboats and tugboats are the same craft, but the brown-water sailors on the Mississippi and other inland waterways generally think of tugboats as littler vessels that push around ships in deep-water ports. The small boats that are sometimes needed to coax towboats and barges into especially treacherous locks are usually called helper boats, rather than tugboats. To inland-water mariners, a “tow” is the cabled-together combination of towboat and barges.
Day and night, the towboats keep a slow but relentless course. They usually make about 90 miles a day in the Upper Mississippi where, from St. Louis to St. Paul, passages through the frequent locks can impede progress for hours on end. The locks and their adjacent dams, nearly all built during the Great Depression, keep the river at a sufficient depth to maintain a 9-foot-deep barge channel. Without the structures, reaches of the Mississippi would be shallow enough to wade across in a dry summer.
Towboats and their cargoes keep going in wind, freezing rain and the snows of early spring and early winter. Only thick fog and the heavy river ice that usually clogs the Upper Mississippi for a couple of months each winter halt the river’s commercial activity.
Life on board is fatiguing, lonely and little understood by the people “on the bank.” Although Ingram Barge Co. stocks the vessel with videotaped movies and books, the 12-hour workdays leave little time for much except eating, sleeping and doing one’s duty on the deck, in the pilothouse, in the galley or in the engine room.
The rewards of the solitary life consist of decent pay (from $110 a day for a deck hand to $300 a day for a captain); comfortable, no-rent lodging; an always-open galley with lots of good food (but no alcoholic beverages); and 28 days of uninterrupted time off once the trip is overa prospect that grows in promise with every day spent out in the Mississippi channel.
Ralph Brittain of Evansville, Ind., the Martha’s burly second mate, has worked on the river for 31 years. “I love it,” he says. He also allows that working on the river took some getting used to after his more gregarious life as an oil-field hand in New Mexico.
“I’m on here for 28 days,” Brittain says. “I can’t go to the bank to cash a check. I can’t go to the store. I can’t go have a cold beer. The isolation part is hard to get used to, but you get so you take it with a grain of salt and get on with it.”
On this particular trip, the 23-year-old Brittain has gone upriver from St. Louis to St. Paul and back down to a point just above the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities. He has 12 more days of duty to go. “All I want now is to see my wife and see my kids and get a cold beer.”
The Martha began its downriver trip at St. Paul, pushing 12 barges–loaded mostly with corn and industrial coal–and picked up two more barges near Clinton, Iowa. Lashed together three abreast by inch-thick steel cable, the barges extend more than 1,000 feet beyond the Martha’s bow. All told, the towboat is pushing a weight of around 26,000 tons. Most of the freight the Martha is pushing is destined for industries and food processors along the Ohio River, which joins the Mississippi at the southern tip of Illinois at Cairo.
Varied talents–some requiring agility and muscle, others requiring a watchmaker’s fine touch–are required of the Martha’s 10-member crew to keep vessel and cargo moving safely into and out of river locks and through the Mississippi’s strong currents.
Viewed from the pilothouse on the Martha’s fourth and highest deck, the task of easing the rigidly connected barges into a river lock seems to an outsider to be all but impossible. The front ends of the farthest barges are just over 1,000 feet ahead. If the entrance to the lock looks like a small target, that’s because it is.
Think of hitting a needle’s eye with a stiff thread more than three football fields long. The width of the three-abreast barges is 105 feet. The locks are 110 feet wide, providing a clearance of just 2 1/2 feet on each side. Deckhands, stationed at the front of the first barges, serve as the pilot or captain’s visual surrogates as the tow approaches a lock. Using two-way radios, the deckhands call out constantly to inform the pilothouse of the distance to a lock’s entrance and sidewalls.
And some railroad bridges, around which dangerous currents usually push and pull, present safe passages not much wider than the river locks.
“Patience. Patience,” the Martha’s captain, Louis Frank, says to himself as much as anyone as he eases the towboat and barges through a treacherous passage beneath the Union Pacific Railroad bridge near Clinton. Frank positions the huge tow so that the Martha and its barges will themselves help direct the current, then let the whole tow drift through the opening at a speed approximating that of an advancing glacier.
Patience: For nearly five hours, the Martha and its barges sit at Le Claire, Iowa, waiting for other towboats and barges to get through the lock about 10 miles upstream from the Quad Cities. Sometimes the waits are much longer.
Most of the 29 locks along the 680 miles of the Mississippi River between Minnesota’s Twin Cities and St. Louis are 600 feet long, too short by half to handle the 1,200-foot, modern-day tows such as the Martha R. Ingram and its barges. So most tows have to be broken in half and locked through in two stages. By the time the grunting deckhands have disconnected and reconnected heavy cables that bind the barges to one another and the tow’s two sections have been moved through a lock, upwards of two hours may have elapsed.
But the barge industry is one corner of a fast-paced world in which speed is not of the essence. The attraction of moving huge quantities of grain, coal, fertilizers, chemicals and other bulk commodities by river is the low cost. The Corps of Engineers figures, as one example, that shipping grain from the Twin Cities to Baton Rouge, La., costs more than twice as much by rail as by barge.
On its passage down the Mississippi, the Martha pauses only for fuel and supplies. At some of the locks through which it passes, on-shore provisioners who have taken orders by radio restock the boat with groceries. A ways downriver from the Quad Cities, a supply vessel meets the Martha to replenish its fresh-water tanks and the 126,000-gallon fuel reservoirs that feed the boat’s two thirsty, 16-cylinder diesels, each capable of pounding out 3,070 horsepower. Then the big, self-sufficient boat–with its own electrical generators, sewage treatment system, central heating and air conditioning, laundry, kitchen and well-stocked pantries and refrigerators–continues down the Mississippi, passing and meeting other commercial tows, tourist vessels, houseboats and flitting runabouts.
Life on the Martha R. Ingram and hundreds of other towboats on America’s inland waters is little understood away from the navigable rivers, says Steve Crowley, assistant vice president of operations for Ingram Barge Co., which owns the Martha R. Ingram and more than 60 other towboats. (The barge company is part of Nashville-based Ingram Industries.)
Even in Paducah, Ky., operations headquarters for Ingram Barge and a major hub for commercial shipping on the Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, real understanding of the business is concentrated primarily on the banks of the Ohio. Says Crowley, “A lot of us have heard through the years, `Oh, you work on a barge and sleep on a barge.’ We say, `No, we sleep on the boat. We push the barges.’ “
A towboater’s world for 28 days at a stretch is circumscribed by the vessel’s 48-by-160-foot dimensions. Although the boat may be operating on the Ohio River, the Upper Mississippi, the Lower Mississippi (defined as the stretch from Cairo down to New Orleans), or some other big river, the same crew normally is kept together for the boat’s long trips.
Everyone on board, from the captain to the lowliest deckhands, speaks of the crew as family. “These are my brothers,” says Brittain. “When we get off the boat, we go to the bar for a beer together.”
For 34 of his 53 years, Louis Frank, the Martha R. Ingram’s captain, has been a riverman. At 19, Frank set out to find a job on a shrimp boat in his native Louisiana. Stopping for a cup of coffee, he ran into a man who offered Frank a job on a little tugboat. “I took it and I’ve been on the river ever since,” Frank says.
Except for ship-to-shore phone calls–which are too expensive to place very often–Frank and the rest of the crew are isolated from their spouses, children and friends on the bank. “It takes a certain type of person to work on a towboat,” Frank says. “I guess I’ve been out here so long, that’s all I know. But when you do get home you can plan anything you want to. You’ve got 24 hours a day for 28 days and you won’t be disturbed.”
The Martha R. Ingram’s cook, Shirley Knapp of Counce, Tenn., has roamed thousands of miles on America’s rivers during her 11 years on the Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Ohio. She loves to watch the sunrises over river bluffs and to glimpse the riverbank towns and rural cottages that the towboat churns past. But everything she has seen from the river has been just beyond her grasp.
Knapp, 64, plans to retire in a year or so. “I hope to travel some,” she says. “You see these roads with all of these cars going by. . . .” She pauses. “I have a desire to stop and check these places out.”
