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The Monongahela
by Richard Bissell
Preface
Monongahela River
The Monongahela River is formed by the confluence of the West Fork and Tygart Rivers about 1 mile south of Fairmont, West Virginia. It flows in a northeasterly direction into southwestern Pennsylvania and then in a northerly direction to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it joins the Allegheny to form the Ohio River. Total length of the river is about 128 miles, of which 127.7 are marked with daymarks, 119 miles are buoyed, and 117.2 miles are lighted by navigation lights.
District Engineeeer, Pittsburgh District
Corps of Engineeeers, U.S. Army, Pittsburgh, Pa.
January, 1951
Chapter 1
The ‘Coal Queen’
I pluggeded up and down the Illinois River for a couple of years as deckhand on the towboats, hauling coal from Havana up to Joliet, and then in the drainage canal up to Chicago, and the draft board took the second mate, so Captain Bloodworth called me up to the pilothouse and said, “You’re the new second mate.” I took my paper suitcase out of the pigpen and up to the mates’ room, and one thing sure, that mates’ room smelled better than the deckhands’ bunkroom, and even had a light in the bunk to read by, and a clean blanket with no fuel oil or coal ground into it. You go out and carry ratchets and chains and those 100-foot lock lines for a while and you will understand what I felt like to be a mate. I couldn’t have felt any better if they’d made me governor of the state.
I was mate there for over a year. We brought up a lot of coal from down below, and if summer nights in the canal weren’t much of a treat to the nose, and winter nights pulling ice cakes out of the lock gates weren’t very romantic, still it was $145 a month and all you could eat, and ten days off with pay every forty, a good tavern near the dock at Joliet, and the boat was a home.
One afternoon a week or so before Thanksgiving when the wind from Lake Michigan was slicing down through the frame houses and factories, we had just tied off six loads at the Joliet landing and the shore watchman came hunting me up where I was having coffee in the galley.
“Ole Murphy he wants to see you up in the office,” he said. “My, I wisht I was a big mate so’s I could set in the galley drinkin’ coffee.”
“You wanna make this trip downriver and back for me?” I said.
“I gotta get back,” he said.
I went up to the office and Helen, the new office girl with the glasses, told me to go right in, that Captain Murphy was waiting for me.
“Not that I think you’ll ever amount to a damn,” says Murphy looking out the window at the canal with a sour look, “but the pilot on the Coal Queen fell off a barge last night and got himself drownded like a jackass and the boat is tied up. Now you go and pack up and take the train for Morgantown — you can be there tomorrow afternoon.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling a little dizzy. “But I’m no pilot, and where in hell is Morgantown? I never heard of it.”
“West Virginia,” he said. “Monongahela River. You stand a few watches and you’ll either be a pilot or in the nuthouse. Now get goin’. Expense money from Miss Rundel.”
“I never knew the company had boats way over there,” I said.
“There’s a lot of other things you don’t know,” he said, “but don’t let the strain injure your brains.”
A couple of days later, after missing a train in Pittsburgh and other incidents, I got off a crummy old day coach and there I was in Morgantown, and a guy comes up and says, “Are you Bissell?”
“Yes, I am, and where is the boat?”
He loaded me in his car and said we would go out to the landing and I could go to work right away, they had only been doing day work since the pilot drowned — the captain was working days and they tied up nights. We came down across some tracks toward the Monongahela and I noticed a little old dirty boat with a telescoping pilothouse and a single stack, a piece of marine junk overdue for the scrap yard.
“Who owns that palatial yacht?” I said.
“Why, that’s the Coal Queen,” he said. “That’s the boat.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Well, let’s you and me go right down to the depot again. I can probably still get a train out this afternoon.”
“Why,” says the shore boss, looking hurt, “what’s the matter?”
“Why, man oh man, I just came off the Inland Coal, 1,350 horsepower Atlas Imperial. What makes you think I’m gonna live in this old converted oil drum?” I said. “Look at the stack, tied up there with baling wire. Look at that deck — looks like Blum’s junk yard. Look at them tow knees all bunged over. And what are them two dwarfs standin’ there all over coal dust? Deckhands, I suppose, or is that the captain and chief engineer?”
Well, I went aboard. What the hell, it was awfully cold back on the Illinois. I pretty near changed my mind again once I got aboard though. What a layout. First place, all the officers, the deckhands, and the cook slept in one bunkroom in a great pile of bunks, suitcases, pillows with no pillowcases, shoes, overalls, comic books, oily blankets, newspapers, shaving cream, oilskins, dirty socks, orange peel, cigarette butts, coffee cups, underwear, rubber boots, foot powder, razors, Western Stories, and cough syrup. And in order to get the most benefit out of all this, the system was to keep all the windows sealed tight and get an oil-soaked engineer and a couple of ripe deckhands in there, get the cook to fire up his pipe with some Plough Boy, turn the stove up high, and leave the whole thing to simmer for six hours at a time.
I opened the door and went in the bunkroom. A slim, swarthy-looking bird with curly hair and sheik mustache was lying on a bunk reading Blue Beetle Comics and smoking cigarettes; he had his shirt off and his shoes off and his feet resting politely on the pillow of the next bunk.
“Ain’t this here Blue Beetle the goddamnedest?” he said to me as I set down my case and lit a Revelation to kill some of the smell.
“They sent me over here to go pilot,” I said. “Where’s the captain at?”
“What a shame,” he answered. “Now we got to go to work again. My, it’s been peaceful here since Happy drownded.”
“You the captain?” I asked.
“I’m it,” he said. “Ain’t it the berries? What boat you come off of?”
“The Inland Coal,” I said.
“Finding it kind of a shock so far, hey, buddy?” he said. He got up and stretched, and reached over and poked some old boy asleep in a bunk across from him and hollered, “Gas! Get the hell outa there. Here’s the new pilot aboard and that’s his bunk from now on. Come on, Gas, you’ll hafta double up with National.”
This deckhand was in between the sheets in his work clothes — an old pair of greasy pants and check wool shirt — and even had his shoes on. You can imagine what a deckhand’s shoes have to put up with in the way of oil, coal dust, water, mud, grease, and paint in a six-hour watch, so you can picture the sheets easily enough. He rolled out and fell on another bunk about four feet away.
“Where’d that guy get a name like Gas?” I said.
“Come on up to the pilothouse,” says the captain. “Why, that’s because he comes from Edna Gas.”
“Maybe I better go home,” I said. “What’s Edna Gas?”
“Why, man, it’s one of these here coal mines upriver a ways. That’s his home. His ole man is blacksmith at the mine.”
We got up in the pilothouse. There was just barely room for the two of us, quite a change from the big roomy pilothouses I was used to, with benches, chairs, stoves, water coolers, and so on.
“Hey, National,” the captain hollered, sliding the windows back. “Get up off yer dead ass and turn that line loose. Come on, buddy, let’s go!” And one of the dwarfs, who had been sitting on the bank looking at his shoelaces, got up and commenced to turn her loose.
“Where’s he come from?” I asked.
“National Consolidated, up by Lock 14.”
“Why don’t you call him Consolidated, then?”
“Sometimes we do.” He gave the engineer a backing bell, and the old Fairbanks-Morse shot a bushel basket of soot and rust out the stack, which was right behind the pilothouse, and the boat commenced backing away from the bank into the stream.
“Hey, National,” he hollered down to the deck, “bring us up a couple coffees, okay?”
“Where we goin’?” I said.
“We’re goin’ over to the Dupont landing and pick up an empty and take off for Kingmont. You watch me make the pickup and this first lock and then you can take her.”
“Okay, but understand this is all new to me. I never piloted anything
bigger’n a Illinois River duckboat.” “Didn’t you never steer on the Inland and them other boats?”
“Why, sure, but any damn fool can steer out in the river. It’s these here locks and landings makes it hard.”
“Aw, have some coffee. It ain’t bad.”
We got across the river and there was a fleet of about ten or fifteen barges, empties and loads, and a big coalyard behind them. And then piled up on the hill behind the heaps of coal was the damnedest-looking plant you ever saw, a monster — big buildings and towers, chimneys and trestles, cranes and sheds, smoke, flames, cinders. I don’t know what they made there but they called it the Morgantown Ordnance and we expected to see the whole works blow up most any time and move Monongalia County down around Pittsburgh someplace.
We came up on the barge fleet and the captain rang a slow bell and then a stopping bell and we drifted up easy to an empty barge. “What’s your name?” the captain asked me. “Bissell,” I said.
“Okay, Beedle, now watch how we face up to this here empty,” and he never called me anything else again as long as I knew him except when he wanted to borrow money, and then he used my first name.
The deckhand got up on the deck of the empty and grabbed the face wires and dumped them in place on the timberheads. Then he trotted out to the other end of the barge and turned it loose, and before we even had the wires tightened up the captain gave a full ahead bell and we bounced alongside a couple of empties, cleared them, and sailed off up the river. The whole thing didn’t take more than three or four minutes.
“My God, do you make all your landings that fast?” I asked.
“Beedle, we make ‘em as fast as we can, boy,” he said.
“How much coal do we deliver there?”
“All we can tow,” he said. “We gave ‘em 68,000 tons last month. Here, get the feel of this here thing,” and he got up off the pilot’s chair. “Set down, Beedle, and make yourself at home. I’m goin’ down and get me a slice of salami. Just hold her off this point easy and the lock is around the bend.”
“If you say so,” I said.
“Call me Duke,” and he climbed down the ladder to the deck.
It was a dreary day for sure, with a greasy sky, and a yellowish foggy smoke hanging in the air, and the whole world looked sick and sad. The damned old barge in front of me was a cheerless, banged-up derelict, I was 900 miles from home and still had a hangover from my stopover in Pittsburgh, and I was very lonesome for Joliet and those familiar locks and landings — Dresden Island, Starved Rock, Brandon Road, and the canal into Chicago. I couldn’t see myself sleeping down there in that rat’s nest, even to be a pilot. However, the sensation of being at last a pilot, even on this tin can, grew increasingly pleasant, and I lit a cigarette, leaned back on the pilot’s stool, and steered with my feet.
The door opened and National stuck his head in. “Say, cap, you want some more coffee?”
That was the first time anybody ever called me ‘cap’, and it sounded pretty fair after I had been crawling around on deck so long with my ears full of soft coal.
“No, no more coffee now,” I said. “Say, where’s that lock at?”’
“You’ll see it in a minute. You can blow for it any time now.”
Sure enough, out of the yellow winter fog I saw the lock and I found the whistle and blew a long and a short. Duke showed up with a pile of crackers with salami in between them.
“No, I’ll take you in, Beedle, and show you how we do it over here. Want some salami?” He gave me a handful.
Man, I never saw anything like the way we went into that lock. We slammed into her like a taxicab on Wabash Avenue about 5:00 p.m. And when they had raised the water and opened the upper gate we came charging out with the barge alongside, turned it loose, picked it up again on the fly, knocked some concrete off the lock wall with our stern, and away we flew like a wild mustang.
“National,” Duke shouted down to the deck, “bring up a couple more coffees.”
So I took her again and Duke went down and tackled Blue Beetle. This was the toughest, dreariest, most godforsaken-looking country I ever saw — the hills looked as though a battle had just been fought among the barren trees; they were desolate, dirty, scarred, and under the dull winter sky looked like there was not much hope left anyplace.
The mines, with their coal tipples and lines of coal cars, and the clusters of unpainted frame company houses, and slate piles and muddy streets and Royal Crown Cola signs, made you sick just to look at them. How a man could put in his time whacking away underground and come out into a mess like this and raise up a family in one of these terrible-looking shanties was more than I could understand. It was just homesickness working on me, I suppose — God knows there are some awful places along the drainage canal and in South Chicago, places that would give you the blues even on a spring morning.
Later on I got used to the burnt-over look to things, and it seemed natural and right to me that the world should consist of coal mines, coal trains, coal houses, coal taverns, coal trees, coal streets, coal children, coal everything.
This was bad enough on this dismal afternoon, but night came, and I had some pot roast and apple pie in the galley-messroom, a little hole aft of the engine room, and Duke said, “You lay down and I’ll call you at midnight. Get some sleep, Beedle.”
I lay down and tossed around for a couple of hours, dozed, woke up, heard shouts out on deck, dozed, woke, listened to National snoring, smoked a cigarette, finally fell asleep. Seemed like about ten minutes later the deckhand came and woke me. “Hey, cap,” he said. “Midnight.”
The most dismal words in the world, the call for night watch. Getting up at midnight is bad enough if you’re just a deckhand with no responsibilities, but to stagger up to a strange pilothouse on a strange river — well, no, thanks.
“She’s rough and she’s tough, Beedle boy, but oh how we love it,” Duke said. “Well, call me if you get in trouble.” And with this sad farewell he was gone.
