Roll Away, Roll Away

By David Van Biema/Aboard the Michael J. Grainger

Spanky Duley is spilling his heart to the Rev. Jim Wilkinson, and it sounds like a country song in overdrive. Spanky's wife left him. The girlfriend who followed left him. The woman he's courting is the sister of his ex-wife's new husband. Wilkinson acknowledges Duley's "difficulties" and congratulates him on the upside--that his young daughter continues to live with him. As the men 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.

When Wilkinson, 55, retired after 22 nomadic years as an Army chaplain, he remembers thinking "the appropriate thing would be to get settled." Then his Episcopal bishop spotted an ad announcing that the Seamen's Church Institute, which has ministered to ocean mariners for 165 years, was expanding to the nation's towboat fleet. Within months, Wilkinson and his colleague Karen Cox were staring at a pastoral fiefdom encompassing the Ohio River, part of the Cumberland and the Mississippi from Greenville, Miss., up to Lock 27 above St. Louis--1,808 miles as the catfish swims.

In bygone days the job would have been not 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 The stereotype is outdated: massive consolidation hit the freight-barge business in the 1980s, and large firms like the Ingram Barge Co., which owns the Grainger, imposed large-firm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 dry land except to take a boat through a lock.

That doesn't 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 a towboatin' family." As for churchgoing, it's "so easy to forget. When you get home, you tell yourself you don't want to let anything get in the way of a time off."

Wilkinson's approach to this challenge is low-key. Unlike the motorboat-riding evangelists ("ambulance chasers," he calls them) who infest some locks, Wilkinson wants only to draw the men more closely into the 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 another in Paducah in November, and a pilot fell off a tow in Greenville last month, Wilkinson visited the survivors "to let people know someone is concerned when things happen on the river."

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."

Ten hours later, as Wilkinson debarks in Marietta, Ohio, Spanky Duley and some other deckhands request a sermon the next time the chaplain comes on. He mulls Mark 4: 35, in which Jesus and the disciples, crossing the Sea of Galilee to preach on the far shore, encounter a storm that threatens their boat. "The guys on the towboats may not think they are in a spectacularly good environment in which to be religious," Wilkinson says. "But in the end, I think they can minister to one another. You know, the disciples ultimately got safely to the other side of that lake, and a lot of good work got done. I think if I move the pieces of the story around a little, it could have some effect."