A company named Buchanan owns barges and tugs. It leases the barges out all up and down the river to people who load stuff on them, and then it hauls them somewhere else and unloads the stuff. Above what's the waterline when the barge is fully loaded, each of them was painted a bright color in its youth: red, blue, yellow, green, purple. Below, they were all black. Now all the colors are faded and soft, and both above and below the waterline everything's streaked with rust. One of my favorite early-morning sights happens every couple of weeks, when a tug pulls a line of empty barges -- six, today -- up the river to drop them various places to get their next loads. They ride very high, identical in shape, with BUCHANAN in white on their faded colors and their rusty hulls showing. The tug, red and white with BUCHANAN on its side in black, rides ahead of them by about sixty feet and the whole parade moves slowly. The ferries and other boats have to manuever around what amounts to a block-long barrier; one ferry I saw today just had to sit and wait until the Buchanans moved out from between it and its dock. When I got to the park today they were coming into view from downriver; by the time I left the last one hadn't quite disappeared.