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Show RTVER larger than mine did not give him the right to give me orders. I'd read Rules of the Road for Western Waterways and knew who had the right of way-I did. He gave his order a third time and I stood up and waved my fist at him and told him to put his orders where the sun don't shine. But I never did lose my awe of the towboaf s tremendous power and size. When they steamed past it was like standing by a four-lane highway while a convoy of tandem-trailer diesels howled by at eighty miles an hour, sucking away the very air. Watching the bow of a towboat sweep past was awesome: a towboat pushing empty barges had a bow that loomed fifteen to eighteen feet above of the water, a slanted wall of steel hundreds of feet wide that pushed ponderously through the river making a hissing sound like a boiling teakettle. Looking down the relentless line of a barge's bows as it lumbered past in a show of brute force and naked power was like peering down the throat of a leviathan shark. I gave the big boats lots of room. I drifted past one especially new and clean towboat, her white paint so smooth and her fittings so bright that she appeared to have just left the shipyard. She was large, probably the flagship of her line, and though her lines were strictly utilitarian, she rode the river as proud as a steamboat. I expected her to have some fine Indian name, but as I came close I could see her nameplate bore the humble words Wilbur D. Mills. Named after a congressman! What a homely name for such a beautiful boat. And this was before Wilbur acquired a nautical reputation frolicking with a hooker in the Washington Tidal Basin. I was in love with the big ditch. The river had restored my mental balance and restored the joy of being alive. It had brought me back to the gentle rhythms of nature, the endless roll of the wide waters, the rising and setting of the sun -193- |