At 8:30 AM Captain Lowell “Beetle” Bailey is standing at the controls of the Chicago Peace, watching a tall towboat as it slowly shoves ten barges toward him up the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The Peace rocks slightly in the water, her two 600-horsepower engines thrumming, as the barges, which are lashed together into a “tow” that is two barges wide and five long, drift to a stop in front of her. Bailey pushes the two levers that control the engines. The air lines hiss, the engines surge, and the Peace softly thumps into the side of the tow, straddling two of the barges. Bailey says he always tries to be gentle with the boat if he can, partly out of pilot’s pride, partly so he won’t wake the three crew members sleeping below.
Lowell Bailey and the Peace will take only five of the Phillips’s coal barges upriver this trip, and they must be broken out of the string of ten. Two deckhands jump from the Peace onto the tow and untie the ropes and uncouple the chains and cables–“river jewelry,” they used to call it–that hold the six forward barges to the rear four. Two of the barges in the rear section and three in the forward will go upriver. When there’s nothing but inertia keeping the two sections together, the Phillips backs up, pulling the four barges with it. The Peace glides into the open space and eases up to the remaining six barges. The deckhands lift two heavy cables from the sides of the Peace, and Bailey moves the levers that slacken them. The winches clank, the cables sag, and the deckhands loop them over the pointed kevels on the corners of the two rear barges. Bailey cranks the cables back in till they are rigid and the flat front of the towboat is tight against the barges. Then he pulls the engine controls full astern.
Bailey tells Krug where the five barges are headed and where to pick up a sixth, an empty, that’s also going upriver. He also says that he’s bought Krug the Tribune and the Sun-Times. Krug swallows his coffee. “Go on. Get out,” he says with a smile. Bailey laughs and disappears.
About a mile farther upriver Krug backs the engines to stop the tow, and the Lorna Hackworth, which is waiting with the empty, slides the barge into the remaining front slot. The deckhands from both boats quickly tie it into the other barges, tightening the cables with long-handled ratchets. When the cables are tight, you can jump on them and they won’t bend. “There’s an old saying that you tighten till it won’t tighten no more,” Krug says. “And then you give it three more turns.” He thanks the other pilot for his help and shoves the engines back up to full speed.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Turnover among the deckhands is high; of the four men on the Peace, three are new. George Rone, who lives in Arkansas, has been on the boat for four years. He gets tired of commuting 500 miles every three weeks, but says there’s no work around home that pays anywhere near as well. Deckhands are paid $40 to $120 a day, though most of them get around $80. But like many pilots, who make between $140 and $250 a day, they work 12-hour days and usually work only half the month. One of Ham Tug’s boats is small and has no living quarters, so the men on it work 12 hours on the boat and 12 off. But the men on the Peace, which is larger and has a galley and bunks for six men, work a traditional river schedule: three weeks on, three off. Even for a company that makes only short runs, this schedule is the most efficient–at least when business is good–because it’s hard to predict when a tow will arrive or when the boat will make it back to the office; a round trip to the south side takes anywhere from 20 to 30 hours. Many of the men who work on the river (river work is still very much men’s work; Bailey says he once heard of a woman deckhand who later became a pilot, but the only women he’s ever seen have been cooks) live far from their port office, and so they like the traditional schedule. Krug lives almost 100 miles from Lemont and Bailey nearly 300; two of the crew are from Arkansas, one from Kentucky, and one from New Mexico.
He started, as every river pilot must, as a deckhand, putting in five and a half years on the rivers around the Twin Cities. While he was there he met Beetle Bailey. He decked for him and was eventually trained by him to be a pilot. They have known each other for 15 years and have worked together for 12. “He’s like my dad, or big brother,” Krug says. “Or something.”
Around 11 AM, just east of Argonne National Lab, Krug makes a right turn from the Sanitary Canal east into the Calumet Sag Channel. The front end of the 70-foot-wide tow seems headed straight for the corner of land between the two canals, but at the last moment it swings neatly into the Sag, easily clearing the cement wall that runs along the north bank. Krug uses reference points–a familiar tree or pole–along the river to help him calculate his turns, but says he steers by the feel of a tow more than anything else.
