Iowa Roots

Jack Libbey: Transcript

My name is Jack Libbey. I'm from Lansing, Iowa, in the beautiful northeast part of the state. I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, about two hours away. And then after I finished high school, I moved up to Lansing, Iowa. One reason I moved up here is because I spent a lot of time on the water when I was younger, with my family in the houseboat. We had relatives up in this area. And I really, really enjoyed the Mississippi River, and I wanted to be closer and live closer to it.

I knew since I was about 10 years old that's what I wanted to do. When I saw my first towboat go down the river, I thought, "Wow, what a great life that would be! I could drive boats for a living and keep my feet propped up.” What I didn't realize, though, is half the time they are standing up in a nervous wreck; it's hours and hours of boredom interrupted by a few moments of sheer terror.

You know, some of the tows that we push up and down the river through here are 1200 feet long. And if you put that in perspective, that's 200 feet longer than an aircraft carrier and three hundred and some odd feet longer than Titanic. So here we are going through a windy, twisty river. It keeps you on your toes.

I suppose if you want to get a river man kind of graveling the wrong direction, you can call his towboat a tugboat. And a towboat is not a tugboat. A towboat is designed specifically to push barges up and down the river, and it has a square bow. A tugboat docks ships and pulls ocean barges. It's pretty much a common characteristic for everyone to call us towboaters tugboaters, but that's a very, very big misnomer.

The best part of the river is being up high in the pilothouse, and just being out on the river, listening to the birds, watching the people, the bald eagles, the wildlife. The river always changes, no matter what level or what time of day or what time of year. It's a new season almost every new week, and it's just the change, and it's just never-ending excitement. You never know what's around the next bend, even though you may have been around it a thousand times.

One of the traditions on the river, whether it is daylight or dark, when you meet another towboater, as you pass, you always wave with both arms above your head, back and forth, and that's the river hello. And even in the middle of the night, you'll turn the pilothouse lights on to do the same thing, and, which is—. Everyone in the pilothouse likes their darkness, but you will turn on the light for the—to meet the other boat and wave hello. But the ironic part of it is, out at sea, to do the same thing, that's a distress signal. So I guess we just constantly are in distress on the river.

Blue herons—the legend on the river has it that when a river boat pilot passes on, that their soul comes back in the form of a blue heron. And that if you—on a foggy night, or a dark night, or even an unfamiliar part of the river, if you follow the herons from a—or as they lead you up the river from snag to snag, or from obstruction to obstruction, the uh, once a pilot will take care of you. Of course, my biggest problem is the fact that over the 30-some years as a pilot, I've probably not made other pilots all of them happy. And I'm sure that some day, if I follow the old heron legend, that it may be someone that I disappointed. And he may not point out the right snag or obstruction to me.

Now, another one, we were out on the river the other day, and my daughter, when I saw a heron, and he kept trying to hide behind the tree, and she says, "Well, Dad, that's kind of unusual because usually they like to show off." I said, "Yeah, that's probably some old pilot that still owes me money."