River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (10 page)

The day began to gloom up as we passed Bushnell’s Basin and the old Richardson’s Canal House, a restaurant and inn and one of the most beautiful restorations on the Erie; had we been free of the convoy, we’d have pulled in for the night. We startled a couple of mallards into the air, and a bicyclist passed us on a biking-hiking trail that will one day cross New York atop the towpath. Rochester sprawl has metastasized into Pittsford, another affluent historic canalside town, where we traversed a section of fine houses that Pilotis referred to as holding “the homefires of the urbanities.” Then came rear ends of industries, parking lots, piles of rock and dirt—the usual sad unmitigations—but the wind rose and hit
Nikawa
and diverted us from further lamentation.

Lock Thirty-two held us for the convoy, then we entered the chamber first to avoid a shuffling for proper position. Perhaps we’d become cocky over our new locking expertise: I went in with enough headway to prevent the wind from working its wonted mischief, but our speed was too much for Pilotis to catch the mooring cable, and then the gusts had us, and in a trice they turned
Nikawa
sideways. As I cranked the wheel and struggled to realign, Cap started in over the radio at us, a flurry of impatience and a distraction I failed to brook when I heard for the third time,
“Nikawa!
What are your intentions?” Still well off the wall, I grabbed the transmitter and yelled, Cool it! You know very well the goddamn wind got us! A crackling, commodorial, and offended Cap said,
“Nikawa!
That is no way to talk over marine radio!” and he put his big trawler into gear and charged right in at us. Our bow got rocked toward the wall, close enough for Pilotis to snag the cable with the boat hook to pull us clear just in the nick. I respected Cap too much to say anything, but Pilotis hissed through the window, “Really, mate! You must stop harassing Admiral Hockle.” The name was a knotical wisecrack to settle me down. When I settled, I said, Lend the admiral our
AVOID IRRITATION
plaque.

Except by means of aqueducts, it would seem as impossible for a canal to pass through a river as for a river to cross a lake, but not far south of downtown Rochester, the Erie traverses the Genesee at nearly right angles, as one avenue does another. If the guard gates were open, we should likely be free of high-water problems on the rest of the Erie, and one more potential trap would lie behind. We waited in keen anticipation. The gates came into view, both of them raised, the way open.

Near the intersection of canal and river are several small, graceful bridges designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, spans that give elegance to the old laboring Erie. Beyond to the north we could see the high buildings of Rochester. West of the far guard gate we started into the Long Level, a sixty-four-mile stretch without locks, the first portion of it cut through an immense stone ledge once an ancient seabed. The shale walls, rising to eighteen feet, closed off any prospect other than the cloven-rock channel itself to create a claustrophobic trough, but they also blocked the wind, so
Nikawa
could move over smooth water. What potholes do to a highway, mild wind does to a river.

On the high north bank we saw two boys fooling in the brush, the bushes moving in that certain way, that guilty rustling of lads up to no good. Small splashes pocked the channel, rocks perhaps, but before I could get us to the other side, we were under the devilment, and we watched something big roll to the edge and fall heavily toward us. Pilotis yelled a warning, but
Nikawa
was helpless at canal speed to maneuver out of the way in time. A terrific splunge of water rose over the bow, rocked the boat, drenched the windows. Pilotis said, “What the hell was that?” Surfacing violently, like an angry god thrusting his trident from the sea, was an automobile wheel. Pilotis: “There but for the grace of et cetera.” Indeed. We averted what would have been a terminating disaster through no agency of our own, and I understood, more clearly than ever, that to reach the Pacific would take luck as much as preparation and prudence.

Near Spencerport we emerged from the miscreant Rock Cut only to catch the wind head-on, a bullying that beset us all the way into Brockport, and there we stopped. The convoy be damned,
we
were in for the night. Pilotis called for a room in a big Victorian house with knickknacks, whimwhams, gimcracks, and fribbles worrying every corner, shelf, and wall, but it was otherwise tranquil. At a canalside grill, I found myself sitting transfixed on the water until I realized I was trying to sail a barstool west, and I turned my back on the venerable Erie.

F
IRST THERE WAS
the soap salesman at breakfast, a man of ready and glad hand who asked but a single question, what were we doing in town, and when Pilotis answered, “Crossing the country in a little boat,” the drummer nodded and began speaking about the difficulties of “marketing store-brand detergents vis-à-vis name brands.” The meal done, he rose to hustle off to his accounts, and Pilotis said, “There goes a man whose curiosity never got the best of him.”

Second: after we walked down to the boat, we learned the truth of the rumor: several miles west, at Albion, a bridge-construction barge was blocking the waterway, and the convoy would have to stay put until the Canal Office could persuade the highway department to let us through. We were enticingly near the terminus of the Erie, and I mumbled and mulled and decided we’d press on alone in hope luck would befall us and the slender
Nikawa
could squeeze through where the others could not. In that land of numerous low bridges, we would proceed to see whether the way might open.

The fifteen miles to Albion were easy and full of the delight of small lift-bridges clanging a bell at the traffic and rising promptly at our arrival. With each safely behind, we felt the accomplishment of mileage slowly earned, and I savored it for its inchmeal accumulation. That gray and mild morning, Pilotis cut a finger wrapping our anchor line, uttered an “Umph!” and I followed with, “Ejaculated the squire,” a thing we did only when we were happy. We passed along the H villages of Holley, Hulberton, Hindsburg, then a stretch of old, hand-laid stone canal wall with recent breaks repaired by a load of coarse rock dump-trucked into the breach—another paradigm for our era. Twice we came upon mergansers that let us approach close before diving beneath our bow only to reappear in our wake, a game according to Pilotis, and I said, If only we could glide like that under the construction barge.

Then we saw it and knew
Nikawa
couldn’t squeeze by, and I heard, “Stop thinking about snow in the Rockies.” Amidst my mutterings, we coasted to a halt. Almost immediately, as if by the hand of a water spirit, the huge thing, like a garden gate, began to pivot, workmen with ropes over their shoulders pulling it aside, and we proceeded as the way narrowly, ever so narrowly, opened, and
Nikawa
slipped beneath the scaffolding, Pilotis singing “Low bridge, everybody down.” Then I quoted the proud old Eriemen who boasted, “We bow our heads to nobody but God and the canal bridges.”

Along the way were tidy farms, neat fields, and an apple orchard. By the Knowlesville lift-bridge we made fast to a wall at the old Tow Path Store, a false-front general merchandise of a type more common farther west. We filled fuel tanks, water jugs, and our little larder, and then went on, passed over Culvert Road, the only place automobiles go under the Erie, a detail once noted in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
On to Medina for a walk and lunch. A man, perhaps a bit barmy, told the owner and cook for all to hear, “I never said I was Jesus. All I ever said was I’m related.” Later, when I asked about him, a woman said, “He’s not a lunatic—he’s just a believer because his evangelical father used to punish him and his sister by pounding them with a Bible. It drove the girl into Hare Christmas.”

We took to the Erie again and went on to Middleport where a couple of years earlier I swam in the canal with some tugboatmen, a thing most residents, remembering earlier days of foul water, still refused to do. Yet in truth the Erie Canal is probably cleaner today than ever, a result of wise federal and state environmental regulations—not to mention those rascal zebra mussels.

We reached Gasport, once the home of Belva Ann Lockwood who, in the days before women could vote, ran twice for the Presidency. It was in the village on the Fourth of July, 1839, that citizens raised toasts to the President, the Governor, Heroes of the Revolution, the Militia, Old Glory, American Democracy, the Plow, Literature, the Erie Canal, and—why I don’t know—the Mississippi. Then came Orangeport, the only town in the United States, so I heard, to take its name from the color of a hotel. By early afternoon we saw the steeples of Lockport on its bluff. The old flight of five stone locks there has been well preserved right next to the somewhat newer and much larger ones that in just two steps took
Nikawa
fifty feet onto the top of the great Niagara Escarpment, the long shale ridge that is the cause of the falls. We were exuberant at reaching those last locks, for unimpeded water now lay between us and Lake Erie.

Waiting for the gates to release us, I violated our unspoken precept—few lines of endeavor are as encumbered with superstition as the sailor’s—and unnecessarily talked of the next day: tomorrow Lake Erie and a short milk-run across water without speed limits, bridges, locks, construction barges, or the tortoise
Doctor Robert.

We motored through Lockport and under what may be the widest short bridge or the shortest wide bridge in America—it looks more like a parking lot than a bridge—and into another rock cut, this one through the stone ledge that extends twenty miles west to Niagara Falls. On we went, down the canalized portion of Tonawanda Creek flowing an unnatural color of pale turquoise, past a long line of somewhat tired waterside retreats sporting miniature windmills, lighthouses, and plastic gulls, on through the twin Tonawandas and beneath five bridges, blowing our whistle in celebration under each, and then we entered the Niagara River, ten miles above the falls. The grand Erie, at 338 miles, the longest canal in America, lay at our backs.

The Niagara River is thirty-six miles long, a length hardly commensurate with its fame, but above the falls it’s rather broad and would be more so were it not split by Grand Island. The current was swift, but no other boat traffic was bucking it, so we let our river horse run, and she fairly skimmed past the built-up shoreline under the overcast, and Pilotis cut loose with snatches of song. All was joy as we went beneath the Peace Bridge where the “headwaters" of the Niagara constrictedly flowing out of a full Lake Erie piled three feet up against the big piers, an unnerving display of power.
Nikawa
bounced up over a veritable rampart of lake water, but we figured it nothing more than fitting, since four fifths of the Great Lakes was rushing seaward underneath us; besides, our harbor was only three miles distant. The Black Rock Canal, offering protection from the open water at Buffalo, was closed for reasons we didn’t know, an ignorance that was about to cause trouble.

The lake became progressively meaner, with ceaseless rises and falls (things I’d call neither waves nor swells) that began to thump us with a severity
Nikawa
had never encountered. Downtown Buffalo lay quietly a half mile off her port side. She labored up the crests, crashed into the troughs, and Pilotis couldn’t stand without holding on; reading the chart to find a course to our harbor was nearly impossible, and the binoculars were of no more use than were we in a demolition derby. We had to shout over the tumult, and
Nikawa
was making almost no headway against current, waves, and wind. When I tried increasing the rpm’s to counter, the violence turned intolerable. After fifteen minutes of torturing her over the assaults, the hull shivering with every drop, Pilotis yelled, “Can she take this?” I shrugged and struggled to hold the wheel on something like a course, but things only got worse. “It sounds like the hull is splintering!” It did indeed, but I shouted, It can’t! “How do you know?” I don’t, goddamnit! “I think we’re in trouble!” That’s when I knew my deep-water sailor was also scared, and that unnerved me even more.

Buffalo sat blithe and impassive to our plight, even though as the only boat under way anywhere near, we must have been quite visible. How could those citizens let us capsize in full view of safety? I called out that I was going to head for downtown whether or not there was a small-boat dock, and Pilotis shouted, “It’s too goddamn shallow! You’ll reef us!” Sounds good to me! Turning from a transfixion with the water ahead, my friend shook the chart at me: “For once be a prudent goddamn mariner!” So I fought my urge to park us up on Church Street, and to control my fear I tried to despise it.

After almost an hour we’d gone only a couple of miles, and in the falling light we couldn’t find the entrance to our harbor at the mouth of the Buffalo River. I said nothing, but before dark would cover us, I’d determined either to reef the boat or hit the nearest shore. We hand-cranked the window-wiper to clear the spray, and Pilotis kept watch on our bilge-pumpless cockpit to see whether we were taking on water. We quit trying to speak in the noise and rode in grave silence as the wind-driven lake tormented us with only an illusion of forward progress.

Then in jubilation Pilotis shouted, “The breakwater!” I made the happiest left turn of my life, and we quartered the swells so that
Nikawa
rolled madly but no longer fell into the troughs. Behind the wall it was merely less rough as we found our way into Erie Basin, once the terminus of the canal, a long-gone exit that avoided such turmoil. Even with several turns in the channel, angles that usually baffle waves, our first chance to dock was impossibly rough, and we had to continue until we ran out of water and choices, and there we tied up our horse while she thrashed in her reins as if wanting to come ashore with us.

Standing on the solid wharf, we were sure it was moving, but it was only the wobble in our legs, and I laughed at my pigeonheartedness, and Pilotis laughed, and we threw our arms around each other like dancing bears, and little
Nikawa
banged her fenders, but there wasn’t a drop of water in her pilothouse. We climbed a slope affording a good overlook of the boat and went into a restaurant with phony nautical decorations that seemed to jape us, and we spliced the main brace like sailors just pried from the maw of a deadly sea.