WATERWAYS

A Reconnaissance: Part One

Mohawk Valley. Schoharie Creek near Martyr’s Shrine. WNW from 42.9396 x -74.2867

No human being can survive without water for more than three days. Civilizations arose in riparian zones, where water could be drawn from rivers for personal use, and irrigation. Economies of trade developed along these waterways. Since the dawn of navigation, waterways remain the most cost-effective way to move large quantities of cargo. The total volume of ocean-going freight today is nearly triple that of 1990. Displacement tonnage for ships is based in part on the weight of water, with one American pound being equal to one pint of water.

Nautical tales form the core of travel-literature, from Homer’s Odyssey and Jason’s Argonauts, and Virgil’s Aeneid, to Coleridge, Melville and Conrad. Around the globe, sacred rivers such as the Ganges, Jordan, Mississippi, Danube, Nile, and Urubamba embody the eternal stream of being, life, and death.

Water plays a recurring role in Judeo-Christian scripture—from Noah’s flood, to the discovery of Moses, along the banks of the Nile, the waters of which he miraculously turns to blood. He later parts the Red Sea, and summons a stream from dry rock. Death comes to Moses, as he beholds the promised land across the River Jordan, near which Christ will be baptized twelve centuries later.

            Riverine journeys gave storytellers a durable narrative trope—from Bodhidharma crossing the Yangzi on a reed, and Huckleberry Finn’s escape down the Mississippi, to Charles Marlow steaming up the Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life follows a man’s progress from infancy to dotage, as he glides along a river in an open boat. By the time Cole finished these four allegorical canvases in 1842, the Hudson River was abustle with maritime traffic. Day and night, paddlewheels churned the waters, spewing smoke and cinders as they pierced the air with boat-horns and steam-whistles. I was always curious why so many Hudson River School paintings depict locations in Italy, Lake George, Labrador, and South America, and how few there are of the river itself.

William Guy Wall. The Confluence of the Hudson and Sacandaga Rivers. Hudson River Port-Folio. 1820

In 1820, both William Guy Wall and Jacques-Gérard Milbert traced the Hudson as far north as Lake Luzerne. The Irish-born Wall was accompanied by English travel-writer John Agg, who composed prose impressions of his companion’s topographical subjects. Their Hudson River Port-Folio was released in suites of five prints during the next four years. French naturalist Milbert followed an itinerary similar to Wall and Agg. Upon returning to France three years later, he compiled his notes and sketches into a manuscript published in 1829 as Itineraire Pittoresque du Fleuve Hudson et des parties Laterales de l'Amerique du Nord. Inspired by Milbert’s travels, the late American painter Don Nice traveled the Hudson by boat, from New York City to Glens Falls and beyond. A stretch of the journey was completed in a rubber raft.  I had met Nice on numerous occasions toward the end of his life, and regret that his Hudson River voyage was unknown to me prior to his passing.

Jacques-Gerard Milbert. The Falls at Luzerne, New York. 1828

            For more than a decade, the focus of my work has been on American Rivers. In 2017, I published Hudson Highlands; the first in a series of fine-press limited editions. Another suite of prints was published the following year. Drawn from the pages of my Schuylkill River sketchbook, it became the centerpiece of an exhibition at Philadelphia’s Independence Seaport Museum. James McElhinney: Discover the Hudson Anew opened at Hudson River Museum in September, 2019. One of Nice’s watercolors was included in the exhibition, along with several bookplates from Milbert’s Itineraire Pittoresque. Traveling to New Mexico earlier that year, I filled a pocket sketchbook with watercolors of sites along the Rio Grande. This was exhibited along with a series of monoprints produced with Michael Costello at Hand Graphics, at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe. The prototype for Grand River Sketchbook—another fine press limited edition—was created. Its release was delayed by the pandemic until 2021. Sketchbook Traveler Southwest was released in 2022. The recent publication of Sketchbook Traveler: New England completes the trilogy.

Din Nice. Hook Mountain. 1999. Reproduced under Fair Use

            Since Kathie and I shifted our base of operations to the North Country of Upstate New York, with a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, I have continued to develop new works related to the Rio Grande and Southwestern landscape. Looking at new projects focused on regional waterways, I visited Adirondack rivers that feed the Saint Lawrence watershed, such as the Raquette, Saranac, AuSable, and Boquet. Touring Lake Champlain and Lake George, I reconnoitered the northern reaches of the Great Warpath that proceeds down the Hudson Valley. In the end, I decided to explore an artificial river; the Erie Canal. At the time of its completion in 1825, “Clinton’s Ditch” was the greatest feat of inland navigation in the world. By uniting the Atlantic seaboard with the Great Lakes, the canal elevated New York State to near nation-status. Its economy today ranks tenth worldwide. In realizing its own manifest destiny The Empire State displaced indigenous communities and leveled ancient forests. The canal was built with no support from the federal government, by a combined work-force of private landowners, convicts, free African-Americans, and Irish immigrants. The latter were sometimes paid for their toils in whiskey. Two hundred years later, the environmental impact and lasting consequences of these stupendous works have yet to be reckoned.

            2025 will be the bicentennial year of the Erie Canal’s completion. Apart from being the engineering marvel of its day, the physical remains of “Clinton’s Ditch” are compelling relics of a gob-smacking feat of human intervention that reshaped terrain, in ways that disrupted some communities, and nurtured others. Cutting through indigenous homelands, the new transportation-corridor delivered a multitude of immigrants and entrepreneurs into a former wilderness. Many of the newcomers were handy with a pick, shovel, or broad-axe. The new waterway fostered extractive industries, such as mining, and logging, and quarrying—as once was evidenced by its locks, aqueducts, gates, and timber trunks. Medina sandstone and Onondaga limestone was used in bridges, buildings, and façades. Syracuse salt sat on dining-tables across America. Huge tracts of timber were clear-cut for lumber, devastating the Adirondack region. Diminished groundwater retention in devastated areas reduced to a trickle those feeder-streams and tributaries need to maintain navigable depths in the Erie Canal, and along the upper reaches of Hudson’s River, in which water-levels might soon have been enough to float a lumber-laden barge. When bean-counters reckoned that overland transportation costs would profits, lumber-barons were forced to modify their previously rapacious practices. As early as 1873, geologist and surveyor Verplanck Colvin (1847-1920) had predicted that clear-cutting in the Adirondack region threatened the viability of the Erie Canal. Colvin played a leading role in the establishment of the New York State Forest Preserve, located within today’s Adirondack Park.

The Erie Canal came into being, where commercial endeavor was empowered by opportune terrain. The ruins and traces of New York State’s early canals also represent the human cost and environmental consequences of such ambitious projects. To some, the canals were gateways to empire. Indigenous communities were displaced by them. Enslaved Americans followed the canals as pathways to freedom. These artificial waterways offered cost-effective ways for miners and lumbermen to deliver raw materials to faraway manufacturers, at the same time warning extractive industries to adopt more sustainable practices. When the New York Barge Canal was opened to traffic in May of 1918, the old locks and channels of “Clinton’s Ditch” were abandoned to the gentle neglect of nature. Between now and October 26, 2025‚—the anniversary of “The Wedding of the Waters,” I hope to retrace the Erie Canal, to discover what its ruins can teach us about the past, the present, and ourselves.

Letters from the field and incidents of travel will appear here, along with my original drawings and photographs of visited sites. You can support my efforts by subscribing to this newsletter. Paid subscribers receive full access to all content, as is is published. Free subscribers will have access to new writings two weeks after they first appear. Non-subscribers will be able to read two to three free articles each month.

Thanks for reading! —James Lancel McElhinney © 2023

(To be continued)