3 posts tagged “oswego”
Welcome aboard the Luv-n-It, the cruiser we helped motor up the Oswego River last weekend. Here are a few more images from our recent adventure in lake-and-lock navigation. First stop: Oswego, NY.
Oswego is mainly known today as a home for a SUNY campus and a Niagara-Mohawk power plant. Once, it was a thriving shipping port on southern Lake Ontario, which is why its river has a series of locks for transporting goods from the port. My favorite place to visit in town is Fort Ontario, where Franklin Roosevelt housed a thousand European refugees during World War II. You can learn about this episode in quiet diplomacy here.
Another view from the Oswego River. You'd swear you were in Philadelphia, right?
Why is this man smiling? Because we're actually cruising up the Oswego River. Yes, it was raining. I became proficient at using a boat hook to grab onto cables suspended along the walls of each lock. The cables help keep the boat stabilized as the lock fills with water and lifts the vessel. By the end of the day, my arms ached.
Why isn't this man smiling? Because JK ended up on the fore deck to grab his cables. And there's no weather canvas on the fore deck, making this a rainy, slippery proposition. That's what teenagers are for.
Here we have the troublesome Phoenix, NY lock. The yellow cantilever bridge in the foreground kept raising and lowering. The lock gates beyond the bridge didn't open on the first few tries. It took much longer than we wished to get through this modest little town.
"This is one of the prettier photos from the voyage," he said modestly. Largely because, after the first day of sunny, clear waters, Day Two brought ceaseless rain.
I'm depositing a few images below to give a feel of what we encountered. Locks along the Oswego River -- part of New York State's Canal System, which includes the Erie Canal -- are in various stages of repair. Some operated flawlessly, like the lock at Minetto, NY. Others, such as the locks in Phoenix, NY and Waterloo, NY, had power failures and drawbridges that inexplicably raised and lowered.
Anyway, here's a short sampling from this excursion, all captured with my good ol' Panasonic Lumix FZ-5 camera:
A typical lock on the Oswego River, with a spillway creating a pseudo-waterfall off our port bow. Picturesque, in a way. Minetto, NY, where they had no trouble operating the machinery that raises vessels up to the level of the next stretch of the river.
More later. The good news is, no one got tossed into Class 3 rapids on this voyage.
I am a little insane about these things.
Among my fondest college memories was going to the campus post office, opening that little P.O. box, and finding:
- A love letter
- A barely legible note from my roguish grandfather, who liked to send cash bundled in several sheets of paper
- Anything from home
It didn't happen often enough. And now, with the march of time, it happens even less. But the experience stayed with me. So, while exploring an antique co-op in tiny Alton, NY recently, I came across the makings of my own post office:
Yes, it's true. Two-hundred bucks and a semi-treacherous, open-door minivan trip back home, and it's now mine.
Backstory: the p.o. boxes were actually taken from a small hotel in Oswego, NY, where they'd been custom-built. Apparently, they were used for guests' mail -- although one of the boxes contained some mail I think was meant for a student at SUNY Oswego. Interesting off-campus living arrangement, I guess.
You may ask:
- Do you have the combinations? (Answer: of course.)
- Why did you buy this relic? (Answer: because they were fresh out of library card catalogs, which I'd also been searching for.)
- What would someone do with their very own wall of post office boxes?
