Captain Joe & the Old Man

Just above Dubuque, the Coast Guard’s Del Commune ran into real trouble last week. The Mississippi’s Dam No. 11 was frozen tight; the little towboat had to stand by for five hours while men thawed out the valves with hot water, cut away 20-inch slabs of ice from behind the gates, finally nursed them open. Then the Del Commune moved upstream through the locks—into an icefield that stretched from bank to bank as far as the eye could see.

The Del Commune’s men looked at the ice, at each other, at the 85-ton ice plow attached to their boat’s blunt bow. Their job, if they could do it, was to clear the Mississippi’s channel so that oil barges could get to Minneapolis by the first week in April, two weeks before shipments had ever gone through before. Behind them, in St. Louis, the barges waited. Ahead, in Minneapolis, war factories waited for the oil. But the ice was thick, the weather still bitter cold, the Mississippi stubborn.

First Night Out. Engines pounded. Grizzled old Pilot Joe Lloyd, who has spent nearly half a century on the river, pointed the Del Commune straight ahead. The ice growled, snapped, cracked. Two ducks beat a hasty retreat to the brown Wisconsin shore, Slowly, laboriously, the towboat crunched forward. A snowstorm blew up; night came early; Captain Joe turned on the two big searchlights.

The going was tougher now. Captain Joe had to back the boat up, make his run, go pounding into the ice with jolts that cracked the necks of the crew. Each time the Del Commune bit off no more than 30 yards. Soon the snow fell faster: flakes danced defiantly in the searchlights, the beams traveled a few hundred feet and died. Captain Joe shrugged. “I don’t know where the hell I’m at,” he said. “They’s no use going nowhere when you can’t see where it is.”

He headed the Del Commune back to the dam, tied up for the night.

Second Day Back. Dawn brought leaden skies, sleet that soon turned into a light, lazy snowfall. The temperature stood at 27°, the barometer fell slowly. Captain Joe shook his head. With his own rough brand of respect for God, he said: “They think they’re going to get through this river before it’s time. But they don’t know that it’s the Old Man who’s running the navigating up here.”

The Del Commune made her run, smashed into the ice, ground and grated to a sudden stop. Her men rubbed their aching necks, fought to keep their balance. In the galley, chicken soup spattered out of a kettle. On the bridge, Captain Joe brooded: “This just ain’t steamboating weather. I ain’t seen a bird.”

Under the constant pounding, the Del Commune began to stagger. Her joints creaked. With every blow her decks seemed to buckle. She sprang a leak under the stern transom. Given time, she seemed bound to shake herself to pieces. “You just cain’t go kickin’ this river around this way,” murmured one of Captain Joe’s copilots. “You just cain’t do it.”

By noon the Del Commune had traveled only three miles. Her officers took counsel, decided to give up, pointed her battered nose back to Dubuque. When she crept into harbor she was sheathed with snow and ice.

A workman on the shore yelled: “What’s the matter? River too tough?”

“The Old Man didn’t want it,” said Captain Joe.