I figured it’s high time I actually finished the story of the junk rafts called The Miss Rockaway Armada and put a nice little bow on the whole thing. It’s been so long since I wrote the earlier chapters that they are way shorter than the kind of pieces I write now and none of them have pictures on them. Maybe I should go back and either add more details to them or lump them together into a smaller number of entries and stick some appropriate photos on them.
You know that thing that people say “a picture is worth a thousand words”? I kind of added both. Compared to my earliest pieces the ones I make now probably have at least a thousand more words and a picture. When I was first starting this project an old friend of mine named Martin Bilben was reading it for me and offering advice and said something along the lines of “every word should be there for a reason”. I think I’ve come around to what’s basically an opposite understanding that to craft the effect I’m shooting for I need to add a lot of words for no reason at all. Tyrant. Cosecant. Quaternary.
It’s not like I’m rambling for it’s own sake. I think it conveys a very specific emotion or something like an emotion when I do it the right way. I couldn’t explain how it works or anything but I pretty much write all these in a single draft and when I read them back it more or less sounds right. I could be wrong – everybody’s mother says they’re handsome if you know what I mean.
Anyway if you haven’t read the earlier Rockaway chapters you could go back and read them now and it would probably only take as long as reading two or three of the new ones. Here’s a link to where it starts to make it really easy:
The Miss Rockaway Armada Part One: On the Nature of Junk Rafts
For whatever reason I didn’t do the thing where I put the year and city in the title but all of this was in 2007 and it was pretty much all in Saint Louis or East Saint Louis except for a couple of days at the very beginning that were in Alton. The rafts went way more places than that but I wasn’t there so I don’t have stories from it.
I’m going to pick things back up immediately after the events of chapter three: The First Annual Junk Raft Rodeo. The Coast Guard and a random fisherman were determined to help us tow all the rafts against the river’s current to dock at Cementland. All hell broke loose but miraculously nobody was killed or injured and the rafts ended up more or less back where they started.
You can read about it in more detail in the chapter I just wrote down the name of.
As they were depositing us back on the banks of East Saint Louis everybody was convinced that the first words out of the Coast Guard’s mouths would be that we were crazy and our rafts were a hazard and death trap and we needed to get them the hell out of the river. Before the failed towing attempt the Coast Guards had been showing us videos on their cell phone of a different junk raft one or two Summers earlier colliding with a barge and getting sucked into the river.
That raft was led by a guy named Matteapolis. I was never sure how to spell his name because I’d only heard it and never seen it written down but this guy named Geoff I met at the Black Butte party this year told me how to spell it. I guess I should have guessed it would be exactly like the name of the city except for the “Matt” part.
I wish I had swapped contact info with the Geoff guy because I’d be interested in talking to him so more. I gave him the blog link so maybe he’ll read this and could reach out.
That would be cool.
So anyway if you’ve read the earlier chapters you’ll know the Coast Guards didn’t say any of those things. They were actually excited to keep trying and already had ideas to increase the chances of it being successful. We had been doing all the traveling in Voltron mode, or with all the individual rafts tied together, but they said it was probably the worst setup for towing. It makes sense – a single junk raft already creates a ton of drag so sticking a bunch of them together in roughly the shape of a jigsaw puzzle piece could only make things worse.
The first raft they wanted to try with by itself was the engine raft – to quickly recap it was the best constructed, made out of three parts for a total length of sixty feet and had two Volkswagen Rabbit engines in the back that had been converted to propellers. I had forgotten the names of the engines but I talked to Caryl for a second and found it was Mortimer and Jenkins. We couldn’t have turned them both on during this second tow because one of them, probably Jenkins, had gotten it’s propellor shaft bent out of shape during the fiasco of the first attempt.
I don’t think they were far enough apart that only turning on one would cause the raft to go in circles but it probably wasn’t even necessary to turn the remaining one on. There were no problems during the towing of the engine raft whatsoever. I would say that it went off without a hitch but of course it was necessary to hitch the engine raft to the far more powerful Coast Guard vessels.
You know, for towing.
Once the engine raft was securely tied up at Cementland it was time to try to tow up the smaller rafts and the next one in line was The Garden of Bling. This one was thirty eight feet long, covered with a three story structure and completely useless mast and sail and was the one I had recently gravitated to as my home vessel. This tow must have failed almost completely due to the Bling’s inferior constructions as opposed to our actions as crew members during the tow – considering that none of us had to do anything but sit there while the engine raft was being towed.
At the same time I don’t want to take credit away from us for royally screwing up our responsibilities as crew members while the failed tow was going down because we did that with flying colors.
The entire endeavor had kicked off pretty close to the crack of dawn but between the first disaster, the second success and gearing up for this third attempt it was inching toward evening. I can’t remember what part of the day it was when we started drinking but we were good and drunk. Sparks was the usual beverage for Garden of Bling degeneracy but for whatever reason that wasn’t what we were drinking this time around – it was beer in bottles.
The Coast Guards had given us a walkie talkie so we could communicate with them during the towing process but we kept setting it down and forgetting where we had put it. They were really unhappy about that. Obviously we were all really invested in holding a bottle of beer to drink out of but that still should have left an extra hand for the walkie.
I think what happened was that the bow started to dip under the water and when the deck was getting covered in river water Harrison grabbed a broom to try to push the water back over the edge. He probably set the walkie talkie down somewhere to pick up the broom. When the raft was succumbing to drag and sinking into the water and none of us were picking up the walkie talkie they had given to us to check in during exactly this kind of situation they probably had to radio another Coast Guard vessel to come find out what was going on.
What they found was a crew kind of laughing, being unconcerned about where the walkie talkie was and thinking that pushing water with a broom would make the situation better in any meaningful way – drunk people stuff. If you’ve ever made public servants like Coast Guards or Park Rangers get angry at you by being inappropriately drunk you know the kind of voice – like suddenly serious incredulous authority guy voice.
I remember my exact level of being drunk in the moment as like bright colors and things lurching around but not to the level of feeling motion sick drunk. Sometimes I have dreams where I’m this kind of drunk walking down a street and I fall onto the ground and start sliding forever because in this drunken dream universe there’s no such thing as friction.
In the dream version the fact that I can’t seem to make myself stop moving makes me anxious but in this particular real life situation I wasn’t bothered at all. The situation was probably potentially dangerous and we had just screwed up our only opportunity to get the raft towed to where we needed it to be but if you scroll back up and look at the photo I definitely look I’m having a good time.
Harrison is sitting directly next to me in the center of the photograph. He maybe looks like reality is dawning on him about the severity of the situation and what it means for this particular raft a little bit. He was always the least willing to accept the fact that The Garden of Bling would never get moving again and we’d never make it down to New Orleans like he wanted to.
That’s Nick underneath the neon orange hat. You can’t see his face at all but the angle of his head isn’t exactly expressive of exuberant joy. That’s the thing about photography though – it tells an absolute truth but that truth is limited to the tiny portion of time during which the aperture is open. Maybe a fraction of a second later they looked as happy as I did. Who can say?
We pretty much exhausted the good will of the Coast Guards and screwed things up for all of the other rafts that were hoping to get towed up to our promised berth several miles up the river. Or that would make the most sense. If not for the phantom anecdote.
I have this one distinct memory that is nearly impossible to reconcile with the surrounding facts but I know it has to be based on something g that actually happened. Once The Garden of Bling tow failed and the Coast Guard said they weren’t going to help us anymore and any raft that wanted to keep moving had to prove it could safely navigate the Lower Mississippi nearly everybody abandoned the project and started dismantling their rafts.
We were going to try to keep going on The Garden of Bling even though we were stuck away from Cementland back in East Saint Louis. And then there was another crew that was going to try to keep going too. I nicknamed them The Chimney Sweeps, often shortened to The Sweeps, and the name basically stuck and they started using it.
The name had it’s origins in my friend Josh from Oakland telling me that his housemate Vanessa had made a statement about needing to stop dating guys that looked like chimney sweeps. It basically referred to the mid 2000’s New Orleans adjacent train rider fashion of wearing a lot of striped socks, button on suspenders and just dark colored old timey sort of clothes. And then if you were traveling all of this stuff would usually get really dirty too.
The Sweeps were led by a girl named Brandi Gump. She had originally been connected to The Garden of Bling and had even built a part of it, a small taxidermy museum on the second story, but it got cut off with a Sawzall when it made the raft float lopsided. There was also this shifting relationship thing where she’d been dating someone on The Bling and now that person was dating someone else.
I don’t really need to say who these people were – if you know all these people you already know. That was pretty much a hallmark of The Rockaway anyway – there were some couples like Caryl and Nick that stayed together for the length of the project and probably before it and long afterwards and even to this day as far as I know, but it was much more common for these things to be in flux.
Brandi wasn’t around when I first showed up but she got back to the boats and started putting a crew together. It was her, this really nice girl named Josie that kind of gave house mom vibes and a kind of scrappy feral girl named Rocket that had already been on a famous raft before with someone named Poppa Neutrino that you can look up.
Then it was Corey Vinegar, Soup and eventually Tim from Cementland. Tim worked for Bob Cassily and was pretty much a mainstream vaguely wiggerish dude until the day John Patzius had him operate a backhoe to help pull the furthest aft section of the engine raft out of the river. After that he hung around the rafts as much as possible and at some point him and Brandi started dating and he changed his name to Tim Treason and adopted the chimney sweep fashion all of his crew mates were into.
The phantom anecdote was that at some point I heard that the Coast Guard also tried to help The Sweeps tow another raft up to Cementland and also failed. What I can’t figure out is when this would have happened or what raft it would have been. The vessel that The Sweeps ended up trying to retrofit was the galley, or the central portion of the engine raft, and this had already been towed up in the only successful tow of the three part engine raft.
Obviously it wasn’t The Garden of Bling. That leaves The Giraft and The Kirksville. The Giraft had been built on top of an actual commercially produced aluminum pontoon and Charles started dismantling it the moment after the failed Bling tow so that’s out. The Kirksville was built by girls from Kirksville and was designed to be bicycle powered which I don’t think was especially viable and not long after it came untied in the night and washed up on some rocks downstream and we cannibalized different pieces of wood from it to try to do repairs on The Bling when it started to break down.
The Kirksville seems like the best contender for this failed tow but something about it seems unsatisfying to me. Could there be another raft I’ve completely forgotten the existence of? I guess it doesn’t really matter. Here is the phantom anecdote:
I heard that the Coast Guard tried to help The Sweeps tow whatever raft it was up to Cementland and in the course of failing they briefly had to tie it to the side of a coal barge. This wasn’t something I saw first hand. Either in person or over the phone I was repeating this anecdote to Caryl who had most likely already left the project. The only thing keeping this whole thing in my memory is her response:
“Did they get their dresses dirty?”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 