Full Metal Planet Manual Woodworkers
My friend Buckley McAllister has spent his life around tugboats in New York Harbor, and he belongs to one of the historic families that still rule his industry—the Crowleys, the Morans, the Fourniers, the Bouchards, the Wittes, the Watermans, and the Danns, among others. Towing ships is a dynastic business, hard to establish and harder still to give up.
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It’s built on deep allegiances and cutthroat margins, and its inner workings, especially in Buck’s stories about his own McAllister clan, are full of intrigue and successionary drama: fistfights, lawsuits, power struggles, and disinheritances; raging, intemperate fathers and sullen, rebellious sons. Everyone loves a tugboat, it seems, but no one more than tugboat owners, and that love can twist a business in ways that are hard to foresee. New York was once the tugboat capital of the world, with more than eight hundred boats crisscrossing its harbor in the nineteen-thirties. The McAllisters were part of the so-called Irish Navy, with its patchy fleets of steamboats, diesel tugs, coal barges, and smaller fry, schooling on what was once known as the porgy grounds, around the Whitehall Ferry Terminal.
The boats were manned by brothers, uncles, cousins, and more distant kin, their blood ties a bond against the petty thieves and extortionists of the waterfront. Tugboats were the great go-betweens of the shipping industry, connecting ocean to port and port to river. They docked ships, towed barges, salvaged freighters, and generally went where other vessels couldn’t go. About eight hundred million tons of cargo are still moved by tugboats in the United States every year, but in recent decades the traffic has gradually shifted south in search of cheaper anchorage and offshore oil work. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Jacksonville now each handle tens of millions of tons every year, and Houston takes in more cargo than New York and New Jersey combined. But one of the true towing capitals of the world, Buck says, is southern Louisiana.
Morgan City sits on the shores of the Atchafalaya River, an hour and a half west of New Orleans, sheltered from hurricanes by forty miles of marsh and cypress swamp. Its skyline is a skeletal framework of oil derricks and cranes, and its waters seem to breed tugboats like eels on the Sargasso Sea. The tugs tow the derricks, loaded on barges, out to the Gulf of Mexico, then bring them back again after twenty or thirty years’ service, to join the mountains of rusted scrap along the river. The first offshore well was dug by Kerr-McGee, in 1947, but the boom didn’t begin in earnest until the late nineteen-seventies, after the Arab oil embargo.
“This place was no different than the Wild West or a gold strike in the Yukon,” one tugboat captain told me. “It was a boomtown without any morals. You’d get friendly with someone in a bar and wake up the next morning on a boat heading into the Gulf. Shanghaiing was a reliable trade.” Things have calmed down since then, but only intermittently, and the Cajuns still try to keep their business in the family. One local phone book lists numbers by nickname as well as by given name—Jimmy (White Bean) Sonier, Michael (Possum) St. Tierre—as if it were still a sleepy fishing community and not a global hub. “We invented this stuff here,” another tug captain told me.
“I can go into any airport in the world and meet a coonass coming or going on oil business.” About five miles east of Morgan City, below a set of locks that connect the lower Atchafalaya to the inland waterway along the coast, there is a small bridge and a floating casino called the Amelia Belle. In their shadow, two tugboats can sometimes be seen docked on opposite shores. One belongs to Latham Smith, the owner and operator of Smith Maritime; the other belongs to his daughter Rachel and his son Dominique. Both sides of the family specialize in salvage and ocean towing, among the most dangerous and unpredictable lines of tugboat work, and they sometimes bid for the same jobs.
But whereas Latham is wealthy, with a fleet of tugs, barges, and a giant derrick crane named for his second wife, Dixie, his children have only the one boat, bought with the help of their mother, Elsbeth. The two sides haven’t spoken to each other in five years. The Smiths are from Florida originally, of Irish and British extraction, but the Cajuns have accepted them as their own.
Latham is something of a legend in the towing world. When he and Elsbeth first took to the sea, in the late sixties, they seemed like characters from a picture book: the little tugboat family, island-hopping across the Caribbean, homeschooling five children as they went. Together and separately, Latham and his children have weathered cyclones on the Atlantic, towed barges up the Amazon, and circumnavigated the globe, even as the industry around them has grown ever more regulated and safety-conscious. “They’re like the mad scientists of tugboating,” Buck told me.
Georgia State License Plates Examples. “They take on projects that most others are afraid to do.”. Tugboat captains have always had to make their own fortunes.
They’re the symbionts of the shipping trade, in constant search of a host. When the first steam-driven tugs appeared, in the early eighteen-hundreds, they were an insult to the art of navigation. Sailors who’d spent their lives tacking up narrow inlets or into secluded bays saw hooking onto a tug as an admission of failure or frailty—like an old man taking the arm of a small boy. As late as 1835, the tugboat historian George Matteson writes, a little brig called the Galen spent two weeks fighting her way up the Mississippi, trying to get from the Gulf to New Orleans.
A tug could have taken her there in not much more than a day. The early tugs were expensive to staff and almost comically difficult to steer. A twelve-hundred-horsepower boat might burn twenty tons of coal in a day and require ten men to shovel it. Every time the tug needed to reverse direction, the engine had to be stopped and re-started, by which point the boat might well have run aground. Wheelhouse and engine room were only tenuously connected. To change course or speed, the captain had to send his orders down to the engineer via a system of gongs and bells threaded through the boat, as if phoning a foreign country. The busiest tugs, Matteson writes, averaged more than five hundred bell commands in an eight-hour shift.
On trickier maneuvers, the rate could rise to six per minute. Latham’s survival instinct has no clear genetic root, nor does his equal and opposite tendency to throw himself into harm’s way. His father was a small-town lawyer in landlocked central Florida, his mother a music teacher. His older brother and a younger sister were lawyers, his youngest sister had a Ph.D.
In psychology, and Latham’s failure to follow suit was a deep disappointment to his father. As a boy at St.
Andrew’s preparatory school in Sewanee, Tennessee, he excelled in mathematics and track, but mostly dreamed of the sea. Before getting shipped off to St. Andrew’s, at the age of eleven, he’d made a kayak out of wood and canvas. He dubbed it the U.S.S.
Idiot, in honor of his friends’ opinion of him when he began the project, but it worked just fine. Six years later, he was halfway done building a catamaran when Yale offered him a scholarship. “That ruined all my plans,” he says.
“It was like coitus interruptus.” New Haven, as Latham recalls, was “a cold, wet place, with people telling me what to do.” He arrived in the fall of 1957, at the height of the Eisenhower years, when wearing anything but Brooks Brothers or J. Press could get you labelled a beatnik, he says. “They had, to put it politely, the establishment mind-set, which does not allow for certain adventures of the mind and the body.” Latham was a “fidgety” youth, by his own account, prone to spending hours in the library studying anything but the assignment at hand. By the end of his freshman year, he claims, he had the lowest grade-point average at Yale. “It takes more effort to do that than to be nonchalant.” He took a leave of absence and lived with friends at Harvard, where he rode a Harley and did odd jobs for the mathematician Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. Then he returned to Florida, met a girl—she was playing the organ in a chapel one evening, and he followed the sound till he found her—got married, and went back to New Haven for one last, failed year at Yale, before heading south again.
Florida, in the early sixties, was still mostly undeveloped, its swampy backwaters a haven for rednecks and hippie dropouts. Latham became a little of both. He began by driving a bulldozer for his father-in-law near Daytona Beach, clearing land for I-95, tomato farms, and watermelon patches. Then he moved to the Everglades, on the Gulf Coast, where his wife, Elsbeth, took a job as a fire spotter in a lookout tower and Latham worked as a stone-crab fisherman. They had two girls in four years—Rachel in 1961, and Rhea in 1965—and always seemed to be short of money.
Yet, in the flickering frames of their home movies from that period, their lives seem suffused with joy. Elsbeth has hip-length red hair and a pale, freckled face lit with a determined innocence.
Latham is lithe and deeply tanned, with shaggy hair and a satyr’s crooked grin. His brother, Spencer, was a civil-rights lawyer in Miami who’d done work for Allen Ginsberg and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, and he gradually drew Latham’s family into his circle.
Elsbeth attended the March on Washington in 1963, and when King came to Florida the following year she and Latham joined him for the protests in St. “He was very much anti-establishment,” John Patton, who first met Latham in the late sixties, remembers. “I had just come back from Vietnam— I’ve got a coffee cup that says, ‘The only Woodstock I knew in ’69 was an M-14.’ So I didn’t have much use for long-haired leaping gnomes.” Yet Latham had more grit than it seemed. In 1968, the family moved to Miami and he began to do repair work on tugs and other boats. (He had taught himself welding by then, as well as metal fabrication.) The tugs struck him as by far the more interesting vessels.
“With a ship, you have to go the straights and narrows. Tugs can go up the nooks and crannies,” he says.
“With tugs, you can change your mind and do what you want to.” He took careful note of what needed repair—where water collected and timbers rotted, engines failed and hulls were unstable—and what didn’t. “I stole every good idea of every boat I ever saw,” he told me. Then he set about building a tug of his own. There was, to be a sure, a question of financing.
“I was considered to be totally insane,” Latham says. Cand Un Barbat Iubeste O Femeie Serial Coreean. “And insane people don’t borrow money easily.” A tugboat isn’t cheap to build. Latham’s had to be as powerful as a freighter and as maneuverable as a Zodiac. It needed cables, winches, and a fully equipped galley, a high wheelhouse for peering down at barges and a heavy keel for staying upright in storms.
A good boat could cost half a million dollars in those days—a tenth of what it would now—yet Latham had little savings. Worse, he had no blueprints, no templates, no tug-building experience aside from his repair work. Although he scoured local bookstores and libraries for plans, he found them of only moderate use. “Damn few naval architects live out of sight of land for a year,” he says. “They just interact with college types and read formulas.” Instead, he followed his own instincts and observations. “I guess I would compare it to how a bird knows how to build a nest,” he says.
“You fly around and get twigs, and it just stays up.” Every line of a tug’s design entails a compromise of some sort: the larger the propellers, the deeper the draft; the stronger the engine, the greater the fuel consumption. “For everything you want, you have to give something up,” Latham says.
Harbor tugs that spend their time docking ships and shuffling barges can sit low in the water. But to navigate Lake Okeechobee or the inland waterways of the Florida Keys, or to snake his way to any of a thousand cheap inland anchorages worldwide, Latham needed a boat with a flat bottom that drew less than seven feet of water. “It’s a huge part of profitability, the shallow draft,” he says. “And it’s more fun.” He needed twin propellers to negotiate the twisting inlets along the way, and a high bow to breast Atlantic swells. He needed berths for two or more crewmen as well as his family, and at least a few of the comforts of home. When the boat was done, Latham intended to live on it. “Frankly, I was skeptical,” Elsbeth, who is sixty-nine, told me recently.
“Anyone would have some doubts about putting their family on an untested boat.” For the next two years, Latham did his repair work by day and most of his tug work at night. “I built it when most people sleep,” he says.
He began with three thousand dollars and “a big pile of dirty steel,” scavenged from sites around Miami. The three-quarter-inch plate for the hull came from some discarded oil tanks on Biscayne Boulevard. The framing was from a demolished warehouse by the interstate. An old telephone truck, fitted with a boom, served as a crane, and an empty lot along the Miami River as a shipyard. Latham did much of the work with Hans Peter Newe, a German sailor who’d come from Mexico on a sailing ship and decided to stick around.
Newe was a gifted woodworker and shipwright. He spoke seven languages, read Shakespeare in Spanish, and had been a stunt double for Marlon Brando in “Mutiny on the Bounty,” Elsbeth says. “They had a symbiotic experience, building that boat,” she told me. “Peter had the carpentry, Latham had the ability to scrounge the money and bend the steel.” [cartoon id='a14832'] Theirs was a strange, hybrid beast of a boat. It had a curved, pointed bow like a Viking ship’s and a slab-sided wheelhouse of marine-varnished wood.
It had a hobbit-hole bedroom for the girls, tucked behind the galley, and a piano bolted to the floor in the captain’s quarters, for Elsbeth to play. (Later, a stuffed moose head hung above the bed, slowly losing its hair to the tropical humidity.) The railings were of exotic purpleheart, the panelling of angelique, the floorboards of American pine, laid on wide-set joists to give them more spring and make them easy on the feet. The propellers were oversized and driven by two five-hundred-horsepower Caterpillar engines—both still running, forty years later—and the hull drew less than six feet of water.
“You take that design to a shipyard and ask them to build a tug and they’ll laugh you out of the door,” John Patton told me. But Latham went on to build three more like it, each substantially larger and more versatile. When I asked Patton why more builders didn’t copy Latham’s design, he laughed. “A lot of people don’t think they’re as functional as they really are. Besides, it’s his signature, and nobody wants to copy Latham Smith’s signature. It’s like Elvis Presley wearing his collar up.” They finished the tug in the spring of 1969, heaving it onto a pair of steel skids and down into the green Miami.
In a Super 8 film of the sea trial, Allen Ginsberg is along for the ride, the wind tossing his already tousled hair. He and his partner, Peter Orlovsky, had become fascinated by the tug—Orlovsky had even written a poem about it—and Latham, for all his suspicions of Eastern intellectuals, had taken to Ginsberg as well. “What I was doing was strange to the maritime community,” he told me. “But Allen had worked in the Brooklyn shipyard, and he would come and ask me questions in a very thoughtful and gentle way, to get me to verbalize what was maybe visual but not verbal. To me, it was like I’d had a vision, and Allen wanted to penetrate that veil.” In the film, they stand side by side in the wheelhouse, both wearing thick black glasses—an homage of sorts, in Latham’s case, since he was rarely seen in them again—grinning into the sun like two small boys on a Ferris wheel.
If nothing else is conventional about the Smiths’ story, the last part is. In an industry ruled by family-owned businesses, inheritance struggles are inevitable. The McAllisters, for instance, have had a succession of family skirmishes over the years, starting with Buck’s great-great-grandfather, whose second wife sued her stepson for ownership of the tugboats. Buck’s great-grandfather went on to fire his son for converting a steam tug to diesel (a prescient move, as it turned out); his grandfather and great-uncle spent twenty years wrestling for company control; and his father nearly lost the tugs to a businessman brought in to save them. “The current era is one of uncharacteristic peace,” Buck says. Other families have had similar issues.
Nine years ago, in Portland, Maine, an old-time captain named Arthur Fournier sold a fleet of his tugs to the McAllisters. The two families were close: Arthur’s eldest living son, Brian, was named after Buck’s father, and the McAllisters kept him on as president of the operation in Portland. Nevertheless, last July, Arthur, now seventy-eight, launched a new company in the port. He has since undercut his son’s prices, swiped one or more of his clients—depending on which family you ask—and sued Brian for defamation of character. The McAllisters, for their part, sued Arthur for unfair competition and breach of contract. Neither Fournier, in any case, is ready to quit the tugboat business.
“What would you rather be?” one tug captain asked me. “If you had the opportunity to be a tugboat captain or a bank teller, what would you choose?” Yet the footloose spirit that once sent sailors to sea has been slowly starched out of the business—mostly with good reason.
Beginning with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in 1989, regulations have ratcheted up with each high-profile accident: in 1993, when the tugboat Mauvilla, lost in fog, hit a bridge in Alabama, sending an Amtrak train plunging into the Whangaehu River; in 1996, when a barge towed by the tug Scandia ran aground in Rhode Island, dumping nearly a million gallons of oil into Block Island Sound; in 2002, when two asphalt barges towed by the Robert Y. Love struck a highway bridge in Oklahoma, dumping eight cars and three trucks into the Arkansas River. “Used to be you could get away with just about murder,” another tug captain told me. “We’ve entered a new age.” Most tug captain’s licenses now require at least three years’ training at sea, if not a four-year degree from a maritime academy. Background checks, safety inspections, and drug and alcohol tests are mandatory, as are certifications in radar, firefighting, first aid, and social responsibility.
As a result, in the past decade oil spills have decreased by more than eighty per cent compared with the nineteen-nineties, and crew fatalities and injuries have been nearly cut in half. [cartoon id='a14622'] The new severity has its good points, one McAllister captain admitted.
“I get into some pretty cool shit, running mock drills for catastrophic events. Who’s hiding a bomb on a pier? What if someone overpowers a tug?” Yet the tramping days of Latham’s youth, when a sailor could spend his shore leave exploring the markets of Bangkok, the bars of Panama City, are gone. Towing a thousand-foot container ship will always be an awe-inspiring experience—the ropes as thick as tree trunks and spools the size of houses, like children’s toys for giants, and everything dwarfed by the immensity of the sea. But, in the meagre hours between just-in-time contracts, today’s crews are mostly confined to their ships, at slips sealed off from land by high fences and razor wire.
“People say, ‘Oh, you’ve travelled so much, you’ve been to so many beautiful places!’ ” Rachel told me. “And I think, Yeah, I’ve been to all the industrial backwaters of the world.”.