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Authors: William Least Heat-Moon
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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.”
We ascended Lock Fifteen and went on beyond St. Johnsville, the old milltown where the citizens formerly made whiskey, cigars, player pianos, and knitted underwear, a village I called Goodtimeville and Pilotis St. Longjohnsville. A mile west, the canal leaves the Mohawk and follows a four-mile cut, then rejoins the river three miles downstream from Little Falls and Lock Seventeen, at forty feet the biggest elevation change on the Erie. Through the locks and up the slightest slope of waters we had risen above the Atlantic the height of a thirty-two-storey building; traveling at only eight miles an hour makes even modest altitudes take on significance, much as they do with a hiker.
The lockmaster arrived early and happily let
Nikawa
through without the convoy, an accommodation to allow us to tie up at the tiny wharf opposite the river from Little Falls. We walked the bridge just above the remains of an 1822 aqueduct, at one time another distinctive canal structure. Part of it still stood when I’d seen it a year earlier, but too few people had cared to preserve it, never mind that it helped make the village what it is, and the arches now lay a hopeless pile of broken stone in the shallows. Little Falls sits along the narrow gorge of the Mohawk, the Erie paralleling the river but forty feet higher. The route here has shifted only a few yards from Clinton’s day, and the dark waterside cliffs have long been one of the often painted scenes on the canal. Were Little Falls more alert to its history and setting, it could be the gem of the Erie. On Ann Street we found a café where we washed up and tucked into breakfast, then went back to
Nikawa
in time to catch the convoy passing, and as we overtook it, received a scowl from Cap.
A couple of miles west, the waterway leaves the Mohawk briefly, rejoins it west of Herkimer for four miles, and then departs from the river for good, although it’s rarely more than a half mile away. Across the Mohawk from Herkimer, the old nutcracker and BB-gun burg, is Ilion, one of the canal towns named after ancient Mediterranean cities—Troy, Utica, Rome, Syracuse. Like its predecessor, it has a long association with war, weapons, and words through the Remington Arms factory whence emerged not only guns (famous models and ones less so, like the Mule-Ear Carbine, the Zig-Zag Derringer, the rifle-cane) but also the
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.”
We ascended Lock Fifteen and went on beyond St. Johnsville, the old milltown where the citizens formerly made whiskey, cigars, player pianos, and knitted underwear, a village I called Goodtimeville and Pilotis St. Longjohnsville. A mile west, the canal leaves the Mohawk and follows a four-mile cut, then rejoins the river three miles downstream from Little Falls and Lock Seventeen, at forty feet the biggest elevation change on the Erie. Through the locks and up the slightest slope of waters we had risen above the Atlantic the height of a thirty-two-storey building; traveling at only eight miles an hour makes even modest altitudes take on significance, much as they do with a hiker.
The lockmaster arrived early and happily let
Nikawa
through without the convoy, an accommodation to allow us to tie up at the tiny wharf opposite the river from Little Falls. We walked the bridge just above the remains of an 1822 aqueduct, at one time another distinctive canal structure. Part of it still stood when I’d seen it a year earlier, but too few people had cared to preserve it, never mind that it helped make the village what it is, and the arches now lay a hopeless pile of broken stone in the shallows. Little Falls sits along the narrow gorge of the Mohawk, the Erie paralleling the river but forty feet higher. The route here has shifted only a few yards from Clinton’s day, and the dark waterside cliffs have long been one of the often painted scenes on the canal. Were Little Falls more alert to its history and setting, it could be the gem of the Erie. On Ann Street we found a café where we washed up and tucked into breakfast, then went back to
Nikawa
in time to catch the convoy passing, and as we overtook it, received a scowl from Cap.
A couple of miles west, the waterway leaves the Mohawk briefly, rejoins it west of Herkimer for four miles, and then departs from the river for good, although it’s rarely more than a half mile away. Across the Mohawk from Herkimer, the old nutcracker and BB-gun burg, is Ilion, one of the canal towns named after ancient Mediterranean cities—Troy, Utica, Rome, Syracuse. Like its predecessor, it has a long association with war, weapons, and words through the Remington Arms factory whence emerged not only guns (famous models and ones less so, like the Mule-Ear Carbine, the Zig-Zag Derringer, the rifle-cane) but also the
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