Mia's Castle
Spaces of Forgetting and Remembering, Man Thinking, the Riverman's Lexicon and
“The land that used to be My Father’s America is still a beautiful land. Heartbreakingly beautiful.” - from Field Notes
I took a picture of what is part of an old water pumping station in Newport, Kentucky. It reminded me of a castle. A single brick tower, the kind that you can imagine having an oubliette1 or one of those tower cells with no door, the kind you’d find in a fairy tale, with a rickety walking bridge from the tower to the shore. I remember sending to my family’s group chat without comment. I wanted to call it “Mia’s Castle”, after my granddaughter who is too young to understand why I’m gone. All she knows is that Papaw isn’t there. She knows I’m off on what she calls “Papaw’s Boat. She sends me short videos on my daughter’s or my wife’s phone, and when she signs off, she calls me “sugar.” I know she loves and misses me, and she’s not great with change. But she also plays, telling me when she sends videos with my wife that I don’t love her Amma2 because I’m not there. She doesn’t mean it. I think she’s picking up early on the fact that my family is a deeply sarcastic one. Her mother was pretty fast at picking up on sarcasm when she was that age, too.
Sometime after 1115 hours, the forward generator shut down, temporarily killing the fuel pump. I close the fuel valves on the burners and get ready to light off again when Dan switches to the aft generator. If the generator goes down, we can continue on for about 15 minutes before there’s not enough steam to operate the engines. Most of the time, it only takes a couple of minutes to switch over. In the event there’s something wrong with the aft generator too, we could switch over to the steam turbine generator, which is noisy and more fuel inefficient than the Cummins gensets. If need be, I can use the transfer pump we use to move fuel from the bunker to the day tank to transfer fuel to the burners. One of the reasons the Belle of Louisville is still operational is process redundancy. When one system goes down, there’s another way to do the same thing until the inoperable system is brought back online. Dan applies this same logic to training engineers; everyone in engineering is cross-trained so that we can step in where needed. This is also done on the deck side. The mates make sure people are cross trained on different positions and the good mates move people around so they get experience.
