High Water

by Richard Pike Bissell

Duke Snyder found his first job on 'a dirty old cinder-throwing stern-wheeler' when he was 16 years old with just 65 cents left in his pocket and nothing else to do. Ten years later, he’s still on the river aboard an old diesel towboat hauling eight barges of coal toward the Chain of Rocks above St. Louis with all hands on deck facing the ominous rise of high water.

As the waters of the Mississippi rise to alarming levels, Bissell takes us aboard the steamboat with Duke, now first mate, and captains, Ironhat and Casey, engineer, Greasecup, and crew members Arkansaw, the Kid, ole Swede, One Eye, and Zero. Embraced by rain and fog and night is as black as ' the inside of a Holstein heifer', we learn about the lives of the crew, past and present, losses, loves, strengths and flaws, and are caught up in the flood of their lives much like the swell of the raging river.

Bissell loved river life and spent much of his time on a towboat on the Mississippi.

Genres: Fiction, Literature

218 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Richard Pike Bissell (June 27, 1913-May 4, 1977) was an author of short stories and novels, playwright, business executive and riverboat pilot/master. He was best known for his river books, and for his novel 7½ Cents, based on his experience in the garment industry, which he helped convert into Pajama Game, one of the most popular Broadway musical comedies of the 1950's and made into a movie musical. He wrote a book about the experience called Say, Darling, which chronicled the ins and outs of a broadway musical production; this book was also turned into a musical of the same name.

Bissell was born and died in Dubuque, Iowa. The scion of a wealthy family he graduated from Harvard University, about which he wrote You Can Always Tell a Harvard Man. After college Bissell had a brief adventure in the Venezuelan oil fields and then signed on as a seaman on an American Export Lines freighter. In 1938 he married Marian Van Patten Grilk and returned to Dubuque, where they lived on a houseboat on the Mississippi River. Bissell became a vice president in the H. B. Glover Company, a clothing manufacturer. Turned down when he tried to enlist in the Navy during World War II, Bissell worked on towboats on the Ohio, Mississippi, Illinois, Tennessee, and Monongahela rivers. Returning to Dubuque and Glover's after the war, he published articles on his riverboat experiences in such prestigious national magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Collier's, and Esquire.

In 1950 Bissell published his first novel, A Stretch on the River, a largely autobiographical story whose nonstop dialogue portrayed the excitement, humor, and independence of a hard-working steamboat crew on the upper Mississippi. It was published to significant critical acclaim; several commentators compared Bissell to Twain. Both flattered and embarrassed by the frequent comparisons to Twain, Bissell addressed the issue with self-deprecating humor in 1973 with the publication of My Life on the Mississippi, or Why I Am Not Mark Twain.

I learned three-quarters of what I know about writing from reading Richard Bissell, God bless him.
—-Elmore Leonard

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy stories about sailing ships and ocean adventures, but it is easy to forget that working on a riverboat can be just as much of an adventure as going to sea. This book was written by a man who for a time had lived the life he wrote about, and it feels as vivid, raw, tense and occasionally humorous as that life could be.

Our narrator, Duke Snyder, is first mate on a towboat (more on that term in a minute) and has been called to work during a horrendous rain which has sent the Mississippi river to high water stage before Duke and the rest of the crew even leave the dock.The tension builds as slowly and relentlessly as the water level, while we all struggle along with our tow of eight barges full of coal. There is rain, fog, confusion at times, snarling between crew members at other times, and a girl to be rescued from atop a flooded house.

Reading High Water, I felt I was on the towboat in the dark, listening to the rain and wondering if we would get to the next system of locks before they were closed down because of the flooding. I could almost smell the river, feel the cold, and I was as caught up in Duke's thoughts as he was. I worried like he did about all the little details he claimed he did not have to worry about since he was not one of the pilots. But he cared. And he made me care, too.

There is some locker room language in places, and a few disturbing passages in others. But this is a realistic story, and the riverboat men of the late 40's to early 50's were frequently men who could not fit in elsewhere. They found homes on the towboats, but they were never completely civilized because of that. An interesting aspect of this book is that none of the conversations between the men seem forced or unnatural. I could easily imagine each character saying exactly the words Bissell had them say. And by the end I felt like as much of a crew member as Duke himself.

I have another book by Bissell, where he tells of his own experiences working the river towboats in the 40's. I really wish I had found room to bring it down with me on my last trip. Now I will have to wait until May.

Oh, I meant to comment about that term towboat. Riverboats don't tow, they push their barges. But the barges themselves are called tows, and the pushers are called towboats because, according to a wiki article I consulted Towboats always push the "tow" of barges, which are lashed together with steel cables usually 1 to 1.5 in (25.4 to 38.1 mm) in diameter. The term towboat arises from steamboat days, when steamboat fortunes began to decline and to survive steamboats began to "tow" wooden barges alongside to earn additional revenue. During the 19th century, towboats were used to push showboats, which lacked steam engines to free up space for a theater.

Once I got that straightened out in my head, I was more ready to be a proper member of the crew. One more note about the author. According to the wiki article about him, Elmore Leonard cited him as a major influence on his own writing, citing for one reason the way he was able to write conversations between his male characters. So I guess I wasn't the only one to notice that!

Oh, and Bissell wrote a little book titled 7-1/2 Cents, which became the Broadway musical Pajama Game!

[Lee Goldberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an interview with Barnes & Noble, Elmore Leonard said his writing was deeply influenced by the works of Richard Bissell. So I immediately went to Amazon to get a copy of Bissell's work...and I am glad I did. And after reading HIGH WATER, a tale of a first mate on a Mississippi steam boat during an epic flood, it was easy to see the influence Bissell has had on Leonard's approach to character and dialog. Bissell has that same naturalistic, funny, amiable way with characters, whether they are "good guys" or "bad guys," that makes even the most minor players in the tale memorable and interesting. His plotting is loose and yet surprisingly powerful. And his eye for the telling details is sometimes astonishing in its simplicity and truth. I can see why Leonard, as a young writer, was impressed, and why he adopted some of the same techniques. HIGH WATER is worth reading, not only for insight into Leonard's writing style, but on its own considerable merits . I loved it and look forward to devouring Bissell's other work

[Jim Ament · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review: http://www.jamesrament.com/book-revie... and:

I decided to find, then read High Water (1954), by Richard Bissell because an author I admire, Elmore Leonard said this about Bissell: "When I decided to become a writer, Hemingway was my model, his spare prose and realistic dialogue. But he had no sense of humor and I discovered Richard Bissell who did." Leonard then listed High Water as one of his ten favorite books. I just had to read it.

This is the first-person story of Duke Snyder and a motley crew of riverboat men traveling up the Mississippi in a tug, the Royal Prince, pushing eight barges full of coal—too many barges—during a particularly bad flood. Bissell himself was a seaman on the Upper Mississippi and the Monongahela rivers, with a mate's and a pilot's license, so he wrote about something he knew here.

I had a little trouble getting into the story, given that the story isn't driving the book—it's more about the characters and their interactions—and it soon started to roll. I particularly read it to notice the writing style, the narration, the character development, the dialog, and the humor—all good. These few samples perhaps indicate why Leonard liked Hemingway and Bissell:

"You can beat some son of a bitch over the head uptown and get no work out of him but give him a job on the water and he will do the damnedest things in order nobody will think he is a quitter. You can tell anybody to anything, nearly, on a boat, and they will do it. They figure they have to break their neck for the team for some reason, which it says is Psychology in the Correspondence Course and maybe it is. Whatever it is, you can drive a man harder on a boat than you can anyplace on the shore." (page 49)

"Age creeps up on us when we are not looking, when we are doing a lot of things that are a lot of miserable foolishness such as taking correspondence courses, reading up on how to make yourself a swell backyard barbecue fireplace, turning the pages of True Confessions magazine, or working all day and being too tired in the evening to do anything but argue. You play and join the Eagles or the Moose Club, and you get your hair cut, and the seasons change and it rains and snows and the birdies go tweet tweet; then you find yourself in the men's room of some forty-nine cent Middle West night club, inhaling the perfume of the West Disinfecting Co.'s urinal deodorant, and when you look at yourself in the mirror as you arrange your curly locks with an Ace pocket comb you realize that you are old, and mean as hell, and you wonder where the years went so sudden." (pages 50 and 51)

"When you are out on the boats you think a lot about things that are over on the land, things you never think about at all when you are there. The girl problem, for one thing, becomes something you live with, and think about, and talk about. Oh man, the millions of hours that have been spent since the Egyptians or somebody invented boats, by men and boys sitting around on deck and in messrooms and bunkrooms and engine rooms talking about girls." (page 68)

"Long days and long nights on the river, a couple of centuries in boxcars and looking at the cold stars from alleys where you go to piss or throw up, a hundred light-years of reading about politicians in the newspapers as leaves drop and the sleet begins to cover the sidewalks and tar-paper shanties, all of eternity with a free lunch thrown in and you will never find out anything definite on anybody. They are all slippery as Mississippi mud. All the brains...put together can't seem to improve the natural orneriness of the human race or predict where the hell it is going to break out next." (pages 91 and 92)
"I used to stand out on the barges in the evening, after I gave up roaming throughout the Great Western Plains area and became a sober, righteous, and God-fearing Steamboat Man, and look across the river and into the tress and through the scraggly littler islands and wonder a lot of things about life, liberty, and the pursuit of a living wage, but there was never an answer in the sunset and I would return and lie down in my bunk among the other deck hands as they lay snoring their guts out in expectation of the next call on deck." (page 94)

On page 113, there is this little recap following the sinking of one of the barges, number 36, which also points to the great flood that must be reckoned with: "So Grease Cup had his Milly and Kennedy had his stomach about to be removed and the Kid's old man had run off and left them all behind to look after themselves; Casey was in bad with the company on account of sinking number 36 and Ironhat was scared over the flood and I had punched Jackoniski and knocked onto the galley floor; and upriver there was more water coming down at us than anybody had ever seen before steamboats began."

On page 135, the crew saw a girl on the roof of a house with only her jeans on. They rescued her and learned that she had lost her parents, her brother, all the farm animals—and her shirt from waving it to possible rescuers—to the flood. The rescue entailed some humorous moments dealing with "a nice young maiden passed out cold and with nothing on but a pair of blue jeans." But soon came the big wreck: the steering had broken so the tug had no control. They abandoned the barges but the river swept them into an bridge abutment smashing the boat and killing most everyone on board. Duke saved the girl, Marie Chouteau, and saved himself not knowing until later that she was okay. There is a happy ending.

A good book but I didn't find it particularly stirring. Then again, I read it critically—with an eye for the writing style—rather than for pure pleasure.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 James Ament

[Joe Surkiewicz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this based on Elmore Leonard's recommendation, a slice of life about working a tugboat on the Mississippi River during a flood. Highly entertaining. A sample:

"I went out and looked at the river and it was cold and gray and the fog had lifted for a while but settled down into a cold drizzle, so the islands over across the way looked hazy and pale. The decks were wet and had a dull shine to them and the river smell was strong. Unless you have ever smelled the Mississippi River you don't know what that means and no use to attempt an explanation, but she smells like islands and willows and railroad ties and mud and she smells like Minnesota and Illinois and Wisconsin and Iowa and parts of Missouri, all mixed up together. Then she smells like standing under a bridge, or sitting in a duck blind, and like old overalls and marine engines, and like a retriever when he is crouched shivering in the boat on the way home. She also smells like wet oilskins, coal smoke, dead catfish and buffalo and gar pike, like rotten logs and hepaticas on the hillsides, and like the whiskey breath of an old deck hand who can't quite remember where he come from."

Not much in the way of plot. But with writing like that, who cares?

[Mike Zickar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun, fast-moving novel about life on a steamboat on the Mississippi during a major flood. The writing has a nice mix of being down-to-earth and insightful.

[Novita Whillock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Slow book. Took me seven months to finish. Good ending!

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elmore Leonard once said that he learned to write humor from this novel about Mississippi River bargemen. The plot of the novel is suspenseful, while its cast of 20 or so characters drives eight loads of coal upriver from St. Louis to St. Paul during a flood.

Bissell immerses the reader in the world of these workingmen, all of them nervous in the ever-rising waters and agitated in each other’s too-familiar company. The narrator is Duke, a first mate, who has known many years of commercial transport on inland waterways, a single man with a girl in every port...

More at my blog.

[Sam Bissell · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you liked HIGH WATER, you should try A STRETCH ON THE RIVER......,more polished and more exceptional stories of river life and the people who worked the inland waterways of our great country!