The River Goes Where It Will

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 38

The River Goes Where It Will

"Holy Mo-ly, Dad! He's gonna hit the dam!" Eleven year-olds Ramon Garcia and Michael Murphy jostled each other with excitement as the pilot of the MV Darin Adrian reversed the twin diesels of the 50 year-old towboat. A single small figure, seated in a big pilothouse, kept working the 15-barge tow -- loaded low to the water with US No. 1 yellow corn -- toward the Lock and Dam 6 guide wall.

Rick Garcia had the two boys along for the day. The Iowa NRCS conservationist would sit down to a lunch meeting with Army Corps planner Larry Grimm in about an hour. Arriving early, Rick had planned to drive up through the state park, but the towboat drama caught his eye instead. The three now stood at the foot of Main Street in Trempealeau, Wisconsin watching the Adrian making a difficult downriver approach to the lock in high water.

As the five-long and three-wide tow, and the 156-foot long, white and red Marquette Towing boat itself, had glided past them minutes earlier, the boys waved to a string-bean deckhand on station at the bow of the boat. They looked directly into the open engine room doors right at eye level. The Upper Miss was running high and hard today.

Once the towboat and barges ahead of him had exited the lock, the Adrian's pilot moved off the shelter of the Wisconsin bank where he'd held his 15 barges while they waited his turn. Now he had to swing the head end of the 975-foot tow toward the Minnesota bank and into the fast water in order to clear the end of the long wall that guides each towboat into the lock.

Then, in the space of just over a quarter mile, the Darin Adrian would have to wrestle its lead barges back to port to enter the lock.

"Kinda like leaving a parallel parking spot with your thousand footer on the left-hand side of the road, and gettin' over to the right lane quick in fast traffic," mused Rick as they watched this maneuver.

The pilot worked his rudder levers and engine throttles with skill, raising and lowering the pitch of the diesels' tandem whine, alternating the screws ahead and back in a slow dance with the river.

The big river, meanwhile, saw patterns and heard rhythms of its own. It went its own way mostly, especially since spring thunderstorms on hot air days last week had charged the cold northern lands with excess surface water.

Today, in mid-May, the river seemed to see the bright daylight that gleamed under Lock and Dam Six's three fully-raised roller gates nearby. It saw the green of the Minnesota side under the hoisted tainter gates at the dam's opposite end, too. The US Army Corps of Engineers was commanding no extra river water to remain impeded in Pool 6. Not today. No, sir.

Since the river goes where it will, especially up when it will, a six-foot rise in seven days was not unusual. Not in merry May. Yet, a towboat laden with corn in fifteen 195-foot long floating bins does not always go where it will, at least not in a hurry, nor on the first try.

From their vantage point, an outfielder's cutoff throw away from the front door of the historic Trempealeau Hotel, the entire length of the Darin Adrian and its barges gunsighted the first roller gate in the dam, about 30 degrees to starboard of where she should be pointed. The pilot had cleared the end of the long wall, all right, but now the outdraft from the river's reflection off that wall was sucking the entire vessel toward the roller gates.

"Holy Moly! Holy Moly! Now what?" exclaimed Ramon.

"Well, that river's not helping much, is it?" answered the elder Garcia. "Watch that deckhand now at the bow of the towboat, right there by the end of the wall."

String Bean could've stepped up from the boat deck to the top of the wall in one stride from where he stood. Instead, he passed the spliced loop of a heavy line to the Corps lock operator and turned to take up the slack at the towboat's timber head while the lockman dropped the loop over the long wall bit.

Now the master of the Darin Adrian had a fulcrum, albeit working from the short end of a near-1000 foot lever, to pry 22,500 tons of corn toward Wisconsin when it seemed determined to go to Minnesota. The Upper Mississippi itself noticed this effort hardly at all, except when the Adrian's starboard prop wheeled ahead while the port screw turned reverse. Then, the farm land runoff and silt-charged water boiled amber white on the right and slick brown gray on the left. The big old diesels raced, but never for very long. Power and finesse. You don't fight the river.

The deckhand and the lockman stood back from the stretching line, thinning with the strain from the size of a man's forearm to the width of his wrist.

"It's gonna break, I betcha." said Michael Murphy.

"It sure could," answered Rick Garcia. "See how those guys are getting out of the way? Even a soft line like that could kill you if it broke under that kind of load and hit you in the head. Remember that, ok?"

"We will, don't worry!" said the boys.

Garcia looked over his right shoulder at the sound of a train whistle and into the bright even-in-daylight headlamp of an oncoming southbound Burlington Northern Santa Fe coal train.

"Hup!" he said, "Let's step aside for this Wyoming coal. That's BNSF fossil electricity headed for Chicago."

Rick Garcia put a hand on each young collar and stepped backward from the railroad right-of-way. The orange and black engines and the string of 108 matching aluminum coal cars thundered by. The cross tie wind combed the boys' hair.

The Darin Adrian disappeared from their view.

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To be continued...Chapter 39.

Thanks for these resources:

Jack Simpson of Little River Books and a photo of the Darin Adrian from December 12, 1992, copyright John Robert Miller. http://www.littleriverbooks.com/photos/adrian.jpg

Bill Zumwalt at Old River - Bill's R/C Model Towboats

David Tropple and the fine people of Lock and Dam 6, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers St. Paul District Water Control Center.

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 38 was written and edited by John Gabbert.

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The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.