The Midwest Passage, Cont'd
If you are plotting a cross-country journey of epic proportions, the kind where you find yourself, the meaning of life and/or America, please make note that in October you run the risk of fundraising season for Public Radio.
“For the same price that you pay for a cup of coffee, YOU can bring quality programs to Wisconsin.”
“Minnesota needs your support. Have you considered sending us $50? Some of you could probably give $100—or if you have $200 lying around somewhere…”
It never stops with those damn broadcasters: the classical music, the thoroughly investigated feature pieces, the whorish demand for listeners’ money. The unfairness.
I had my own music too, though I’d rationed it. I’ve found that a few boring hours of driving in silence makes me appreciate playing the tunes that much more. In a masochistic exercise of self-discipline, I had kept the music off all the way through Pennsylvania. By Indiana, I entertained myself by trying to sing with Robert Plant’s highs; driving Illinois, I aimed for Johnny Cash’s lows.
When I came back to the radio, I decided that if those lefties were going to spend the whole day bitching about how poor they were, I’d get back at them by listening to the right wing. I ended up spending about 45-minutes learning how to choose the right Catholic College for my kids. Any school that puts on the Vagina Monologues or teaches literature by gay people is right out. The kid might as well major in bible burning and witchcraft.
As I absorbed these words of wisdom, I noticed a dark object resting in the middle of my lane. It was a waist-high package of fertilizer. By the time I realized this I was already in a 70-mile an hour swerve over the rumble strip and into the breakdown lane.
It was good to have avoided the collision, but there was still plenty of reason to be vigilant. The roadside was a tour-de-gore, the graveyard for a hundred Bambi’s, their corpses interspersed with the odd skunk or woodchuck mashed into the asphalt. The de-animated animals were as regular as mile-markers. The radio people explained that mating season was making the deer more reckless. Consequently, they were getting massacred like horny teenagers in a horror flick.
2,350 Miles: The Mississippi River.
I got out at the visitor center at the Minnesota side. There was a cold wind blowing, stirring up waves on the river. I walked down the bank so that I could dip my hand in. The rocks were coated with mussels. It’s tempting to say that they were zebra mussels, but I didn’t see stripes, so they were likely another species.
Back inside the center, I found this rather amusing graffito in the bathroom:
The river looked to be at least two miles wide, impressive when you consider that it was still about a thousand miles from its terminus in New Orleans. And it’s impressive, if sobering, to consider that even this natural force has been fundamentally altered by human engineering and made to serve the purposes of commerce. I’d say the river has been tamed, but when you consider its habit of rising up and killing people on the flood plain, that could be an overstatement.
Nearby, there was an enormous lock for regulating the river’s flow, for raising and lowering the enormous barges that travel between the ports. I spent about fifteen minutes watching boatmen guide a barge through.
It was an incredibly delicate operation, like threading a needle if your thread were the size of a football field. There were in fact, two of these football-field sized barges for the one tugboat to push. They had to go through one at a time. The vessels were conglomerations of enormous plastic crates, lashed together by rope. They had all the elegance of a herd of dumpsters.
From behind the fence, I got to ask the boatmen a couple of questions as they worked. There were maybe a dozen of them, in charge of the whole operation from St. Paul to St. Louis. At that point, another tug would deliver the goods to New Orleans. The boatmen would head back north for another trip. Soon however, the river would freeze up and commerce would halt.
The containers were filled with grain and coke: your Wheaties on the move, along with raw material to make the spoon you eat it with.
The barges were 105 feet wide, while the lock itself was 110 feet wide. A five-foot margin of error. The tug couldn’t fit inside the lock at the same time, requiring the boatmen to use the flow of water to move the freight.
I asked one of the guys if the barge ever hit collided with the rails. “It doesn’t hit often, but when it does, it’ll tear hell out of the sides,” he said.
After the lock was closed, it relied on gravity to go down, routing water through pipes to the other side. The water outside the lock boiled furiously as it emptied. After water inside the lock was equal with the south side, the doors swung open and the barge made its slow progress out. When it was finally out of the gate, the workers tied the thing off to pier, and started working the second segment through.
Given the fences and no-trespassing signs, I was surprised that nobody objected to my picture-taking. I asked if one of the workers would mind being in a photo.
“Go ahead, he was on the Discovery Channel last week.”
A fine experience, to be sure, even if it will never live up to his appearance in Tom’s On The Move.
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