A man wearing a dark plaid shirt and a black, peaked stevedore’s cap sticks his head out the little window of the hot dog stand and shouts across the street to a construction worker, “Hey, buddy! How about knocking off for lunch? How about a bowl of chili?”
All day the man in the cap pokes his head out the little window near the comer of Clark and Cornelia and calls out to passersby:
Dickens left school at 15 to work on a barge as a deckhand, “and once I wore out my first pair of shoes, I was hooked,” he says. He progressed from deckhand to mate to engineer to pilot. At 27 he earned his captain’s license. He says he’s worked on barges on the Great Lakes, along the east coast, and on the Mississippi and her tributaries. Now 38, Dickens has been retired two years because, he says, shipping is slow: more materials are being moved by rail and truck. Once, though, last summer, he came out of retirement to transport the submarine Silversides from Chicago to Muskegon. Towing the craft 120 miles was “an honor–and a risky business.” Dickens has a five-year-old son, but has never married because his schedule–“being on boats as much as 30 days at a time”–was an obstacle.
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Dickens can talk a blue streak when he gets going. His nickname, he admitted with an embarrassed grin, is “Silly Willie.” How did he earn that name?
“It got rough out there sometimes. That lake, oh, she’s a killer. You notice I said ‘she’? That’s ’cause she’s a bitch, all right. A whore–a fucking whore, that’s what I call her. People who work here, they know they’re gonna come home every night after work, but out there you wonder if you’re gonna get home at all sometimes.
