ShareThisWith photo/graphic: SH07F287RIVERREADER, SH07F288RIVERREADER
By TOM CHARLIER
Scripps Howard News Service
CARUTHERSVILLE, Mo. -- He makes his rounds with a steady gait and worn sneakers -- a lonely figure on a catwalk gazing at water that, like the world around him, is relentlessly passing by.
Wayne Lee, perched high above the Mississippi River, is carrying on a tradition he knows might be nearing an end.
He's 82 now, in the twilight of a long life shaped by the river. And his job -- manually reading the Mississippi's elevation and posting the stages on a signboard for barge pilots -- has been rendered increasingly obsolete by automated satellite stations, e-mail, the Internet, satellite phones and other trappings of a digital world.
"They're going to cut me out pretty soon, I'm sure," Lee said.
Still, just as he has done twice a day, virtually every day, for the past 50 years, he has driven to the bank of the Mississippi in this farming town 90 miles north of Memphis to read the river gauge.
At the end of a catwalk coursing through a noisy grain terminal, Lee unlocks a small box mounted on a rail. He then turns a crank that lowers a cylindrical wire weight toward the brown, swirling waters of the Mississippi.
When ripples tell him the weight has reached the water, Lee reads the calibrated gauge: 13.0 feet, it says on this warm June afternoon.
But as if to flaunt its technical superiority, the automated station in another box adjacent to the manual gauge blinks a more precise measurement: 12.99.
Lee, a retired county government employee who also does part-time work for local drainage districts, is one of 10 river-gauge readers along the Mississippi still employed by the Corps of Engineers' Memphis district. Eight others monitor smaller tributaries.
"It's something to get me up in the morning, get me out," Lee said of the job.
For all his troubles, he is paid $3 per reading, or $6 daily. Other gauge-readers get anywhere from $2 to $5 per reading.
"The majority of them are older people who are on some fixed income. This is a good little supplemental income for them," said Andrea Williams, hydraulic engineer for the corps in Memphis.
Despite all the electronic and digital advances in recent years, the service provided by the gauge-readers remains vital in monitoring rising water during floods and potential navigation problems during droughts, she said.
The automated stations, with all their electronic gear, can break down and are vulnerable to vandalism.
"In that event, we rely heavily on the readings from our readers," Williams said, adding that she knows of no plans to phase out the gauge-readers.
Nevertheless, the signs, or dayboards, on which Lee and other gauge-readers post river stages with huge metal numbers aren't nearly as important to commercial navigation as they were in the decades before computers and satellites.
"Honestly, I don't really utilize them," said Dwight Shinley, captain of the towboat Dennis C. Bottorff, reached by phone while on the river near Cape Girardeau, Mo.
Shinley's employer, Ingram Barge Co., e-mails extensive river-stage information to its boats each day. Pilots don't have to wait until they see the boards to know how much water is beneath them.
"We get all the river stages electronically, as well as the Coast Guard broadcasting them on the air. ... We know what the gauges are from one end of the river to the other," Shinley said.
Few, however, could know the river as well as Lee. For him, the gauge-reading job is a continuation of a lifelong connection with the Mississippi.
Lee was born in a tiny farming community on the Tennessee bank. But the family lost their home to the historic 1937 flood, during which his father, Alf Lee, loaded them and their belongings onto a cabin boat and moved them across the river to Caruthersville.
Alf Lee worked as a lamplighter on the Mississippi -- cleaning, fueling and illuminating lights mounted up and down the river bank as navigation aids. When he died in 1948, Wayne Lee assumed his father's job.
Lee continued to tend to lights along up to 22 miles of the Mississippi even after electric bulbs replaced the oil lamps in 1959. By that time, he also had been reading the river gauge at Caruthersville for two years.
Lee was the last lamplighter left on the Lower Mississippi when the Coast Guard phased out the job in 1982.
After a half-century of reading the gauge, Lee hopes that job, too, doesn't become a victim of modernization.
If reliability counts for anything, he shouldn't worry.
Except for rare out-of-town trips, such as for the birth of his only grandchild in Nashville eight years ago, Lee never misses a day. Not even icy conditions during winter, when he has to crawl down the slippery catwalk and leave the gauge box unlocked to keep it from freezing shut, can stop him.
"I don't miss a reading," Lee said. "I've been sick, but I come down here and read the gauge."
Lee lives about a mile from the river with Sue, his wife of 56 years. He spends much of his spare time fishing in the Mississippi.
Lee said he'll continue reading the gauge as long as he can.
"I love the river," he said. "I've been around the river all my life."
(Contact Tom Charlier of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., at www.commercialappeal.com.)
