A
Juxapostion of Lifetimes
My
father struggles with the worst storm he ever traveled through. The heavy
unforgiving rain beats down and the freezing-cold water makes it hard to
breathe. My Dad is late for his shift, fumbling with his rain suit, unwilling
to go out in the storm unprotected. The thunder and lightning are dangerous to anyone
on the deck but they are moving through a lock and that makes work unavoidable.
He pulls his feet to the exterior door pulling on his rain suit, one leg at a
time when the whistle blows, loud and angry. He flies out the door half
dressed. The rope is tied to a post on the deck, a huge potentially
catastrophic mistake. This all-important rope holds the ship to the walls of
the lock they are currently moving through and the water level lowers but the
boat does not. The heavy tugboat is literally suspended in the air; this will
not last for long, the ropes they used were strong but not that strong. My dad
curses out the man working before him and quickly unties the rope giving the
line some slack, chocking on cold water, his breathe labored. The ship lowers.
I
sit in my high school math class staring up at the white bumpy ceiling. The
sophmores and juniors around me talking, yelling, playing, the epitome of high
schoolers, as I think about my father’s
stories.
Mr.
Surver snaps me out of my daze with the start of class. I sit up open up my
notebook expecting class to be chaos as usual. Logarithms, awesome. I see Mr.
Surver’s blue squiggly handwriting on the Smartboard turn into the blue-green Illinois
River as my father stares out at it from the deck of a towboat. I see the tow
attached to the barges with ropes and cables pulled as tightly as they can just
like my father told me they would be.
I
can almost hear the cables snap myself as my father turns around to see all the
deckhands curse out the boat that bumped them. The barges push down the river
past the tow all on their own.
“You have got to
be fucking kidding me,” says someone, maybe Snake, my father’s roommate. I
would kill to know a guy named Snake.
The cables snapped because another
ship bumped into them and the tow had fallen apart. It was a miracle no one had
been killed. Cables that thick, moving at that speed, could cut a man in half;
it was sheer luck that they were all still alive.
There was work to be done. All the
barges now floating on their own, with no ties to the boat, would have to be
caught and reattached. The merchandise in those barges was their paycheck.
It was only my father’s second trip
on the towboat since he had gotten the job in November of ‘82. They were headed
towards New Orleans on the Illinois.
In
the face of adversity my dad sought out adventure. I think in some ways I
looked for adventure in taking extra college classes. To be perfectly honest
I’m not really sure why I started. I have the lies I tell other people; college
credits, to escape the boredom, to stop being treated like a child. Maybe it
was adventure I was looking for.
“Frances, FRANCES,” Mr. Surver yells,
my little trip to dream world suddenly obvious to the entire class. “You want
to join us?”
I sigh, hold up my pen in surrender and wrote
down the notes on the board. But a minute later my thoughts slip into the world
of daydreams.
How different my father and I are. I
always compared myself to him. I could talk to my mom but I always saw myself
as more my father than my mother. But now that I know what he’s been through,
what he’s done I can’t help but feel I don’t know him at all. Once again I
flashed back to that afternoon when he had told me of his time as a deckhand.
My father’s job as a deckhand
started a year after he graduated college. He had finished his last
archelogical dig for the summer and although he had ignored it all summer he knew
furthering his education in anthropology would not lead to a job. My great aunt,
who lived in St.Louis at the time, suggested deckhand school having connections
to the Huffman Towing Company. Coming from an East Coast wealthy family, her
idea of towboats was a little romanticized. I think her and the rest of my
father’s family were picturing some version of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. In
reality there was even more profanity and a lot less romance.
But he needed the job, or rather a
place to go and figure out what to do next. So my dad traveled from Ohio to
Arkansas to a deckhand school. The test taking part was easy considering most
of the deck hands that came through were not college educated. The physical
component was a little harder. He learned to fight boat fires, tie complicated
knots and throw heavy rope onto bollards, short metal posts on which rope was
attached to a dock a ship. Twelve weeks later he was on his way to St. Louis.
The bell rang and everyone made
their way out of the classroom and into the noisy hallway. The loud noise of
two thousand talking students breaks into my thoughts, I quickly pack up my
notebook, tablet, and folder, plug my earbuds into my ears and ignore the look
of judgment from Mr. Surver as I shuffle out the door.
I walk through the hallway and into
the busy commons, Mat Kearney blasting in my ears drowning out the sound of
happy teenagers on their way to fifth hour. I head to the west entrance, flash
a smile at the Para at the desk and walk out of the school.
The brightness of the sun make my
eyes blink and dilate, not used to natural light after four hours of florescent
light.
The
bright light floods through the circular window and my father groans trying to
remember the events of the previous night. Snake groans from across the room.
“Dave
what the fuck? Close the shades.”
The
memories flood back from last night. Snake had woken him up with a plan to
sneak of the boat, a forbidden but luring idea. If they were caught they would
be fired but the boredom of the same face, hallways and rooms was getting to
him and the rest of the crew. I see them sneak past their supervior’s
corriders, a league of trampling men whispering and tiptoeing behind my father
and Snake. Up the stairs and into the night air, from there they step off the
ship and on to land for the first time in weeks. Most of them stumble when
their feet hit solid ground, their centers of gravity missing the rocking of
the boat.
They
weren’t caught, a miracle to say the least. Most of the men came back drunk,
even more buoyant versions of themselves, louder and with fewer inhibitions to
get in the way. Each man was returned to his room. The smell of beer would take
months to leave the ship mixing with the heat of the summer.
I
climb into my stifling hot car. I had forgotten to crack the windows that
morning, still adjusting to the nice weather. I plug my iPod in, put my broken
shades on, put the car in reverse and escape.
Once
I am a comfortable distance from the school I roll down my windows, let my hair
out of the tight bun it had been confined to and exhale.
As
I stop at a red light I thought about my dad’s stories. Will I have stories
like that to have my childern? Not the way my life is going right now. Another
year of part time high school, part time community college. Three years of
nursing school. Maybe a spring break trip abroad. A job, an apartment, bills,
adulthood, everything moved so fast. I
had never been brave enough to try new things, with the one exception of
becoming a PSEO student but that just meant more school and more stress. I had
always been a planner, an organizer. Would I ever be able to run away to
Arkansas and become a deckhand?
The
light turned green and I turned onto highway seven.
I
see my father’s boat turn as it docks in Mississippi, this time with only one
piece of cargo to unload, my father. Maybe he hugs some of his shipmates, maybe
he hugs Snake, his roommate for the last year. He waves to the boat as it leaves
him behind. A plane picks him up at the airport and he flies home. His time as
a deckhand has come to an end, a little bit closer to where he is supposed to
be.