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Mississippi Drifting

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The journey from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico can be divided into two sections: the 165 miles from St. Louis to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River converges with the Mississippi; and the 981 miles from Cairo to New Orleans. To Cairo's north, the scenery is filled with hills, a few bluffs and an occasional river town, the prettiest of which is St. Genevieve. It sits on a hill, and when the Parsonage glides past, its architecture and setting look positively European. Below Cairo lies a vast, open waterway only a few feet above sea level; here, it feels like you're traversing the Amazon.

Near Cora, Illinois, 75 miles south of St. Louis, the Parsonage stops for 10 more barges, mostly coal. Deckhand Russell Sacra and watchman Randy Green await the load from the towhead 75 yards in front of the boat. The tug glides headfirst toward the front of the lead barge, and the entire Parsonage shimmies as the barge hits the tip. Then the two deckhands, along with the tugboat's workers, tie it in with wire. About twenty minutes later, the little tugboat pulls away and heads north for more barges, leaving a solid wake in its path.

Then the Parsonage waits. And waits. It doesn't faze the crew; it's part of the deal. They're on for the duration, whether they're moored or moving. They say the 28-day cycle is the best part of the job. Workers cram a year's worth of work into six months but pay the price with dense twelve-hour work days, which add up to an 84-hour workweek. The crew is only able to sleep in five-hour stretches, maximum. The cost is half your home life, half your anniversaries, birthdays and Christmases.

Randy Green looks like a younger, chunkier Harvey Keitel. The Cape Girardeau resident has been working boats for seven years. A few years back he took a six-month sabbatical. "I wanted to try other things," he says. He got married, and his wife suggested a more normal lifestyle. "My wife was like, 'Maybe you should try to get a job at home so we can spend more time together.'" He tried the nine-to-five racket. "I didn't get no 28 days off, and that's the thing that I really love about the job."

Usually it's the first-timers who get stir-crazy during the cycle and decide to bail out. Chief engineer Randy Chambers of the Harry Waddington, which runs the Illinois River and upper Mississippi, recalls being on that boat with a novice who panicked a week into the trip. "He dove off wearing just the clothes on his back, and screamed back, 'You can keep my stuff!' [and] swam to the bank. He cut through the woods, then realized he was in the middle of fucking nowhere, and jumped back into the river and climbed back aboard."

"Just being out here is the hardest part," says Green. "You have to be able to deal with that mentally. As far as doing the labor, I like that. It keeps you in shape a little bit. I'd probably be really fat if I didn't work here."

"Keeps you in shape?" hollers Eric Raderstorf. "All the lead men [the deckhands' bosses] are fat. You're fat, Lenny's fat, Scott's fat, Chris is fat." He looks over at deckhand Sacra: "Russell, you're the next lead man, ain't you? I need to put on a few pounds. Maybe I'd get a damn pay raise."

The trade-off for the endless hours is a decent wage. "There's absolutely nothing wrong with the mate making 35 to 40 thousand a year," says MEMCO's Knoy. "Yeah, you can't live in Chesterfield, but you can live damn near anywhere you want in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, West Virginia."

A deckhand starts at about $25,000 a year, a mate at $35,000, and an engineer at $50,000. After seven years, the captain can be pulling down $75,000. "Where I live," says deckhand Raderstorf, "everybody is like, 'Shoot, he's making more money than us and he's only working six months out of the year.' I'll say, 'Well, I work 84 hours a week. How many hours a week do you work?'"

The lifestyle does attract its share of characters. "I remember one guy came on the boat carrying this huge red cooler, and [he] immediately put it in his room," recalls the Harry Waddington's Chambers. "The guy would work, then go straight to his room until it was time for the next shift. We thought that he didn't know that he was invited to have dinner, to eat the food. So one day I went up to him and said, 'You know, you can eat with us.' And he said, 'I brought my own, and that's what I eat.' I asked him what was in the cooler and he opened it and it was filled with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. That's all he was eating."

Cook Peggy Rowberry sits at the dinner table, a five-foot Masonite rectangle that butts up against the starboard side of the galley. As with the rest of the ship, the walls are beige wood paneling; the floor, a heavy-duty speckled black rubber. She's just finished cleaning up after a pizza dinner. Behind her, a window the size of a hotel painting overlooks the river and a retaining wall, which welcomes river traffic to Cape Girardeau, 111 miles south of St. Louis.

Rowberry gets up at 3:30 a.m. to start breakfast (eggs, bacon, potatoes, pancakes), and stays awake to make a big lunch (fried chicken, meat loaf, pork steaks, roast beef, pasta, cold cuts) and dinner (taco soup, steak, fish, hamburgers, hot dogs). "These guys, they won't eat pies, and very few cakes," she says with a Loretta Lynn twang. "About the only thing they'll eat is cookies and chocolate."

The crew's surrogate mama, Rowberry confides in the crew, listens to them, watches them. "I saw Scott and Russell eat both meals today," she says, "which is highly unusual. You may not think I'm noticing things, but I do." She has to. She is only budgeted $3.95 per worker per meal, so she has to have an intimate understanding of their eating habits.

The cook is the queen of the galley. There is no cussing. Workers clear and rinse their own dishes and place them in the washer. No one else is to use the stove. She makes the menu but will do her best to accommodate any request. Deckhand Russell Sacra, who looks like a young Randall "Tex" Cobb -- the same weathered nose -- walks in and smiles at Peggy.

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