Mississippi Drifting

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."

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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.

"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."