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Show RFVER The towboats themselves, heirs of the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee, have decks that resemble stacks of consecutively smaller cigar boxes that are pushed flat at one end. The engine room occupies the lower deck almost completely, but here the average modern tow also squeezes in a galley, mess, and recreation room. The upper decks contain living quarters, done up for all the world like motel rooms. The reverberation and the dull roar of the engines rattle every part of the boat, even the glassed-in pilof s house outfitted in wood and leather and polished metal that sits atop the whole structure. Towboats now use radar, radios, and enormous floodlights to navigate at night: even when a dense fog shuts down on the river, the towboats still boom along on instruments. Towboats-especially large towboats-create tremendous wakes. The most treacherous variety, the prop wake, thrashes out directly behind the boat, rolling Whitewater undulating in wicked waves that roll and crest like surf. The bow wake rolls out in a wide "V" and is not nearly as dangerous as a prop wake, but it can become violent enough to easily capsize a rowboat. Towboats are as dangerous as dinosaurs to small craft. When several hundred thousand tons of steel or soybeans are sent hurtling downriver at ten to fifteen miles an hour, right-of-way laws favoring unpowered small craft are as ridiculous as they are irrelevant. It literally takes miles to stop a towboat with a full complement of barges. Most boats are painted white with black or green trim, though sometimes they will be trimmed in blue or red or yellow. Some have fine, deepwater names like Raja, Elizabeth Ann, or Badger, but many are named after politicians, revered robber barons, or somebody's mother-in-law. The best names are those taken from Indian tribes or the rivers themselves-the Coast Guard christens its - 2 1 - |
