On the Valley Transporter, I came on watch one night at midnight. Not finding Mayfield in the engineer's booth, I went looking for him. He wasn't in the lower engine room, so I walked down the starboard side of the boat to check the rudder room.
I found him back towards the stern, where we had a sort of built up railing between the walkway and the river called the bull rail; it was about two feet wide and three feet high. He had a pile of knotted laundry sitting on the rail, and he was beating on one “object” with the biggest ball peen hammer we owned.
Turned out that these were his pants that he had been running through the laundry while he was on watch. They were mostly dry, but the legs had been tied in knots... And not just a single knot, but multiples, and they were so tight that he was having one hell of a time getting them undone with that huge hammer. Not being entirely cruel (hey, I had to work for this guy), I did what I could to help. We ended up getting the knots out of two of the three pairs of pants. There was no hope for the third pair... He went up to the second deck to his quarters, and I went back to the engine room. He left vowing to "get" whoever did this, but I already had a pretty good idea of who the culprit was.
Towards watch change time, I was in the lounge when Floyd walked in. He saw me, and was grinning. I said, “What did you do to Mayfield's pants?” So, he told me...
Mayfield had come into the lounge with his dirty laundry the evening before, headed to the laundry room. (It was a small room just aft of the lounge on the starboard side.) Floyd waited until Mayfield had the washing machine going and had gone back to the engine room. He went in, and removed the wet pants from the washing machine, and took them out on the head deck of the boat.
The head deck is where the work gets done when we build tow (put the barges together), break tow (take the barges apart), and face up (connect the boat to the tow). There's very heavy duty equipment out there to do that work. There are electric winches that are used to connect the boat to the barges, and electric capstans that are used with a lock line to pull barges together so that the barges are held tightly while the deckhands are lashing them up with steel cables and turnbuckle ratchets.
These two capstans each had a ten horsepower, two speed electric motor driving it, and this is done through a gearbox that lowers the speed and substantially raises the pulling power. Floyd had taken the pants, tied the first knot in them, and then, using some handy line tied to the loose end of the pants legs, had used the capstan, on low speed, to pull the knot tight. Back off, tie another knot in the pants, tie the handy line to the free end of the pants legs, use the capstan again to pull it tight, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat until all three pairs were tightly knotted, and then throw them in the dryer on high heat...
Mayfield was not a quick study. He never did figure out that if he simply treated people decently, they wouldn't do these things to him. The only change in behavior was that after that, he stayed near the laundry room the whole time his clothes were in the washer, and when they were done, he took them back to the engine room to dry on the handrails, where he could watch them till they were dry, and gathered up. 😀
