July 25, 2001
Cozy Quarters, Ample Plumbing, Riverfront View...
By Bruce Nixon
- LEO
When you reside on the Ohio River, and we do mean on the Ohio River, your ears soon learn to track the comings and goings of the other folks on the water. The occasional cigarette boats that sound like descending aircraft as they swoop down the channel. The throaty bounce of the jet skiers, like baritone chainsaws, skinning fretfully over the chop. The rise and fall of a speedboat engine, like a stuttered soliloquy, and the regular slap of its hull as it crests the waves. The even, monotonous hum of a towboat emerging in the distance, never rising or falling, passing with an unvarying hiss of wash and then fading slowly as it pushes its load down river. Each sound travels distinctly across the surface as it rides the river breeze, penetrating the calm flutter of the waves that tickle the shore and tap against the side of your boat.
But this is just the traffic. Your neighbors are never more than a few feet away. Think of a row of apartments with windows in the adjoining walls, not just at front and back. And of course there are those folks who can be downright informal when nature calls. You might notice a guy standing near the back of his boat, watching nothing in particular with an attentive attitude that can mean only one thing. But if you do use the head, forget privacy, not when the walls are this thin. Anybody in earshot knows exactly what you’re doing. And the mayflies? Can you imagine like maybe six bazillion bugs alighting on your back porch, at the same time? The bees can be nasty in the fall, too. And you landlubbers out there, when was the last time you had to scrape zebra mussels off the bottom of your car? And floods … we’ll get to that.
This, friends, is houseboat life along our little stretch of the Ohio.
We could also mention the excursions to Cincinnati when Jimmy Buffet performs there. Hundreds of houseboaters turn out, clogging the river with their bulky craft. Or the weekends at Grassy Flats. Or the sociability among people who share this life, and have done so together for years. Or the feeling of coming home at the end of the day to a place that is like no suburb on earth, and the balmy, river-smelling breeze at dusk.
“Love the water, always have,” said Bill Kramer, a contractor who has a home in Clarksville but spends his nights in a houseboat on the Kentucky side of the river during the season. “Everybody’s lived here for a while, so we know each other pretty well. You either help ’em out or kick ’em in the ass, whatever’s needed. Good friends.”
At that moment, Kramer was standing on the grassy lawn by the dock in front of his houseboat, replacing a handle on a rowboat-sized inflatable dingy. He held up two tiny vials of adhesive: “Twenty bucks. But you got to have ’em. I’m telling you, houseboating’s a disease.” He put strips of duct tape over the handle to hold it in place while it set and then shrugged philosophically, a big white-haired man who looked as though he’d been around the track a few times. “It’s always a getaway. When I come out here, work’s over. It’s time to sit back and relax. It’s a great spot. I got a nice view. And the marinas are as hot as hell in the summertime.”
The slips behind him, which extended for several hundred yards along a piece of riverfront known as Waldoah Beach, or Key Waldoah to the several dozen houseboaters who dock there, are definitely not a marina. They lie just east of the Water Tower — the peak of the tower is visible through the trees — in a setting that most people would regard as at least a tad unorthodox. After you turn off River Road and follow a narrow asphalt lane across the broad river fields, you come upon a row of handsome little homes among the heavy trees. Most of them were built many years ago as summer cottages, and their owners sublet the slips from May through October to the houseboaters, many of whom are longtime Waldoah veterans. Each slip has hook-ups, and on most weekdays you’ll find perhaps a dozen houseboats lined up there, snug against the river currents. But this is a hardy breed of
houseboating, more bohemian than the marinas, which are off the river, generally well-appointed and well-protected. You get the feeling that if the marinas are like condos, the river anchorage is a campground. Or to put it another way, you are now off the beaten path.
“You do have diversity, that’s for sure,” said Mike Muse, an electrical contractor who shares a 70-foot Monticello with his wife, Jackie. The boat is smaller than an apartment but larger than a motor home, with an ingenious open floor plan that belies the idea that houseboats must be cramped. “There’s always something going on.”
“It’s not a marina, and that’s why we like it,” Jackie Muse agreed. Their slip has a homey touch, with plastic chairs scattered in a loose circle around the dock, a grill, and a row of tomato plants that look pretty satisfied with the riverfront soil. “But it’s the people that make it interesting.”
Suddenly the boat started rocking like mad. Something big had just passed on the river. The sound of the waves against the hull was more agitated, too. As I looked around, Jackie Muse smiled knowingly: “You get used to it. We don’t even feel it anymore.”
“It really is a lifestyle,” her husband said. “We were already involved in boating, and we did this after we went into our own business. We were putting in more time, and this is only 15 minutes from the office. It’s 2 1/2 hours to a lake. Who can do that every day? No matter how busy we get, we can still come here.”
“Most houseboaters are party people,” Jackie added. “You won’t find too many recluses here.”
“That right,” Mike said. “I remember seeing 600 boats at Buffett one time. Really. For houseboaters, Buffett’s as big as Thunder.”
“But it’s a whole different crowd, of course,” his wife said.
Jimmy Rakutt is an anesthesiologist. He and his wife Shelly live with their two kids in a large boat several slips down from the Muses. This is their residence during the season, and when winter arrives, they move their boat to a marina for the winter and themselves to an inland dwelling. This is typical, actually. For some, like the Muses, the houseboat is a residence and they continue to live aboard while it’s in the marina for the winter, but most folks have a “real” house, too. Either way, it’s the rare houseboater who remains on the river during the winter, and none at Waldoah Beach: bitter winds, extremely powerful currents, and ice floes and large debris in the water all make for a hazardous season.
“I grew up on the river,” Rakutt explained. “It just gets in your blood, I guess. My parents’ boat is right next to us. I’m fortunate that my wife acclimated herself to this.”
Shelly, who happened to be sitting nearby after sending the kids off to another part of the boat, rolled her eyes. Not unhappily, it seemed.
“It’s an odd assortment of people,” Jimmy continued, “but that’s the river. It’s an escape that’s close. And the water is fabulous.”
“I don’t stay on the river,” said Bill Ryan, an advertising salesman at
WHAS-TV whose older-model maroon and white boat sports an Irish flag that snaps in the taut breeze. “I’ve got my camp on the river and it floats. I’ve stayed on the river a lot, but now I come for cookouts with friends or for the weekend. It’s a fun life. But it’s not my home.”
This isn’t roughing it, exactly. As you make your way along the dock, you’ll spot boats with cable television hookups and telephone lines. A few have little satellite dishes on their roofs. Some are online. Cell phones are always in evidence at gatherings. But it isn’t just a vacation, either.
The boats carry their own water supplies and generators, so they can go out on the river, and a boat like the Muses’, with a keel hull rather than a flat bottom, is designed especially for the strong river currents. It’s not just a lake boat. But it also gets about a mile per gallon of diesel fuel, and when the tanks have a 900-gallon capacity, well, a trip to the pumps is never the casual fill-up that us car-bound folks take for granted.
Then you have the zebra mussels, little critters that gather in fist-sized clusters on the bottom of the hull. They are not native, either, having arrived just six or seven years ago after making the long trip from Michigan, undoubtedly in quest of fairer waters, and they have been a mixed blessing at best. Although each one processes about a gallon of water per day and they do seem to be helping to clean the river, they have a way of getting into the intake ducts below the waterline of the boats. (This has been a problem for the Louisville Water Co., too, since the mussels also get into the ducts that draw the city’s water supply from the river.) Some boats now have a hull coating that discourages the mussels from hopping on, but they are not mussel-proof, by any means.
“You can’t let them go too long,” Mike Muse said. “We have to clean them off pretty regularly. Usually we make a day of it. We go someplace where the water is clear and fairly deep, so we can get underneath with scuba tanks. Then you can take them off pretty easily with a plaster drywall scraper.
“But you never want to let your maintenance go too long, not with these boats.”
And the mayflies. I knew something was up one evening when I arrived at Waldoah and they started diving onto the car windshield even before I’d come to a full stop. They peppered the sides of the houses and landed on my clothing, only to flit off again in an instant, brownish bugs with long bodies, almost like dragonflies, and short, transparent wings. But they formed a clotted mass on the backs of the houseboats, which looked from a distance like something spilled over the sides of the vessels.
Seems they hatch pretty much all at once, live about 24 hours, and have no purpose in life other than to provide feast days for the fish and birds in the area. They arrive about four or five times a season and are gone again the next day.
Make an offer
No one knows exactly how many houseboats are currently afloat in the United States, but at the Houseboat Association of America, which happens to be based in the unlikely location of Idaho Falls, Idaho, they figure the number of houseboaters at 100,000. While interest in houseboating appears to be on the rise, the vast majority of houseboats are land-locked, which means that they’re found on lakes. And as it turns out, the second and seventh most populated houseboat lakes are in Kentucky — Lake Cumberland and then Dale Hollow. (For the record, Utah’s Lake Powell is No. 1, while Lake Shasta, in Northern California, is No. 3.) Lake boats generally have flat bottoms and are not really equipped to handle the currents in the big rivers.
A survey conducted by Houseboat magazine reveals the following statistics about houseboaters:
66 percent are between the ages of 41 and 61.
88 percent have annual incomes exceeding $70,000.
66 percent have college degrees.
75 percent own their boats.
48 percent plan to buy another one in the
near future.
Which reminded me of something Bill Kramer said when I asked about a boat for sale at the nearby Louisville Turners dock: “Every boat here is for sale. Just make an offer.” It sounded like kind of an inside joke, but at the same time, few at Waldoah were on their first houseboat. Most, in fact, had stories about starting with smaller houseboats and working their way up.
Louisville, however, does have an unusually long history of houseboat culture, which more or less began with the construction of the McAlpine Lock and Dam in 1921. The combination of a sizable population and the large slackwater pool created by the installation of the dam proved ideal to houseboats. This was helped along in 1936, a year before the big flood, by the construction of the
Louisville Municipal Harbor, off River Road in the eastern part of the county; indeed, some vintage boats can still be seen there.
Houseboats have received a lot of bad press lately after some kids died while swimming from them. According to the Waldoah Beach boaters, this is strictly a lake boat problem, and in all likelihood the result of inexperience and inattention. Lake houseboats have become popular vacation rentals, and when the boats are overcrowded they get mighty warm, so people often crank up the generators to keep the air conditioners running. Meanwhile, the kids continue swimming around the platform area at the back of the boat, which is also the location of the exhaust pipes. Many boats are now being retrofitted with aerial stacks to eliminate this situation.
So the river boaters are a tougher breed. But as it turns out, few have undertaken those fabled adventures that us landlubbers might imagine for them — the great trips down the Mississippi to the Florida Gulf Coast. The cost of fuel has something to do with it. But then again, have you ever watched a houseboat out in the channel? Would you walk to New Orleans? Who’s got that much time? The Muses once did an upriver trip to Portsmouth, a distance of about 250 miles. It took nine days.
Learning what the river can do
These were quiet July days. Despite regular rain during the preceding weeks, the level of the river was normal, the water muddy, a pale brown like coffee with milk. On several occasions, I stopped by Waldoah Beach to find it all but deserted. A cool, steady breeze carried a slight odor of musk and the water lapped against the shore. No one was out as the houseboats rocked against the waves, their ropes creaking. Most of the boats were closed up and I’d been told that when the drapes and blinds were pulled across a houseboat’s windows, its occupant did not wish to be disturbed, so I didn’t bother to knock. The lawns that rose from the boats to the houses above them were green and thick, and as the water gently slapped the hulls and pilings, the place seemed so tranquil that you could quickly forget the city just a few miles away.
Already I’d discovered that when I told someone about the Waldoah houseboats, they tended to conjure an image of makeshift vessels constructed from plywood and sheet metal. Shantyboats were once a familiar sight on the river, of course — Wendell Berry’s account of the life of Harlan Hubbard is a shantyboat tale from an earlier time — but houseboats as we know them now became popular in the late 1960s, and they have only continued to evolve. If few of the boats at Waldoah Beach seem truly luxurious, none are makeshift.
But on these peaceful afternoons, you could also forget that the river is not always a calm home. In late May, after some of the boats already had moved from their winter quarters in the marinas, the water was halfway up the lawns and full of debris. The docks float, of course, adjusting to the level of the river, but intrepid houseboaters still had to use their small boats to get ashore. Beer runs were made judiciously. Boards were used as bridges between the boats, since only one boat had access to the land. Indeed, the dates and levels of various flood lines from years gone by are painted on the side of one of the houses nearby, a reminder of what the future inevitably holds for those whose choose to live along the river banks.
On a previous evening, Jackie Muse remembered the 1997 flood, and how she had to take a small boat several hundred yards down the river and across a flooded field, while the houseboat remained stranded by the high water. They were still in a marina at the time, but at Waldoah Beach, the water had risen to near the tops of the houses. The current was strong, so she had to watch for large debris — trees, parts of houses, stuff like that.
“Now last year,” she said, “we didn’t have any big ones.”
The Muses had been joined on this particular evening by Ray and Marcia
Reisert, who live in the boat adjoining their own. The joke is that Ray, a technician who works on the slot machines at Caesars, never comes off the river.
“People who don’t have any association with the river have no idea how many floods we actually have,” Marcia said. “And they don’t realize how bad it is. You can watch all the TV news you want, you still won’t get it. And the other thing is, there is lighter flooding, where the water might be up on the grass there, and they don’t even cover it. But if you’re down here, you soon learn what the river can do.”
“Last year we had one pretty good flood,” Jackie recalled. “I had to take the little boat out to get to the airport in time. That was interesting.”
Now why would someone voluntarily put up with that?
“I don’t know,” said Fred
Rakutt, Jimmy’s dad, who had come aboard with his wife, Mary, to join the conversation. When he shook his head, the gesture seemed to suggest that such matters are beyond words and do not even need to be discussed. Fred began boating on the Ohio River during the mid-’50s, and even though he and his wife are retired, they continue to spend summers on their houseboat. Mary still swims in the river every day, as do their grandkids.
“One time on the river and it gets inside you,” Mary said, with the same note of mysticism regarding the river that I’d already heard from some of the other houseboaters as they attempted to describe their affinity for the watery life. “You can’t get it out.” She paused. “But the people are different here. They’re really nice people.”
There were other stories told about life at Key
Waldoah, and Fred recalled the day his grandson announced that he’d finally hit the side of the next boat. Fred knew that the boy wasn’t talking about baseball. Everybody laughed appreciatively. It was one of those anecdotes that seem to capture the boating life.
Contact the writer at
leo@leoweekly.com