In New York: Lone Voyager

By Peter Stoler

I've got a mule; her name is Sal.

Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.

--American folk song Captain Olaf Kaldefoss does not have a mule to pull his boat through the Erie Canal. He has a pair of 25-year-old diesel engines, one of which has just been overhauled. But he is confident that they can move his craft, the 256-ft. M.V. Day Peckinpaugh, through the canal at a stately, steady speed of 8 m.p.h., and so is the ship's engineer, a compact, muscular fellow named Dan Sauvey. So, with the sun just clearing the horizon and beginning to burn off the mist shrouding the upstate New York city of Utica, Kaldefoss signals his crew to cast off the lines holding his command to the New York State department of transportation dock and eases it slowly, stern-first, out into the basin. Then, his craft clear, Kaldefoss settles himself behind the huge, spoked steering wheel that dominates the Peckinpaugh's pilothouse and steers for the lock leading from the harbor to the Erie Canal, a 338-mile-long liquid highway that runs from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, all the way east to Albany on the Hudson River. "Well," says Kaldefoss in a voice still heavy with the cadences of his native Norway, "here we go again."

Kaldefoss's statement is one of fact, not resignation. The only commercial ship still plying that route, the Peckinpaugh has made more than 30 trips so far this year between the industrial city of Rome, located near the center of the state, and the Lake Ontario port of Oswego. It makes the trip west and north empty, completing the run in about 16 hours. It makes the trip back loaded with some 1,600 tons of cement. And the ship does it cheaply, carrying its high-bulk, low-cost cargo for less than the cost of sending it by either train or truck, which is, Kaldefoss explains, why the vessel is still working. Commercial traffic on the Erie Canal has all but disappeared; the Erie Navigation Co. of Erie, Pa., which owns and operates the Peckinpaugh, is one of the last shippers still using the water route across New York. But the Peckinpaugh and its eight-man crew remain and, more important, pay their way. "This isn't an exhibit in a museum," says Kaldefoss as the gates of the harbor lock swing open to receive him and his ship. "This is a real working boat."

That the Peckinpaugh is no pleasure craft is evident. Built in 1921 and named for a Great Lakes coal shipper whose brother Roger once managed the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians, the Peckinpaugh was drafted into service during World War II to carry coal offshore, and made several runs to Cuba. But then it was restored to its original purpose, which was to run the still waters of the canal.

That it has a working crew becomes clear as the boat enters the lock. With practiced ease, Deck Hand Basil Kuvshinikov, whose name and accent both attest to his origins in the Russian city of Smolensk, steps ashore and walks beside the slowly moving boat, a loop of its thick forward hawser over his shoulder. As he slips the loop over one of the mushroom-shaped bollards onshore, another deck hand, a stocky, bearded man named Tim Burke, tightens the line, snubbing the Peckinpaugh to the side of the lock.

Passing through the lock takes only a few minutes. No sooner have the gates closed behind it than the Peckinpaugh begins to rise, buoyed by the water pouring into the rectangular lock enclosure until its rail towers above the head of the lock keeper. A moment later, the lock's forward gates swing open and the ship sails on, a full 16 ft. higher than it was when it entered. Ahead of it stretches the Erie Canal, as straight and flat as a highway.

Ahead, a huge gray crane, disturbed by the Peckinpaugh's passing, rises from the surface and flies majestically away, its wings beating as if in slow motion. Ducks, more used to the Peckinpaugh's passage, edge toward the banks, quacking.

There are other craft on the canal as well. A transportation department tug, painted a bright blue and yellow and looking more like a child's bathtub toy than a working boat, passes the Peckinpaugh toward midmorning, heading east for Utica. Otherwise, the only other boats are recreational, mostly Canadian boats using the canal to get to the Hudson and the Atlantic Ocean. A large trimaran, the Tournamente of Toronto, its mast removed and lashed to the deck, chugs by under power, its crew bundled against the autumn chill and waving as much to keep warm as to greet the Peckinpaugh and its crew. Other pleasure craft slide by as the morning wears on. Their destinations: Florida, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands.

"I wish I were going with them," says Lock Keeper Bob Walker as he welcomes the Peckinpaugh to Lock 21. "It gets kind of lonely here in the fall." Glad for the company, Walker seems in no hurry to lock the Peckinpaugh through. A barrel-shaped man, he stands at the side of the lock chatting as the water pours out, dropping the boat a full 26 ft. He and the Peckinpaugh's crewmen talk like neighbors who have not seen one another for a while. Walker reports that the man who used to be in charge of the next lock, No. 22, died within the past month. Kaldefoss reports that he hopes to make a few more trips before ice closes the canal system around the end of November. Both men wonder how long it will be before the state of New York, which is spending in excess of $25 million a year to maintain the barge canal system, decides that it can no longer afford to do so.

Their concern is understandable. When it was first opened in 1825 by Governor DeWitt Clinton, the canal provided the only practical way of hauling cargo across New York. For decades it prospered. But the coming of, first, the railroads, then oil and gas pipelines, eventually turned "Clinton's ditch" into something of an anachronism, and now, traffic on the system is down to a trickle. As recently as 1973, commercial shippers moved a total of 2,548,113 tons of freight on the New York State barge canal system. Last year they moved only 579,777 tons. Shippers have all but abandoned the canals, which still charge no tolls.

Kaldefoss, who has been sailing the Great Lakes and the canals for 30 years, speaks of the decline with sadness, for it is obvious that he loves the canal and the people who live along its banks. He shows his love by a flow of stories, like the one about the old man who used to blow a bugle whenever the Peckinpaugh passed, or the one about the elderly woman who still stands at her kitchen window and waves. His first mate, Stewart Gunnlaugsson, chimes in with stories of fogs that can blot out the canal's marker buoys and make navigation impossible and lock keepers who bring the Peckinpaugh's crew up to date on the news as they pass through. "Canal people are like a family," he says as the ship sails across 21-mile-long Oneida Lake and swings north into the Oswego River. "We really get to know each other along here."

"We get to appreciate the canal too," says Kaldefoss as the Peckinpaugh eases into the first of seven locks that descend, like a giant flight of steps, from the Erie to Lake Ontario. "This is one of the last of the great bargains, and most people don't even know it exists."

This lack of knowledge is unfortunate. The Erie Canal and its tributaries do, in fact, offer something for everyone. The canal system provides shippers with an inexpensive way to move high-bulk goods like sand, cement and asphalt. It gives pleasure boaters a safe way of getting from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. It even offers the salmon who migrate through Lake Ontario an easy way to reach their spawning grounds. "Some salmon still fight the falls," explains Gunnlaugsson. "But the smart ones wait below the locks and go upstream with the boats." --By Peter Staler