The Pull of a Continent

AS IF IT SLEPT, the river lay quiet when we arose at dawn to wash up and then fire the motors to stir the water so that it seemed to flow again, and above the curious lines of the art moderne Green Island Bridge we assembled our little convoy that the Canal Office required. On the west bank of the Hudson was an old and yet still operating powerhouse, built by Thomas Edison, where Captain Schuyler Meyer awaited in his forty-two-foot motor yacht called a trawler, and we fell in behind, followed by Cap’s second vessel, the Doctor Robert. At the rear was a last-minute addition, a slovenly tour boat run by a grousing, jowly, slovenly man moving it west from its winter berth; he carried a reputation of trying to amuse tourists by using his loudspeakers to gibe lock tenders. Pilotis and I hoped to pull free soon of the sailing order, meeting up only when necessary.

The news was good: repair obstructions at the front of the Erie Canal were gone. We had lost only one day. The federal lock at Troy is the first—or last—on the Hudson, and it demarks the northern limit of tidal flow, the end of estuarial influence, as it does the farthest point Henry Hudson reached in 1609. There he determined the river was only that and not the imagined grand egress to the western sea. He turned the Half Moon around without knowing Samuel de Champlain just seven weeks earlier had descended by water from the north to within seventy-five miles of him.

We warily entered our first lock. Pilotis, on the bow, was a novice in canal procedures and edgy about casting a mooring line and missing a bollard to hold us fast in the swirling water that would fill the chamber. I was uneasy about wind spinning Nikawa as we slowed and lost steerage, so I came in fast, too fast. Pilotis’s first toss landed in the water. The second bounced off the bollard. Then the wind grabbed our stern as the third throw looped over just in time to pull us securely to the slimy walls. I went to the welldeck to hold the stern line. The huge gates groaned closed behind, covering us in the dusk of a deep well, and water began rollicking beneath Nikawa, raising her slowly from the dimness again into sunlight. Fifteen minutes later, the forward gates opened to let us proceed a mile north of the three mouths of the Mohawk River where, at Waterford, we came upon a sign with one arrow pointing right to the Champlain Canal and another left to the Erie. For the first time I felt the westward pull of the continent in spite of the flow against us, perhaps because we were now running in the proper direction—toward the Pacific.

 

The Erie Canal east, Troy to Lake Oneida, 133 miles

 

The Erie Canal, 170 years old that spring and in its first season ever without commercial barge traffic, is a marvel of nineteenth-century engineering, as travelers have remarked since 1825, but they do not commonly speak of its former 350 miles as a route of noteworthy beauty. Usually it’s little more than “a nice journey through pretty country,” and that’s accurate, although the eastern end, above Cohoes Falls, where the Mohawk River drops over a great rocky shelf, is a splendid scape of land, water, and canal. Bypassing the cascade is a stair of five chambers, once the greatest series of high lift-locks in the world, stretching across only a little more than a mile, a hydrological escalator carrying the sweet name of the Waterford Flight, and indeed, our ascent was like a gentle rise in a hot-air balloon.

The first lock on the Erie, despite incomplete repairs, was ready enough to let us enter. Pilotis looped the pin on the second try, and the wind, passing across the chamber rather than into it, ignored Nikawa, and we soon started up between the eroded walls. Unlike its river sections, the canal for some miles beyond the Flight is an excavated cut, narrow and intimate, trees overhanging the water, the current slight, the bottom without treacherous surprises. As we climbed the locks in thirty-three-foot increments, the view back toward the Hudson Valley opened to the Taconic Range, and on the distant eastern horizon Massachusetts and Vermont appeared to lift into view. When we topped out and entered the channel leading to the Mohawk, we had risen 165 feet in less than two hours, and at last the Atlantic Ocean truly seemed down. If high water or farther repair work did not stop us, we thought we could reach Buffalo and Lake Erie in five days.

The earliest Erie Canal, the one called Clinton’s Ditch, was, in its entirety, a slender, shallow, dug channel, but that old course in places is now a dozen miles away from the newer route. During subsequent reconstructions, engineers increasingly took advantage of lakes and rivers, especially the Mohawk, sometimes to the detriment of the natural waterways; Pilotis preferred the river sections, while I liked the canal cuts but, even more, the change from one to the other. When Nikawa passed under highway bridges, like Interstate 87 west of Schenectady, we motored along smugly free of striped concrete and truck mudflaps, and our sailor’s life was easy. Then came Lock Seven.

The wind blew directly upriver into the chamber, and as I slowed so Pilotis could secure the bow, a gust took the stern and in an instant we got shoved sideways to the chamber walls, and the driver of the tour boat (permitted to travel the canal early only because of our passage) called over his loudspeakers, to the interest of all those watching—a locking-through generally draws spectators—“What the hell are you doing!” I spun the props to complete our shameful pivot quickly, and with a stellar toss Pilotis got the line to a crewman on Cap’s trawler already tied to the wall, and we pulled in snug against her. To ease my chagrin, Pilotis said, “Sooner or later every rider gets thrown,” and stopped me from going to the welldeck to address the tour boatman’s supererogatory rhetorical flourish.

We proceeded on, into a long stretch of natural river, on past the Knolls Atomic Laboratory formerly manufacturing propulsion units for nuclear submarines, on beyond steep shale cliffs, then hooked northward where the Mohawk passes the arched stone remains of an aqueduct that once carried canal boats across the rocky river to easier passage on the opposite bank, on to Schenectady, the lightbulb city.

I told Pilotis of my visit there a year earlier when, at my late father’s request, I looked in on his elderly colleague Miss So-and-so whose quiet elegance time had diminished but not erased, now living alone, rarely leaving her house, a place desperate for light and fresh air. She set out a pot of thin tea and limber Saltines and was pleased with the company, but whenever our conversation paused, out of apparent habit she would lift the receiver of her rotary-dial phone, although it hadn’t rung, and hold it gingerly to her ear for several moments, then say softly, “Hello?” Waiting, then, “Anyone there?” Perhaps noticing my quizzical look after the fourth pickup, she said to me, “Just checking.” I nodded, and she added, “It doesn’t ring often, so maybe the bell doesn’t always work.” She mentioned Mr. Such-and-such whom my father had to give a pink slip years ago: “Yes,” she said, “he joined the Silent Majority.” I said, I had no idea he, of all people, had turned religious. She: “He didn’t turn religious. He died.” I see. “Yes, liquor finally took him.” How old was he? “Ninety-seven.” When I got up to leave, I mentioned my plans for crossing the country by water, and she asked would I go through Canada, and I said no, and she: “Yes, that’s probably good. When I think of Canada, nothing comes to mind.”

Cap had arranged to take aboard five students from old Eliphalet Nott’s Union College to let them see the canal still living its history. It was Cap, two years earlier, who had invited me aboard the canal tug Urger, nearly a century old, to show me the Erie. On occasion, he gave me the helm of the ponderous thing. One afternoon, moving easily along, I fell into a lull and almost missed a channel buoy and had to turn the clumsy boat so swiftly I came close to dipping her gunwales. Thereafter the crew called me Captain Zigzag, a name to go alongside real canal captains Crash and Aground. Given those choices, I didn’t complain about my moniker.

Schuyler Merritt Meyer’s lineage was this: a father who represented as both assemblyman and senator a silk-stocking district in Manhattan in the early part of the century; an uncle, George Bird Grinnell, the famous ethnologist, who once showed Sitting Bull the city and learned the great warrior liked nothing so much as elevators; a childhood chum of Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Archie. Cap was tall, balder than he preferred, a man who laughed more than he fumed but did both well, a fellow of means and generosity, a philanthropist who lived much of each year aboard his trawler anchored near Manhattan. He helped found SCOW, the State Council on Waterways, a nonprofit association working to preserve the history, character, and especially the operation of the Erie Canal, a noble endeavor because the waterway, its commercial traffic unable to compete with trucks and now gone, needed new reasons for continuance. Hope for its survival lay in boaters traveling it, discovering its history, and those expectations were behind the Canal Office granting us early passage.

A few months earlier, when Cap learned of my intent to cross the country by boat, he was seventy-three, struggling to recover from serious surgery, and about to founder on his sharpened perception of mortality. Within hours of seeing charts of our proposed route, he began to revive, even more so when I mentioned I was four months away from leaving but still had no boat that I believed could make the voyage. He talked vigorously about finding me a suitable craft on the East Coast. A month later he’d discovered a fat, heavy, wooden cruiser built for offshore water; it was charmingly eccentric, of a character to match Schuyler’s. He loved the boat, and I too admired it, as I did him, but I doubted its deep hull, cantankerous diesel engine, and the lease price. Even so, I thought long about it and came close to accepting. Then I declined. Annoyed, Cap bought the thing anyway, the very Doctor Robert then riding in our wake, and donated it to SCOW; to prove its riverworthiness, he decided to take it along much of our route, halfway across the United States to the head of navigation on the Missouri. I confess I didn’t like his plan of following us but assumed that in the long river miles beyond the Erie Canal we would find independence. Helping Cap on his two boats were four men good and true. The tourist tub notwithstanding, Pilotis and I convinced ourselves the convoy was an inescapable accommodation to Meyer and the Canal Office, a necessity we could somehow try to enjoy for a few days.

Near Amsterdam the students disembarked, and we went through the next two locks so smoothly I saw Pilotis wearing the Hell Gate Grin. The trick for novice venturers is to learn quickly enough before inexperience does a journey in; I optimistically reckoned that each day of survival, each league of fast education, increased our chances of completing the voyage.

Pilotis and I wanted to tie up for the night at a pleasant park near an abandoned brewery—Bowler’s—on the northwest side of Amsterdam, but Cap insisted we keep moving to where his plush trawler would have electricity and fresh water. To appease us, he let Nikawa leave the mandated sailing order and push ahead so we could gain a little solitude and time to look at the beautiful ruin of the 1841 aqueduct that crosses Schoharie Creek at Fort Hunter. Its fourteen arches, like something out of Roman Umbria, stood entire for a century until engineers, trying to prevent frequent jams of ice and driftwood, dynamited two of the pillars and so weakened the span that over the following years more arches collapsed, leaving fewer than half remaining from one of the finest structures on the old canal. Slide-rule men, never known for listening to people who have the longest experience with the country, would have done well to consider the Iroquoian meaning of Schoharie: “driftwood.”

Five miles west, across from Fultonville, we pulled up in Fonda to a high concrete docking wall that made clambering ashore from our low decks difficult. The village was a tired place, and we ate a tired Chinese meal, and bought tired ice cream cones at a tired filling station, and walked tiredly back to our bunks. It was my turn to sleep in the cramped forward berth. The temperature dropped steadily, and what little warmth I could muster condensed on the uninsulated overhead so that droplets spattered down on me much of the night. It was twenty-six degrees by morning, and we were loath to leave our sleeping bags and step into cold and damp clothes, so we lay waiting for sunrise to thaw the air.