This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Imagine what the view from Rock Island must have been like just before the Civil War, when some 1,500 steamboats a month passed the island, carrying immigrants north to Midwest farms, and produce from those farms south to St. Louis markets. The Mississippi River steamers ranged from small, basket-ball-court sized packet boats with paddle wheels in the rear to 300-foot-long football field models with two side wheels, the most haunting and romantic mode of transportation ever devised.
With decks stretching out far beyond the flat-bottomed hull, the steamboat looked as though it was floating on air, inches above the water. Riding on the hull, the larger boats rose up four stories like a tiered wedding cake on the water, the bride and groom replaced by tall smokestacks, the decks wrapped in rails decorated with gingerbread filigree like the cake's icing.
I asked an old-time Rock Islander Fred Kahlke of the famous Kahlke Boatyards, where he got the designs for his beautiful boats. "Off good lookin’ women," Fred replied. He told me there were no plans. A builder laid out a sheet of paper the size of the boat and drew the hull freehand. The boat rose out of his own imagination deck by deck without the benefit of engineers or committees.
Yet the intuitive and mystical beauty of the steamboat was fiercely practical. Mere inches here and there might make the difference between a boat that would sink, and another that paid for itself in two trips. The flat hull and the paddles allowed for the boat to travel the shallow water of the Mississippi. The wide decks allowed for extra cargo. The pilot house had to sit four stories high to allow the pilot to see far enough ahead to steer the boat back and forth with the channel, the smokestacks were tall to keep the smoke and sparks from the boat and the passengers.
That was the steamboat's secret: form and function were one, its beauty the desperate beauty of nature and necessity and not surface cosmetics, the chrome trim, that passes for beauty in so much of our culture.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
