A river running through families

Carolyn Schwettman has plenty of reasons to hate the river. It is a mistress that has wooed away almost every man in her life for weeks and months at a time. Her grandfather, father, husband, brother, uncles and in-laws have all spent much of their lives working far away from her on dredges, tugs and barges on the Mississippi River. There have been lonely and frustrated nights when, under her breath, she's cursed its existence.

But it's never that simple. Her life has followed this river, and it has provided for her and her children since they were born. It's in her blood.

So as she watches the brown ripples of the Mississippi slowly course southward on a recent afternoon, she is torn between emotions, between the shifting faces the river takes on in her mind. From her perch on a bench at Riverside Park in Cape Girardeau, she keeps one eye on her two grandchildren, Clayton, 3, and Chelsea, 10, down at the bank tossing rocks into the water. The other scans northward to the bend in the river, searching for a boat that is due any time.

She knows he's coming. She's just not sure when. Waiting is a constant part of her role as a river wife.

Schwettman learned this patience from her mother, Ruby Routon of Scott City.

"You can't get mad at what is your livelihood," Routon said. "It's that paycheck that keeps taking them out there."

In 1935, at age 14, Routon married Ted Routon, one of eight sons born to a man who worked the Missouri River. All the brothers eventually followed their father to work on the river, including Ted Routon, who started out as a water boy on the river at age 13. He would die on a riverboat 50 years later from a massive heart attack.

Ted Routon was 20 years old when he married, working on Missouri River dredges and small tug boats, putting in rock dikes or dredging out the channel at certain areas, making the waters navigable for larger tows. Since he worked on the construction side of the business, he was forced to move up and down the river every three to six months to different project sites. His wife and eventually his three children followed.

"I was young, I learned to adapt," Ruby Routon said. "I loved him, and I wanted to be with him."

In those days, being with him essentially meant being a vagabond, moving from town to town and job to job. It meant pulling the children out of school after school -- Schwettman said she never finished a term in the same school.

It also meant raising a family almost single-handedly. Because the men were always gone, it was the women who had to combine the roles of mother and father, housekeeper and electrician, cook and accountant. Some of the women also worked full- or part-time jobs to supplement the household income.

In these makeshift communities, the women could draw strength from each other. Ruby Routon said that was important because the mothers and older sisters had to have mental strength enough for the entire family.

That strength was needed to protect the family from within and without. River families often lived together in mobile home parks down by the river. When a crew would move on to another job, this mobile home caravan would move with them. Wherever they went, these nomadic river towns faced grief from their new neighbors on top of their everyday family issues. They were often looked down on by the townspeople. Schwettman and Routon remember calls of "river rats" and "river trash."

"They didn't like it when we moved into their towns," Ruby Routon said. "They thought we were the scum of the earth."

As a result, Routon said the transient communities formed tighter bonds. But by 1961, the Routon family had enough of this rootless existence. They pulled up stakes and moved to Cape Girardeau to stay.

Wed to the river

At that time life changed for the Routon family, and it was indicative of a general shift in river life. Ted Routon continued doing construction work on the river -- on the Mississippi instead of the Missouri -- but now his family stayed in one place while he worked aboard the boat for a month or two at a time between months when he would be off work and at home, much as it is now.

Now river couples essentially lead double lives. The men on the boats are usually confined for about 30 days at time with 10 other crew members, each instrumental to the operation of a multimillion dollar tow of 28 to 36 barges, each carrying about 1,500 tons of cargo. With the skill required to get a tow that size down a fluctuating river, Schwettman said the men cannot be bothered with worries from home. That's where the river wives step in.

Taking care of the children, the pets, the house, the lawn, the cars, the bills and anything else from the book of honey-do-it-yourself lists, the river wives hold down the house. During the other six months out of the year the roles change. Schwettman said the husband now home reassumes the head of the household. Schwettman said it is the wife's new responsibility to support the husband and help him unwind and transition smoothly to spending 30 days at home on land. But that seeming normal life at home can be shattered at any time with one ring of the phone. That's because as much as river life has changed over the years, one maxim has held true: The boat comes first.

"That boat was always No. 1," Ruby Routon said of her late husband. "If you don't go when they call you, you don't have a job. It's that simple."

Many a river boat man has left crying wife and children at birthday parties, ball games, graduations and on vacations to catch the boat. Schwettman's brother-in-law was called away just as his wife, Carolyn's sister Sharon Niswonger, was undergoing a C-section at the birth of their first child. When the boat calls, the man has to answer.

That's a fact Schwettman learned at least twice: Once from her father, again from her husband, Jim Schwettman.

Carolyn Schwettman met her husband a few years after moving to Cape Girardeau. He was 25 and had hardly ever left Cape Girardeau. But a month after they were married, her father -- by then a boat captain -- hired Jim as a deck hand. Forty-two years later, Jim Schwettman is still a river man, captain of a company boat and tow.

Early in their marriage, Jim worked on the river as many as four consecutive months. To take advantage of the fact her father was captain, Carolyn would actually join her husband on the boat when he was in the area. She'd also travel all over the region to meet her husband when he knew where the boat would stop. Driving dirt-covered river roads that weren't on any map, young Carolyn would often get lost in remote areas of Kentucky, Arkansas or Illinois trying to find the rendezvous point. Afraid and alone, she would sometimes have to rely on the help of strangers to find the place where her husband was to dock.

But when the Schwettmans' started a family of their own, these meetings diminshed. In the early days, the only means of communication between home and the boat required Jim to jump on an outboard and call his wife and daughter from a store in a nearby town. These beginning family days were and still are the most trying times in the life of a river wife.

Coping with loneliness

Carolyn Schwettman's father told her long ago that your life is what you make it. So when her husband was gone, she kept busy raising her family. But when her only child, Cyndi, was grown and out of the house, keeping her mind occupied in her husband's absence became more of a chore.

She started working at a lumber yard. She joined a card club, then a ceramic class and a garden club. But she couldn't maintain constant membership in any of these because when her husband came home she wanted to spend every minute she could with him before he was again called away. When he was gone, friends and family members often neglected to invite her to parties or to go on trips because she was alone and they were couples.

Carolyn remembers one Fourth of July she spent alone in her Scott City house. Jim was on the boat, her mother and sister were out of town, the lawn was mowed, the house was clean and she had no invitation to any cookouts. She had resigned herself to watching some television and going to bed when she heard the chirping of a cricket in the house. She never saw it, but she sat for hours listening to it. That irregular high-pitched din was finally broken by a phone call from Jim.

"I told him about the cricket, and I told him, 'You know what Jim, I haven't killed it because it's the only living thing around to keep me company.'"

After that, Jim bought her a dog.

Carolyn now runs her own business, Carol-Cyn's in Cape Girardeau, with her daughter. But she still has nights when the longing for her husband brings her to tears.

"You never get used to it," she said.

That's why she's back at Riverside Park waiting for Jim's tugboat, the Elizabeth Dewey, to pass by Cape Girardeau.

When it appears around the bend, she immediately recognizes the 47-foot high white boat with its black smokestacks and black trim, towing its load southward. As it approaches Carolyn and the grandchildren, she can make out the form of an older man dressed in a polo shirt and jeans with a tuft of white hair atop his head, speaking into a bullhorn receiver.

"Chel-sea, Clay-ton. This is paw-paw," Jim calls over the horn from the deck, waving as he and the boat pass the jubilant children. "I love you."

Smiling, he then quickly directs his attention to his wife who stands and waves.

"I miss you," he calls to her. "I'll be home soon."

As she watches the water bubble up from beneath the stern of the Dewey Elizabeth, getting smaller as it floats south, Carolyn feels a rush of pride, love and admiration for the river and her husband on it. But she also feels the pin prick of loneliness forcing a tear down her cheek as she watches him fade away. Finally he's gone.

"So near, yet so far away," Carolyn later said. "You never get used to it."