Word: boatmen
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...sewage spilled into U.S. waterways, a drop in the slop bucket compared with the daily deluge from archaic municipal "treatment" plants, not to mention the wastes from waterside factories. Unorganized boatowners, though, seem an easier target than major polluters. The upshot is a flood of laws and regulations that boatmen consider arbitrary, capricious, discriminatory and unenforceable...
Most of the time, that is. The preliminary trials are a time for making mistakes, a time to work out the kinks in boats and boatmen. In the opening races between the brand-new Valiant and the refurbished Intrepid, there were kinks aplenty. On the second leg of the first race, for example, Valiant was threatening to take the lead when her genoa jib ripped. In the next race, Valiant was troubled by the wash from the 125-boat spectator fleet, a faulty backstay and a spinnaker sheet that snapped with a sharp bang, causing the sail to flap wildly...
...meaning. The Iranians expressed the same thought with different words: "Two midwives will deliver a baby with a crooked head." So do the Italians: "With so many roosters crowing, the sun never comes up." The Russians: "With seven nurses, the child goes blind." And the Japanese: "Too many boatmen run the boat up to the top of the mountain...
Rising in the Rockies and meandering listlessly through four states, the silt-strangled Arkansas River has brought devastating floods and fascinating legends to the hapless people along its banks, but not much else. Boatmen in the 1840s stopped near Conway to soak up liquor and lie in the sun until they swelled like toads, giving Toadsuck Ferry its name. At Dwight Mission, the Cherokee sage, Sequoyah, developed his syllabary in 1828, providing a written Indian language. Now Toadsuck Ferry is gone, replaced by a bridge, and Dwight Mission lies under the waters of a reservoir. Both are victims...
...waterway. Keelboats explored it in the early 1800s. By the 1820s side-wheelers pushed past the Fort Smith sandbars. Before going to Texas, Sam Houston steamed up a tributary in Oklahoma to wed his Cherokee beauty. Henry Shreve, founder of Shreveport, in 1833 eliminated 1,500 navigational snags, but boatmen still grumbled that the river's "bottom is too near its top." By the 1870s, the snags, sandbars and erratic flow were stifling traffic along the Arkansas, and when rails spanned the river at the turn of the century, even the steamboats vanished...