River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (7 page)

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.

T
HE STARS
had hardly thinned to vacancy when I heard a rumbling engine and Pilotis call out, “Cap’s leaving!” It wasn’t the worst way to meet dawn because we so hurried into our frigid duds I barely felt the discomfort. We didn’t mind he’d chosen not to alert us before getting the motor yacht under way, but we did mind our thoughts of his heated cabin fragrant with fresh coffee and his hot plates of eggs and pancakes.

Pilotis stumbled about hauling in our frosted lines, and I fumbled the tardy
Nikawa
upriver and in behind Cap who, it seemed, was almost hoping to leave us behind and dash our chance to get through Lock Thirteen where we’d end up trapped till the season opened; perhaps he harbored irritation at my not having accepted the
Doctor Robert
now laboring in our prop wash.

The land through that portion of the Mohawk was little farms between small stands of timber, the sunrise bringing all of it into the colors of early spring. After the lock, we passed between the Noses, Big and Little, a break the Mohawk forced through the Adirondacks, an opening at least as important to the westering of America as the Cumberland Gap, for without it the Erie Canal would have been significantly more difficult to build. Even today, betwixt the proboscises run two railroads, two state highways, one interstate, the Erie, and the river.

We again proceeded ahead of the others to find the water quiet but for a lone canal-tender doing maintenance. Along one isolated bend we came upon, although we could hardly believe it, an animal once the most widely distributed in the Americas and today among the most elusive and mysterious: a crouched cougar lapping at the Erie before bounding in high arcs toward the north forests, its long tail whisking the icy brush. Pilotis: “That’s something, if you’re lucky, you see once and never again. Not in our time anyway.”

Four miles west of the Noses is “the pot that washes itself,” a translation of the Algonquian name Canajoharie; the “pot" is a surprisingly circular depression several feet across that gritty, swirling currents have cut into the rock bed of Canajoharie Creek; people drive out just to watch it work. The village is close enough to the canal to allow a small boat into the mouth of the stream below the old BeechNut chewing gum factory, and travelers can tie off and walk to Main Street and on down between a couple of blocks of stone and brick nineteenth-century storefronts all the way to the intersection with an old-style traffic signal at the center, the thing called “the dummy light.” I once asked the mayor why that name: “Because it stands in the middle of the street.” Said Pilotis, “Have you got a better Canajoharie story?” Not really, I said, except for that fellow here—the man who thumped his little boy’s full belly to see whether he could eat more watermelon and who sold me a history of the Mohawk Valley and said, “My wife lives her days like forgiveness is the best revenge, and she’s forgiven me day in and day out for ten years.”

The forty miles of canal from Amsterdam to Little Falls was easy running through softly cambered terrain of wooded hills that become larger and more deeply timbered as they recede from the Mohawk Valley northward. Only ten miles away they rise to become the Adirondack Mountains, a tract big enough to clean the slow wind that rode over us on its way down along the great Appalachian corrugation. In several places the canal berms are low, and we found good views across the narrow valley. Here and there, Interstate 90, the New York Thruway, came within a few yards of the Erie, and drivers waved as if we were locomotive engineers, and we saluted, since their Thruway tolls underwrote the operation and maintenance of the State Canal System: we could boat across New York because they drove I-90.

In the morning sun, Pilotis at the helm, I sat back, feet propped up, and watched the canalmen putting out buoys for the new season, a farmer turning a fallow field, buds on the frosted bushery beginning to thaw; but the willows and sycamores, playing the vagaries of a north ern spring more cautiously, had only bare branches as if winter had just gone, and that made me imagine we had a world of time to reach the snowmelt of the far Rockies.

Our conversation was doodling items of the sort people fall into when they are on water and content to believe they’ve earned an easy moment: as we passed Otsquago Creek I began rattling on how I liked American Indian toponyms and the manifold and usually fanciful translations attending them. I offered that Hudson was a better name for an automobile than a river and wished it were still the Mahicanittuck or the Mohegan; I said I wished the spelling of some upstate names looked more Indian: Skanektadee, Skoharee, Kanajoharee. After all, how much more native seems Tennessee than were it, say, Tenisi. And how about my state as Mazooree? “Not elegant.” It’s true, I agreed, one can carry even an Indian name too far. Take the Massachusetts lake due east of us, the one called, in its entirety, Char-goggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaug, the longest American place name I knew, now changed to, if you will, a watery and weak Anglo one: Webster. I didn’t actually speak the Algonquian name because my tongue couldn’t make it through those forty-three letters. I tried to recite a piece of old verse (which I here give correctly):

Ye say they have all passed away,

that noble race and brave;

that their light canoes have vanished

from off the crystal wave;

that mid the forest where they roamed

there rings no hunter’s shout;

but their name is on your waters,

and ye cannot wash it out.

We stopped at Fort Plain to wait for both Cap and the locktender, and we sat in the sunny welldeck and talked of whatever came to mind. I asked Pilotis what face of an American, other than a president or perhaps Ben Franklin, was the most reproduced visage. Pilotis cogitated. I hinted, Consider where we are. Pilotis ruminated. A New Yorker, I said. An answer: “Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill.” I didn’t think so and gave a punned clue: A man of the first water. Pilotis cerebrated. I said, The person carried a keg of Lake Erie water over this very route to pour it into New York Bay. Pilotis said disbelievingly, “DeWitt Clinton? Come on now.” I asked, Do you remember the little blue federal tax-stamps stuck to every pack of American cigarettes for almost ninety years? That face looking at the smoker was the Father of the Erie Canal. How many packs of cigarettes had there been in those years? Ten billion? A zillion? Sighing, Pilotis said, “This is what happens to people released from the necessity of mundane toil.”