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Show RFVER handsome cutters this way. The worst names are derived from the companies that own the boats: the ugliest appellation I've ever heard for anything that floated was for the tow Amoco Missouri. Except for a few mavericks, Ithe towboats are kept clean and tight and seamanlike, swept and hosed dpwn and painted and polished. Ironically, the tows all fly their ensigns behind their smokestacks, so Old Glory is invariably black, not to mention considerably worn and torn up. Towboats aren't pretty macnines, the way a clipper ship or steamboat was a beautiful creation, but a modern riverboat has the beauty of a clean new diesel truck. Like a gleaming new Keriworth or Peterbilt, a towboat has an aura of brute mechanical power. Their design is pure function. Like a diesel truck, a towboat also has a lurking sense of destructive potential. Even more than trains, they convey power in motion, especially when passing close by. The boats are manned by the same kind of desperadoes you meet on construction sites and oil fields, I in jails, and at low-rent bars. Working on a towboat is a lot like working in a coal mine: the pay is good, but the work has its disadvantages. Deck hands and| pilots work two six-hour watches every twenty-four hours. The job can get as miserable as the weather and there are enough grisly stories about deckhands getting maimed, crushed, drowned, or otherwise destroyed to warn the faint-hearted away from what is truly a mankilling job. Even piloting, the best job on the river, has its drawbacks. Pilots still die on the job, though the boats don't blow up so often or violently as they did in the steamboat's heyday. Navigation is much easier thanks to technology and the Army Corps of Engineers, but the river is still treacherous. Threading a mass of steel the size of several football fields through the narrow trestles of an ancient -22- |