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Up a Lazy River…Modern-day Sagebrush Sailors Key Link in World Trade Chain |
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Written On: September/October 2005 |
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Written By: Story and photos by Ron Dalby |
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In the early years of the last century, the rugged men who navigated commercial boats through the rapids on the Snake River were known as Sagebrush Sailors. While those who run the tugs and barges on the same waters today don’t refer to themselves that way, the moniker still fits.
Once you pass the Dalles, most of the water on the 480-mile journey from Portland, Ore. to Lewiston, Idaho is surrounded by little more than sagebrush-dotted bluffs. The once raging rapids have now been tamed by a series of eight dams.
These men — and this is still almost exclusively a man’s world because of the strenuous physical requirements — do have to contend with things most sailors wouldn’t normally think about.
Like rattlesnakes.
"Whenever you pick up a barge load of logs," deckhand Aaron Troutman said, "you have to look out for rattlesnakes." He casually mentioned this while leading a guest on a really narrow walkway between a stack of logs on a barge and the Snake River on a hot August afternoon.
Troutman has been a deckhand for a couple of years with FOSS Maritime. Before that he slung garbage cans around for the city of Portland. "I decided I didn’t want to be a garbage man for the rest of my life," he said. Family connections helped him get a deckhand's job with FOSS. His work ethic insures that he keeps it.
Capt. Kevin Gabriel in the wheelhouse isn't quite so sure about the serpents, though. He's been working tugs and barges on the river for more than two decades and said, "I’ve never seen a rattlesnake on a barge."
Gabriel sits mostly alone in the wheelhouse about 40 feet above the river, surrounded by four radios, a television-sized radar set, a laptop computer with a constantly updated mariner's chart of the river, controls for two searchlights, a depth finder, two tillers for steering the tug (no traditional ship's wheel on this boat), a compass, two captain's chairs, a sofa, a barometer, an anemometer, and a gauge that gives the temperature both inside and outside the wheelhouse.
Sit with Gabriel on a long, hot, calm afternoon when the river stretches for miles in front and behind him and the tug chugs along at a seemingly effortless 8.5 mph and the sea stories start to flow, like the tale of Macaroni Reef.
You won't find Macaroni Reef on the charts, but every Columbia River sailor knows where it is. Seems a captain, whose name, boat and company shall remain anonymous, left the deckhand in the wheelhouse to steer while he went below to concoct a macaroni salad for supper. For whatever reason, the deckhand decided to steer on the wrong side of a channel-marking buoy. The empty barges they were pushing, drawing very little water, slipped unhindered through the shallow water over the rocks. The tug, drawing 10 feet of water, did not and slammed to a halt, tearing out most of its bottom in the process. This particular rock pile just under the surface of the Columbia River has ever since been known as Macaroni Reef.
Sea stories aside, Gabriel, Troutman, Capt. Mike Rayburn and deckhand Brock Cook, crewing the tug Lewiston on this voyage, are proud of what they contribute to the Northwest's economy and, in particular, of their ability to deliver bulk goods at low cost.
In August, the primary downstream cargo is wheat, thousands and thousands of tons of it. Shore-side grain elevators from Pasco to Lewiston are bursting at the seams, and huge, conical piles of wheat grow steadily beside the full grain elevators as trucks continue delivering from local farms. Gabriel figures his tug and barges can move around 10,000 tons of wheat in a single trip down river depending on the water level and the current.
Hauling out a pencil, Gabriel quickly calculates the number of trucks and/or rail cars it would take to haul that kind of a load. It would take 400 or more trucks (25 tons per load) to move a similar amount of grain or more than 140 railroad hopper cars (70 tons per car). The tug-barge system, though consuming in the neighborhood of 1,200 gallons of diesel fuel a day, can move the grain for about half as much fuel as the railroad and about one-tenth the amount of fuel that the trucks would require.
Personnel costs are an added bonus. The tug-barge system requires only four people to operate around the clock day after day, a considerable savings in labor costs when matched against 400 truck drivers. Tugs and barges offer a very efficient means of moving bulk cargos.
Not everything, though, moves downstream to market. Specially-designed barges transport millions of gallons of oil and gasoline upriver, helping to ease shipping costs for consumers. Logs might be picked up along the way upriver and dropped off near plants that create special brands of furniture. The Columbia and Snake rivers and an elaborate system of eight dams allow for the cheap transport of goods back and forth between the Pacific Ocean and Lewiston, Idaho. Idaho, an inland state, actually has commercial-shipping access to the Pacific because of these dams.
Barge crewmen work two six-hour shifts a day. The senior captain and deckhand work from 6 a.m. to noon and from 6 p.m. to midnight. The junior captain and deckhand work the shifts in between. The junior deckhand also doubles as the cook, preparing breakfast in the last hour of his morning shift and supper during the last hour of his afternoon shift. On this particular tug, each fends for himself at lunch.
The busy part of any shift comes when approaching one of the dams. Here the crew’s teamwork and the deft touch of the skipper at the controls come to the fore. Maneuvering a barge-tug package 600 or more feet in length and up to 84 feet wide can be a neat trick in locks that are only 86 feet wide and 650 feet long.
"You only have a foot of space on each side of the barges," Rayburn said when he described pushing a tow of four barges into the locks. He might have added that there’s only about eight feet of clearance ahead and behind a normal two-barge tow in the long concrete tunnels that are the locks on the downriver side of the dams.
Headed upriver, entering the locks can best be described as slowly creeping into the shade of a long, narrow concrete canyon looming nearly a hundred feet above the water. Once inside, a gate slowly closes behind the boat and the water begins to rise. Short minutes later, the tug and barges burst back into the sunlight as they are lifted to the level of the water behind the dam.
Eight times between Portland and Lewiston shipping must be raised to a higher level by a series of dams: Bonneville, the Dalles, John Day and McNary on the Columbia River, and Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite on the Snake River.
Starting at sea level in Portland, the locks built as part of these dams raise tugs and barges to an elevation of about 750 feet above sea level at Lewiston, an average of little more than a 93-foot rise per each dam. The last of these dams to be built, Lower Granite on the Snake River, was opened to river traffic 30 years ago.
Deckhand Brock Cook has worked the river for 27 of the 30 years navigation has been open to Lewiston. In that time he’s probably made 700 or more trips up and down the river.
"I’ve found a home here," Cook said. "I really like the week-on, week-off schedule."
Like the others who work the river, Cook has found his niche. Like the ebb and flow of the river currents with the seasons, his life, too, moves with a rhythm that is dictated by his job on the river. By all appearances, he couldn’t be happier.
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