This is a part Iconic PassagesThe collection celebrates America’s vast and varied landscapes and the different ways that we travel through it. Read more here.
You remember that old song with the mule Sal? I would like to add a modern line: “I dropped a phone in the Erie Canal.” The original song “Low Bridge, Everybody Down” commemorated the beasts that pulled 30-ton barges. Albany to BuffaloThe experience that I draw on to create my song is what gives me the courage to sing.
This was the second day of the three-day paddle, covering 40 miles on the New York State Canalway Water Trail. As we paddled in a rented boat, a houseboat passed us by. The boat was modeled on canal packets of old, which were flat-roofed and squat in order to fit underneath the low railroad crossings. The captain had a sense of humor.
“No wake! “Slow down!” He yelled. He thought that our slow pace was funny. Then, distracted, I fell. my phone.
My photos, travel notes and interactive water trail map were all gone, along with my flight information, email confirmations, booking emails, and bank card. Lisa, a friend of mine, was sitting up front with her phone in her jacket. She’d witnessed similar disasters when paddling in New York Harbor on her outrigger boat. I felt like any other 21st century gal. I started my journey with such enthusiasm.
Day paddler by nature, I wanted to do a longer canoe journey. With its slow-moving current, the New York State Canal System seemed feasible. It was also the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal. DeWitt Clinton of New York, after a three-day journey of 363 miles over 18 aqueducts through 83 new locks and after a nine day voyage, poured Lake Erie into New York Harbor in 1825, just 38 years following the ratification of the Constitution. His canal pushed America westwards, opening up the interior for migration and trade. It also secured (then Podunk). New York CityMegalopolis is the future of.
But it also advanced the displacement of the land’s original inhabitants—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscarora of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Haudenosaunee do not see the Erie Canal’s engineering as a marvel. They view it as an attempt at genocide. I was interested in the Erie Canal’s complexity.
