[billhilly]

Howie, your "clack clacking" up the Tennessee River as a boy strikes me at the heart. Many days as a boy I stood on the bluffs in Hickman, Kentucky watching the towboats move massive numbers of barges up and down the river. One of the places I stood watching was behind the library, just across the street from the elementary school where I attended the earliest years of school. From the books checked out there I was familiar with many of the towns and cities along the Mississippi, the river that flowed beneath those bluffs.

Fifty or sixty miles east of there grew the massive dam that turned the Tennessee River into one of the country's largest lakes. I hope your boyhood, like mine, included passage through the locks at Kentucky Lake, outside Gilbertsville, Kentucky.

[Howie]

I remember a double-lift lock along there, Wilson, or something like that. It had a 90 foot total lift that was spooky when you got to the top and looked down.