Before He Had a Son to Teach

The Mississippi does not care who you are when you first meet it. It asks nothing about your ambitions, your fears, or the man you hope to become. It simply moves — wide, brown, and indifferent — and it waits to see whether you will stay or go.

Terry Inman stayed.

He was young in those photographs. Young in the way that is almost painful to see once you know everything that comes after — the decades of work, the licenses earned, the men he would one day teach to read a river the way he had once taught himself. In this image he is just a deckhand, lean and unfinished, standing somewhere along that great water that would come to define the shape of his life. He is not yet the man his son Kevin would know. He is not yet the captain, not yet the teacher, not yet the father. He is only a young man who looked at the Mississippi and decided it was worth the effort.

There is something quietly astonishing about photographs taken before we were loved by the people in them. They show us a version of a person that belongs entirely to themselves — before the children, before the years of accumulated responsibility, before the soft authority that comes from having earned something hard. This is Terry Inman at the beginning. A deckhand learning the language of locks and currents, of towlines and tides, of the slow muscular logic of moving cargo on a river that does not forgive carelessness. He was making something of himself, though he may not have had the words for it that way at the time. He was simply working. Simply showing up. Simply refusing to be the kind of man who gives up when the river pushes back.

On July 29th, 2024, Kevin brought his family to Grafton, Illinois, where the Illinois River opens into the Mississippi and the bluffs rise gold and green above the water. He brought Kelli, and their three boys — Ezra, Bodhi, and Holden — boys who carry their grandfather's name in their blood without ever having been old enough to fully know him. Terry had died in 2020, and grief, as any family knows, does not follow a clean schedule. It surfaces in unexpected places. It surfaces, sometimes, on the banks of the very river where a man once proved himself.

Kevin stood there with his sons and looked out at the same water his father had once worked, and the distance between then and now collapsed for a moment into something bearable, even beautiful. The Mississippi still moved the way it always had — indifferent, ancient, unhurried. But it held the memory of Terry Inman in it the way rivers hold everything they've carried: invisibly, completely, and without end. The boys would grow up knowing that their grandfather had started here with nothing but willingness, and had become, through years of steady effort, a high captain who trained others to do what he had done. That is no small thing to leave behind. That is, in fact, exactly the kind of inheritance that cannot be counted or divided — only carried forward, in the way a family stands together on a riverbank and looks out at the water and understands, without quite saying it, that they come from someone worth remembering.