Lee Hendrix recounts stories of his river days while navigating the Mississippi in 'Peep Light'

Midwestern accents gave way to a variety of southern drawls as the towboat chugged down the Mississippi River, but one particular accent required a bit of interpretation.

"It took me a while to figure it out," Lee Hendrix said. "We would talk to people on the radio along the river. Once we hit a certain point in Louisiana, we'd talk to people with these accents, and they would use the wrong tense and say things like, 'Brought yourself here.'"

Hendrix can't help laughing at the memory. He was freshly graduated from high school when he first boarded a tugboat in his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. 

He hadn't traveled much and thought working as a deckhand would earn him enough money in a month to travel to Europe. He also thought living and working on the country's mightiest waterway would be an adventure.

Well, Hendrix wouldn't make it to Europe until 11 years later. That's how long he worked as a deckhand, a job that would change his interpretation of adventure. Life on the river wasn't all Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It was day after day of challenges, hard work and hazards.

That's not saying there weren't adventures to be had. If there weren't, Hendrix wouldn't have had stories to fill his new book, "Peep Light: Stories of a Mississippi River Boat Captain."

This collection of nonfiction stories was released in January by University Press of Mississippi in Jackson, featuring a mix of tales from his days as a river captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with those of his days commandeering the Delta Queen steamboat, along with casino boats.

And it's not an exaggeration to label Hendrix as the peep light in his title — which is the first lesson you should learn before joining him on that towboat in the first chapter. The peep light provides a steady blue light as a point of reference for the towboat's wheelhouse as it steers the barge along the river.

As narrator, Hendrix provides the point of reference as he guides readers through everyday life as a deckhand. He recounts prospective near-death experiences to experiences with people and places along the way. Though Hendrix is long retired, he hasn't strayed far from the river, making his home in Lake City, Minnesota, which stands atop a descending bank along the Mississippi.

"Right where I live, the river is wider than it is in Baton Rouge, believe it or not," he said.

Which is unusual, because the river's width narrows in its northernmost region.

"It's wide in Lake City, because we've got a natural lake that's been formed by the Chippewa River, and the deposits from the river have created a natural dam," Hendrix said. "And we're on what's called Lake Pepin, but it's still part of the Mississippi River, and it's 2 miles wide here."

And it's from Hendrix's Lake City home where he recounts the stories in his book, whose first chapter begins with a story of him looking back at his life on the river.

"Last month, he heard a couple of deckhands refer to him as 'that old man,'" Hendrix writes. "He chuckled to himself in the blackness of the night, then muttered, 'Yep, I am, but with a young man's heart. Still in search of something that I may never find.' You have to talk to yourself a bunch more than you did back then because nobody wants to come up to the pilothouse and talk at 2 a.m. like they did years ago. Some of them have said they want to become pilots, but most would rather watch TV or play iPhone games than sit up there in the dark with a 70-year-old man. Staying up while off watch to talk to the pilot was how he had learned. Some things change; others don't."

One of the things that hasn't changed is how both towboats and the Delta Queen company's steamboats navigate the hazardous routes beneath some of the 142 bridges connecting the east and west sides of the country.

The most perilous is Baton Rouge's Huey P. Long Bridge, locally known as the "Old Mississippi River Bridge" on U.S. 190. Hendrix, in "Peep Light," writes that "professional navigators refer to it, not affectionately, as the combat zone."

Why? Because, Hendrix explains, the navigator has three spans from which to choose: the Baton Rouge side, which is widest but with the swiftest current; the preferred span on the Port Allen side, which is closed off by a sandbar in low water; and the center span, which, at 623 feet wide, is difficult to line up.

"Next to the Vicksburg Bridge, the Upper Baton Rouge Bridge is the most clobbered bridge on the Lower Mississippi River," Hendrix writes. "Still, most of the unsavory reputation of the bridge has little to do with its navigational oddities. It does have to do with the person it was named after."

Of course, he's talking about Louisiana's governor-turned-senator, Huey P. Long.

Hendrix provides a brief history of Long before delving into the legend of Long's ordering the bridge to be built at low clearance to prevent oceangoing ships from going past Baton Rouge. 

Hendrix later met riverlorian Clara Isenhour, who was told by the son of the bridge's designer that the real reason the bridge was built low was because the federal government didn't want to maintain a 40-foot channel above Baton Rouge.

"When asked, historians in the Old State Capitol Building in downtown Baton Rouge said the same thing," Hendrix wrote. "Too bad. Another good legend blown out of the water."

Speaking of legends, Hendrix's own stories throughout the book sound like something out of a great novel or movie. But they're better — they're real.

His journey begins with the naive aspirations of a teenager, twists and turns through daring feats and near-death experiences, and gives readers a Mississippi River view that can be seen only from a river captain's perspective.

It's a river he knows by heart, so much that when he went to work for the Delta Queen Steamboat Company he had to draw the river and all of its bridges from memory.

And he did.

"I had to get what was called a first-class pilot license, and I had to go into the Coast Guard and, from memory, draw the river," he said. "And I drew it from New Orleans all the way up to St. Paul, putting in all the bridges and the dimensions on the bridges and the buoys and the lights, the navigation lights and the sandbars and everything that could cause you some trouble. So yeah, I would say I know the river fairly well."

But the river clearly is more than just a navigable route for Hendrix. He knows her personality, her quirks and her dark moods.

"There was no moon up around Morganza that night, but soon that wouldn't matter," he writes. "In less than an hour, he'd begin to see the lights around St. Francisville, the 'Exxon glow' above the tree line that foreshadowed arrival into the 'combat zone' at Devil's Swamp, then on down to Baton Rouge. He'd have to switch to VHF radio to Channel 67, ending the relative gentleness of the night. In the meantime, he'd keep following the peep light."