Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

The Crane Operator

On the River Barge

Is Just a Girl

It’s been my experience that management typically prefers employees who do what they’re told to do without asking too many questions about the “direction” that management is taking the company. You do your job, they say, and we’ll do ours.

A company’s “direction” can be like an old river barge floating down the Mississippi with a heavy load of Iowa soybeans going to the Port of New Orleans, where it’s loaded onto ocean freighters, goes through the Panama Canal and then across the Pacific to China where it’s turned into tofu and sauce for rice.

Let’s just say that one of the barge workers (maybe a crane operator who’s a girl) has enough down time during the day to keep up with the news and to think about what’s going on, searching for the obvious in a sea of seemingly unrelated facts.

It soon becomes obvious to her that she and the crew are on a fool’s errand.

The world had changed. Anybody should be able to see that. The people in China didn’t need American soybeans anymore. They can get them from South America or Africa where BRICS has freed the global South from the austerity of a patriarchal dollar, using their own currencies to finance vast new agricultural regions; farm machinery and dams and irrigation; processing plants; rail to new ocean ports and new ocean ports.

She thinks that if the rest of the world wants to grow their own soybeans, that would be fine with her. America didn’t have to have millions of acres of soybean fields to meet its own needs. Rather, the land could be a vast stretch of newly opened space where a new generation of 21^st century homesteaders might try their hand at creating something new.

Anyway, the romantic image of “farm life” was not all it was cracked up to be. She’d grown up on a farm — 4H ribbon winner at the county fair — so she’d been there, done that, and she’d rather be operating a crane on a river barge where the view is never the same from day to day.

In her bunk at night she imagines she’s the young Mark Twain, floating down the Mississippi. She thinks about all that could be done with all that newly available land.

I try to imagine what she imagines… see it through her eyes… new communities gathered around a fusion reactor out on the old Illinois prairies — a tiny thermodynamic sun surrounded by people on different diets, rooting for different football teams, finally willing to at least try to get along on a planet in space where it had become obvious to anybody with half a brain that it beat the alternative.

It was possible.

Leibniz said whatever is possible demands to exist.

She woke in her bunk with a start. They might as well have been on the Niagara. She could hear a great falls on up ahead.

She felt compelled to tell others before it was too late.

She told some co-workers while they were eating sandwiches for lunch — all guys.

The guys said you just "gotta tough it out."

She turned her head.

The guys would listen to her and then go back to the work the company was paying them to do. It was an old river barge and required lots of maintenance. It had been built during WWII to float war materials from the steel plants of Pittsburg down the Ohio to the Mississippi and then overseas to waiting armies. The company that owned the barge was eventually sold to a Cleveland steel company which was eventually sold to a Wall Street hedge fund which threw it into a bag with lots of other unrelated companies with offshore accounts protected by City of London secrecy rules. Its international board of directors probably didn’t even know they owned some old barges on the Mississippi.

She was just a crane operator on an old barge going down the powerful river that divided the land. A girl. She liked her job and didn’t want to make waves. But she had to tell somebody, didn’t she?