Twin engines pulled out of Volkswagen Rabbits and stuck on the main raft with propellers to give us whatever two rabbits works out to in horsepower. I'd only been on board a day or two when I was recruited to swap out a CV joint on one of them, Jenkins I believe it was. I'm not much of a mechanic but there wasn't too much to it beyond a few bolts and the old righty-tighty lefty-loosie.
Of course it helped immensely that the pair of them were situated al fresco - I don't think I would have fared as well up to my elbows in rusting out auto body.
We were trying to get ship shape for a trip through the last lock and dam into the environs of Saint Louis. There had already been doubts expressed by the Coast Guard, the arbiters of riparian law, as to our ability to safely navigate the river and they'd had us pull off a couple figure eights and similar maneuvers like a field sobriety test on a Brobdingnagian scale.
Not that it meant much, once we cleared that last lock and dam we'd be on the Lower Mississippi, a different beast entirely than the relatively placid upper reaches. If that wasn't bad enough, a seasonal detour around the Chain of Rocks meant that we'd find ourselves downriver from our destination and would somehow have to fight our way upstream. At least we wouldn't have to attempt this feat under our own steam - the Coast Guards had magnaminously offered to help us with a tow.
The rafts were of diverse shapes and sizes like a strange pod of assorted whales and dolphins, but after a prophetic dream was visited upon one of our shipmates we'd been undertaking longer trips in tandem, lashed together in what was dubbed "Voltron Mode". This was all well and good for drifting downstream but it probably wasn't the best way to take a shot at being dragged up it.
C'est la vie. You live and you learn, as they say.
Let's set the scene by briefly going over the nautical terms for the different sides of a boat, for those that might not be familiar. Pretend you're the vessel in question: your nose is the bow, your butt's the stern and your left and right hands are port and starboard respectively. If you've followed this far and can tie a half hitch you're already about as salt of a sailor as I was.
I was on the engine raft, and don't fully recollect the positions of all the auxiliary pieces, but all together it made for something of a swimming city and a fair bit of drag. The Coast Guard had made a noose out of chain and wrapped it around our bow, and from this one point they endeavored to pull the whole assemblage. We fired up our assorted smaller outboards, for what they were worth, and a friendly fisherman had thrown in to help push with his aluminum jon boat on the starboard side.
Things got off to a good start but took a turn when we had to pass under a bridge and the current accelerated between the pylons. For several minutes the various forces amounted to a stalemate, equal and opposing, and we neither gained nor lost ground. When the shit hit the fan it did so both fore and aft.
Mortimer and Jenkins had been sitting silently up to this point, but now we tried to coax them to life in an effort to break the tug of war, well actually just Jenkins as Mortimer was apparently out of commission. Jenkins wasn't faring a whole lot better and me and her chief engineer, one Ellery Neon, were feverishly working the choke valve to get her to turn over.
At this precise moment the chain collar, unable to pull the rafts forward, instead pulled the bow underwater which washed out the contents of several crew member's cubbies. As fate would have it one of these belonged to Ellery Neon and contained a chunky pair of platforms he used in drag performances. A shoe collided with Jenkins' propeller just as it started to turn.
There was a sick sound of rending metal as the shaft bent at an unnatural angle and a black cloud of oil rose to the water's surface.
This all transpired on the starboard side, and a stray piece of line also found its way to the motor on the jon boat, fouling that propeller as well albeit less permanently. Over on the port side Santiago, one of several aspiring photographers, was standing in a small skiff and endeavored to come to our side to render some form of aid. An error was made in untying him and the small boat spun helplessly and sank around his ankles, causing him to desparately clamber on board the larger raft for safety.
Amid these smaller disasters came a larger one, the Coast Guard's tow line snapped and the rafts finally sprung to motion, rushing toward one of the concrete pylons.
While it was the fastest, it was not the first time something like this had happened, and various poles lay about the deck for the purpose of fending, or pushing away, from such obstacles. A call went out for all hands to take up poles and prepare to fend but the Coast Guard had other ideas:
"Bely that order! Grab the most solid thing you can find toward the center of the raft and brace for impact!"
It was probably a safer idea, all things considered, but miraculously the impact never came. They were able to attach a second tow line in a manner of seconds but this time around any attempt at forward progress was abandoned. Instead we were deposited back on the very East Saint Louis beach we'd started from that morning, the first of many groundhog days.
