Blue Highways: Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire

Unfolding the Map

We get to a rural area of Lake Winnipesaukee with William Leat Heat-Moon (LHM) where he remarks on the pickups he sees.  I grew up with pickups and have lots of memories about them and the DIY culture in small towns that makes them necessary.  If you want to know where Lake Winnipesaukee is located, do some DIY at the map.

Book Quote

"I took route 104 up to the motel congestion of the west side of Lake Winnipesaukee - the lake with a hundred thirty different spellings and almost as many translations from the Indian (the best is 'the smile of the Great Spirit') - and then around to the north shore into quieter country.  On this corner of the lake, instead of stationwagons with wet swimtrunks tied to antennas and door handles, there were worn pickups, each hauling at least one rusty something."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 10

Sunset over Lake Winnipesaukee, by Valerie Laroque. Photo hosted at Travelpod. Click on photo to go to host page.

Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire

The words that catch my eye in the quote above are "worn pickups, each hauling at least one rusty something."

If you have read a few of my posts as we journey with LHM together in Blue Highways, you know that I grew up in a small town in Northern California.  One of the facets of living in a small town is that the number of services and amenities available to people is limited.  Sure, you can probably find every service that is needed, or every item that you want, but there are still restricted choices.  What if, for some reason, you don't trust or like the service?  What if the model and make is no longer available?

By necessity, people who live in small towns are usually DIYers in some way, shape or form.  They do their own landscaping, their own gardening, their own building.  If repairs need to be made on automobiles, many of them do it themselves unless the job is so complicated that it needs to go to a shop.

And because hauling needs to be done, people in small towns own pickups.  A typical two-car family will often have a sedan of some type, and a pickup.  I grew up with a succession of pickups that my father owned.  The first I remember was his International Harvester and his last truck before he died was a Ford F150, I think, but I'm not quite sure.

Not only that, but in my town every truck had some things that were standard accoutrements.  Each truck had a gun rack, because almost everyone went hunting at some point or another during the year.  Each truck also usually came equipped with a chain saw, because almost every home was heated by a fireplace or stove.  In the forests around where I lived, downed trees were often available to be cut up for firewood with the appropriate permits.  A chain saw could also be used to clear a downed tree on the road.  Often an industrious group of drivers could clear a road before the official highway maintenance people got there.  Every truck also had something called a "come-along," which was a type of pulley that one used if one got stuck in the mud or in a river somewhere, one could wrap a chain around a tree, attach it to the come-along, and pull themselves out of their predicament.

In a town full of full to partial DIYers, it often meant that one didn't necessarily need to go to the stores to buy things.  Chances are that someone had a needed item if you looked around carefully enough.  My father had a barn, where he kept a lot of stuff.  A wide range of tools, some useful, some not, for various purposes.  Lumber, for that room he was going to redo.  Nuts, bolts, nails and screws that he had saved from various other projects that might come in handy.  Old appliances that just might be able to be fixed some day.  The barn was probably a chemical nightmare, as he kept old cans of paint well past the time that they were useful.  Seeds for gardening that he had saved over the years.  Various bits of metal.  My father was only a partial DIYer, and didn't have a lot of skills in fix-it or repair or metalworking, but yet he kept these things just in case they were needed.

My next door neighbor, Mr. Cleary, was more skilled in a lot of things, and his barn showed it.  He was skilled in auto mechanics, and had all but the most heavy equipment needed to repair his family's cars.  If he ever needed to put the car up in the air, he knew a few people who had the lifts to allow him to do that.

And, like LHM describes about Lake Winnipesaukee, I too often saw people hauling things around in their trucks - old rusty things that didn't seem like they would have a purpose, but they did.  If it was an old metal frame of something, barely recognizable as former office shelving, for instance, it could be put to use for something.  Perhaps it could be reconfigured into a rack to hold stuff in the barn, or a planter for out in the garden.  Old appliances could be scavenged for parts that might fit into newer appliances that with a twist here and a poke there could be made to run for another few years.  Old cars, sitting in yards, could either be repaired with scavenged parts from other vehicles or serve as parts supplies themselves, donating their innards like people donate kidneys, so that other cars might live longer.  If anything was thrown away, it was because it either had no conceived further use or because it had been scavenged for everything that it was worth.

One of the most popular radio shows on our local radio station was the Swap Shop.  People called in to Ellie, the host, and said what they were looking for.  Others would call in and announce what they had.  Sometimes they were selling, sometimes they were willing to trade.  But it was another indication that the store was often the last step in the chain to finding something one needed.

I make it sound like our town, and perhaps other rural areas around the country, were filled with hoarders.  Unlike hoarders, who collect for no discernible purpose other than their obsession, there was a purpose in the collection of things.  They served purposes and, since my parents' generation grew up in the Great Depression, there was perhaps a drive to wring all possible usefulness out of every item they purchased and, if someone else could use what they couldn't, to make sure that it was available to them when needed.  It stands in stark contrast to today, where we are used to things working until they die, and then they are thrown away and another cheap model is bought.  Every town used to have a few shops where appliances were fixed, even small appliances like toasters.  Now, a toaster dies and we just run to Wal Mart and pick up another.

In a month or so, I will go back to my hometown to visit my mom.  I'll hear and see her neighbor, with his garage and shed, working on some piece of equipment that needs repair.  I'll see the pickup trucks with their chain saws and their gun racks and come-alongs, many perhaps more modern looking but with the same accessories as yesteryear.  And, I'll take another stroll through my dad's barn, where many of the things that he left still sit, waiting for their new purpose to be discovered.

Musical Interlude

In the spirit of what they are now calling the DIY generation, Debbie Harry teamed up with punk rockers Rachelle Garniez and Palmyra Delran on a song called Do It Yourself.  The song aims to encourage kids to learn about doing things on their own.  The song can be found on the album KinderAngst.

And of course, it wouldn't be complete without a song about pickup trucks.  Would you believe that most of the songs about pickup trucks are in the country music genre?  Here is legendary Texas artist Jerry Jeff Walker singing his poignant Pickup Truck Song.

If you want to know more about Lake Winnipesaukee

Lake Winnipesaukee.net
Lake Winnipesaukee Museum
Lake Winnipesaukee Travel Guide
New Hampshire Lakes Region Tourism Association: Lake Winnipesaukee
Wikipedia: Lake Winnipesaukee
Winnipesaukee.com

Next up:  Melvin Village, New Hampshire

Blue Highways: Somewhere on the Erie Canal

Unfolding the Map

The Erie Canal is huge.  Not necessarily in dimensions - it was only four feet deep and often just 40 feet wide, though it does span 363 miles from end to end.  However, it is really huge in that it was an massive government public works undertaking, criticized and ridiculed, that paid for itself in a short amount of time and contributed in countless ways to the development of the United States.  Stand with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) on the edge of the canal, imagine the packet boats filled with people and barges filled with goods towed by mules and horses, and learn more about this amazing piece of our history.  To find my approximation of where LHM stops at the canal, duck your head at the low bridge as you travel to the map.

Book Quote

"The canal, only four feet deep in its early years, had become a rank, bosky froggy trough.  But it was that forty-eight inches of water that did so much to open western New York and the Midwest to settlement and commerce....

"From Lake Erie to the Hudson River (363 miles, 83 stone locks, 13 aqueducts) the canal moved people and things between the middle of the nation and the ocean; it was this watercourse, as much as anything else, that made New York City the leading Atlantic port.  Travelers who had some money could take a packet boat with windows and berths, while poorer immigrants heading into the Midlands rode cheaper and drearier line boats.  Ten years after Clinton's Folly opened, the populations of Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo increased three hundered percent; the canal, having paid for itself in that decade, had changed the northwest quarter of America.  No paltry accomplishment for a scheme that even the visionary Thomas Jefferson saw as a little short of madness."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 6

The Erie Canal near Rome, New York. Photo by "genewest" and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Somewhere on the Erie Canal

When I was in grammar school, we still had some music education in the public schools.  It didn't happen often, maybe once a week, but it usually involved some kind of percussion playing and/or singing.  I think we had a guest teacher who would come in and lead these sessions.

I remember that the song book with which we worked had patriotic songs, and I remember that there were a couple of folk songs in there that I liked, but which I can't really remember so many years distant.  John Henry might have been one of them, or at least it comes to mind.

The one snippet of song that I remember from that book is this:

Low bridge, everybody down,
Low bridge, 'cause we're comin' to a town.
And you'll always know your neighbor,
You'll always know your pal,
If you ever navigate upon the Erie Canal.

Why I remember this one lyric, I can't say.  After all, there were more recognizable songs in that book.  There were other tunes in that book that were fun to sing.  Yet I've always kept that lyric about the Erie Canal in my head.

The Erie Canal is one of those massive efforts in our history that shouldn't be forgotten, but the benefits of which are not often considered.  The concept was simple - create a waterway that joined a major river system with the Great Lakes so that development of the middle of the country could proceed.  The execution was anything but simple.  This waterway had to traverse over 363 miles of country with a total elevation rise of 600 feet, entailing inventiveness and the practical application of engineering that had never been used before.  The sum estimated to build it was considered to be almost unimaginable.  Even Thomas Jefferson, the man who sent Lewis and Clark into the interior with an instruction to look for woolly mammoths and giant sloths, thought that the project was practically insane for the time period.

Even so, it was taken up by the New York legislature and passed.  The canal became known as Clinton's Folly (after Gov. DeWitt Clinton of New York) and was widely expected to fail.  Yet it didn't.  It employed thousands of people in the construction, particularly recent immigrants in need of work, and many of whom died of disease in marshes.  At the time, the United States had no civil engineers, so it literally created the practice of civil engineering in the country.  The builders of the canal, with no practical experience, had to solve problems like marshes and escarpments that stood in the way of joining the Hudson River with Lake Erie.  The Canal also utilized new inventions, like hydraulic cement, to solve problems such as leaks.

How did the Canal work?  Draft animals such as mules or horses pulled barges and packet boats by walking along a towpath alongside of the canal.  There was only a towpath on one side of the canal, so when boats met each other, one draft animal would move toward the canal side of the towpath and the other toward the far side of the towpath.  The mule or horse team at the far side would stop and let the boat float, causing the towline to go flat, and the other team would step over it and continue on.

This was a public works project that yielded enormous benefits to the benefits to the fledgling nation.  American inventiveness and ingenuity were suddenly the envy and marvel of the world.  New York City became the preeminent port on the Atlantic, spurring competition in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia.  According to A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, in his comprehensive history of the hotel, the increased opportunities of transport led to a rash of hotel building throughout the United States.  Some estimate the Canal led to savings in transport costs of up to 95 percent.  People and goods had to travel by animal drawn wagon before the Canal was built.  If you consider that it was estimated that a team of four horses could pull one ton twelve miles to eighteen miles a day, depending on the road, but 1000 tons for 24 miles over water, you can see just how effective the Canal was in increasing commerce into the interior.  The accompanying surge in population to the Midwest was an added benefit to a country that saw itself with a Manifest Destiny.

I am intrigued, in this day and age when government spending on public works is attacked as wasteful, how much good this governmental outlay of capital on such a project caused so much good.  We are in a period where government can do no right, and certainly there were many doubters about the Erie Canal, yet the expense worked to the betterment of the nation.  I am especially intrigued because, probably even more than now, the country had an immigrant problem.  Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were flocking to the United States and settling in slums in major cities.  The construction of the Erie Canal allowed them to find work, as well as moving them out of the slums and into areas where they could settle.

In New Mexico, the state government is almost finished on a project called Spaceport America.  I almost see the idea as being analogous to the Erie Canal.  As the federal government ramps down its spending on NASA, there is a push for private industry to step in and fill the gap by providing service to the International Space Station and other space initiatives.  There is also expected an accompanying rise in space tourism.  When my wife and I took a tour of the Spaceport facilities, the tour guide was positively gushing about the private sector role, and very negative about government.  The message was that government doesn't do any good, and should stay out of the private market.  My wife was moved to remind him that without government spending, the Spaceport would not have been built at all, and that government spending can often spur additional private spending.  The guide then modified his rhetoric to agree, but then argued that government should then get out of the way.

As I see all the problems facing this country as I write, including a crumbling infrastructure, a large unemployment rate, and questions about immigration, I see a place for government spending.  I may be revealing my political stripes, and readers are free to disagree, but of course I live in a state that lives or dies by government spending on military bases and research, federal lands, and reservations.  But, it is very telling to me that some of the United States' biggest accomplishments could only come about by government being willing to spend money where a need was perceived, often regardless of how that expenditure was seen by the public, and often with spillover results that yielded benefits beyond the initial project.  I'm willing to admit that government is not always positive, but often it is.  Just look at the Erie Canal and its place in our history.

Musical Interlude

The Erie Canal song was written by Thomas Allen in 1905 after Erie Canal traffic switched from draft pulled barges to engine-powered barges.  It is a piece of nostalgia about loss of a way of life and change in an increasingly mechanized society.  In this version that I found, the song is performed by no other than Bruce Springsteen, off his tribute to Pete Seeger in his album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.  The song was recorded live in Dublin, Ireland which adds an additional link - at the time many Scots-Irish immigrants to the United States were employed in building the canal (there is also a recording of Springsteen doing the song in Belfast, Northern Ireland which would have been even more appropriate, but it is not as good as this recording).  This is the song that I sung in grammar school, but probably not as good as Springsteen and his band.

If you want to know more about the Erie Canal

Building the Erie Canal
The Erie Canal: A Journey Through the History
Erie Canal Museum
Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor
History of Building the Erie Canal
History of the Erie Canal
New York State Canals
Scenic Historic Erie Canal Sightseeing Cruises
Wikipedia: Erie Canal

Next up: Rome, New York