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Alone on the Water

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2015.0070

1934-421X

George Keithley,

American Environmental and Regional History

Alone on the Water George Keithley (bio) ABE Lincoln was seventeen when he was hired for $1.40 a week to help a man harvest his corn, butcher his hogs, and provide firewood for the steamboats arriving at the junction of Anderson Creek and the Ohio River in the southwestern region of Indiana. At home he’d had no patience for hoeing and weeding—the heat, the stooping. And if the dark loam he turned up with its sudden sheen promised a fine planting, it also brought him the cool scent of death—the memory of the hasty burial of his mother, Nancy Hanks, when he was nine. She had braved her husband’s anger each time she encouraged their boy to read. And he had helped his father, Thomas, build her coffin. He saw it laid in the shallow grave his father had dug reluctantly and promptly covered. The widower had left the gravesite with no headstone, not even a wooden marker, as if the loss of his wife was immediately forgotten. After the death of Nancy Hanks, Lincoln in time learned to lose himself in the long hours of a harvest that typically began at sunrise and might end under the broad light of a full moon. Though he would rather shun the task, he learned to tolerate working in the high rows of tassled corn. But he dreaded butchering a hog—the clubbing and cutting, the stench, flies and mosquitoes rushing to the bloodied flesh. He was already tall and lanky, with a lean-muscled strength, and back home he had worked with his father felling trees and chopping firewood. A father always willing to let him do more than his share of their chores, who slapped him if he talked back, then beat him if he tired or slacked off. Now, in the riverside lumberyard that serviced the boats, he handled an ax like a grown woodsman. Free of his father for these few weeks—he had parted without a word from the man who often swore that he owned him—he chopped wood to fuel the steamboats. He thought they were handsome craft, these steamers that halted at sundown near the mouth of the quick narrow creek before returning at daybreak into the broad sweep of the river. [End Page 487] Lincoln loaded the wood into a stiff-bottomed boat he built himself. Using a single long oar he sculled through the shoreline ripples and on out to the waiting vessel, where he tied to, then brought the wood aboard, making as many trips as the boat’s pilot requested. Hauling the firewood could not wait; no pilot showed him any patience. But, when he was done with supplying the wood, he rowed passengers, many clutching their carpetbags, to shore for an overnight stay in his employer’s house. The next morning he rowed them back to their boat, brought up their bags, and returned to shore for the work he had once detested—among the hogs, corn, firewood. Later Lincoln would encounter the Sangamon, the Mississippi, and ultimately the Potomac. But the Ohio was the first river to enter his mind and imagination, and he admired its constant energy, its ever-changing nature. From that first hour of dawn the Ohio was a major waterway, bearing fishing boats, barges, flatboats, and scows large and small. Shrill whistles signaled each steamboat’s position at anchor. When a new steamer thrust itself through the shimmering light, he heard bells announcing its arrival. Then a booming voice called out the depth of the channel, and in its echo he heard other voices from the crew and passengers. Chopping wood, sculling it to the boats, and promptly transporting people back and forth, Lincoln saw the river traffic increase all morning. The clamor of bells and voices continued into mid-afternoon while he ached for rest. Only when the shadows of dark elms and bone-white sycamores lengthened along the shore did the activity on the river gradually ebb. Once, at the end of the day, standing in his scow as it rocked in the river’s low swells, he found himself alone on the water waiting for his...