Riverboats and Bone Yards III |
Monday Feb 19 2007
By Stu Whitley
Bio
It is inevitable that the pressures of the past that are felt by the present have to be contained in some sort of manageable context. Life must be worth living. Gazing upward to the crumbling decks of those forlorn leviathans from my canoe on the Yukon River, I wondered about the men who worked those paddlewheel steamers. Back-breaking work it must have been to feed those enormous furnaces. Even the ship’s wheel needed to be six feet across to achieve the mechanical advantage necessary to turn the fat twin rudders under the paddlewheel. It must have required Herculean effort to avoid the snags and bars of the Yukon River. Did these men too end their hard lives as empty relics, used up, discarded on the strand as life’s indifferent perpetual current continued to flow by?[Read More]
Written by eldering at Learning
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