Word: grainger
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...talk, a changing landscape of fancy houses, junkyards, suburbs and woods unscrolls on either side of them. Two football fields away, over Duley's shoulder, the blue jackstaff light marks the front end of 45 million lbs. of cargo that the boat they are on, the Michael J. Grainger, is pushing up the Ohio River. Black water purls gently off bargesides...
...just daunting but preposterous. River towns still treasure tales of binging, brawling and murder among flatboatmen whose godlessness was a point of pride. The stereotype is outdated: massive consolidation hit the freight-barge business in the 1980s, and large firms like the Ingram Barge Co., which owns the Grainger, imposed large-firm professionalism: no drinking or smoking on board and a zero-tolerance drug policy enforced with random testing. Even a crew bent on mayhem would have trouble scheduling it. The tows run 24 hours a day, and for the length of their 30-day shifts, the boatmen never touch...
...mean they don't have their discontents. Their work, the constant unstitching and restitching of 200-ft. barges into the tow, can be tedious when not frenzied. Their month-long absences are like those of truckers, except that calls home over ship-to-shore phones are prohibitively expensive. Recounts Grainger pilot Kip Brown: "Three days after my daughter was born, I caught a boat in St. Louis for 60 days. My wife didn't stand for too much of that. The second marriage, two sons, pretty much the same. I got one now I just married, she comes from...
...Christian community to which most of them already belong. He has set up an 800 number for mariners in need of emergency pastoral care far from home, and in three months has logged 7,000 land miles in his white Ford Escort, recruiting shoreside ministers to respond. Boarding the Grainger at the Robert C. Byrd lock in West Virginia, he forgoes preaching in favor of hearing the crew's news and distributing the prayer schedule of the institute's tiny Paducah, Ky., chapel: the boatmen can join in as their work shifts and the river permit. When one deckhand stabbed...
They appear to get the message. "That sell you have, that's a good sell," says Grainger captain Billy Burkett, as his boat eases past the mouth of the Kanawha River. He wears a Hawaiian shirt and a faded tattoo of a bird on his arm. "You try and convert people, they'll just back away. But this little place here is our city and our town, and every city needs a parson, and you're ours...