There’s a thing that sometimes happens to me. It’s so surreal and weird, and I wonder if other people experience it. Every so often, even 13 years after he died, I think, “I’m gonna call Dad and tell him [insert topic here].” And then I remember he’s gone. Like, for a split second, I forget and think that I can actually call him. It’s bizarre and breathtaking. In a bittersweet way, I cherish that split second. It’s like a tiny glimpse of how life was before they were gone forever. When things were normal and okay. It sounds depressing, and I guess it is in a way, but I mostly look at it as a gift.
I’ve been missing my Dad a little more than usual lately. I think it’s because I could use his advice right now, but I also sometimes get stuck thinking about how things might be if he were still here. I took a long walk over to some bench swings on the Ohio side, right next to the river. Sat and talked to him. Even if he didn’t hear me, it felt good to vent in my head. Also felt good to be outside on a tolerable-weather day. I wandered around with my new toy camera and took some pictures to test it out.
Last year, I got sucked into the Instagram algorithm that kept feeding me posts about a little hand-crank camera that looks vintage. The marketing worked, and I got one for Christmas. You have to wind a crank on the side of it to take videos, and the viewfinder is at the top of the camera. It’s pretty cool. Anyway, I took it out for a walk today to see how it works. The pictures reminded me of film photography.
As I was walking back from the Ohio side, I stood on the bridge and watched as the Mary Ellen Jones was moving along and passed under me, heading east on the river. I hand-cranked until she went out of frame if you wanna see.
The point of this blog (are they still called blogs?) is to learn about the river that’s right outside my window, so that’s what I did. Today, I learned about the Mary Ellen Jones, so now when I look outside, I’ll start paying closer attention to see how often she passes by. Here are some fun facts about her:
Mary Ellen Jones (MEJ), originally named Elaine G, was built by Dravo Corporation in Neville Island, Pennsylvania in 1965. She’s a twin-screw boat with two propellers, measuring about 151 feet by 40 feet with horsepower in the 4,300 to 5,600 range.
On the Ohio River, boats like this are part of the everyday freight system moving stuff up and down the river.
Today, MEJ was pushing a tow of covered barges (the things with the rounded hatch covers on top). They’re used for dry bulk cargo, so not an oil or fuel barge. It was possibly coal, grain, salt, fertilizer, sand, aggregate, other dry industrial materials or a mixed load.
She’s owned by Amherst Madison, and the crew received a Lifesaving Award at the 2023 River Bell Awards. According to The Waterways Journal, the Mary Ellen Jones and the Mike Sanders (another towboat) were involved in the same rescue on March 9, 2023, around 1:15 a.m. A man accidentally drove into the river from a ferry landing and ended up on top of his sinking vehicle. The two crews launched skiffs (small workboats the towboats carry to use for quick jobs), worked together, and the Mary Ellen Jones’s crew got the man into their skiff and then aboard the boat so he could be warmed up, before getting him back to shore after EMS arrived.
Now for some semantics, because this was driving me nuts and I had to research: MEJ is often classified as a tugboat, but on the Ohio River, “towboat” is usually the more specific term. Boats like this typically push barges on inland rivers, even though people still commonly call them tugs. The barges being moved are called a tow. Confused yet?
Have a beautiful day!
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