"That'll do her, Dave"—Memories of the Flood, Pt. 2

    The Mississippi River flooding going on now prompted me to look at the stories I filed from the great flood of 1993. This one was one of my favorites, about when the river was re-opened to navigation. I was so taken with meeting the fifth generation of river rats that I pitched the story to Life magazine, which was still around then. They passed, which I thought a shame, since, as you'll see, they were quite an interesting crew.

     MOLINE — With its twin 250-horsepower Caterpillar engines roaring as if all the noise in the world were trapped inside, trying to get out, the James P. Pearson edges into the center of the Mississippi, bound for another appointment with 2,000 tons of sand and gravel.
     One of the numerous river workhorses idled for weeks by the flood, the Pearson, a towboat, is now pushing barges six days a week, trying to catch up.
     "We're only supposed to work five, but with the flood and everything, we're way behind," says Dave Williams, deckhand of the Pearson's two-man crew.
     A self-described "river rat" with five years on the Mississippi at the ripe age of 21, Williams introduces himself as the fifth generation of his family to work the river.
     At least a dozen relatives still do; one of them, his cousin, Shawn Olson, is pilot of the Pearson. He shows up for work with a bad cold, a briefcase filled with rock 'n' roll cassettes, "enough cigarettes to kill any man" and a supply of juice to combat the sweat-wringing 95-degree weather.
     Unlike larger boats making the trip "from Saint to Saint," (St. Paul to St. Louis), the Pearson is a small boat making a local run - four empty barges to drop off at the Moline Consumer's sand dredging operation in Cordova, Ill., swapped for four full barges of new sand to be brought back to Moline and Bettendorf, Iowa, where it is made into concrete mix. Round trip is about 50 miles.
     They are pleased as can be that navigation is still bottled up down river.
     "We wish it would stay like that until next year," Olson says, not wanting his run to be delayed at Lock and Dam No. 14, the only one of the Mississippi's 27 locks that the Pearson needs to go through.
     Going through the lock is fairly quick and simple: The boat and its barges enter the lock, the south gates swing shut, six feet of upriver water is allowed to flow in, the north gates swing open and the Pearson goes on her way on the higher portion of the river. It takes about 15 minutes.
     On a good day.
     But if there are any boats waiting in front of it, there is delay — sometimes for hours, even days, as the Pearson queues up behind larger boats maneuvering their big clusters of barges into the lock.
     Because of flooding conditions lingering downriver, there are practically no boats on this part of theMississippi. There is no wait at the lock. In fact, the Pearson passes only one commercial boat in nine hours - the immense Conti-Arlie, pushing a dozen grain barges. "Fifty-six hundred horsepower," Williams says, reverently. "That's a real working boat."

    Mostly the Pearson has the river to itself. The only sound, outside of the clangorous engine room, is the splash of the river against the barges and the sawing of cicadas in the trees lining the shore.
     Olson steers casually between the wide channel markers, barely needing to touch the wooden and brass rudder controls.
     Williams does his real work when the boat drops off or picks up barges, or goes through the locks. He scampers nimbly over the wet steel barges, securing ropes, winching steel cable. It is hard work in the hot sun, and Williams doesn't seem to have enough fat on his body to make a good butter pat.
     "My job is hard to explain," he says. "People say, 'You're a deckhand? What do you do? My grandfather (Don Williams, captain of the Queen of Hearts casino boat) used to say he told people he was a trucker, so they won't ask any questions . . . the majority of people around here are just society. They don't know anything about the river at all."
     Although both Williams and Olson complain about working on the river - Olson pointed out that "nobody got rich as a pilot" and Williams says he would like to find a "white shirt" job - they both obviously love what they do.
     "Some of the nicest people you meet on the river," Williams says. "They'll take care of you, free of charge."
     At Cordova, four barges containing 1,950 tons of sand and gravel are waiting in a large cove carved out of the shoreline by years of sand-dredging. Olson angles the empty barges next to the company's dredging machine as casually as if he were tossing cards into a hat.
     "Look at that big old bird up there," he says, pointing to something flapping over the forest, just as the barges ease against the dock. "That must be an owl, I betcha."
     Williams unleashes the barges, then takes time for a quick dip in the river, executing a neat jackknife dive into the cool water. "Ah yes," he says, breaking the surface.
     The journey downstream is a lot quicker - about 90 minutes less than it took to fight the current. There is still plenty of time to sit on a timberhead and enjoy the warm, soft breeze (river life is filled with quaint, anachronistic terms. Timberheads are the capped pegs used to secure lines - once cut from logs, they are now steel. At the lock, the little tram used to tow barges, if necessary, is called "the mule," a nod to its animate predecessor).
     A long Soo line freight train pulling auto carriers draws alongside at the river's edge and gives a few friendly toots.
     "That's the competition," Williams says, and Olson says hello back with a few blasts of the air horn.
     The James P. Pearson is almost home now. The sun is setting, a huge orange ball peaking out from behind the trees. "Is that beautiful!" Williams says. Olson opens the front window of the pilot house and turns up the volume on some vintage Allman Brothers Band.
     "Lord, I'm southbound," sings an Allman. "Lord, I'm coming home to you."
     In its final minutes, the sun puts on a display rarely seen outside of English Romantic oil paintings - bands of orange, blue, pink, purple and even green, radiating from the horizon. The gold light shimmers off the ripples, swirls and eddies formed by the barges cutting through the river.
     Two barges are left at the Bettendorf dock, below the bucket crane which will empty them before the Pearson returns at noon the next day - gingerly empty them, because the sand is so heavy that, if not unloaded uniformly, they can easily flip over.
     The other two barges are left at the Moline dock. The Pearson ties up at 8:23 p.m., about as early as she has ever returned from a full day's work.
     "That'll do her, Dave," Olson says, and he gives the horn a few celebratory blasts.
     Williams goes down to the engine room and shuts down the twin Caterpillars, which sigh to silence after nine hours of work.
     The only sound now is the gentle lapping against the wharf of the mighty Mississippi, now tamed to a gentle purr.
                            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 30, 1993

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1993

 

Photo by Al Podgorski

    The Mississippi is flooding again. The last time it was this bad was 1993, when I was a grunt reporter, and the City Desk sent me down a number of times to report on the disaster. Even after nearly a quarter century, thinking of the flood conjures up unforgettable images: the Mississippi, swollen and wide, racing along almost at the base of the Arch in St. Louis. Whole towns turning out in places like Grafton and Alton trying to keep their sandbag levees intact. Townsfolk keeping their wallets in Baggies.

     And a solitary stone house, which photographer Al Podgorski — who snapped the photo above — and I came upon in Saint Genevieve, Missouri.  An extraordinary sight: a peninsula of sandbags, jutting into the swollen river, protecting a single stone structure. I wrote about the efforts to save the house, and ended up on the stand bag line, trying to keep the wall in place. It was scary. I remember watching water trickling through the cracks between the sandbags thinking, "A guy could die here." But the wall held. None of the historic homes in Saint Genevieve were seriously damaged by the flood. 

     STE. GENEVIEVE, Mo. — This house north of town is called the Rock House because of its solid stone construction. Built in 1805, it is the oldest stone dwelling in Missouri.

     The house has seen a lot of history in its nearly two centuries of existence. It was, for a while, home to a slave trader. It was, for a while, a brothel. 

     It should be under water up to its second floor, and about 50 feet into the swollen Mississippi River.

     But it's not. 

     Walk up to the house, and the mind almost rejects what the eye is seeing. The house is surrounded on three sides by the river, kept out by a fragile sandbag and plastic levee. 

     The house also is called the Myers house, for the owner, Frank Myers, and it was his determination, along with his family's, that has kept the house safe. 

     "When he had resigned himself to fate, it was really when a lot of the family said 'No, we have to save it,' " says Stuart Johnson, Myers' son-in-law, who took over when Myers went into the hospital for a coronary bypass last week. (Ask anyone whether the fight to save the house put Myers in the hospital and the answer is always: "It didn't help.") 

     They have been fighting the river since July 4, and how it will work out is anyone's guess. On Friday, the river crested at Ste. Genevieve, a town of 4,500 about 50 miles south of St. Louis, at 49.6 feet, the highest point ever. 

     Around the Rock House, water seeps out of the bottom of the levee in sheets, forming a considerable creek at the base, where two pumps throw it back into the river. 

     The family has been aided by hundreds of volunteers, from the local girls basketball team, to the National Guard, to prisoners from the Farmington Correctional Facility, who endeared themselves by being concerned about getting the floors muddy. 

    As with much of the efforts to fight the flood, there is a factor of human nobility — or perhaps irrationality — in the fight to keep the river out of the Rock House. The walls are 3 feet of stone; the river probably wouldn't sweep the house away. Why not just give up and put all that effort into cleaning up afterward? 

     "I'll give up when the water brings me out the back door," says Johnson. "When I'm swimming out the back door, then I'll decide what to do next. 

Sandbaggers Get To the Nitty-Gritty

    Sandbags have a rhythm, a mantra. They are too heavy, and you need too many, for it to be otherwise.
     In creation, they require four people, as any volunteer can tell you, in something close to a nursery rhyme:

     One person holds it.

     One person fills it.

     One person ties it.

     One person stacks it.

     The parking lot at Valley High School here looked like a factory producing brown and green pillows.   Tens of thousands of 40-pound sandbags, piled about 3 feet high on wooden pallets, filled most of the area. Around the perimeter, volunteers worked feverishly, making more.

     Grab any sandbag team here and you find a cross-section of Midwesterners who left their lives, temporarily, to drive for hours to do back-breaking work in the hot sun for free to help total strangers.

     Mary Boyer, from Vincennes, Ind., held an empty bag. Ron Lyon, from Caledonia, Ohio, took a shovel and filled it — three shovelfuls to the bag. Nancy Hendrixson, also from Vincennes, tied it, and Marilyn Anderson, from Olney, Ill., did the stacking.

     "We brought a van load of goods donated by the town and dropped them off at the Salvation Army, then came to sandbag" said Hendrixson, explaining how they got there.

     "It's a chance to help out," said Lyon. "To give somebody else a break, to step into the breach."

     Jim Runstrom walked up. He had just driven 10 hours from Waterford, Mich. He asked if he could fill in for anybody, and Anderson let him take over the stacking.

     "I've been seeing these people on TV every day, and they look like they need help," he said. "So I came down."

                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 9, 1993

Have a Boswell New Year!

     Friday is New Year's Day. A time of resolutions, of personal goals solemnly set.
     Some are general: be a better person. Some are very specific: lose 15 pounds.
     Less clear is how to go about trying to reach those goals: how to eat less. How to be that better person.
     I'm going to suggest something out of left field: consider James Boswell.
     Famed as the 18th century biographer of British man of letters Samuel Johnson. But a fascinating figure in his own right, an ordinary man with a genius for hanging out with the most brilliant minds of his era. As a teenager he knocked on rationalist David Hume's door, barging in to talk philosophy. Later he argued about God with Voltaire and invited himself to be the house guest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, hospitality he rewarded by eventually seducing Rousseau's wife.
     I'm not suggesting you spend 2016 cuckolding the great philosophers of our day — our era doesn't really have prominent philosophers. But Boswell's energetic efforts to give his life meaning can be emulated, and they start with one practice that anybody can do, right now, with no special equipment or training: keep a journal.

To continue reading, click here. 

Roll with it we shall

    2015 sort of blew, didn't it? Between Donald Trump and the Syrian refugees, Bruce Rauner shutting down Illinois and Chicago dripping blood. I can't put a good spin on it and wouldn't be so dumb as to try. 
   But it's over now. 
   And at least 2015's suckiness was limited to a city, state and national scale. Close to home, on the micro-local scale, all hums along. The boys thrive in college; work endures, the wife and I enjoy our frequently empty nest. We have much to be grateful for and are, every day.    
     Though it can be hard to be content with our own little garden when the clouds gather and half the country seems to have lost its mind, in harmony with 3/4 of the world.  Not only did 2015 blow, but the prospects for a non-sucky 2016 don't seem so hot either.
    Which leaves us with ... what? Hope, I guess. Hope is the last coin in your pocket when you've spent everything else. Hope is faith when belief has drained away and you figure things have got to get better because the thought of them getting worse is just unimaginable.
     Maybe not. Maybe not so unimaginable. Maybe they will get worse. President-elect Trump, lower lip pouting out like Il Duce, pondering on his throne whether his first act on Jan. 20, 2017 will be to deport all Mexicans or bar all Muslims. 
    Nah, can't happen. Can't can't can't. As Nate Silver said, neither party has nominated a candidate as unfit as Donald Trump in more than a century. They won't start now. 
    And if they do, well, as the poet Thomas Campbell writes, "To bear is to conquer fate."     
     Meaning, whatever life serves isn't so bad if you roll with it. 
     So roll with it we shall. Hope you're rolling now, rocking and rolling, out having fun. We'll be joining you in a bit, going over to friends to have fun, or what fun we can, and that should perk things up. 
     Happy New Year. Let's grab the wheel in 2016 and try to turn this bus into a better direction.  Somebody has to.
  

Flashback 2003: Happy New Year!

Found the photo after this was posted.

     This New Year's Eve we're lucky enough to have friends who are throwing a party, so we've got good company, good food and a good time only a few blocks away. But for years I puzzled and struggled through New Year's Eve like everybody else, usually writing something for the paper. This column had a marvelous photo of myself, in a suit, looking stern, wearing the small Tiffany party hat that I mention at the end.     
     Which I should have bought, given that it was $225, then, and is selling online for four or five times that. Alas, the photo seems lost in the river of time that we all splash around in, but I think the column still is worth revisiting. Happy New Year to all! Drive safely.  

TEN . . .

     Here we are again. In another noisy, jam-packed restaurant on triple price night, wondering where that waiter could possibly be. Or at the neighbors, making yack, yet again, with the Hendersons, the Pendersons and the Schmendersons. Or sprawled on the sofa before the tube -— and not a wide HDTV tube either — with Ethel. Again. Puzzling where Dick Clark went or — if one is a certain age — where Guy Lombardo went. Weren't they just here? It's both routine and a shock. A regular surprise.

NINE . . .

     New Year's Eve. It gets to be like those old movies where the calendar pages flutter off the wall, like falling autumn leaves. One minute, they're playing David Bowie's "1984" and you're thinking, "Golly, it really is 1984, almost," and the next it's Prince singing "1999" and the next it's, well, whatever clatter they're playing on the radio now, assuming anybody listens to radio anymore.

EIGHT . . .

     Still, we rouse ourselves, as midnight approaches. Stand up. Square the shoulders. Refill the drink. Run our fingers through whatever hair time has left us. Direct our attention to the Big Ball at Times Square. New Year's is all about joining the crowd, getting with the program, digging out the good suit, facing the Hendersons (and Pendersons and Schmendersons). Observing the customs — the champagne, the hot dogs in dough, the tiny party hats.

SEVEN . . .

     It's all a lie, of course, this New Year's business. It's the New Improved Product that really is the same old product, but smaller. Two ounces less at the same price. The Happy New Year is the Rotten Old Year with tinsel draped around it.
     There is no 2004, not in any objective sense. The universe spins its clockwork machinations in the same unimaginably vast, indifferent fashion. We can't grasp it, so we pretend the "3" snaps to "4" at midnight, and frankly even that scrap of symbolism is troubling if you ponder it.

SIX . . .

     New Year's Eve doesn't begin at midnight, it ends. Soon after, the party changes gears and guests get their coats. One other special day of the year has a midnight deadline; yes, April 15. Maybe the IRS needs to wed taxes to champagne — you file, pop the bubbly. They wouldn't even need tax laws then; I mean, do you know anybody who shrugs off New Year's? Hard to imagine. A scientist in his lab, a poet hunched over the page, looks up at the muted roar from distant crowds and thinks, "Oh? What? New Year's? I suppose they do that sort of thing" and then plunging back into work.

FIVE . . .

     Put that way, neglect sounds ideal. Not that I could ever do it. I swallow New Year's. Or did, because of the social barometer factor — where you are on New Year's gauges how well you are doing in life. Thus parties. Fancy restaurants. Hit plays.

FOUR . . .

     The Millennium cured me of that. First, I had to work — the whole newspaper did, ready for the disaster that never came. Work was humbling; I felt like Cinderella missing the ball. Second, the entire Millennium hoopla was so overblown and unseemly. Such a huge honking deal: the 21st century! The worries! The geegaws! (They were supposed to be worth something someday. Check out eBay. I saw a $6.99 stuffed "Y2K Bug" selling for a dollar).

THREE . . .

     Now I do it for the kids. We eat hot dogs wrapped in dough, watch movies, play music, dance around. I like to wear a little party hat. I always have, particularly because most men shun them. Too uptight, even guys who don't mind painting blue C's on their bellies and taking off their shirts on TV at Bears games.

TWO . . .

     Party hats are the one part of New Year's that isn't a lie. They remind us to slip into silliness —to shelve dignity, shelve the weary awareness that is, in the end, as futile as giddy celebration. Ignore the grinding gears of ceaseless time. Grab fun when you can. I was musing how party hats are the last festive item untouched by fashion; always cheap cardboard, stapled together. Thinking how we should each get our own lovely, hand-tooled party hat — a little fireman's hat, enamel over metal, or a miniature top hat — we would wear as children to our cherished kiddie birthdays and then keep, in a little satin box, to bring out on grand occasions as adults in need of youthful uplift.

ONE . . .

     As I was having this thought, as if to remind me of the regular falsity of my opinions, I noticed a Tiffany & Co. ad for their $225 sterling silver party hat. A dear little thing, created for the Millennium along with a horn and a noisemaker. The trio proved so popular Tiffany kept selling them. I'm modeling a loaner hat above, and believe me, if I didn't have two kids, a house and a stay-at-home wife locked lamprey-like on my finances and sucking hungrily away, I'd snap one up. I could sure use it. But I do, so back it goes.

    Tonight is a good time to set aside your grim self, don a party hat and join the chanting crowd. Reality will be here tomorrow, waiting.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

                 —Originally published in the Sun-Time, Dec. 31, 2003

State of the Blog III

Jim Bachor's mosaic "Thrive," installed at the Thorndale 'L' station in 2014.

    When I mentioned to my wife that I was sorting through the numbers for my third year end State of the Blog report, she replied, quickly and, I thought, rather emphatically, that I shouldn't. That nobody cares about the stats but me, and my doing so is unseemly, a personal flaw, and I should resist the urge. 
     To which my unspoken answer was: Yeah, and a pony for the children.
     Meaning, in some ideal world, it wouldn't matter if a piece of writing influenced one person or a million. Emily Dickinson's poems were just as good, written on sheets of paper and bound with thread into little booklets and jammed into a drawer at her home in Amherst as they'd be splashed across the cover the Ladies Home Journal. 
     But at some point somebody had to read them.
     And in the 24-hour-a-day roar, the howling free-fire zone that the Internet is, numbers seem to count for something. Anyway, the machine keeps track of them, and I do try to pay attention.  On days when I get 2,000 hits, such as today (assuming you're reading this on the day it's posted, Dec. 30, 2015) I feel as if I've accomplished something. If that is sin, then it is my sin, and I own it.

    Onward, as Rick Kogan would say. 
    The news is good, well, goodish. Last year I suggested that 50,000 hits a month would be some kind of success. I hit that mark for January-- 51,780--and surpassed it two more times, topping out at nearly 60,000--59,986--in August, almost 40 percent higher than the 2014 high of 43,000.
     In 2013, the daily average was 918. In 2014 it was 1200. This year it was 1539 a day.
     Not Kim Kardashian's ass breaking the Internet. But steady progress.
     The blog reached a million hits this year, averaging 47,718 hits a month. And while I estimate that 10 percent of those are Spambots, still a milestone of some sort. I held an on-line party the day we passed a million, with music and mingling, and several hundred readers showed up. That was fun. 
     Not the skyrocketing success that some blogs find. But not bad either, I'm told. We're going for the long term here. The blog is part life raft, part archive, part hobby, part unpaid job. 

    I can't pretend that stopping is an option at this point, for a variety of reasons. First, I get more control over the blog. Last May's post on performance artist/singer Amanda Palmer sticks in mind. I thought it an interesting encounter, and had pictures, and asked the paper for a page, which I'd thought I'd get. Then late in the day, pressing news intruded and I had my usual 750 words, and I had to cut the column in half, clumsily, at the last minute. Which would have really irked me, but it remained the same on the blog, and that is what would be available the next day. Palmer's husband, fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, retweeted it to his 2 million followers, meaning it reached far more people through Twitter than through the paper. The print edition is becoming an increasingly mooted, momentary paper interlude, and that trend will only continue.
    Which is the second reason the blog is important. It's about he only way you can find archived columns of mine. The newspaper, for some unfathomable reasons, yanked its archive off line, and you can either pull them out of Nexis, or find them here. Several times I've tried to refer people to columns which, though only a few weeks old, have already vanished. So having them here is important, to the degree that my columns being available is important, and that conversation I will leave to you.
     I'm skipping the poster this year. The 2015 poster sold eight copies, and while I enjoyed making wheat paste and slapping them up in the West Loop, that isn't reason enough to commission a new one. Maybe for the book, which comes out in the fall. I'm also thinking of creating a coffee cup instead for 2016, to give out as prizes.
     What else? Marc Schulman of Eli's Cheesecake returned sponsorship of the blog for the holidays and through January, and I am grateful to him for that, and urge you to show your appreciation as well by sending the gift of cheesecake to yourself or a loved one.
    Finally, as always, thank you for reading this stuff. Without you, I would be talking to myself. 

Accidents will happen

    

"Untitled," by Robert Gober, Art Institute of Chicago

     Whoops! 

     How clumsy of me. Almost spilled my coffee.
     Well, accidents happen. We've all dropped cups, tripped on rugs. So when the Chicago Police Department says that Bettie Jones was shot "accidentally" by police last Saturday, what else to do but nod our heads in sympathy for the poor officer, who took out his gun and spilled some bullets on a grandmother as she opened the door to let him in. Could have happened to anybody.

     Of course, accidents must be put in context. If I drop my coffee cup every other day, something might be wrong with me. Maybe a neurological condition. Maybe I should see somebody.
     Something is definitely wrong with the Chicago Police Department, though lest we be accused of picking on long-suffering, abused, misunderstood and bullied CPD, we should leap to point out it seems to be the same thing wrong with lots of city police departments. Being an officer is a dangerous job, one made safer by shooting first and then analyzing the situation later.
     Safer for the police officer, that is. For the teenager stumbling down the middle of the street or the woman opening the door, not so safe.

     To continue reading, click here.