Mississippi Drifting

He points to Pittsburgh, then to Chicago, where steel is made, then to the plains states: "Then we have the grain. Fertilizer goes up [the river], grain goes down." All told, roughly 600 million tons of material are shipped annually through the inland riverway system.

The Christopher M. Parsonage was built in 1998 and named after the son of MEMCO's founder. It measures 180 feet long and 48 feet wide. It's a three-story workboat shaped like an oblong pyramid. The top deck is the wheelhouse, a square room with a 360-degree view of the river. The guest quarters are below it: two separate bedrooms and bathrooms connected by a sitting room that faces the towhead, and below the guest rooms are the crew's quarters. On the main level is the galley, the TV room, two more bedrooms, the engineer's office and the hotter-than-Hell engine room. Below the waterline is a subdeck, where the engines sit.

"You kind of view the boat as a mobile city," explains Knoy. "They have everything on there they need. They have all their own systems. It has everything on board it needs to repair itself: the spare engine parts, generator parts, plumbing parts, electric parts, an element for the stove. The engineers on there can pretty much fix anything that breaks."

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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."