River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (6 page)

Our enforced layover seemed to relax Pilotis and gave us time to work on our logbooks before we went to eat. After the meal, we propped back, and I talked about the creek—I never knew it to have a name—that ran near my boyhood home in Kansas City. One afternoon, when I was ten and messing about in it, I suddenly realized it wasn’t a dead end: that flow around my ankles actually went somewhere. Just like a road, it had a destination far beyond my sight. At home I dug into my father’s maps and discovered that the creek, no wider than I was tall, meandered into a succession of ever-larger ones, all leading to the Missouri River and on to the Mississippi, the Gulf, the open Atlantic. I determined to put a note in a bottle and launch it nearly from my back porch on a voyage to Huck Finn’s river, to New Orleans, perhaps the Mosquito Coast, or the mysterious Sargasso Sea, Casablanca, the very shores of the Sahara. I was woozy with a child’s excitement as I realized that nameless creeklet was the first leg of a long voyage to Cathay, the Coral Sea, the Arctic. The waters of the world were one! Water linked the earth! The street in front of our house ran to the ends of two continents, but that creek led to the darkest jungles up the Congo, around the Cape of Good Hope, to the Ganges and bathing Hindus, even to the mountains of Tibet. I began planning voyages and reading about far places, books like
The Royal Road to Romance
by Richard Halliburton. Our creek was a threshold beyond which lay the realms of poesy.

Looking around the battered tavern where we’d just finished pitiful plates of potatoes and cabbage, lifting a chipped mug, Pilotis toasted, “To the realms of poesy, matey.”

The next morning, we hoped the Erie Canal would be ready in another day, so we cast off from the small wharf on Rondout Creek, motored past the brick lighthouse, one of four remaining on the Hudson, and turned again upstream. The weather was fine and the water gave us only mild chop in a reach called the Flat. For the rest of the morning, the river showed us sand and mud shallows but little stone, and we clipped along, almost free of our greatest fear—underwater rocks that could abruptly end our voyage. As if an old tar, Pilotis sang pieces of song, some of them one chorus more than necessary, but I knew the river was at last full upon my friend.

By midday we reached Catskill and went up the tree-lined creek, a place not yet leafy, to hunt a beverage to go with our smoked shad. We found a winsome waitress named Rhoda whom Pilotis insisted on calling Rhonda, and, motioning toward me, said to her, “We have an unattached man here headed west in that boat tied up below. I’ll leave the expedition if you’d like to join him.” And she answered, “Last week I’da took you up on it.” We went back to the river, got under way, and I said, You, Mate, are not yet expendable, even for the lovely likes of Rhonda, but one more chorus of “Blow the Man Down" may change that.

But Pilotis sang on, three runs of the Beach Boys’ “Help me, Rhonda.” We passed under the town of Hudson high on the east bank and on to Coxsackie to our portside. As the ridges began to recede from the river, kills flowed down to expend themselves in the Hudson, and then the water widened into the turning basins just below Albany, and industry lay here and there along both banks. Not long ago, that stretch of river was so severely polluted a public hearing on the Albany Pool, according to one report, caused men to grit their teeth and women to leave the room. Today, with improved sewage and industrial waste treatments and increased monitoring by ordinary citizens, conditions are better, but still that portion, like much of the Hudson, is an unfunded Superfund site.

The state government towers of Albany show well from the river, and they reminded me of traveler Clifton Johnson’s comment near the turn of the century about the city: “One of its claims to distinction is the fact that it existed for over a century without a single lawyer.”

Near there, Henry Hudson found a warm native reception—among several other violent ones—during his brief exploration of the river he called Manhattes. After sharing a meal of pigeon and plump dog with the Indians, he wrote (in one of the few passages extant from his missing journal): “The land is the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon, and it also abounds in trees of every descrip tion. The natives are a very good people, for when they saw that I would not remain, they supposed that I was afraid of their bows, and taking the arrows, they broke them in pieces, and threw them into the fire.”

Four miles upstream we stopped for the night at Troy, the first of several cities we’d see that have turned their backs to the river. At the town dock we refueled and met up with the man who was to lead us, under orders from the Canal Office, through certain construction areas. He had good news, if we could trust it: the first lock would be ready early tomorrow. I did a happy little jig. With that prospect before us, I invited all hands to Brown and Moran’s brew pub, a few yards up the alley from the dock. In 143 miles, we had climbed only five feet above the Atlantic, yet the first river was all but behind us. Five thousand miles of water and weather lay ahead.

II

[Erie Canal packet boats] are about 70 feet long, and with the exception of the kitchen and bar, occupied as a cabin. The forward part, being the ladies cabin, is separated by a curtain, but at meal times this obstruction is removed, and the table is set the whole length of the boat. The table is supplied with everything that is necessary and of the best quality with many of the luxuries of life. On finding we had so many passengers I was at a loss to know how we should be accommodated with berths, as I saw no convenience for anything of the kind, but the Yankees, ever awake to contrivances, have managed to stow more in so small a space than I thought them capable of doing. The way they proceed is as follows—the settees that go the whole length of the boat on each side unfold and form a cot-bed. The space between this bed and the ceiling is so divided as to make room for two more. The upper berths are merely frames with sacking bottoms, one side of which had two projecting pins which fit into sockets in the side of the boat. The other side has two cords attached one to each corner. These are suspended from hooks in the ceiling. The bedding is then placed upon them, the space between the berths being barely sufficient for a man to crawl in, and presenting the appearance of so many shelves. Much apprehension is always entertained by the passengers when first seeing them, lest the cords should break. Such fears are, however, groundless. The berths are allotted [according] to the way-bill—the first on the list having his first choice, and in changing boats the old passengers have the preference. The first night I tried an upper berth, but the air was so foul that I found myself sick when I awoke. Afterwards I chose an under-berth and found no ill effects from the air. . . . The bridges on the canal are very low, particularly the old ones; indeed they are so low as to scarcely allow the baggage to clear, and in some cases actually rubbing against it. Every bridge makes us bend double if seated on anything, and in many cases you have to lie on your back. The man at the helm gives the word to the passengers. “Bridge!” “Very low bridge!” “The lowest on the canal!” as the case may be. Some serious accidents have happened for want of caution. A young English woman met with her death a short time since, she having fallen asleep with her head upon a box [and] had her head crushed to pieces. Such things however do not often occur, and in general it affords amusement to the passengers who soon imitate the cry and vary it with a command such as, “All Jackson men bow down.” After such commands we find very few Aristocrats.

Thomas S. Woodcock

New York to Niagara
, 1836

A
S 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, 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.