Locked out

Here's something I put on my Flickr photostream tonight, and now I can't find the edited photo.

I want to go back

You know, I've been blessed to have been able to travel to a variety of places. I've walked the streets of the Old City in Jerusalem and stood in the Garden of Gethsemane on a Saturday night, staring across the valley at the lit up Temple Mount.

I've visited Hiroshima and stood near the spot where the bomb detonated. I've walked past a place where Mozart lived and a place where Gregor Mendel did some of his experiments in genetics.

A cab driver in Amman, Jordan, took me down to the Dead Sea and introduced me to a camel herder. I've driven the Pacific Coast highway from San Francisco to LA.

I want to go back to the Pacific Coast highway, but this time I would drive it north from Santa Barbara to Seattle. That's just a fantasy, though. I have neither the money nor the time for that. Just as I'll never drive the road -- I think it's U.S. 2 -- from the Pacific coast through Montana and North Dakota.

I want to go back to the lower part of the Ohio River someday, preferably on a warm, dry week in summer. I want to spend a week in Paducah alone, and another few days exploring the area from Evansville to Cairo. I want to chat with the locals, see the old wicket dams, cross the bridges and count the boats.

There are plenty of towns with histories most of us never think about. There are contrasts within a few miles that I want to examine. What, I really want to know, is the difference between Cairo, Illinois, and Wycliffe, Kentucky? On a July evening, would I still find a couple of boys fishing at Lock and Dam 53? Are some of the old buildings that I saw on a quick visit to Golconda in1986 still there?

And where is the best place to photograph the lower river?

Maybe I will get down there someday. Adam wants to go with me. You can have Myrtle Beach and Las Vegas and Disney World. I just want to see America -- including the town of that name in Illinois.

They're only words on a map

Before Adam and I left the park at the mouth of the Ohio, I was up in the observation tower and heard a boat coming down the Upper Mississippi. Adam ran down to the river's edge to get a photo in case it turned up the Ohio, but it didn't. The M/V Mary Parker kept on going down the Miss.

That red navigation light in the lower left part of the picture is supposed to mark the end of the Ohio, I guess. But if you've seen the mouths of rivers and even creeks, you know the river doesn't end where a guy draws a line on a map. It ends when its waters mingle with and can't be distinguished from what flows down from the other river.

This day, I didn't know where that mixing zone was or how far it extended. It would have been nice to know, but I already knew the "Ohio" extended somewhere off into the distance out there. Where it ends and the combined waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi make a greater river, I don't know. Because that boundary changes every day, it really didn't matter.

Actually, it did. But there was no way to find out, and it was time to move on.

It was off to Olmstead.

Milestone for Milton-Madison bridge

If all went as planned, traffic moved across the new bridge connecting Madison, Indiana, and Milton, Kentucky, tonight.

In a a paragraph or two, I'll paste part of the news release about the event. I need to get down there soon. How many people can say they crossed an Ohio River bridge before it was closed and moved to another spot nearby? I mean, how cool is that?

You can find the full text of the news release starting with the link to the left on the project. But here are the first couple of paragraphs.

Louisville, Ky. (May 29, 2013) – After more than two years of construction on the new Milton-Madison Bridge, workers are gearing up for some of the final – and most anticipated – stages of the project, expected to take place this summer.

The first milestone occurs early next week when traffic is switched from the old bridge to the new bridge in its temporary location. Project contractor Walsh Construction expects the switch to take place on June  3 or 4.

Cairo highway bridge

We couldn't be that close to Cairo and not make a few trips across the highway bridge over the Ohio near its mouth. For the first part of this journey, we followed the usual practice of me driving and Adam shooting.

First, this is how the bridge looks as you approach it from the Kentucky side.

Looking straight on like this, it's easy to see this bridge is bigger than the ones we're familiar with on the middle and upper river.

Adam shot some barges being fleeted, and again, things are different down there. Up here, there's nowhere near enough room in the river to fleet barges away from shore like this.

Here are a couple of views from the park on the Illinois side.

The bridge is very narrow. I saw some tractor-trailers cross it, but I was not on there to see two of them traveling in opposite directions at the same time. That must have been a tight fit.

And there is no sidewalk. That disappointed me, as t here are some good boat pictures to be made up there. The first time we crossed it was around midnight, and there was plenty of nighttime activity on the river. When we left on Sunday morning, the rising sun made the AEP boat over by the Illinois shore shine really nice.


We first crossed it at night heading from Illinois into Kentucky. I thought the road signs said the bridge carried U.S. 60 over the Ohio. The road signs on the Kentucky side said we were on U.S. 51. It was almost five miles before I could pull over to check my map to see where we were. As I was doing that, my Marine Corps son got out his iPhone and used his GPS to tell me we were about 100 feet from where we needed to turn.


Here is some information on the bridge that I pulled off the National Bridge Inventory Database. There are some things that surprised me in here, particularly the last number where the bridge had a 22.4 sufficiency rating. That was higher than I expected, but when you think about how important it is, Kentucky probably spends a lot of money keeping it repaired. The cost of replacing a bridge that's more than a mile long can't be cheap.



State: KY
NBI Structure Number: 004B00021N
Route Sign Prefix: U.S. Highway
Route Number: 51
Facility Carried:US-51
Feature Intersected: OHIO RIVER -IC (SOU) RR
Location: 4.0 MI WEST OF JCT US51&6
Year Built: 1937
Status: Structurally Deficient
RecordType: Roadway is carried ON the structure
Level of Service: Mainline roadway
Owner: State Highway Agency
Highway Agency District: 01
Maintenance Responsibility: State Highway Agency
Functional Class: Principal Arterial - Other, Rural
Service On Bridge: Highway
Service Under Bridge: Railroad-waterway
Latitude: 36 59 40.49 N
Longitude: 89 08 40.36 W
Material Design: Steel
Design Construction: Truss - Thru
Approach Material Design: Steel
Approach Design Construction: Stringer/Multi-beam or Girder
Structure Length (m): 1,787.7
Navigation Vertical Clearance (m): 15.2
Approach Roadway Width (m): 7.3
Lanes on Structure: 2
Average Daily Traffic: 5350
Year of Average Daily Traffic: 2011
Design Load: M 18
Scour: Bridge foundations determined to be stable for assessed or calculated scour condition.
Bridge Railings: Do not meet currently acceptable standards.
Historical Significance: Bridge is possibly eligible for the National Register of Historic Places (requires further investigation before determination can be made) or bridge is on a State or local historic register.
# of Spans in Main Structure: 5
# of Spans in Approach Structures: 27
Bridge Median: No Median
StructureFlared: No flare
Transitions: Meets currently acceptable standards.
Approach Guardrail: Meets currently acceptable standards.
Approach Guardrail Ends: Meets currently acceptable standards.
Navigation Control: Navigation control on waterawy (bridge permit required).
Navigation Horizontal Clearance (m): 192
Structure Open?: Open, no restrictions
Deck: Good Condition
Superstructure: Satisfactory Condition
Substructure: Good Condition
Structural Evaluation: Basically intolerable requiring high priority of replacement
Sufficiency Rating (%): 22.4

Quick trip to Cairo, Illinois

I had heard Cairo, Illinois, was a city in decline, but I didn't realize how much until Adam and I drove through there last weekend. He was disappointed in what he saw, and I told him Cairo was like a lot of towns whose best days appear to be behind them.

There were a lot of empty buildings and vacant lots. We drove through the floodwall to look at the river, but we didn't stay in town long because we had other places to be and not much time to be there.

The bad part about that was that we didn't get to call ahead of time and arrange to talk to people who live there about how Cairo is their home and how they're trying to bring the city back despite the obstacles. One of the easiest things for a news person to do is to helicopter into a city, find people who say, "This town is dead, man" and leave. We go back home and write a story about how a place is filled with despair and someone ought to do something about it. And we move on to the next "dead" town.

I knew Cairo had had some problems in the past, but I didn't realize the extent of them until I read this Wikipedia article about the town and its history. When you see the population decline of the past 90 years, you can understand the vacant buildings and empty lots, and you wonder how people there now get along.

Adam and I want to go back when we can spend more time and get to know the town. You can't make a quick trip in and out and pretend you know the place. We're probably the only people we know who really want to spend a week wandering around the Paducah and Cairo areas. Go figure.

The end of the river ... or not

So this is it. The so-called mouth of the Ohio River.

Between the entrance ramps of two bridges – one over the Ohio River and one over the Mississippi – is a road to Cairo Point. It’s a road you have to look for. Once you’re there, you look for an observation tower. Then you follow some steps take a ramp down to a muddy river bank, balance yourself while you walk on some rocks in the water and step onto a square piece of concrete slightly above water level.

In theory, the left side of the point is the Ohio River and the right side is the Mississippi.

But not so fast.

 Adam and I were there last weekend. We arrived early in the morning, having left our motel in Paducah, Ky., so we could squeeze in a few hours of river exploring before he had to be in the wedding party of an aunt. One thing we noticed about this park was the awful smell. There were barges tied to the bank, too, and the M/V Walter Hagestaad was either dropping some off or picking some up. But the smell was terrible. 

We saw and older coupe walking a dog. Their car had Illinois plates, so I asked why the place smelled so bad.

The man said it was because of dead fish. The park was under water the week before, and when the river went down it left a lot of fish on the ground, he said.

He started telling me how this spot was the end of the Ohio River, and how he had traveled north in Minnesota to a place near the Canadian border, to Itasca, so he could step across the Mississippi.

I told him that hydrologists and others will tell you that the upper Miss is a tributary of the Ohio. Here at Cairo Point, the Ohio kicks in more water than the upper Miss, so that river is really a tributary of the Ohio.

He didn’t like hearing that, and I was wondering later if he told people about that know-it-all jerk from West Virginia who thinks the Ohio is a bigger river than the Mississippi.

It doesn’t matter. It’s an old story. Truth vs. prejudice. We know who usually wins, and it’s not truth.

I guess the park there at Cairo Point is a nice enough place when the ground is dry and you don’t have to worry about sinking two inches when you step on the grass, as I did a time or two. Adam kind of liked the place except for the mud and the smell.

He had his camera and I had mine, and we thought we would get a picture of something when I was up in the observation tower (the stairs are very steep, by the way) and heard a boat coming down the Mississippi. I stayed there and Adam went down to the bank in case it turned into the Ohio. I think I caught its name as the M/V Mary Parker. But it didn’t slow down to turn. It kept on going down the Mississippi (I’ll give the old fellow this one).

We went to some other spots nearby before we had to be back in Paducah. More on those later.

Where's Adam?

Adam and I and the rest of our family had an out-of-town family function to attend this weekend. We're back now and trying to recover and catch up on everything. While we were gone, Adam and I broke away from the rest of the family one morning to do some river exploring. More on all that later, but here are two photos for your consideration. Some river folks will be able to guess where we were.

While we were in this area, Adam asked if we had any family there. I told him that an obituary of one of my ancestors said he was a riverboat captain who had women in at least a couple of ports, and that some people of our last name in this state are his descendants, too, along with our branch, which is from Ohio.

Two CSX locomotives

Seen on the old B&O line along the Ohio River.

The one in the first picture was parked near a crossing where a taxi was waiting. The one on bottom was on a sidetrack a couple of miles up the road. I assume  he was waiting for the remainder of the train from the other locomotive, which was a mile or so down the road, to pass. This area has only one track. The 933 was pulling a lot  of AEPX cars, by the way.

Life changes

Posting items on the Ohio River Blog has become sparse lately.

When I started this blog about four years ago, I had just been laid off from a job I had had for more than thirty years. The company I worked for was going through some hard times, and management decided to eliminate my position and several others. The company is run by a board of directors of old-timers. A few months ago they added younger blood -- a person in his early 60s. Seriously. Most board members are in their 70s and 80s, so things are done the old-fashioned way. There were no optional buyouts. I was not given the opportunity to bump anyone out of a job and take a demotion. I was told I and several other people were being terminated. They gave me a check for two weeks' vacation pay and two weeks' severance pay. I was given time to clean out my office, and I was walked out the door. So much for three decades of service.

So I took an interest I had -- the Ohio River and its tributaries -- and I started this blog. It happened to be at a time when AEP, Crounse and Marathon were adding new boats to the fleet, and a time when my then nine-year-old son was taking a liking to the river, too. So I lived on unemployment checks while learning that no one wanted to hire a 50-something journalist for anything other than an entry-level job where I would be on call 24/7 to go cover trailer fires in the middle of the night, sometimes leaving my nine-year-old at home alone.

It got discouraging after a while, knowing people with lesser experience and skills were working while I was not. The up side was that Adam and I got to spend a lot of time together, and he got to learn a lot of history and science by learning the river -- the kind of history and science they don't teach in school while they obsess over standardized tests.

We had fun chasing boats and looking for new ones. We looked for boats we had not seen before. At one point, Adam squinted toward the setting sun and decided a boat a mile or more down the river had been built by Jeffboat. He was right. We met pilots and port captains who were surprised by the knowledge the kid had accumulated event though his family was outside the river fraternity.

I've had a good time with the blog, but things have changed. No, I'm not shutting it down. I'm still out there every now and then, but it's four years later. I'm now the managing editor of a weekly business newspaper based in a city that's an hour away from my house. I have a grandchild who needs my attention. And there are very few boats in my area that I haven't seen, and if there were, they're not pushing nearly as much as they did four years ago. And I have other matters that need my attention.

Those are some of the reasons blogging is light lately. I'm hoping I can pick it up soon. But I need more recharging time between those long trips down to the river, which by necessity are fewer now. When I do go out, I look for the really good pictures, the kind that I don't necessarily put on the Internet because I don't want other people stealing them.

So please bear with me. I'm not making any money off the blog. It's a hobby that had introduced me online to a lot of good people. But as with all blogs, the fire fades as the fuel is spent. I need to clean out some ashes so I can put more wood in the stove.

Adam and I have to go out this morning. Who knows? Maybe we'll see something interesting and write about it. Or maybe not. You never know what's going to happen, do you?