ROLLIN’ DOWN THE RIVER

[HostDave]

Imagine for a moment that you are on a riverboat gliding down a serene river, forested hills on one side and a limestone bluff on the other. It’s a perfectly cloudless day with the temperatures in the mid 70s and a pleasant breeze blows across the deck, bringing with it the scent of freshly cultivated fields and the distinct aroma of magnolia blossoms. You are sitting in a rocking chair on a covered deck with a warm praline pecan cookie and a glass of sweet tea, your favorite book lying on your lap. The landscape glides by and you have to fight the urge to take a nap in such idyllic surroundings. Your body is thoroughly relaxed but even more importantly, your mind is clear and uncluttered - the thoughts of mortgages, the persistent leak in the basement and the need to repaint the railings on the porch far, far from your mind. This is pure bliss. But even as you savor this moment, you’re a bit restless. There’s one thing that will make things complete. Despite the urge to nap, you finish your cookie and sweet tea, take your book and get up from the rocking chair. Fellow guests wish you a nice afternoon and you stroll aft, toward the stern and the promise of something truly authentic.

As you walk, a rhythmic sound of splashing water is heard, somewhat like a washing machine as the agitator twirls back and forth except that this sound is bigger; it has more depth. As you round the corner and walk up to the railing overlooking the stern, a huge 65-ton bright red paddlewheel thrashes the water into foam, its giant bucket boards slapping the river in front and lifting a brief fishtail of water behind. The sound is much louder and much more forceful than what you heard moments ago. This sound is about raw power and the paddlewheel is all about the business of propelling your riverboat forward. Looking at the stern wake, you notice that unlike the wake from a traditional boat which is flat and then ripples outward, this wake undulates. It is the telltale sign of a paddlewheel. As you take a deep breath and stare at the red paddlewheel and the river, you realize that although this is 2013, it could just as easily be 1843. The sounds of a paddlewheel and the sight of its red rotating blur as it goes about the business of moving an elegant riverboat along the river has remained unchanged for well over 150 years.

Surely, Mark Twain stared at a virtually identical sight, you think to yourself. That undulating wake that could only come from a paddlewheel is the same wake that drew Samuel Clemons to the mighty Mississippi River where he learned the ways and moods of the river. It is here that he was inspired to write his classic book Life on the Mississippi and it was here that he became an author known as Mark Twain. Clemens was inspired to use the name thanks to a riverboat captain who would send river navigation observations to the New Orleans Picayune under the pseudonym Mark Twain. Years later, when Clemens began to write his humorous observations of life, he did so initially as a parody of the captain and also used the pseudonym Mark Twain. Somewhere in the splash of the paddlewheel, Mark Twain was born.

There are riverboats all over the world that don’t use paddlewheels. In fact, it’s rare to find any modern boat that utilizes such a quaint form of propulsion. It’s not nearly as efficient as today’s Z-drives, small pods with propellers that maneuver most river workboats. However, if you ask a small child to draw a riverboat, inevitably it will feature a white wedding cake superstructure, tall black smokestacks and a bright red paddlewheel at the stern. The image has become iconic around the world and that silhouette belongs only to the original Mississippi River paddlewheelers.

Paddlewheels have been around for millennia, although not in the powered variety that moves vessels such as the American Queen or, beginning in 2014, the American Empress. They were initially waterwheels, often used to pump water to irrigate farms or, powered by fast flowing streams, to move the crude machinery that ground wheat and other grains. With the invention of the practical steam engine in the late 1700s and its widespread use in industry in the 1800s, the new contraption was soon hooked up to a paddlewheel to drive a boat through the water. In 1811, the New Orleans traveled from Pittsburgh to New Orleans and paved the way for the thousands of paddlewheel steamboats that would follow. It turned out that the paddlewheel, although used for ocean travel until the advent of the propeller, was ideally suited to rivers because of the shallow draft of riverboats. The vast majority of a paddlewheel rotates above the water with only the bottom portion skimming the water and pushing the boat forward.

Setting the paddlewheel at the right height above the water is somewhat of a lost art. In fact, the American Queen’s debut in 1995 was marred by her inability to travel upriver against a current during her pre-delivery trial runs. Eventually, engineers discovered the wheel was set too low and the engines were straining to push its vast bulk through the water. Once it was repositioned slightly higher and some of the bucket boards removed, it performed exactly as advertised.

Our guests are drawn to the paddlewheel at every time of day. Sunset over the undulating wake is as calming as sunrise over the mists drifting along the shoreline and the rhythmic sounds of the paddlewheel churning the river. Indeed, there is nothing quite as reassuring as rollin’ down the river just as Mark Twain once did.