This is a part of Iconic Passages, a set of tales celebrating America and the some ways we transfer by means of its huge and numerous landscapes. Read more here.
You know that outdated tune about the mule named Sal? I’ve a contemporary lyric to add: “I dropped my phone in the Erie Canal.” Like the authentic ditty “Low Bridge, Everybody Down,” which commemorates the beasts of burden that hauled 30-ton barges from Albany to Buffalo, my refrain is born of expertise.
It was the second morning of a three-day, 40-mile paddle on the New York State Canalway Water Trail. We have been making our manner in a rented canoe previous a string of canalside houses with pontoon boats tied to their docks when a houseboat got here chugging by. It was modeled after canal packet boats of yore, which have been squat and flat-roofed to match beneath the low railroad bridges that crossed the canal. The captain was a jokester.
“No wake! Slow down!” He yelled at us. Apparently, he thought our meager tempo was hilarious. That’s when, distracted, I dropped my phone.
There went my photographs, journey notes, interactive water path map, reservation emails, flight data, financial institution card. My buddy Lisa was seated up entrance, her cellphone safe in her jacket. She’d seen related disasters whereas paddling round New York Harbor together with her outrigger membership. I felt as misplaced as any Twenty first-century gal would possibly. And I had began this journey with such esprit.
A day paddler, I had at all times wished to take an extended canoe journey, and the New York State Canal System, with its sluggish present, appeared manageable. Plus, it was the Erie Canal’s 2 hundredth anniversary. In 1825 after a nine-day, 363-mile voyage over 18 aqueducts and thru 83 freshly minted locks, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton poured a keg of Lake Erie water into New York Harbor; it was simply 38 years after the ratifying of the Constitution. His canal pushed the new nation westward, opening the inside to migration and commerce and securing (then Podunk) New York City’s megalopolis future.
But it additionally superior the displacement of the land’s authentic inhabitants—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscarora of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee don’t consider the Erie Canal as an engineering marvel; they see it as tried genocide. I wished to ponder the canal’s complexity.
