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Mississippi Drifting

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"She's also the one that if you're feeling down, she'll always cheer you up," says Sacra. "Always has something funny to say. If it wasn't for Peggy, I probably wouldn't be out here. When I'm mad or something, and if the captain don't listen, Peggy's always there. You can always count on her. She's the one that makes the boat alive."

The back of Russell's XXL gray T-shirt is smeared with coal dust, and his blue jeans ride low. One of his nicknames is Meathead, he says, but only a fool or a friend would call him that. Rowberry, who's been cooking on boats for fifteen years, leans close and speaks quietly. "What I try and do is get them all involved a little bit in everything. Sometimes I'll say, 'Russell, could you fill this up for me,' just making them feel sort of like it's home."

The DirecTV in the lounge is more frustrating than it is useful. When the boat's running and the river is curvy, the old dish constantly loses its signal. Sacra's on the couch watching a motorcycle blooper show. Despite his size, the scars around his eyes and the banged-up nose that gives him a nasal wheeze, his demeanor is gentle.

Sacra loves telling the story of how he and his wife met. His parents were friends with her parents. One night six years ago they all went out to dinner. She brought her then-boyfriend, and sometime during the night the boyfriend hit the girlfriend hard on her arm. "I looked at him," recalls Sacra, "then looked around the table, confused, like, 'Did you all just see that?'" He told the guy if he did it again, he was going to take him outside. Later, the boyfriend hit her again, and Sacra guided him out to the parking lot and pummeled him. "A few days later, she calls me and asks me if I want to go out for coffee."

Tornado warnings in Cairo made the tow work a pain -- it took all night to load the remaining barges. But now the storms have moved on, and the boat's connected to its 35 barges -- the equivalent of 2,450 truckloads. It takes a lot of muscle and fuel (400 gallons an hour) to get the collection up to its maximum speed of nearly 13 miles per hour. Once it gets moving, though, the journey is nonstop. Later in the day, Memphis appears on the horizon. The Memphis DeSoto Bridge, which connects Tennessee and Arkansas at Memphis, twinkles with light.

Scott Davison chuckles when asked whether he's ever fallen in the river. He says he wouldn't be standing here now if he had. He stands five-foot-six and has a coarse, ragged head of sandy brown hair. A fraying ponytail hangs in back, and he wears a double-wide goatee. As mate, Davison is in charge of the tow workers: Sacra, watchman Green and deckhand Raderstorf.

Past Memphis and into the Mississippi Delta, the river is so wide at some points that it seems more like a lake than a river. If you didn't know that this waterway continued on to the Gulf of Mexico, you'd swear it ended just on the other side of that bend. Ahead, gulls move like fighter jets across the river as the Parsonage drifts like a blimp.

Working a tow isn't rocket science, but carelessness will send a clumsy deckhand over and under. If the winch he's tightening slips, he'll tumble headfirst into the river. Trip on a wire, and before he can start hyperventilating, the man is swept beneath acres of solid steel. Laws and common sense dictate that safety vests be worn whenever a worker is on the tow or on deck. But what good's a life jacket? Even if you retain your composure, the two ten-foot propellers will cut you into bits.

Davison and Sacra are out checking the tow. Each shift starts with the ritual of walking the gunwale -- the natural walkways created by the collection of barges -- to look for barge leaks. On each of the barges' four sides are two manholes covered with hatches. The men walk the expanse of the load, a 35-rectangle grid, lift each hatch with a T-shape tool that Davison calls the "backsaver" and peer down into what in barge terminology is called "the void" -- the space between the outer hull and the cargo box. The void creates the buoyancy that makes the steel barge float; it's like two shoeboxes, one inside of the other.

If Davison spies a leak, he'll drop a pump. If it proves to be a big leak, he'll climb down and wade around until he finds the hole, then use a hammer to bang in some shingles -- wooden wedges that he'll use to plug the hole. "You take a knife down there, and a hammer. Sometimes you can put a half a bundle of shingles in it and still not stop it. After a time, they'll swell up, and it acts like a cork."

Finally, after checking all the hatches, Davison is at the towhead, nearly a quarter-mile from the boat. Out here, he has an unimpeded view of the river. It's stumbling-distance away and there are no safety railings. In front of him, the river washes beneath the barge and a breeze hits his face.

"I like it out here," says Davison, looking out over the water plateau and the tunnel of trees in front of him. "You can't hear no boat noises, no engines -- especially in the summertime. It just makes it all worthwhile, right here." He pauses. "It gets eerie out here sometimes. Like that stick out there. You'll be walking by and something will jump up at you." Entire trees buried in the current get swept up by the barges, and roar out of the river like serpents. A few weeks back, one pushed up and out and scraped along the length of the Parsonage. "If someone would have been out there when it happened, he would have been dragged off the boat," says Davison.

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