This is part of Iconic Passages, a collection of stories celebrating America and the many ways we move through its vast and diverse landscapes. Read more here.
You know that old song about the mule named Sal? I have a modern lyric to add: “I dropped my phone in the Erie Canal.” Like the original ditty “Low Bridge, Everybody Down,” which commemorates the beasts of burden that hauled 30-ton barges from Albany to Buffalo, my chorus is born of experience.
It was the second morning of a three-day, 40-mile paddle on the New York State Canalway Water Trail. We were making our way in a rented canoe past a string of canalside homes with pontoon boats tied to their docks when a houseboat came chugging by. It was modeled after canal packet boats of yore, which were squat and flat-roofed to fit 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 pace was hilarious. That’s when, distracted, I dropped my phone.
There went my photos, travel notes, interactive water trail map, reservation emails, flight info, bank card. My buddy Lisa was seated up front, her phone secure in her jacket. She’d seen similar disasters while paddling around New York Harbor with her outrigger club. I felt as lost as any 21st-century gal might. And I had started this journey with such esprit.
A day paddler, I had always wanted to take a longer canoe trip, and the New York State Canal System, with its sluggish current, seemed manageable. Plus, it was the Erie Canal’s 200th anniversary. In 1825 after a nine-day, 363-mile voyage over 18 aqueducts and through 83 freshly minted locks, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton poured a keg of Lake Erie water into New York Harbor; it was just 38 years after the ratifying of the Constitution. His canal pushed the new nation westward, opening the interior to migration and trade and securing (then Podunk) New York City’s megalopolis future.
But it also advanced the displacement of the land’s original inhabitants—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscarora of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee don’t think of the Erie Canal as an engineering marvel; they see it as attempted genocide. I wanted to ponder the canal’s complexity.
