“ ‘Be at the old wharf at five-thirty in the morning,’ he said,
‘if you want to catch the Maple for your towboat trip.’ ”
Around Our House
IT WAS five-thirty in the morning. In late September in Kentucky it is barely daylight at that hour.
It was cold and raw and a sluggish fog lay thickly over the river. My artist friend, Pansy Phillips, and I sat on rocks on the bank of the Barren River at Bowling Green and huddled into our coats and felt the fog on our faces and tasted it on our tongues. In the half-light we looked like sleepy ghosts to each other.
We had been deposited a few minutes earlier by a skeptical taxi driver. “I haven’t seen a boat on the river in three years,” he said. It was his only hint that he believed two middle-aged women expecting to hitch a ride downriver on a towboat were mildly mad.
We felt a strong sense of unreality ourselves, on the bank of this strange river, at this hour of the morning, in a spectral sleaving fog. We chattered nervously for a while, then a silence developed, in which Pansy tried to sketch the island that almost filled the bed. It was no good. Her pad grew damp and her pencil wouldn’t work. She put them away and, chin on her palm, pondered the fog-screened river.
“Why,” she said suddenly, “did he tell you the old boat landing? This isn’t a boat landing. This is just a pile of rocks.”
“The cab driver said this was the place,” I replied.
“But why here? Don’t the Hines people have a wharf, or a dock or something of their own?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “All I know is that Warren Hines said for us to be at the old boat landing at five-thirty this morning. He said the boat would pick us up here.”
“What are we supposed to use to flag him down? I think we should have come equipped with foghorn and signal light!”
I giggled. “Pansy, Warren Hines has made the arrangements. The towboat owner knows we are to be here. He knows to pick us up.”
Pansy rose to her full and impressive height of five-feet-nine. From too many unfortunate experiences she has no faith in her ability to catch trains, planes, buses and, for the first time in her life, a boat. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s the silliest thing I ever heard of.” She mimicked my instructions. “ ‘Be at the old boat landing, somewhere between the ice house and the country club, at five-thirty in the morning. A towboat will come round the bend and slow for a landing. It will put in and you will go aboard.’ No,” she went on, “there is no boat on this narrow little river. It has sunk. Or it has gone off and left us. Or it will not stop for us at this godforsaken place.”
Looking about me at the desolate, lonely, fog-bound place, I felt some qualms myself. It did seem most unlikely that any riverman with good sense would bring his boat into this narrow bend.
And yet . . . I knew that this very place had once been a busy wharf. In the old steamboat days this wharf at Bowling Green had been the head of navigation on Green River. There had been regular and daily runs of steamboats from Evansville, Indiana, up the Green to the mouth of the Barren, then up the Barren to this narrow bend and back again. Beginning in 1828, this river traffic had continued for one hundred and three years. A constant stream of freight and passenger boats had unloaded at this very spot. An immense freight warehouse had stood here.
Now the cobblestones of the landing were overgrown with weeds. The gaping maw of the huge warehouse was closed forever. It had burned with the Evansville. Nothing was left of the landing but this pile of rocks on which we sat and some pieces of twisted iron. Were they, I wondered, struts and braces of the Evansville itself? I felt a personal interest, for her last master, J. Frank Thomas, was one of the retired river captains with whom I had had so many talks. He had told me how busy this wharf used to be, round the clock.
But it had been the nice, courteous voice of Warren Hines that had told me over the telephone the day before to be here in this place, at this hour. “If,” he added, “you want to go downriver on the Maple.”
I desperately wanted to go downriver on the Maple. It was the last leg of research for my novel. All the background reading, all the study of the history of steamboating on all rivers, had been done. All the study of Green River navigation had been done. As many rivermen, pilots, captains and navigators and engineers as I could track down had been interviewed for countless hours. It was all behind me. Now, one way or another, I had to sit in the pilothouse of some kind of boat and see for myself how Green River was navigated. I had, in a sense, to become a Green River pilot myself.
The Maple belonged to the Nasbitt brothers. “I can arrange a trip downriver for you,” Warren Hines had said, “but it may be pretty rugged. Those little boats don’t have accommodations for passengers.”
“That isn’t important,” I had assured him. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll camp on the barge if necessary.”
He smiled at me. “Oh, you can be made more comfortable than that. But I’m afraid you can’t stay aboard overnight. There’s only a double-deck bunk for the crew.”
Sensing my disappointment, he leaned across his desk. “They can take you as far as Rochester. That’s an eighty-mile run, about twelve hours. And that will give you the old river, all there is left of it. Below Rochester and Lock Number Two the new locks have changed the river so much you couldn’t find any of the old landmarks. They have even changed the river so much with new channels it isn’t the same river. But from Bowling Green to Rochester it’s all exactly as it was in eighteen forty-two.”
It was a piece of the greatest good fortune to have this opportunity to see the upper Green. Though rivermen loathe those old locks at Rochester and Woodbury, for my purposes it was wonderful that they had not yet been rebuilt. I was grateful to Warren Hines and said so.
He fiddled with a pencil. “Well, then, the Nasbitts will be bringing up a barge of gasoline next week. I’ll call you in plenty of time.”
Now it had come to pass and here we were, fog-bound and becalmed, cold and ill-nourished on two cups of coffee each. I tried to make the passing of time less tedious by detailing something of the history of navigation on Green River.
The first steamboat came upright on a high tide in January of 1828. It was a small, side-wheel, one-stack boat owned and piloted by James Garrard Pitts, but it opened a great hope for the big, rich, land-locked Green River country. Heading up in a spring under a mountain in Lincoln County, the Green winds 380 miles westward before it joins the Ohio near Henderson, Kentucky. With its thousands of tributaries it drains one-fourth of the land mass of the entire state and, along its lower reaches, is the deepest river in the United States. Near its mouth, where it empties into the Ohio, it is said to be around two hundred feet deep.
Flatboats, keelboats and log rafts had been the only way of shipping for the farmers and merchants along its length until James G. Pitts proved a steamboat could come upriver as far as Bowling Green. Now an exciting era lay just ahead.
Until the locks and dams built by the state and completed in 1842 were finished, however, boat passages were very irregular, having always to be timed to rise in water. But when the locks were opened there were 180 miles of slackwater navigation available and the real era of the steamboat, with regular schedules, began. For ninety years the Green carried the burden of all shipping and most of the passenger traffic on its bosom.
Steam has gone, but river traffic did not end with the steamboats. The age of the diesel towboats began. Today the lower Green, with its fine new hydraulic locks, is humming with river traffic such as it has not ever seen before.
By contrast, the upper Green is almost deserted. On it there are still two ancient, too-short locks, #3 at Rochester, and #4 at Woodbury. Completed in 1939, they are manifestly barriers to modern-day navigation. No boat or barge longer than 138 feet or wider than 35 can pass up the river beyond Rochester, Lock #3.
In the event, we didn’t get to see the Maple come round the bend, which I had longed to do. Instead, Warren Hines came to report a delay and to take us to breakfast, which earned him Pansy’s profound gratitude. His thoughtfulness was wasted on me. I was far too excited to eat.
When we returned to the wharf, the Maple was tied up and waiting. She didn’t look very small to me, with her eighty-foot length and twenty-five-foot beam, but by the standards of tow-boats on the Ohio and Mississippi she was a pygmy. She was squat in the water, plump-looking but smart with white paint and her new pilothouse atop the deck housing. She looked businesslike and sensible, like a rather battered old lady with her head up high and her face powdered for the occasion.
We met Jim Nasbitt, the owner. He was a broad-shouldered, sturdy man of perhaps forty-five, with a laugh and wrinkled blue eyes. “Make yourselves at home,” he said. “The boat is yours for the day.”
“No place we shouldn’t go?” I asked.
“Nope,” he shook his head. “Only, if you go up on the barge, don’t smoke please.” His grin widened. “It’s empty of gasoline now but full of fumes. We wouldn’t like to be blown to kingdom come.”
Pansy and I didn’t allow we’d like to be blown to kingdom come, either, and besides we didn’t think my research required me to inspect an empty gasoline barge.
We met Jim Nasbitt’s son, whom he called Buddy. “He’s the pilot,” Jim said. He was a slim, blond, willow switch of a boy who later admitted to twenty years. He looked sweet seventeen and not a day older. Privately, I was of the opinion that if my fate was in this child’s hands, I might never return from this voyage. I ate my opinion later and did it gladly!
We met the deckhand, “Peanuts” Ray, a solid, broad-shouldered chunk of man who was the cook. He offered us coffee immediately. I was to learn that rivermen, like writers, drink coffee all day long and that, like writers, this writer at least, never know whether it’s hot or cold. The habit is simply a cup of liquid at the elbow.
We met Paul Johnson, the engineer, and looked briefly at his engines. We didn’t see much of Mr. Johnson anymore because he was always with his engines.
This was the crew. Normally the Maple ran with only three and tied up at night, but because the Hines people needed gasoline in a hurry Jim Nasbitt had come along on this trip so they could run straight through.
Seats had been provided for us in the pilothouse. They were boxes upended with life preservers for cushions. We followed Buddy Nasbitt up the steep metal companionway and occupied the boxes while the crew cast off.
We drifted downstream for perhaps a quarter of a mile, then picked up the empty barge. When we saw the long pipeline climbing the face of a sheer bluff and counted the hundred and eighty-six steps leading down to a small platform, we understood why Warren Hines had asked us to board at the old boat landing. It would have taken a bosun’s chair to swing us onto the Maple at this place.
Some towboats actually tow, but most of them push. The Maple was a pusher. The barge, riding very high in the water, was now made fast to the head of the boat. It was 130 feet long. It was done only by backing, going ahead several times. It reminded me of the effort required to get a car out of a tight parallel-parking place. If we had ever swung broadside we would have been wedged between the banks, probably stuck there for hours.
The Barren was low and although the Maple drew only four and a half feet of water she churned mud in this backing and filling necessary to come round. But it was accomplished eventually and we headed downriver.
Except for brief periods, never more than five minutes each, that was the last time I sat down for twelve hours. I found my box too low for watching ahead well, and since I had to “pilot” this boat, I stood.
The Corps of Engineers provides detailed, blown-up charts of all navigable rivers. Divided into sections of only a few miles each, they are bound in book form. Buddy Nasbitt’s chart of Green River was open on the chart table to his right. Studying it, I saw that he had penciled in many details — slides, bars, snags, shallows, narrows, even a baby island lately formed and the place where he had seen some deer.
The names of the charted landmarks fascinated me. Hobson’s Towhead. “What is a towhead?” I asked. Mark Twain mentions them constantly in his Life on the Mississippi without once telling what they are.
“A towhead,” Jim Nasbitt said, “is a spit of land projecting into the water. Most islands are formed by the channel swinging around behind a towhead and cutting it off.”
There was Big Eddy, Stephen’s Bart, Sibert Island, Boat Island, Thomas Landing, Slim Island, Whitehouse Bluff . . .
Barren River coils its way downstream to the Green like a great snake looping back upon itself. The channel is always narrow and the beds are always short. Bearing up on some of them, I didn’t see how the boat and barge could maneuver around, and I became absorbed in how it was done.
It was done a little, I thought, like skidding a car around a curve on ice — in slow motion of course. Buddy Nasbitt would throttle down and nose the head of the barge close inshore, as close as he dared thrust it, then he waited and watched to see if the stern of the boat would swing too wide. Sometimes it eased past the opposite bank, by inches, and we had it made. But twice, at Slim Island where the river makes a sharp horseshoe bend, the island bending with it, we had to stop, back and try again. Buddy said he had made both those bends on the first try and he was apologetic that he didn’t now, but I needed to know what you did when you couldn’t make a bend on the first try and was glad for the two opportunities to watch.
These bends and loops make it thirty-four river miles to the mouth of the Barren, whereas it is only eighteen miles by land. All along the way the river was lined with fishing camps and small craft tied up at private docks. There were houseboats, motorboats, cabin cruisers and skiffs, even a few canoes. Where there were people, they waved in friendliness and were delighted when the whistle answered them. To this day a big boat on the Barren creates a lot of excitement.
About twenty-five miles downstream is the Barren River Lock #1. There are no other locks on the Barren, but this lock needed to be named to distinguish it from those on the Green.
Before we reached the lock, however, Peanuts called us to lunch. The big meal on boats, their “dinner,” is eaten at midday, in this case eleven o’clock. Peanuts had been distressed when we came aboard by the state of his galley. “Don’t put in your book,” he warned me, “that my galley was dirty. I meant to have it cleaned up for you, but we run aground on a bar last night and had to work all night to get off. I didn’t have time to clean up before you come aboard.”
Ordinarily he must have kept his galley as neat and clean as a good housekeeper’s kitchen and it was perfectly clean as far as I could see. But his apologies told us what had caused the delay in picking us up that morning.
“Haven’t any of you had any sleep?” I asked.
Peanuts shrugged. “Well, Jim and Paul are sleeping now. Me and Buddy’ll sleep this afternoon.”
He gave us a feast of good roast beef, mashed potatoes, fresh green beans, sliced tomatoes, pumpkin pie and coffee and milk. A tradition on the river is good food. In the heyday of the steamboats they vied with each other to provide the best food and the widest varieties.
Mrs. Thomas, wife of my retired steamboat captain, had told me that on the Evansville there was always offered at dinner at least three meats — ham, fried chicken, roast beef or pork — and there were never less than three desserts — watermelon, in season, blackberry cobbler, in season, ice cream all the time and pies and cakes. Since towboats carry no passengers, their food is plainer and heftier, meant for a working crew, but it is always plentiful and well cooked.
Barren River Lock # i is one of those that have been rebuilt. I don’t know why it received attention before the Green River locks, but it did. It is both long enough, 350 feet, and wide enough, 56 feet, for comfort and it is operated with hydraulic power. Locking through was automatic and took only ten minutes.
We chugged on down the Barren, past the little village of Greencastle, past Jones Hole, Snowbird’s Point (where we saw only hawks lazily circling), past the Narrows, on to Sally’s Rock, of which I had heard so much.
In the early 1900s, a farmer’s daughter, Sally Beck, had loved steamboats so much that she had run to stand on this point of rock to wave at each one passing. It began when she was a child but continued through girlhood into womanhood. Rivermen knew to watch for the girl and to whistle in answer to her wave. One form of the story has it that Sally’s father became postmaster of their village and the boats carrying mail delivered it into a basket Sally lowered.
Captain Thomas did not recall that as being true. He does say that during his day (1912 to 1931) the Beck store had the only telephone between Bowling Green and Woodbury, Lock #4, and that any riverman wishing to send a message up- or downriver used her lowered basket to get the message to Sally for her father. Ruefully, Mrs. Thomas admitted that the wives of the rivermen unanimously loathed Sally Beck. “That Sally Beck,” they would sniff, “trying to get herself a riverman!”
Ironically, Sally did not marry “on the river.” She married a dry-lander and went to live, first, in Illinois, and then in Lakeland, Florida. The point of rock eventually fell into the river, fortunately at a time when no boat was passing. A government dredge boat had to blast it out of the channel.
Reinforcing her sketches with photographs, Pansy had been busy all morning taking pictures and her artistic soul was delighted with the whitened, bleached sycamore snags thrusting up from the river. She had, also, been sent into raptures over the coloring of the low, striated rocks of the cliffs. I saw their beauty, too, but, piloting the boat even harder than Buddy Nasbitt, I dreaded them for the boat’s sake.
Each one of those gaunt sycamore snags, so startlingly beautiful in its nakedness, was a hazard. Any one of them could rip a hole in the hull of the boat and there was so little room in which to avoid them. The striated rocks were a double hazard, especially on a bend, and they seemed to occur most on bends. There is absolutely no give in a rock and the hull of a boat caught in the current and slammed against a low cliff would have to do the giving in a disastrous way.
I had no fear of this, but, getting into the skin of the pilot as I was, becoming the pilot, I liked neither the snags nor the rocks. They were the reason Buddy Nasbitt never took his eyes off the face of the water. One moment of carelessness might mean death to his boat.
Nine miles below Barren River Lock #1, we came out into the Green, and almost immediately bore up on Green River Lock #4 at Woodbury. In contrast to the ten minutes it took us to lock through at Barren #1, we took forty-five minutes at Woodbury. This lock was finished in 1839, is 138 feet long and 35 feet wide. The barge had to be broken loose and locked through ahead and it was a close fit even so. The gates of the lock were wooden and operated by hand with a sort of windlass.
As the Maple was on its way, the lock chamber was full and Buddy nosed the barge in. The crew broke it loose and he backed the boat away so the upper gates could be closed. It took four men to close the two halves of the gate, two to each windlass set on either side of the lock walls. The men moved down then and opened the lower gates in the same manner. When the barge was down, it had to be hand-towed out of the lock crib. Then the lower gates had to be closed and there was a wait while the water level rose. Buddy nosed the boat in. The routine of closing the upper gates and opening the lower was repeated. Six times, four men had to walk around and around four windlasses, closing and opening the gates. I thought forty-five minutes a relatively short time for locking through, under the circumstances.
Since we locked through Woodbury Lock the dam gave way under flood waters several years ago, so nothing can come up the Green now except fishing boats, shanty boats and the mussel boats.
We found the Green a much lonelier river than the Barren. We had seen the last of the fishing camps and there were comparatively few small craft tied up. The Green is a rampager in flood and it’s best not to build too near her.
It was a much wider river, and deeper, and in our prejudiced eyes a much more beautiful river than the Barren. The Green is our own river. In its upper reaches it flows practically through my back yard. Pansy Phillips grew up on it and has fished and boated on it all her life. We were proud of its beauty and its stillness and its goodness, in width and depth, to the boat. There were fewer bends and they were rounder. There were long, quiet stretches of comparatively straight water.
Buddy Nasbitt marked his log, now, and went below to sleep. His father, Jim, also a pilot, took the helm. There was a forty-six-mile pool of good water ahead of us before we would reach the Rochester Lock, about a six-hour run. Buddy must use this stretch of water and in this six hours make up his lost night’s sleep.
Jim Nasbitt has been on rivers all his life and he is a good pilot. But this was his second run up the Green. The Ohio is his home. He says frankly, besides, that even on the Ohio Buddy is the better pilot. “He’s as good as they come,” he told us, “and better than most. Anybody can learn to be a river pilot but Buddy was born with it in his bones.” He laughed. “He likes a little more water than he’s got on the Green, but it don’t really bother him like it does me. He can make this boat do anything he wants.”
Rivermen speak of making a run up the Cumberland or Green or Kanawha, or down the Ohio or the Mississippi, but they speak of themselves as being “on the river.” Wives of rivermen have a hard time of it, for their men are really married to the river. Some wives hate it and never quit trying to get their men off. Some wives accept it and make the most of their portion. Some, the blessed and the happy, learn to love the river themselves and go with their men constantly, and make the river their home. Mrs. Thomas was one of those. “It nearly killed me,” she said, “when the Evansville burned and we left the river. I was raised on the river. My father was a towboat pilot and then I married Captain Thomas. My whole life was spent on the river. And nothing since has been as good.” It was Mrs. Thomas who had showed me the coonjine step the roustabouts used to do when loading and unloading cargo.
All real river people feel the same. Nothing else is as good. They are a breed, a clan, set apart. They are an aristocracy of their own creating, holding dry-landers in faint contempt for the dull and deadly sameness of their lives. There is always something different on the river, they will tell you. No two runs are ever the same. The river is the heart of their lives and they talk about it constantly. They talk with their hands, as airplane pilots do. You can watch a boat nose into a bend as an old pilot talks you around. Or you can feel the spread of high water from his flattened palms. You can sense the beauty in the unfaded dream of their eyes.
“You should have seen the Evansville,” Mrs. Thomas mourned to me, “all lit up, ready to back out from the wharf. Clear in the channel the pilot always played ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ on the wildcat whistle, to signal we were leaving Evansville for Kentucky. You should have seen the rousters unloading, singing and doing their coonjine step. You should have seen the passengers dancing in the evening at night, the prettiest women and the nicest, handsomest men. I tell you, it was the best and finest life you could have.”
And my old pilot, Mrs. Thomas’s father, had said to me, “In forty years I never took the wheel that my heart didn’t beat up faster.”
“Custom did not stale?” I asked.
“Not ever. Not ever.” He added slowly, “If you cut me, I’d bleed river water instead of blood.”
So, I do not think Buddy Nasbitt will ever get off the river.
Although the Green was wider and deeper here than it is up where Pansy and I know it, its banks looked familiar. As on our own headwater river, there were inroads of shale and gravel, there were drowned logs and bleached snags, there were slides cut off from the bank and there was the same lining of huge, overhanging willow and sycamore trees.
One of the willow trees provided a moment of tense excitement in the afternoon. Jim Nasbitt was nosing the barge into a long swinging bend. He was cutting in near the shore. We drifted around easily; then just ahead I saw an enormous willow hanging very low overhead. I said nothing, however. Jim was steering the boat. I didn’t doubt but that he saw the willow and knew what he was doing. When the head of the barge began to pass under the willow, however, it seemed to me we could in no way avoid hitting the top branches, and every branch was as big as an average tree. River courtesy could not keep me quiet any longer. “Jim, you’re going to hit that tree with the pilothouse,” I said, and I believe I said it quietly.
He raised startled eyes. “By George,” he said, “I sure am!”
Several things seemed to happen all at once. First there was a thrashing of water at the stern as Jim throttled down; then the crane on the barge hit the tree with a crashing impact and sheared off one limb as big around as a man’s thigh and sent a dozen smaller limbs falling like rain over the barge deck. Next we swung sharp right and the head of the barge plowed aground. Although we were jostled considerably by the impact, it is to our eternal credit that neither Pansy nor I screamed. I couldn’t have screamed for I was holding my breath. I remember thinking that right here was where we wrecked!
But the reason Jim had plowed the rake of the barge into the bank became evident immediately. With the head fast on the bank, the stern of the boat began to swing around, slowly, slowly, all too slowly it seemed to me. We waited to see if it would swing wide enough for the rest of the tree to miss the pilothouse. You could have heard a pin drop as we waited. We’re going to miss, I told myself, and then, no, there isn’t time. Still the stern swung about, and about, and then, ducking a little in spite of myself, I saw, and heard faintly, the brush of the willow tips as they swept harmlessly down the side of the pilothouse.
Jim Nasbitt blew out his breath. “Lord, I’m glad you spoke up! I didn’t see that tree at all. I was watching the water depth.”
A little weak-kneed, I sat for a moment while Jim backed off the bank and went ahead. “Suppose there hadn’t been room for you to swing wide enough there?” I asked, when he had the boat straightened out.
“We’d have lost the pilothouse,” he said. He grinned. “Scare you?”
“Yes,” I confessed, without any shame.
He shook his head. “I oughtn’t to have done that. Just shows you can’t ever overlook a thing. You got to watch for everything.” He sighed. “Always something on the river.”
Farther down we passed through a small fleet of mussel boats. Mussel shells are still used in the button industry, though plastics have replaced them to some extent. I believe mussels are eaten in some places. We never eat them on Green River. Too many people have tried and been made ill.
The mussel boats were built like small scows and had a frame of hooked rakes attached to one side and a great, saillike seine attached to the other. The rakes swept the mussels into the seines. The boats pulled to shore at Jim’s whistle toot and watched us pass. I had seen both Nasbitts take up the binoculars often during the day to peer ahead at what looked like a rock or bleached stump to the naked eye. Sometimes it was. Occasionally it was a small boat. Then the whistle was blown immediately. “If you’re ever on the river,” Jim warned, “and a barge boat whistles, get to the bank as quick as you can. The suction can draw you down and wreck your boat.”
I didn’t think a barge boat would ever come up over the shoals to our Beaver Hole, but I tucked the information away. I might be fishing sometime on the lower Green or even the Ohio.
We had a long peaceful afternoon, closing up the landmarks on the chart. Both Nasbitts had entered with much understanding into my needs and had tried eagerly to help me identify the old landings and abandoned ferries. We didn’t have much luck with the landings for they were usually nothing but clearing on the banks and in thirty-one years they had grown over. Most of the ferry roads showed up plainly, however. They had been cut too deep to grow up completely yet.
When the sun went down the barge lights were set out: a green light on the starboard side, a red light on the port and an amber light dead-center. The white light on the stern of the boat was also flicked on, and the headlight centered under the pilothouse. But Jim did not yet use the powerful searchlight mounted on top of the pilothouse.
All through the twilight we ran through a wide, silent stretch of river, the utter peace and tranquillity making us silent, too. Jim flicked on the tiny nightlight over the chart from time to time, but quickly flicked it off. A pilot’s night sight is extremely important and marine law requires that all lights, his own as well as those of other boats, be shaded at certain stated degrees to protect him.
When full dark came, Jim began to use the two searchlights that are atop the pilothouse. They are operated by handles that protrude into the ceiling.
All day, in the long stretches of the river, each Nasbitt had sat much of the time. But now Jim Nasbitt kicked the high pilot’s chair out of the way and stood. I was suddenly conscious of great tiredness in myself and of great tension. No fear entered the feeling at all. I simply knew that running a river at night calls for absolute and undistracted attention and just as Jim Nasbitt girded himself up for it, so did I.
There are queer illusions, after full dark. The reflections of the tall dead snags seem to double their length and you want to veer too far around them. The water shimmers and you want to steer by the shimmer. The river seems to narrow dangerously. You have a feeling that the banks are closing in and that you are creeping down a little creek. And the sense of movement is slowed. Looking ahead, you wonder if you are moving at all. You have to look alongside, watch the banks flow steadily by, to realize you are still chugging along at a fairly good pace.
I recalled that Mark Twain, when he was a cub pilot on the Mississippi, was at the wheel one night. His pilot was resting on the long bench behind him. Suddenly Mark Twain couldn’t believe his eyes. The ripple of shoal water lay dead ahead. He knew it shouldn’t be there. He knew he had good, deep water in that place. But the illusion was so strong that, bearing down on it, he could not make himself hold the boat on the ripple. He swung dangerously aside and the pilot jumped for the wheel. “What the devil are you doing?”
“There’s shoal water ahead!”
The danger of the swing aside now averted, the pilot said, “What made you think there was shoal water there? Don’t you know it’s good water?”
“Yes, sir, but it looked . . .”
“You,” the pilot said crushingly, “won’t make a pilot until you learn to steer by what you know, not by what you see.”
Jim Nasbitt nodded. “It’s the living truth. Many a boat has been wrecked because a pilot forgot that.”
We were due at the Rochester lock at eight o’clock. At seven-thirty Jim sent Peanuts below to waken Buddy. I knew why. Jim had said he wouldn’t take a boat through that lock at night for all the money in the world and Buddy had said it always scared the living daylights out of him in the daylight.
The Rochester lock is built in a short, right-angle bend in the river, with the dam on the outside of the bend. It is even smaller than the lock at Woodbury . . . only 135 feet long and 35 feet wide. It is a ghastly place for a lock and dam, and one can only speculate as to why it was chosen. In the 1830s, as now, politics and private interests played a big part in all public works. Somebody with power and pull had owned the land contiguous to the river at this place, and had got a nice fat price for it as a dam site, probably. For that matter, not a lock on the river was located with a first consideration for the convenience or safety of the boats that would use it.
Buddy came up. “Where are we?”
His father pointed on the chart. “About a mile and a half to the lock.”
Buddy took a few moments to study the chart and get his night sight; then he took the helm and his father went below. I saw him walk out onto the barge and take his stand at the starboard side on its head. Peanuts was already on the port side and Paul Johnson was in the middle. They were ready to break the barge loose when she had been safely cribbed.
Buddy flicked off the searchlights and ran dark for fully a mile. “Watch the tops of the trees,” he told me. They were clearly outlined against the starlit sky. He was steering by them. In this stretch of full, deep water just above the dam there were no hazards, and in the dark the river kept its proper proportions and there were no distorting reflections.
We came round a wide slow bend and saw the lights of Simmon’s Ferry. The ferryboat was pulled into the right bank. Buddy kicked his chair away and blew, both for the ferry and for the lock . . . one long and two short blasts for we were a double lock.
Now he turned on the searchlights, for the lock was just beyond. We passed the ferry. Both searchlights playing constantly now, sweeping ahead, to the sides, on the water, around, first one hand then the other turning their handles near the ceiling, his free hand maneuvering the rudder, reaching to the throttle, keeping the boat steady in the channel, Buddy eased along.
It was a solo dance in a ballet of precision; it was stylized, slowed and infinitely graceful movement. The boy was still so young that he could not have made a graceless movement. His slim body swayed as he reached for the lights, played them, bent again over the controls, reached again, as he felt his way into the bend.
To the left was the dam and we could now hear its roar and see the glare of its white water. The slightest miscalculation could have sent us over with the rush of water. If this boy did not bend in close enough, or if he swung too wide, the current could catch us and take us over. If he lost power too much, throttled down too much, the boat wouldn’t steer and we would be helpless against the strong current. I knew all this and yet I felt absolutely no fear. I knew the boy had said it scared the living daylights out of him, and my absence of fear was not wholly faith in him. It was simply that there are times when danger does not frighten; it exalts instead. And this was one of those times. I was caught up, and lifted, by the fantastic beauty of the whole drama.
Well into the bend, the lock lights showed up. The gates were open. The head of the barge found them, nosed past them noiselessly. The whole length of the barge crept by inches into the crib, slid past the walls, was swallowed and pocketed. The barge was in. Without scraping so much as a flake of rust off the barge, or a mossy lichen off the old rock walls, the boy had put his barge precisely where he wanted it. I expected it, but it was still a miracle when it happened.
Oh, I know steamboat pilots did it for ninety years. But they weren’t pushing a barge ahead of them. And I know towboats pilots did it for a long, long time. But they tied up at night. This boy had done it with the face of the water shimmering with reflections, distorted almost beyond recognition, full dark on all sides, the narrowest measure of safety between him and the dam. I was suddenly as limp as a tired old dishrag.
But the boy only hooked up his pilot’s chair to wait for the barge to be broken loose. He grinned. “Well, here you are.”
I tried to tell him what the trip had meant to me, how invaluable it had been and how fine he and his father had been. He waved it away. “It’s been our pleasure. You have turned a routine trip into something special. We’ll never forget this day and you’ll always be welcome on a Nasbitt boat.”
Pansy and I clambered up the ladder of the lock wall, my husband, who was meeting us, and Jim Nasbitt giving us a hand. I tried to tell Jim, too, what the trip had meant. Like his son, he waved it away. But he laughed, and then said to Henry, “If she writes a book as hard as she pilots a boat, she ought to write a damned good book about the river. She sure as hell did run herself a river today!”
I certainly had run me a piece of the river, and the title for my book was given to me now, too. It had to be Run Me a River.