River World Field Trip, Alton, IL to Lake Charles, LA and back on a working towboat, 1956
October 24, 2015There was a lovely clear sundown on the winding river, with a fragrance at dusk which the Captain said was willows, but it smelled more like honeysuckle, or something. Night and stars were reflected in the river, and Venus left a shimmering path of light on the black water. We went under the pipeline overhead, passed the OMAHA, the INVADER, and the STEPHEN FOSTER. The latter said:
“To the GAPE ZEPHAH, ” said a tug “Say, Cap, there’s a drudge workin on the west wide up here. Not a whole lot of room, pass him on the one-whistle side” (starboard or right)
There was considerable short-wave yakking in Cajun, which sounds explosive, runs on at a fast and unintelligible clip, and usually ends with either the speaker or the speak-ee, saying casually, “Okay, I gotcha.”
Into the Wiggles, that aggravation on the Waterway where you always meet the most traffic. With so long a tow, it was a job to get around those endless sharp bends. We usually met a tow on the worst bends, and several times we got over so far we scraped the bank. As we were passing a tow, a rash motorboat decided maybe to cut between us, but wisely decided against it, and got through on one side, somehow, while our wakes surged wildly, gouging the shores. “You got to crowd in close on this little bitty left hand-bend,” said a tug captain.
More flooded rice fields, and a small biplane roaring back and forth over the waterway, over the boat … and two men on opposite sides of the flooded field, waving red and yellow flags. So we saw how the plane swooped low in a swath, released five vents and let forth the rice seed….. planting by plane,
Past the big dredge Tchefuncte, occupying most of the Waterway till it hauled in a bit.
And along about 5 p.m. we began to see armadillos on the high clay banks so close to the boat we could see their gleaming armor. We saw five of them, fine creatures, prehistoric looking. And the rhyme I wrote the other trip, when we saw none, now no longer holds true:
Oh, we looked for armadillos,
Armadillos in the willows,
But never an armadillo came in sight.