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THE SECOND TOWBOAT WAS much smaller than the first and was only pushing a single barge that was carrying a big construction crane strapped down on its flat platform. I could tell Terry was relieved not to have a repeat of the last incident and he even gave the captain of this boat a friendly wave instead of flipping him off. He said it was ridiculous how many barges that other boat was pushing and that there ought to be regulations against it. He said they’d rather fine people on small craft like ours for something stupid like not having a throwable PFD on board than to bother the commercial vessels. He said it was the same as on the highways, with all the overloaded eighteen-wheelers blatantly breaking every kind of regulation and getting away with it most of the time.
“It’s all about the money, Robbie. The corporations that own the shipping and trucking industries pay off the right people and they can get away with murder. The police on the roads and on the water are all the same; it’s easier for them to go after the low hanging fruit. They pick on private citizens like us because they know we can’t afford to fight them in court. It’s the same old story of corruption, Robbie. You can’t get away from it anywhere there’s organized society and that’s why we’re going where there isn’t!”
The towboat and its barge with the crane disappeared around a bend upstream and then there was nothing to be seen but woods all around the waterway on both sides. Terry talked about how remote the islands where we were going were, but it seemed to me that we were already in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t see another barge all day, and only passed one other person, a man fishing out of a small aluminum Johnboat. Terry said the isolation out here was just an illusion, because you couldn’t go far in any direction without coming to a road, a house or some other manmade structure. He said there were no good places left in America where you could survive very long after the breakdown that was coming.
“Some people think they can bug out to the deep woods, or head for the hills, but they’re mistaken, Robbie. There are simply too many people in the United States and too many of them are armed to the teeth. The ones that survive the initial crisis will be hunting each other down; first to steal food and supplies and when that’s all gone, to eat whoever they can catch. Sure, there are a few big wilderness areas up north and out in the Rockies where a few tougher holdouts could make it for a while, but certainly not long-term. Times are going to be too hard in the high country for most people these days. Most of them are too soft to live like that anymore, especially in the winter. The only hope is to get as far away from all of it as possible. Halfway around the world is a good start! Having a ship that can take us there on our own and provide a platform for fishing and foraging is what gives us the edge. We won’t need anything the mainland has to offer ever again!”
I still didn’t understand how Terry was so sure everything here in America was going to collapse. I had flipped through some of his books on the subject and seen all the other ones he pointed out in the bookstore. But if those books were true, it seemed strange to me that most of the people I saw every day weren’t worried about something like that happening. If things were really that bad, and life as we knew it was about to end, then why were so many people out camping and fishing at the lake like they didn’t have a care in the world? Why was everybody else still going to school and work like normal? I didn’t know a single other kid whose family had taken them out of school like Janie and me. I sure didn’t know anybody else who had built a big catamaran sailing ship to leave the country on. But Terry was confident he was right and everybody else was just living with their heads buried in the sand, as he put it. He said they didn’t want to think about things like that because then they would have to start doing something about it, and he said none of them wanted to do that. He said what they wanted to do was keep spending their paychecks and talking on their smart phones and burning up gas driving around in their big pickup trucks. He said all that, but I kind of envied all those other people who weren’t so worried about running away. I hoped we weren’t just leaving for no reason and I wondered how we would ever find out what happened back here if anything ever really did. If it was really like Terry said and there was no Internet or TV or phone service out there among those atolls, I figured we probably wouldn’t.
But on the other hand, I was still excited about the adventures that we were going to have. I figured we were already having one now compared to most people. Every time we went around a bend on our way down the Tenn-Tom, I never knew what I was going to see next. It was like being an explorer, and I was glad I wasn’t stuck sitting in some stupid classroom, at a desk, studying about old-time explorers in a boring history book. I was living the real thing, and I knew most of those kids back in Calloway City would never get to do this. Most of them had never even heard of the Tenn-Tom Waterway, much less all the islands Terry said we were going to see.
Terry said most of the locks and dams on the Waterway were in the upper section, and it didn’t seem like we’d gone far at all since we ran aground before we came to the next one. This one was at the small town of Fulton, but you couldn’t see much of anything from the water because of the levees on both sides. The man on the radio who answered Terry’s request to let us through said we would have to wait because a northbound barge was coming through first. This agitated Terry because all we could really do was drift and motor around in big circles while we waited. After our experience with the dock at the launching ramp, he didn’t want to go anywhere near the pilings that were available for waiting vessels to tie off, but it made him furious that we were wasting gas. It was an hour later before we were finally able to enter the lock. We knew what we were doing this time, so it wasn’t as scary, and besides, this lock only dropped us twenty-five feet; a lot less than the big one coming out of Bay Springs Lake.
Once we got past Fulton and crossed under a tall highway bridge, we were back in one of the narrow areas but it didn’t last long until we were in another series of lakes with more locks ahead. I couldn’t believe how many locks there were. We spent the rest of the day until almost dark going from one to another, until we were south of a pretty big town called Columbus, and finally back in the woods again. Terry said that the rest of the way down to the Gulf the Waterway would be a river, with only a couple more locks and dams. He said we would anchor at the first good place we came to and tomorrow the route would cross the state line into Alabama.
All along the way we occasionally passed barges tied up to the banks. Sometimes their cables were connected to pilings and other times to unseen anchors or trees on the bank. Terry said we’d do the same just as soon as we found a good place, and we finally did just before it got too dark to see. He steered the Apocalypse around in a big circle and pointed the bows back upstream, the way we had just come from, as he eased over close to a clay bank with big trees growing on top of it. He said the chart showed deep water right to the edge here and he intended to get close enough for me to jump over to the bank with one of the mooring lines and tie us off.
I was just about to make the jump when I saw a big snake wrapped around a stump on the bank. Terry didn’t see it and was yelling at me to hurry up before the current swept us backwards, but there was no way I was jumping ashore anywhere near a snake like that. Terry yelled some more but by then we were already going backwards and I felt the stern of the hull closest to the bank hit something under the water and cause us to spin around. Terry was really cussing by this time and I climbed back into the cockpit to tell him why I didn’t jump.
“A sailor puts his ship first, Robbie! That snake was probably just a harmless water snake.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it was a moccasin, and if there was one there’s probably more!”
The Apocalypse had bounced off whatever we’d hit with the stern and was now drifting sideways down the river. Terry was going back and forth between the motor wells and the helm as he fought to get the ship back in control.
“We might as well just anchor,” he said, still clearly mad at me for failing to do what he said was a simple task. “It’s too dark now to see what we’re doing well enough to tie up to the bank, so we’ll have to take our chances on the hook.”
By this time he had us pointed downstream and he said we’d look for the first wide spot in the river to drop the anchor that was outside of the barge channel. When we found a place I had the job of going forward to release the anchor so it would drop to the river bottom in the right spot, while Terry tried to hold our position in the current. It was really dark out here now that the twilight had faded away and it was hard to tell whether we were too close to either the bank or the channel. But there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it anyway by now, because pulling it up again and moving in the dark would be a major operation. We just sat there in the quiet after Terry turned the engines off and waited to see if the anchor was going to hold or not, and to determine which way the current was going to push us. I went below and switched on the masthead anchor light because I was still scared a barge might hit us. Terry said that even if we were out of the way, you just never know if some captain driving one might be sleepy or even drunk, like some people on the road at night in cars.
But I was mainly scared because of a story that Terry had told us all one night over dinner back when we were still building the boat. He had been talking about the advantages of shallow draft vessels such as our catamaran and had used the story to illustrate how we’d be much safer than most people traveling on sailboats. He had been talking about this mainly to reassure Mom, who was worried that almost anything could happen to us out there. The story didn’t do much to reassure her though and it sure wasn’t something I would forget about anytime soon. What happened was that right down at the end of this river, at a place called Mobile Bay, which we were going to have to sail across, a family had anchored their sailing yacht out in the middle when it got dark. Terry said that unlike most places on the coast, you could do that there because the water in that bay was shallow enough to anchor almost anywhere. Since they were well away from any marked navigation channels, they thought they were safe from getting hit by big boats and ships, wrongly assuming all of them would stay in the channels. What they didn’t know was that in that big bay, the barges and all kinds of other big commercial boats sometimes took shortcuts that were outside of the channel. After all, the water depth was about the same everywhere, and there was nothing out there for them to hit—except an anchored sailboat some towboat captain was never expecting to be there. It turned out that the whole family was drowned right there when their boat sank after being run over in the middle of the night. Terry said that even if they had their anchor light on, the towboat captain probably wouldn’t have noticed it against the background of confusing lights both ashore and on oil platforms, as well as other boats.
It was scary to contemplate something like that; one minute you’re sound asleep in your bunk and the next thing you know, you’re swimming underwater in the dark. I hoped Terry was right thinking that we could avoid that danger by anchoring the catamaran closer to shore. But here we were already, our first night on the river, anchored out in deep water where some barge straying out of the channel could do us in. And if that happened, it would partly be my fault for being too scared of a snake to jump ashore with the mooring line.
Needless to say I didn’t sleep too well that night. At first, I didn’t hear any barges, but every time I heard motors in the distance from cars or trucks or any kind of machine, I couldn’t help but stay awake listening, just to make sure the sounds weren’t coming closer. Then, sometime after midnight, there was a barge coming. The sound of its big engines was unmistakable, but even louder in the dark than the ones we’d passed the day before. I yelled for Janie and Mom and Terry to get up because I didn’t want us to all die like that family in Mobile Bay. If nothing else, we could all jump overboard and swim for it, but I planned on saving our ship if at all possible. I got Terry’s big twelve-volt spotlight he kept near the helm and plugged it into one of the cigarette lighter outlets he’d installed in the cockpit. I turned it on to make sure it worked and then turned it off again while I waited for the barge. There was no sign of Janie, but Mom and Terry came up on deck, asking what was the matter. Terry said there was no need for alarm and that the anchor was still holding and we were well outside of the channel. But I wasn’t taking any chances. When the towboat and its stack of barges finally came into view, it was huge. It was one of those pushing too many barges for this narrow river, just like that first one that forced us to run aground.
I aimed the spotlight right at it and a few seconds later I knew the captain had seen us because he swept his blinding searchlight right back at us, lighting up our decks almost like it was daylight. Terry yelled at me for shining the light in the captain’s eyes, but compared to that searchlight our little spotlight was like a penlight. I didn’t care if that captain was mad or not, or Terry either, for that matter. What was important was that I made sure he saw us before he ran us down. I heard him revving up his engines as he made a hard turn to miss us, and I was sure that if I had not warned him with that light, he would have probably made a wider arc outside the channel just because it was easier.
“See how close that was? That’s why I shined him,” I told Terry as the massive wall of black steel barges slid by us in the dark, far ahead of the towboat itself. I could tell Mom was shaken up. She had been upset by the story of the sailboat in Mobile Bay too. Terry just grumbled about how nobody would have to worry about things like that if the commercial boat captains would just stay in the channels like he said they were supposed to. I could tell he didn’t want to admit that where he decided to anchor wasn’t a good choice. He knew it when he did it the night before, but he was just ready to stop. And after I messed up our attempt at tying up to the bank because of the snake, he didn’t want to try that again.
Now we were all wide-awake, even Janie, who finally stuck her head out of the hatch to see what was happening. Terry said there was no use just sitting there waiting for the next barge to come along and hit us, so we might as well get the anchor up and keep moving downriver. He said we’d have a better chance of staying out of the way if we weren’t on the hook and that the sooner we got to the Gulf and off this waterway the better off we’d be anyway. I wasn’t sure about that, but I did know I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep after that close call, so it was just as well with me if we got going. Besides, the idea of motoring down the river at night was kind of exciting. I figured that I might finally get to see an alligator or something if I shined the spotlight along the banks.
I didn’t see any alligators that night, but I did see a couple of raccoons at the water’s edge and one deer that stood there watching us go by. It turned out we didn’t pass any more barges until daylight, so we could have just stayed where we were, but I was glad we didn’t. It was kind of mysterious going down the waterway at night, never knowing what might be around the next bend. Closer to daylight, there was a low fog hanging over the water too. Going through that was really neat because you couldn’t even see the water. It was like we were floating on a blanket of smoke about three feet thick that our bows sliced right through. Terry didn’t like it because he said there could be logs or something out there we might hit, maybe even a fisherman, invisible in some low-sided little Johnboat. He slowed the outboards down to just a little over idle, and we were moving about as slow as the boat could go without just drifting. Terry said it was about two or three knots.
Like everything else on the boat, he wouldn’t let us use measurements from land that we all understood. He said speed on a boat, whether we were talking about boat speed or the strength of the wind was always measured in knots rather than miles per hour. Janie thought it was stupid and Mom didn’t seem too interested one way or the other, but after Terry explained it to me, I could see that it kind of made sense. He said that navigating by nautical miles rather than the statute miles the shore bastards used was what made us sailors, and that all sailors, and airplane pilots too, used this method. A nautical mile was longer than a regular old statute mile on land though, so if we were going five knots, which was five nautical miles per hour, it was really like going almost six miles per hour in a car or on a bike. Janie said it was pointless to even bother keeping track since a dumb sailboat went so slow she could almost walk as fast anyway, but Terry said she would understand when we got out to sea and he showed her how keeping track of speed was vital to navigation. Even though we had a GPS to show us where we were, he said we’d still use dead reckoning as a backup. That was another term that was as mysterious to me as all the rest, but I figured I would learn what it meant too when we finally got out on the ocean.
Terry also said we hadn’t seen anything yet with regard to what the Apocalypse could really do. He said that under sail out on open water, she would really come alive and that depending on the wind speed, we would be going two or three times faster than those old outboards could push us. He said that sailing was nothing like motoring.
“A proper sailing ship comes to life in the wind, Robbie. She’s like a living creature, splendidly evolved to harness the breeze and ride the waves, taking her crew wherever they care to go. No engine-powered boat or ship can compare. A sailor plays the forces of the wind with fine-tuned skills instead of trying to fight it with brute strength. Motors were invented because most people are too impatient to develop the skills it takes to sail. The wind will take you anywhere you want to go, but you’ve got to understand the patterns, the currents, the storm systems and the seasons. It’s not for the lazy or the ignorant. But people who go to sea in the future are going to have to go back to sail whether they like it or not. Those of us already doing it will be ahead of the curve.”
Terry was always talking about how the world was going to run out of oil, and that all the technology built around the internal combustion engine was doomed to obsolescence when it did. He said the oil running out was as big a reason as any of the others that most of modern civilization was going to collapse. He said people didn’t want to give up being dependent on it to try to develop alternatives, and that they would be killing each other over it until the last drop was extracted. But running out of oil was just one of the many problems facing civilization that would doom it, according to Terry. Even if there was enough oil, he said things couldn’t keep going on like they were. He said there were simply too many people in the world, competing for far too few resources, and that we had done so much damage to the environment that it couldn’t be undone now. One of the biggest results of this damage was creating the global warming trend that was now unstoppable. Because of that, he said sea levels were going to rise everywhere and a lot of people were going to have to move away from coastlines, unless they lived on a boat like us.
Terry had gotten in a lot of arguments with some of the other teachers and parents in Calloway City when he talked about this kind of stuff in the classroom. People around there didn’t believe in global warming and they didn’t want him trying to teach it in school. He said he would have quit his job there anyway because of that even if he hadn’t married Mom and started building the Apocalypse. It still seemed odd to me that he was ever teaching there in the first place after traveling all over the world like he said he’d done. I knew he said he came to Mississippi to teach at Ole Miss, but he never really told us why he left there. I wondered if maybe he got fired or something, and I figured that must be it. Why else would he move somewhere to teach at a university and then leave that job to teach at some little small town junior high?
Mom didn’t seem to care one way or the other what brought him there, she was just infatuated with him and swept up in his big dreams and ideas. Mom seemed to get that way every time she met someone new, like our old stepdad, Wayne Delaney, the last one before Terry. I hadn’t ever realized she wasn’t like most moms because she had always been this way as long as I could remember. I wouldn’t have known what it was like to have a mom who didn’t get divorced and married again pretty often, and I sure didn’t know what it was like to have a mom married to my real dad like most kids I knew. Mom just had a restless side to her, and she loved adventure and excitement. Terry was more adventurous than anyone she’d ever met so he was just what she was looking for when he came along. Mom seemed to believe everything he told her, at least enough to decide to help him build the ship and sail it away. She believed him when he said the country was going to fall apart, and she believed him when he said he knew the best places to go before it did and the best way to get there. I couldn’t have changed her mind about it, even if I’d tried, which I didn’t, and Janie couldn’t either. Unlike me, Janie did try; real hard at first, pitching fits and threatening to run away, but she finally gave in to the inevitable and reluctantly started helping us.
We still had a ways to go before we could see firsthand what Terry was talking about when he said the Apocalypse was going to come alive under sail. The river just went on and on, with one bend after another unwinding in front of us. There was mostly nothing but the same kinds of trees on the banks on both sides with little to break the monotony as the outboards droned along at the same slow speed. I studied the river charts and flipped through Terry’s boater’s guide to the Tenn-Tom, trying to visualize just where we were in relation to where we’d started and where we had to go to get to the end of it. But it wasn’t as easy to tell out here on the river as it was on the road in a car. We had been in Alabama for a while now, but we didn’t pass any sign on the riverbank saying so, like those big signs you see on the highway when you cross from one state to the next.
It seemed to me like there was even more woods here than there was in Mississippi. There was just mile after mile of nothing but trees and I imagined this must be what it was like everywhere in America back when the Indians were still wild and nobody else lived here. I was beginning to imagine that the eerie fog we had passed through was some kind of portal back in time when we finally came to a huge power line stretched far above the river on tall metal towers that glinted in the light of the morning sun. Later on we passed under a bridge that was almost as tall, and throughout the day a passing barge or some other reminder that we were still in the right century would appear. But even if we were in the right time and there weren’t any wild Indians along the bank, there were alligators. I started seeing so many that after a while they got boring to look at because all they did was sleep in the mud all day. I never did see one swim or even move, but I knew if there were that many on the bank, there must be even more in the water.
Terry figured it would take us three or four days to get the rest of the way down the Tenn-Tom to Mobile Bay, but that was if the old worn-out outboard engines continued to work like they were supposed to. They didn’t, of course. First it was the ten-horse Evinrude to starboard; then the eight-horse Mercury on the port side. The symptoms were always the same: they would run rough and sputter, then finally go dead altogether. Terry was getting good at getting them going again by the third day, mostly copying what he’d seen Jimmy do the day we launched. He would take the covers off, remove and clean the spark plugs, change the fuel filters in the lines between the gas tanks and the motors and then we’d be off again until it happened the next time. The worst time was when it happened just as we were in the middle of the river, drifting helpless in the current while a barge was headed straight for us from upstream. Terry cussed the motors, the barge captain and the river current as he worked frantically to get the starboard motor to running just in time to get us out of the way.
“Maybe we should’ve hired Mr. Jenkins to haul the boat all the way to Mobile,” I said.
“And paid him what, an extra three thousand dollars? Look what he charged us just to go a little over a hundred miles! Besides, it would have been too risky, Robbie. All it would take is one idiot pulling out in front of Jenkins’ truck at the last minute and we could have lost our ship. No sir, not on your life could we take that chance. I’d rather go down the river even it takes us a month!”
It seemed to me that we were just about as likely to get our ship run over by a barge, as to be in a wreck on the highway with Mr. Jenkins. But I didn’t argue with Terry; there was no use. He was always right about everything, according to him, and I guess he really was right about this too, because finally, six days after we launched the Apocalypse at Bay Springs Lake, we reached the end of the Tenn-Tom Waterway.
The first sign we were near the Gulf was the change in the way the air smelled. Since I’d never been to the ocean before, it was new to me, and Terry said it was the salt. He took deep breaths in and out as he stood at the helm grinning, steering us through the last stretches of river where the woods gave way to a wide expanse of grassy marsh on either side of the channel. Soon we were passing the tall buildings and dirty commercial docks along the waterfront of Mobile, and I stared in awe at the big ocean-going freighters tied up there. They were the first real ships I’d ever seen, and they made our catamaran look small, kind of the same way the Apocalypse had made those fishing boats at Bay Springs Lake look tiny.
Terry wasn’t impressed, no matter how much Janie and Mom and I stared at all the new sights we passed going by the city. He said cities held nothing of interest to him and that he’d be glad when he’d seen his last. What really got him excited was when we finally reached open water just past the Mobile waterfront and the bay stretched out in a wide expanse before us. It looked huge to me after being on the river for so many days. The land on both sides was far away and blue looking in the distance; ahead of us, there was nothing on the horizon but a long line of channel markers that seemed to stretch to infinity. Here and there, scattered on the far horizon, I could see what looked like some kind of towers. Terry said they were oil-drilling platforms.
“They’ll keep drilling until they tap the last drop,” he said. “Then those rigs will rust away like every other machine made possible by fossil fuels. But we’re about to be done with internal combustion engines, Robbie. After a quick stop at the boatyard to step these masts, the Apocalypse will become the sailing ship she was built to be!”