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His name is Daniel. It’s the name he was christened with, the name known by all of our sisters and brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles, family and friends. However, during the years he worked as a deckhand on towboats that transport thousands of tons of cargo up and down the Mississippi River, his name was “Chicago.”

I drew this portrait of him when we were on board the Twain Marengo, a twin-engine 5,600 horsepower vessel on its way upriver from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to St. Paul, Minnesota. I was a guest passenger; he was working as part of a crew of nine bargemen. (By the way, the vessels are called ”towboats” even though they push the barges ahead of them rather than pull them behind.) On this voyage, the Twain Marengo was towing/pushing 15 barges loaded with 22,000 tons of coal, road salt, wheat, paper, corn and tinplate. Each barge measured 33 ft. wide and 200 ft. in length. When they were all yoked together with steel cables and cabled to the Twain Marengo, the whole lot measured nearly a ¼ mile in length, longer than the length of the Queen Mary. And all of this tonnage of boat and cargo was pushing against the flow of one of the most relentless forces on Earth, the Mississippi River.

In spite of the massive sizes of the boat and the barges, a malfunction of one of the smallest components can shut down everything. In this watercolor, my brother is repairing a small part of one of the diesel engines. The painting is only a small memory of our time together on the River. I intend to write a longer story of that voyage. The first part, of course, will be an answer to the question: Dan, how in the world did you get the name, “Chicago?”

Once upon a time in our little town, there was a house that was always dark. For as long as anyone could remember, no light was ever seen inside that place. Perhaps someone had lived there, maybe it had been a home. But that would have been long ago, beyond what still remained of our memories.

Once in a while, my sister and I could hear what seemed to be the sound of someone singing a lullaby. And one evening a cloud of green smoke floated out of the big chimney and saturated the air around us with the fragrance of orange blossoms. Now, look! A light!

“Wasn’t the house originally painted black?”

“No, it only seemed so because of the shadows of the forests that used to surround it.”

“How strange now to see a light appear!”

“Strange, oh yes. Now you and I can see things. Isn’t that the wreck of a boat in the parlor at the foot of the stairway?”

“I see it, it looks like something Viking, but maybe it’s only a ghost. It’s raining in there too. And aren’t those apple trees sprouting from the wreckage?”

”The apples are black. The walls are mumbling. I see holes in them and cartridge casings scattered everywhere.”

“There’s a young woman sitting on the edge of a bed with her face in her hands.”

“That must be a memory, sister. Look, now she’s on the bed, on her back. Wait, there’s something crawling between her knees. The room is getting darker. Wait, wait, there’s another. Two! Both of them little girls!”

If we were able to hover, if we could watch from above like angels, we would see a figure walking alone in winter along a river. She, or he, is not lost. At least not lost yet.

Blue open space above the water, sunlight in the west, melting snow, solitude, green mountains in the distance, deep forests close by, close around you, like an embrace, deep, thick, dense pines and fragrant cedars. No sunlight reaches the forest floors here, not now, not even when Spring seems to be so close.

From a space far higher than we can hover, a jetliner disappears. The walker hesitates, looks up to see contrails dissolve and hears the echo of the aircraft’s passing. Thoughts of distance, time, empty space. Thoughts of someone missing, a someone living on the other side of the world, the someone living inside the walker’s own heart.

A chorus of little birds and the croak of ravens rise from the trees. A fresh wind is coming in from the North. Another storm coming? Ears and nose grow colder. Half an hour passes. Snow crunches underfoot. Twilight will be brief. “Where am I?”

Logic says: “Follow the flow of the river. You are not Lost.”

An older voice from memory murmurs:

“Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.”

(“Lost,” by David Wagoner.)