4. Barging in

In a stretch of the Ohio river spanned by several bridges I used to regularly cross, including the one where I once held up a river-span's worth of traffic because I was unable to get my mom's stick-shift Saturn into gear when the traffic light that had trapped us at the far side turned green, leading to a switching of drivers that to observers would have looked like something from one of those old films where the frame rate sped up the action, some 30 barges laden with coal and other "non-toxic" materials recently broke from their mooring and drifted downstream, ignoring the trajectory through carefully engineered locks that had been designed for them and instead tipping over dams and bumping into bridge pilings. Not quite Baltimore's disaster, as emergency inspections quickly assured a worried public that no trestle was trashed, but still, more than a little alarming.

If you haven't seen dams on the scale of those on the Ohio (and this is the uppermost stretch, so they only get bigger), look them up. I've looked up at them from as close as one can, or as close as one can without it being the last thing one sees in the non-watery world. The one I know best sits a little below my stoplight-trauma bridge, where I've seen it from both bank and water. The bank view could be reached off a dirt road of sorts that ran between the river and the railroad tracks, gotten to through a tunnel that my valley's creek passed through just before it came to its end. As kids exploring on our bikes we would occasionally find ourselves there, and I even recall a couple of fishing trips involving awkwardly held rods and tackle boxes transported bike-wise the two or more miles down the valley from our house. But one could also put a boat into the river along that stretch, and we happened to have a "scanoe" – a square-ended canoe designed to take a small electric motor – that we had gotten from my uncle. So a handful of times my dad and I set out to fish in the stretch of water close to the dam, or as close as we dared in such a small craft. The current was strong there, the water aerated and churning from its fall over the dam, and the undertow if one got too close was almost certainly fatal.

I didn't often look at my father as a protective figure. A combination of an introverted and irritable temperament and a generational belief that kids and parents require a certain distance between them insured this. But out there on the water there was a certain sense of danger, and his calmness at the back of the boat steering the motor kept me settled and able to cast my line. I caught a nice walleye one time, the biggest fish I'd caught to that date, but mostly I snagged lures on the many underwater trees and branches that, having sailed over the dam, decided they'd had enough adventure and lodged in the river bottom among the boulders (which had, I assume, started out onshore as protectors of the banks, though possibly they were the river-equivalents to my creek's sheared sandstone).

The recent barge debacle occurred at night, the time for any sensible plan of escape, so I suspect no fishermen were surprised by a massive steel box full of coal suddenly appearing along the dam edge above them. Last I read, at least one was unaccounted for, presumed drowned, possibly below the dam I used to frequent. I'm not sure how the walleye and their scaly kin will like the addition of metal and coal to their habitat, but given the abuses that stretch of river has seen, I'm sure they won't be surprised. Probably by now there are carp who have cleaned up the coal and, when they succumb to whatever the underwater equivalent of an undertow is, will sink to the bottom to create a deposit for some future energy-hungry people to unearth and burn.